Theatre review: The House of Shades

Anne-Marie Duff returns to the stage, bringing with her the usual trepidation over what her generally questionable taste in plays will serve up this time. Beth Steel's The House of Shades isn't among the dodgier shows I've seen Duff in (I made it to the end of this one,) but it does suggest that if you asked her if she wanted a side of subtlety with her political commentary, you'd get a firm "no thanks!" Blanche McIntyre directs a family saga of a Nottinghamshire mining town, spanning from 1965 to 2019 - from optimism about what the trade unions and the Labour Party could do to help the country, all the way to the fall of the "red wall." Duff plays Constance, who fled an abusive father in the only way available to a woman in her position: By marrying the first man who came along. But starting her own family with Alistair (Stuart McQuarrie) soon just turned into a different kind of trap.

Theatre review: The Antipodes

In what is becoming a regular occurrence Annie Baker's latest play gets its UK premiere in the Dorfman, where for The Antipodes her particular brand of hyperrealism tips that little bit further into surrealism. Baker herself co-directs with designer Chloe Lamford, whose deep thrust stage is a luxurious but personality-free conference room in which the characters will spend weeks or maybe months of their lives around the table - there's enough Perrier stacked up against the wall to get them though a siege. There is a real-life situation the scene evokes: The writers' room of an American TV show where stories are pitched and constructed. But exactly what kind of story Sandy (Conleth Hill) has gathered a team - some of whom have worked with him before, some of whom are new - to tell remains vague.

Theatre review: Sweat

On past experience, a play having won the Pulitzer isn’t much of a guarantee that I’m going to like it, if anything the opposite; identifying a hot-button topic to write about often seems to be enough to win regardless of execution. Lynn Nottage is the first woman to have won the theatre prize twice, and the Donald and Margot Warehouse gets the UK premiere of the latest, Sweat. Nottage certainly identified her hot-button topic early: She started research in 2011, for a play which in part feels like an explanation for why parts of America were so vulnerable to the rise of Trump. The good news is that, in Lynette Linton’s production, the execution lives up to the idea. Nottage was inspired by the statistic that Reading, Pennsylvania, a relatively comfortable industrial city in the 20th century, was now the poorest place in America. The shift came when the textile mill that was the area’s primary employer significantly downsized and outsourced its work, leaving people who’d always felt comfortable in their job security suddenly unemployed.

Stage-to-screen review: Henry VI Part 2 (BBC Hollow Crown)

The cynical side of me thinks that the middle part of the BBC's Wars of the Roses wouldn't have focused quite so squarely on the future Richard III if they hadn't got Banoffee Hydrochloride to play him; but realistically I think Shakespeare's first tetralogy of English Histories is so roundly considered to be unloved that the one character everyone's heard of would probably have been at the center of Ben Power and Dominic Cooke's The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses - Henry VI Part 2, regardless of who they got to strap on the hunchback. In any case, making this mix of Shakespeare's Parts 2 and 3 effectively a prequel to Richard III lends it the closest thing it has to an overall story arc, in an adaptation that doesn't live up to the dramatic impetus Power and Cooke managed last week in Part 1.

Theatre review: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Dominic Cooke directs the 1920s installment of August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle - actually the only one of the plays not to be set in Pittsburgh, taking place entirely inside a Chicago recording studio - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. In this decade of Wilson's look at the black experience in 20th century America, the experience is still one of being second-class citizens, but real-life blues singer Ma Rainey (Sharon D Clarke) isn't going to let that stop her doing exactly what she wants: As the highest-earning artist on Sturdyvant's (Stuart McQuarrie) record label, she can get away with diva behaviour like flaunting her young girlfriend Dussie Mae (Tamara Lawrance,) refusing to sing until she's had her three bottles of Coke brought to her, and demanding the spoken-word intro to the titular song be performed by her nephew Sylvester (Tunji Lucas) - despite his stutter.

Theatre review: Detroit

Set in an unnamed "mid-sized" US city (although you'd have thought the play's title was a clue as to location) Lisa D'Amour's Detroit is a black comedy of American suburbia, and the latest play to come to the National from Chicago’s Steppenwolf company. Although this time only director Austin Pendleton and set designer Kevin Depinet have come with it, a new British cast replacing the original American one. Ben (Stuart McQuarrie) and Mary (Justine Mitchell,) in an attempt to reverse the trend of neighbours not knowing each other, invite the couple who've just moved next door round for a barbecue. Even when Kenny (Will Adamsdale) and Sharon (Clare Dunne) turn out to be recovering junkies whose life stories have a worrying number of holes in them, they continue to develop the friendship. But as well as having a sometimes damaging effect on each other, the two couples will also find a surprising amount of common ground.