Theatre review: Hamlet (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

From Sir Andrew Aguecheek straight to Hamlet is an unusual career progression but it's the one George Fouracres has taken since joining the Globe's ensemble cast last summer. After two standout comic turns the announcement he'd be playing Shakespeare's most famous tragic lead was welcome news to me, especially after the last Hamlet I saw actively played against any trace of humour or likeability in the character. Sean Holmes' production is the first time the play's been tackled indoors in the Swanamaker, and the first in the venue since the current Artistic Director played the role in her opening season. And there's some similarities between this and the Michelle Terry version in a general approach that avoids one overarching conceit; but Holmes' production both takes this experimentation with ideas several steps further, and results in, for my money at least, a much more entertaining - if far from cohesive - evening overall.

Theatre review: Solaris

Every time someone puts science fiction on stage the reaction seems to be wondering why it's not done more often; perhaps it's the association with big-budget movies that means nobody expects the story to work without the kind of special effects the stage can't recreate. But there's also a very pared-back side to much sci-fi, a coldly clinical world holding off the unknowable just the other side of the monitor, and that's what David Greig's Solaris taps into so well. Stanisław Lem's novel has been filmed twice but I've not seen either film, which feels like a decided advantage as Matthew Lutton's production - an Edinburgh / Melbourne / London co-production now playing the last of those cities on its tour - unfolds its mystery. A three-person team has spent two years on a space station orbiting the impossible planet of Solaris - entirely covered in ocean, and orbiting two suns, one red, one blue. The story begins as the mission comes to an end.

Theatre review: After Edward

As the name suggests, Shakespeare’s Globe is and always will be most associated with reviving work by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But they’ve always included some new writing in the mix, and a year into her tenure as Artistic Director I’m wondering if that’s what’s going to define Michelle Terry’s time there. Granted, there’s been one honking error of judgement in Eyam, but Emilia has just transferred to the West End and a second raft of good reviews, and now Edward II gets a companion piece written by its lead actor, which certainly speaks to Terry’s nose for trying something new. Tom Stuart’s After Edward takes place not only immediately after Marlowe’s play, but specifically after Nick Bagnall’s production that’s still playing in repertory. So the room’s in total darkness when recently-deceased Edward (Stuart) falls through the trapdoor in the ceiling onto the Swanamaker stage, and Richard Bremmer’s Archbishop of Canterbury makes sure he’s OK and helps him light the candles before reverting to character and berating him for his sexuality.

Theatre review: The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead

To complete the Homeric theme of the Swanamaker's pre-season we have writer Simon Armitage and director Nick Bagnall, who gave us a play based on the Iliad in 2014, now returning to tackle the Odyssey. I wasn't sure what to expect as I found their take on The Last Days of Troy a somewhat redundant addition to the many other versions of the story, but for The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead Armitage has found a new angle and explored it well. In modern-day Britain, a few weeks before a general election, Smith (Colin Tierney,) a minister popular with the people but not necessarily so with his own party, wants to go home to Cumbria for his son's 18th birthday. But the Prime Minister (Simon Dutton) co-opts him to show his face at a World Cup qualifier in Istanbul. England win the match but in the aftermath Smith and his friends get caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time - attempting to break up a violent brawl, a photo taken from the wrong angle makes it look like the minister dealt a killer blow, and it goes viral.

Theatre review: Pastoral

Actor Thomas Eccleshare turns playwright with the black comedy Pastoral¹, which Steve Marmion directs at Soho Theatre, where centuries of urbanisation can't stem the tide when nature decides to take back the land. Moll (Anna Calder-Marshall) is a pensioner who lives in a tower block in an unnamed English city where, out of a sense of duty for reasons that remain vague, two young men look after her. But today Manz (Hugh Skinner) and Hardy (Richard Riddell) aren't just there to check up on Moll; they want to pack all her things and evacuate her because the city's being invaded. The weeds that have broken through her floor are a clue, as flora and fauna have turned aggressive and overpowered the humans. But plans for escape are put on hold when a family of three arrives at the door looking for a safe place to stay, and the six band together against nature. In any case, Moll's certain the Ocado man will be there with the groceries any time now.

Theatre review: After Miss Julie

If TV period dramas have taught us one thing, it's that 1930s and '40s chauffeurs' primary function was to make themselves available for sex at the lady of the house's whim. And so it is in After Miss Julie, Patrick Marber's adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie. Marber makes the play's class relations particularly British by setting the play in a country house in 1945, on the night of Labour's election victory, with the working man and woman looking like they're about to get more of a say in the world. (Thanks to the Beautiful People soundtrack, "Things Can Only Get Better" is on my iPod, which chose to play it on my way home; wrong election, but the right idea.) Patrick Burnier's set makes the audience descend a long staircase to the ground level of the Maria, bringing us to the kitchen of a country house. Most of the staff are upstairs celebrating, and the master of the house is in London on business, but his daughter Miss Julie (Natalie Dormer) has stayed behind. Cook Christine (Polly Frame) has skipped the party though and is in the kitchen making a snack for chauffeur John (Kieran Bew) whom she's "unofficially" engaged to; she's also making a foul-smelling concoction intended to make Julie's lapdog miscarry its puppies.