Theatre review:When Winston Went to War With the Wireless

There's a tendency for previously obscure ideas or stories to get multiple interpretations all at once. Sometimes the coincidence just seems random, at others there's an obvious logic to it: You can see why events of recent years might inspire multiple writers to look back at a historical event when a Conservative government attempted to control the output of the BBC. Six months ago I'd never heard of the feud between Winston Churchill and the BBC's first Director General, John Reith. Then earlier this year I listened to a radio drama about the subject, and within weeks it had been announced that Jack Thorne would be premiering his own take on the subject at the Donald and Margot Warehouse. Having been left with altogether too many W tiles, Thorne presents When Winston Went to War With the Wireless.

Theatre review: Photograph 51

The last time Nicole Kidman appeared on a London stage she famously got her neeps and tatties out; the sight gave an elderly critic an erection we've had to hear about for the best part of two decades. He's retired now, so I guess Kidman felt safe to return, with her pants on this time (better safe than sorry,) to play Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51. Anna Ziegler’s play looks at the race to discover the structure of DNA - although, in what will turn out to be a fatal flaw that consigned her to a footnote in history, Franklin never quite realises that it is a race. Soon after the War, she's working in Paris when a place at King's College becomes available. But she may have been brought there on false pretences as she's instantly taken off her work on protein: Dr Wilkins (Stephen Campbell Moore) wants her to help boost his own research into DNA, like pure theatrical Sanatogen.

Theatre review: Chimerica

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I really don't remember booking a preview performance for this, but think the press night might have been brought back after I booked; it's now next week.

Lucy Kirkwood's Chimerica opens at the Almeida complete with three cast members (Benedict Wong, Andrew Leung and David Tse) from Hampstead's just-ended #aiww¹, and like that play it looks at the rise of China and how the ruling party treats those who don't toe the line. But as the title suggests this time there's two nations being thrown together, and at the heart of Kirkwood's new play is the relationship between China and America, and how the two nations view each other. Spanning 23 years over two continents, and coming in at over three hours, this is an epic in more ways than one. Set during last year's US Presidential election campaign, the action is haunted by the deaths of protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and especially by that day's best-known image of a lone man standing in front of a row of advancing tanks.

Theatre review: Berenice

For the fifth production in Josie Rourke's... unusual first year in charge of the Donmar, designer Lucy Osborne has partly reconfigured the auditorium, moving one of the stalls seating blocks. Combined with the curved wooden staircase that forms the set's centrepiece, it creates a kind of spiral in-the-round staging, and as the whole stage is covered with sand, it feels as if this production of Racine's Berenice is being performed inside a sea shell. Rourke directs, and the novelist Alan Hollinghurst makes a rare foray into theatre to write the translation of one of Racine's Roman tragedies. Titus, who has just become Emperor of Rome, is in love with Berenice and plans to marry her. But Berenice is a foreign queen, and despite having lived through Caligula and Nero, the idea of the Emperor marrying an outsider, let alone a member of a hereditary royalty, remains one of the most appalling things he can do in the eyes of the Roman people.