Theatre review: Three Sisters

Last winter season saw the Swanamaker take a successful first crack at Ibsen; this year, and in the annual onstage appearance by the Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe adds Chekhov to the repertory. In a remote part of Russia the titular Three Sisters live in the house their father bought when he was appointed commander of the resident military garrison. A year after his death, his children are still there, talking about moving back to Moscow but tied to the area by a few circumstances. Over the next five years, instead of freeing themselves from them, they'll end up with ever more reasons they can't escape the depressing small town they only ever thought was a stopgap. Olga is the eldest, the schoolteacher who has little love for the job and certainly doesn't see it as a career she'll progress in.

Theatre review: Mates in Chelsea

The fact that the Royal Court, still probably best known for popularising kitchen sink plays and retaining a reputation as a political powerhouse, is based at the heart of Sloane Square has always been a bit of a contradiction, and one the venue has occasionally played on. The latest variation on the theme is also an attempt to link the location to the scripted reality show Made in Chelsea - "The Poshos," as my sister calls it - and the obliviously privileged characters people are familiar with from TV. Rory Mullarkey's Mates in Chelsea puts modern-day aristocrats in a P.G. Wodehouse-inspired farce in which Tug Bungay (Laurie Kynaston) lives a louche life in his Chelsea flat, looked after by his grumpy Leninist housekeeper Mrs Hanratty (Amy Booth-Steel,) whom he keeps around mainly because a wise-cracking Jeeves type suits the image of himself he likes to project.

Theatre review: Pity

After the comparative triumph of writing the Olivier’s least-worst new play of 2017, Rory Mullarkey returns to the Royal Court where his somewhat disjointed style of playwriting goes up a notch to fully embrace Absurdism. Pity opens on a generic town square – it used to be the Market Square but there isn’t a market any more – where an ice cream stall has been set up, and Francesca Mills runs a tombola before the show starts. A man named only as Person (Abraham Popoola) starts to narrate his day – unemployed, he people-watches as it’s the only way to spend his time that doesn’t cost anything – and meets a Professor (Paul Bentall) who’s in the middle of a reactionary rant to his daughter when he’s struck by lightning and killed instantly. Person responds by proposing to Daughter (Sophia Di Martino) and the two marry without getting round to learning each other’s names.

Theatre review: Saint George and the Dragon

To Rory Mullarkey falls the dubious honour of giving the Olivier stage its best piece of new writing this year; a bar set so low the only challenge it could provide is in a limbo contest. Straight after I saw Albion, another play's title gives away the fact that it'll touch on English identity in the face of Brexit, as Mullarkey gives us his centuries-spanning, epic twist on Saint George and the Dragon. John Heffernan plays failed dragon-slayer George, who returns to the country of his birth only to find that one of the creatures he's been running from has taken up residence there too, turning it into a dark place in constant fear. Charles (Gawn Grainger) begs the knight to slay the beast, but it's only when he sees and instantly falls for Charles' daughter Elsa (Amaka Okafor) - who happens to be the Dragon's next meal - that he agrees to challenge him.

Theatre review: The Oresteia (Shakespeare's Globe)

In only its second-ever staging of Greek Tragedy, Shakespeare's Globe goes straight for the big one, and the oldest extant piece of Western theatre, Aeschylus' trilogy The Oresteia. The Trojan War is over, and Agamemnon (George Irving) is on his way back to his kingdom. But his wife Clytemnestra (Katy Stephens) hasn't forgotten, or forgiven, what he did to get his victory: To guarantee fair winds Agamemnon sacrificed their youngest daughter Iphigenia. Ten years on, he will pay for it with his own life, when his wife's smiles hide a plan for bloody revenge. But in a family that's carried a curse for generations, violence breeds violence. Another decade passes and Agamemnon's son Orestes (Joel MacCormack) returns to the House of Atreus, intent on avenging his father's death in turn.

Theatre review: The Wolf From the Door

Revolution comes in the form of a black comedy fantasy in the first show of the Royal Court's new season, Rory Mullarkey's The Wolf From the Door. 25-year-old Leo (Calvin Demba) is jobless and homeless, but claims to be able to survive without eating, drinking, sleeping or sweating. When he meets eccentric aristocrat Lady Catherine at a train station and she takes him home, he assumes she wants him for sex, but her plans for him are much grander, and odder. Catherine (Anna Chancellor) is a leading light in an underground network of rebels and terrorists who've been meeting for months in innocuous-seeming groups to plot the overthrow of society. Discovering Leo, with his lack of apparent ties to that society, is the final piece of the puzzle, a figurehead for the revolution who will lead the country when the dust settles.