Theatre review: Cymbeline(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

If Love's Labour's Lost can feel like the young Shakespeare workshopping setpieces he would perfect later in his career, Cymbeline could be the older playwright collecting every mad idea he couldn't fit into an earlier play, then throwing them all together to see what happens. The story of Roman Britain sees Princess Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks) separated from her exiled spouse, to be reunited only after a deranged fairytale quest that includes a man hiding in a trunk, a health tonic that's actually a deadly poison that's actually just a sleeping draught, meeting a pair of siblings she never knew existed, and a headless corpse largely played for laughs. The Swanamaker's latest take on the play gender-flips a lot of characters including the titular king; I understand the desire for a powerful female leader figure, but it feels a bit of a pyrrhic victory for that leader to struggle to make an impression because she spends the whole play on more sedatives than a 1980s soap opera housewife.

Theatre review: The Captive Queen

If David Lan leaving the Young Vic has been compared to the ravens leaving the Tower, then what do we call Barrie Rutter stepping down as Artistic Director of Northern Broadsides, the company he founded a quarter of a century ago? The 71-year-old clearly has no plans to retire completely, as he'll be part of Michelle Terry's upcoming first season at the Globe, and before that his final production for Northern Broadsides is also the final show in Terry's predecessor's winter season. John Dryden's tragicomedy Aureng-zebe is named after its painfully noble and loyal male lead, but Rutter's production renames it The Captive Queen, after the woman whose beauty and charm captivates a whole court. Rutter himself plays the ageing Emperor, false reports of whose death have kicked off a civil war between his four sons over who gets to succeed him.

Theatre review: Drawing the Line

Howard Brenton's on a bit of a roll at Hampstead Theatre, where he's debuting his third new play in just over a year. After the English Civil War and Chinese political prisoners he turns to the very last days of the Raj, with the 1947 partition of India, and the man charged with Drawing the Line. A respected judge but with no knowledge either of India or of maps, Cyril Radcliffe (Tom Beard) is called upon to redraw the map of the subcontinent. As the British Empire withdraws, India is filled with bloody religious conflict; although many different religions are represented in the country, Radcliffe's job is to divide along artificially simplistic lines: India for the Hindus, led by Nehru (Silas Carson,) and a new nation of Pakistan in the North for the Muslims, led by Jinnah (Paul Bazely.) With all the religious groups spread throughout the country, Radcliffe begins with a blank canvas, but his attempts at fairness will come across pressure not just from political interests, but personal ones as well.

Theatre review: The Prophet

The second in Christopher Haydon's debut trio of plays about revolution and revolutionaries, and his first as director since taking over at the Gate, takes us to the "Friday of Rage," the 28th of January 2011, early in the eighteen days of Egyptian uprising against President Mubarak. Hassan Abdulrazzak's The Prophet is partly assembled from interviews with a number of Egyptians who took part in the marches, but instead of presenting them as a verbatim piece, the author wraps them up in the story of an apparently ordinary middle-class couple. Layla (Sasha Behar) is an engineer for Vodafone, which puts her on the wrong side of her own principles when the government demand the mobile network be cut off to stop the protesters communicating with each other. Hisham (Nitzan Sharron) is a former journalist who's written one well-received novel. His follow-up book, about a prophet figure in modern-day Egypt, is stalled by writer's block.