Theatre review: Woyzeck

When the Old Vic announced that Jack Thorne would be writing an adaptation of Woyzeck and John Boyega would star I did wonder if the combination of a Harry Potter writer and a Star Wars actor would draw an audience unprepared for a play people have famously struggled to get to the bottom of for over a century. As it turns out I really hope there aren't too many kids being taken along as they'll have come away from the evening with a whole new vocabulary. Georg Büchner's play was unfinished when the playwright died in 1837, so all versions have always taken a bit of leeway in filling in the gaps. Thorne's version moves the action to 1980s West Berlin, where Boyega plays Frank Woyzeck, part of the British army presence patrolling the Berlin Wall. It's a job both stressful and dull, and those stationed there are thought of as inferior to those in the thick of it in Northern Ireland.

Theatre review: The Cripple of Inishmaan

Ireland can't be such a bad place if Daniel Radcliffe wants to go there. It's the mid-point of Michael Grandage's residency at the Noël Coward Theatre and Radcliffe takes the title role in a revival of Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan. Inspired by the filming of documentary Man of Aran on the islands off Ireland in the 1930s, the play's rural community all look for their own ways of escaping the monotony of their isolated lives. Cripple Billy (Radcliffe) is orphaned, severely disabled in one arm and one leg, and has spent most of his life living with his "aunties" Eileen (Gillian Hanna) and Kate (Ingrid Craigie.) They run a small local shop with a shortage of eggs and sweets (for reasons that become apparent) but a plentiful supply of tinned peas. Billy's spent his life being mercilessly mocked for his disabilities and, unable to work, likes to get away by sitting in a field staring at cows - until the arrival of a film crew on neighbouring Inishmore gives him a plan to escape to Hollywood.