Theatre review: Stage Kiss

Sarah Ruhl takes a decidedly metatheatrical stab at romantic comedy, a genre that over the years has seen many stage and screen couples emulate their characters' relationships in real life. Whether the stars actually managed to recreate their happy endings, though, has never been guaranteed. The unnamed leads in Stage Kiss are actors cast in a regional revival of a forgotten 1930s romance; only when She (MyAnna Buring, as opposed to YourAnna Buring) and He (Patrick Kennedy) arrive for the first day of rehearsals do they discover they've been cast opposite someone they had a tempestuous relationship with two decades earlier. As they go through weeks of rehearsal and performances, kissing each other dozens of times a day, the lines between play and reality start to get blurred.

Theatre review: The Merry Wives of Windsor (RSC/RST)

Known for being particularly good with some of the lesser-loved Shakespeares, Blanche McIntyre returns to Stratford-upon-Avon for the new RSC regime's first season. And in the first half at least, The Merry Wives of Windsor justifies its place as very few people's favourite: While the popular myth of Elizabeth I demanding to see Falstaff in love seems very unlikely, it does feel probable that this Henry IV spin-off was written because of popular demand, and its mix of characters from a very different world with a whole bunch of new comic foils begins as a tangle of plots, tricks and misunderstandings. There's even a very tedious version of the Twelfth Night subplot about convincing two different types of idiot that the other wants to duel them to the death, which even the characters get openly and mercifully bored with and ditch after the first couple of acts.

Stage-to-screen review: All's Well That Ends Well(RSC / Sky Arts)

Last year, like this year, a couple of my planned theatre trips outside of That London got scuppered by rail strikes; one of them was Blanche McIntyre's production of All's Well That Ends Well at the RSC. It was a particular shame because McIntyre has been an interesting director of some of the more obscure, more problematic Shakespeare plays, and you don't get many that fit both descriptions better than this one. Rarely performed (arguably with good reason,) it was even included in the original trio of Problem Plays whose tone made them difficult to categorise (like Measure for Measure, which McIntyre's also tackled before, this one got lumped in with the Comedies by the First Folio.) The fact that its lead romantic couple are actually meant to lack any hint of sexual chemistry is the least of the issues which has kept it on the expanded list of plays with seriously problematic elements for a modern audience.

Theatre review: Coriolanus (RSC / RST & Barbican)

Season director Angus Jackson returns for the fourth and last of the RSC's Roman plays, and although Coriolanus is set earlier than the other three, designer Robert Innes Hopkins eschews the togas of the middle two plays, to match the modern dress of Titus Andronicus. In fact this also starts with a rioting gang in hoodies, and since it will actually play first when they all transfer to London, it annoyed me a bit that it'll look there like Blanche McIntyre copied the idea. Fortunately there was less to annoy me about the rest of the production, in which Sope Dirisu takes on the least likeable of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Caius Martius, later given the title Coriolanus after one of his many military victories, is a one-man Roman army, raised as such by his batshit bloodthirsty mother Volumnia (Haydn Gwynne.)

Theatre review: Julius Caesar (RSC / RST & Barbican)

It's ironic that Gregory Doran, to me the epitome of reverential, by-the-numbers Shakespeare, should have delivered my favourite-ever Julius Caesar a few years ago in a comparatively exciting and revelatory production; because Doran having temporarily handed over the reins to Angus Jackson for the Roman season at the RSC, it's Jackson who now serves up perhaps the most vanilla version of the same play I've seen so far. Have no doubt you can expect togas, swords and sandals from Robert Innes Hopkins' design as Julius Caesar (Andrew Woodall) returns to Rome triumphant after a military victory. His popularity sees the people clamour to give him political power at home, but not everyone's impressed: Cassius (Martin Hutson) has never been a favourite of Caesar's and doesn't want to wait and see how he'll fare under the new regime.

Theatre review: Antony and Cleopatra (RSC / RST)

The bonkers Titus Andronicus aside, the Roman plays aren't among my favourite Shakespeares, but they're hard to avoid this year: The RSC is basing its entire summer season around them, and only a week after seeing Ivo van Hove's Roman Tragedies I'm in Stratford-upon-Avon for a full take on the play that provided that epic with its climax: Antony and Cleopatra starts with Mark Antony (Antony Byrne,) who was among the victors at the end of Julius Caesar (which I'll be catching, out of order, in a few weeks' time,) as part of a Triumvirate sharing power over the Roman Empire. Lepidus (Patrick Drury) is older and a voice of reason, but the younger Octavius Caesar (Ben Allen) is more unpredictable, and could make a play for sole power if he thinks Antony's no longer up to the task of maintaining an empire.

Theatre review: Kenny Morgan

Looking to somewhat more recent history than his adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Mike Poulton takes us to London a few years after World War II for Kenny Morgan. The titular Kenny (Paul Keating) was an actor and lover of Terence Rattigan, but by the time we meet him in 1949 his career had stalled and he'd given up his life of comfort with the older playwright who was at that point at the height of his fame, moving into the damp flat of his new, younger lover. But life with Alec (Pierro Niel-Mee) clearly didn't have an upside, as the play opens with Kenny attempting suicide in front of the gas fire. The smell of gas alerts his neighbours, who save him in time; not wanting to alert the police they instead call the first name in Kenny's address book: Rattigan (Simon Dutton.)

Theatre review: Don Quixote

The RSC are of course marking the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death on the 23rd of April 1616*, but they're also acknowledging that Miguel de Cervantes died on the same date¥, with his epic comic novel Don Quixote getting a new stage adaptation by James Fenton. Angus Jackson directs David Threlfall as the titular impoverished lord who's spent his life in his library, absorbed in tales of Mediaeval knights-errant. As he gets old and senile he starts to believe himself one of them, and sets off on a mission to have adventures and bring the age of chivalry back to Spain. He promises the local layabout Sancho Panza (Rufus Hound) an island of his own to rule if he'll be his loyal squire.

Theatre review: Oppenheimer

Two years ago in the Swan, the RSC had a hit with a revival of A Life of Galileo, which gloried in the enduring enthusiasm of the scientist even as his discoveries edge his life towards tragedy. So it's not too surprising if they now revisit the theme, going straight for the subject of Brecht's metaphor: The development of the atomic bomb during World War II. Tom Morton-Smith's Oppenheimer sees the titular scientist, known to all as Oppie (Perennial Next Big Thing John Heffernan,) start as an enthusiastic, popular physics lecturer at Berkeley, whose students provide him with a ready-made pool of young scientists when a controversial new project comes calling. But long before America's involvement with the war in Europe, Oppie and his friends are concerned about the rise of fascism, and holding Communist Party fundraisers to help fight it.

Theatre review: Neville's Island

Plugging a couple of months' hole in the Duke of York's programme is a seemingly last-minute transfer from Chichester: Neville's Island, Tim Firth's spoof of "stranded in nature" stories like Lord of the Flies. Four middle-managers from a Salford mineral water company are on a team-building expedition in the Lake District, but having elected Neville (Neil Morrissey) as team captain, he misreads the instructions and lands them on a tiny, uninhabited island downriver. Thanks to Angus' (Miles Jupp) seemingly bottomless rucksack they have no end of supplies, except for anything they might actually need - like food. After Roy (Robert Webb) had a nervous breakdown followed by a religious conversion, the others treat him with kid gloves in fear of setting him off again; everyone except Gordon (Adrian Edmondson) that is, whose default reaction to everything is sarcasm and disdain.

Theatre review: Other Desert Cities

A few years ago the Old Vic was reconfigured in the round for a production of The Norman Conquests that proved a big hit, followed by some other shows memorable for... other reasons. This configuration has been brought back for Dame Kev's final season in charge of the venue, beginning with the UK premiere of a hit American play, Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities. The setting is Palm Springs on Christmas Eve 2003, with 9/11 and the Iraq War still feeling very new. But a war that still haunts the family of Republican politician Lyman Wyeth (Peter Egan, from the 1980s) is Vietnam: Their oldest son became notorious in the '70s when, at the age of 20, he bombed an army recruitment office in protest at the war, accidentally killing a man, and subsequently committed suicide.

Theatre review: Children's Children

When I'm stuck on how to start a review, a brief overview of the play is the usual standby, but that's not very useful when I have no idea what the play in question is meant to be. Fortunately, during the third act of Matthew Dunster's Children's Children, when the characters all started shouting at each other in a kitchen after a funeral, I figured it out: It's a soap opera. Michael (Ensemble^TM alumnus Darrell D'Silva) is a cheesy TV presenter with a hit Saturday night game show. He's known best friend Gordon (Trevor Fox) and Gordon's wife Sally (Sally Rogers) since drama school, but the latter pair have never had much success as actors. Now in middle age, Gordon's situation has got so bad that he has to beg his wealthy friend for money. By the second act, Gordon and Sally have pretty much moved into Michael's summer house in Dorset, not telling him that their daughter Effie (Emily Berrington,) her husband Castro (John MacMillan) and their new baby are also living there. But this time it's Michael who'll be in dire straits and needing his friends' support.