Theatre review: The Motive and the Cue

The National Theatre has lured a couple of the most commercially successful British playwrights amd screenwriters to the South Bank to premiere new shows this season, starting with Jack Thorne in the Lyttelton, with stage and screen director Sam Mendes at the helm of a play about screen stars, and what draws them to the stage. The Motive and the Cue is inspired by the real story of Richard Burton (Johnny Flynn,) who in the middle of the honeymoon for (one of) his marriages to Elizabeth Taylor (Tuppence Middleton) went to Broadway to rehearse for Hamlet. John Gielgud (Mark Gatiss) had already become a legendary Shakespearean actor by his mid-20s, but by 1964 and at the age of 60 his glory days seem to be far behind him.

Theatre review: The Lehman Trilogy

After having apparently been a hit across Europe, Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy gets its first English-language version from Ben Power, and a glossy production at the Lyttelton from Sam Mendes. Apart from very brief glimpses of supernumeraries, the three-and-a-half hour play is cast only with three actors, Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley. In the current theatrical climate it's hard not to notice that a banner production at the National Theatre exclusively stars middle-aged white men, but then it's hard to argue that the middle-aged white men they're playing haven't had a significant enough effect on today's world for their story to need to be told: The fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was the trigger for the most recent global recession, whose political after-effects are very much coming to play now; this is the story of the men who created the company, and the descendants who steered it in directions that helped put global finance on a knife-edge.

Theatre review: The Ferryman

The last time Jez Butterworth wrote a 3-and-a-half hour rural epic for the Royal Court Downstairs it was the mega-hit Jerusalem, and his latest looks to replicate at least some of that success: It sold out at the Royal Court and had already announced a West End transfer months before opening. But where Jerusalem was a very particular vision of England, The Ferryman takes us to 1980s Northern Ireland and the issue that's dominated centuries of its history. The Troubles are both distant and ever-present in a remote farm in County Armagh where IRA man-turned-farmer Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine) now lives with his extended family. As well as his wife Mary (Genevieve O'Reilly) and their seven children, this includes several elderly aunts and uncles plus his sister-in-law Caitlin (Laura Donnelly) and her teenage son Oisin (Rob Malone,) who've lived there ever since Quinn's brother vanished ten years earlier.

Theatre review: King Lear (National Theatre)

The first King Lear I ever saw, 20 years ago, starred Robert Stephens in the title role, and Edgar was played by the then rising star of the RSC, Simon Russell Beale. It maybe says a bit too much about my age that the wheel, which is so often referenced in the play, has come full circle and it's now SRB's turn - admittedly at the comparatively young age of 53 - to play the king who abdicates in all but name. He reunites with his long-time collaborator Sam Mendes on the National's main stage, and although it's a long-awaited event I couldn't help but feel a little bit apprehensive given I didn't love any of Mendes' Bridge Project productions. King Lear, though, sees the director get his Shakespearean mojo back for a truly epic - there's no major text cuts so we're in it for the full three-and-a-half hours - and emotionally devastating production.

Theatre review: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The official critics have not been invited to this show yet.

With the success of Matilda forgive me if I was a bit cynical at news that a huge musical version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was in the works - would it be rushed to the stage to catch some of the buzz of the last Roald Dahl adaptation? More encouraging was the creative team: With David Greig providing the book, music from Hairspray and Catch Me If You Can's Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and directed by Sam Mendes, its pedigree definitely made it worth a look. Locked away in his factory, Willy Wonka (Douglas Hodge) makes the world's best-loved chocolate, but is himself a mysterious figure. Until a promotion puts golden tickets in five chocolate bars, with the lucky winners promised a trip of the factory. Four spoilt children get the trip of a lifetime, while the final ticket goes to dirt-poor Charlie Bucket (Jack Costello, Tom Klenerman, Isaac Rouse or Louis Suc.)