Theatre review: The Deep Blue Sea

The Deep Blue Sea isn't the easiest watch in the Terence Rattigan canon but it's considered among his great works; that, and Tamsin Greig in the lead role, were reasons enough to revisit a play steeped in despair and redemption in its first return to London since the late Helen McCrory led it at the National a decade ago. The play opens with a suicide attempt: Hester (Greig) is found on the floor of her room in a dilapidated boarding house, unconscious but still alive next to the hissing gas fire. In an early example of how the play juggles the banal with the profound, her life was saved when the gas ran out because she forgot to top up the meter. Landlady Mrs Elton (Selina Cadell) and neighbours Mr & Mrs Welch (Preston Nyman and Lisa Ambalavanar) will get her help, but their meddling will also bring everyone from Hester's complicated life right back to her.

Theatre review: The Tempest(Jamie Lloyd Company / Theatre Royal Drury Lane)

Apparently when John Gielgud ended his run as Prospero at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1957, he foretold that Shakespeare would never again be performed at the venue, which would become a home for big musicals only. No doubt any suggestion of snobbery was fully intended, but it's also probably fair to say that a vast stage and 2000+ seat auditorium might be easier to fill with a big spectacle than with a production of a play that comes around every couple of years in London alone. But the theatre is now owned by His Exalted Brittanic Excellency, The Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB, who has enlisted Jamie Lloyd to end the 67-year Shakespeare drought at the venue with a starry mini-season inspired by the noblest of all intentions: Proving that a man who died a quarter of a century ago was wrong about that thing he said that one time.

Theatre review: Hamlet (Riverside Studios)

Following last year's solo Great Expectations, Eddie Izzard returns to the stage, once again with her older brother Mark adapting a famous work into a monologue. This time, though, instead of a novel with a fair amount of first-person narration to keep the story going, it's Shakespeare's most lauded tragedy Hamlet, a story that's already written for the stage. So the source material is all dialogue, leaving it entirely down to the performer to make sure the audience knows who's saying what to whom. Eddie Izzard does of course have a lot of acting credits but remains best known as a comedian, and if she's previously performed Shakespeare professionally I can't find any reference to it, so this endeavour has to fall somewhere between ambitious and foolhardy, with the distinct possibility of coming across as pure vanity project. What we get in the end is a little bit of all of the above.

Theatre review: Great Expectations

A week ago I saw the spoof Bleak Expectations, this week it's the turn of the actual Charles Dickens (Chickens to his friends,) although there's times when this too feels like it's edging into parody, as a 19th century writer often lauded for his comedy gets it staged by one of the most beloved stand-ups of the 20th and 21st. If it wasn't for the ubiquity of A Christmas Carol, the melodrama Great Expectations would no doubt get the top spot as Chickens' most-adapted book - its most recent TV version was mainly talked about in terms of why there was any need for Olivia Colman to put on Miss Havisham's wedding dress when it was still lightly toasted from Gillian Anderson's turn. At least Selina Cadell's production has an unusual USP: Mark Izzard has adapted the story as a monologue for Eddie Izzard.

Theatre review: The Double Dealer

The Orange Tree tends to be quite traditional about having something light and frothy for Christmas, and this year it's Restoration comedy that's on the menu. It's a genre that earlier this year was proven to need fairly broad strokes to make it work, and fortunately Selina Cadell has experience directing these kinds of plays. Whether the efforts of Cadell and her cast are actually enough to make William Congreve's The Double Dealer look like a neglected classic is another story altogether. Mellefont (Lloyd Everitt) is engaged to Cynthia (Zoë Waites) but their upcoming marriage may be derailed if his aunt has her way: Lady Touchwood (also Waites) is angry at him for rejecting her own advances, and wants to sabotage the union, getting her hands on Mellefont's inheritance in the process.

Theatre review: Humble Boy

I didn't catch Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy when it premiered at the National in 2001, but I've heard it mentioned a lot since as one of the best-loved new plays of the time. Paul Miller now tests how well it's aged with a revival of this gentle tragicomedy with overt Hamlet allusions. Designer Simon Daw has gone all-out in transforming the Orange Tree's in-the-round stage into the garden of Flora Humble's (Belinda Lang) Cotswolds home. Her husband has just died and her son Felix (Jonathan Broadbent) has returned after a long absence to attend the funeral, only to disappear when he was meant to be giving the eulogy. Felix is a theoretical astrophysicist who's been trying to find a unifying theory of the cosmos. His attempts to examine his inner life have been as unsuccessful as those to examine black holes, and he arrives back at the family home still in a suicidal mood.

Theatre review: The Dresser

Ronald Harwood is best-known for his contribution to the field of gibbering misogyny, but he also wrote some plays. Sean Foley's new production of the best-known one, The Dresser, comes to London after a short out-of-town tryout, and follows a co-dependent relationship over the course of one night during World War II. For the last 16 years Norman (Reece Shearsmith) has been personal dresser to the grand old stage actor Sir (Ken Stott,) a fairly well-respected name but appaently not enough to ever get the knighthood he desperately wants. They're currently on their latest leg of an endless regional tour of Shakespearean rep, with a company largely made up of the elderly and injured because all the professional young actors are in the army. Tonight's performance is King Lear, but Sir has gone missing.

Theatre review: Love for Love

In the prologue to William Congreve's Love for Love Angelica (Justine Mitchell) promises all sorts of fun over the next few hours on the stage then ends by saying that, for the more discerning audience member, they'll even throw in a plot. Well there's lots of fun moments on the Swan's stage but calling what happens an actual plot might be stretching the term to breaking point. We're in Restoration Comedy territory, in genre if not historically, as the play premiered in Queen Anne's time and - in a nod to Helen Edmundson's play that will be in rep later in the season - Queen Anne herself is in the audience: In one of many fourth wall-breaking touches, an audience member gets to wear the crown (this afternoon's Queen was clearly thrilled to be chosen as she kept it on throughout.)

Theatre review: The Rivals

The most popular of late Restoration comedies, Sheridan's The Rivals follows the titular suitors for the hand of wealthy Bath heiress Lydia Languish (Jenny Rainsford.) The two most significant candidates are actually the same person: Jack Absolute (Iain Batchelor) has the approval of his father Sir Anthony (Nicholas Le Prevost) and of Lydia's guardian, her aunt Mrs Malaprop (Gemma Jones.) Lydia, though, is a fan of the new florid romantic novels, and won't be satisfied by a romance without a bit of danger in it. So Jack knows the only way to her heart is to pose as the lowly Ensign Beverley and promise her a scandalous elopement. Meanwhile the bumbling country gentleman Bob Acres (Justin Edwards) believes he has a chance with the heiress, as does Sir Lucius O'Trigger (Adrian McLoughlin,) who has letters to prove it - in fact O'Trigger's secret admirer isn't Lydia but her aunt.