Theatre review: Tartuffe, the Imposter

Molière’s religious con-man Tartuffe has been around a lot in the past year, but for various reasons (having bronchitis when I was meant to be seeing it in Stratford-upon-Avon; avoiding the Theatre Royal Haymarket like the plague) the National’s is the first of the current crop I’ve caught. And certainly as adapted by John Donnelly and directed by Blanche McIntyre the play shows why so many people have chosen it at this particular moment. Robert Jones’ set is a garishly opulent living room that nods to the play’s origins at Versailles, but the action’s been relocated to Highgate where Orgon (Kevin Doyle,) who made his fortune in unspecified dubious ways, lives with his mother Pernelle (Susan Engel,) daughter Mariane (Kitty Archer,) son Damis (Enyi Okoronkwo,) second wife Elmire (Future Dame Olivia Williams) and her brother Cleante (Hari Dhillon.) All except Pernelle are currently horrified at the puritanical turn the household has taken.

Theatre review: Richard III (Almeida)

In his first new Shakespeare production since leaving the RSC, Rupert Goold takes on a (mostly) modern-dress Richard III that opens by reminding us of the recent discovery of the real Richard's remains under a car park in Leicester. As the famously curved spine is taken out of the ground, Ralph Fiennes' Richard stands over his own grave to deliver the "Now is the winter of our discontent" speech. A woman a few seats away from me was trying (and failing) before the show to get me to agree that this overt reference to recent events was patronising. In fact the idea of bones being exhumed and reburied becomes central to Hildegard Bechtler's design - the body of the late Henry VI is now a skeleton* about to be reinterred, while for every death Richard causes on his way to the throne, a skull is illuminated on the back wall.

Theatre review: 3 Winters

As we reach Nicholas Hytner's final months running the National, a number of the most successful creatives from the last few years of his reign feature heavily. Howard Davies has been most closely associated with directing Russian classics on the Lyttelton stage, and though his latest production is a new Croatian play, it feels very much part of this ongoing series. In part it comes down to the set, this time provided by Tim Hatley: These shows have been noted for their audacious scene changes, and they're not only present and correct but a vital component of Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters. This is because the winters in the story occur decades apart in the same house, and to the same family. In 1945, as the Communists take over, they evict the old royalist families. Rose (Jo Herbert,) her husband Alexander (Alex Price in 1945, James Laurenson in 1990) and their baby daughter Masha are allocated a large room in the mansion where Rose's mother Monika (Josie Walker) was once a servant.

Theatre review: Love and Information

Nikki Amuka-Bird, Linda Bassett, Amanda Drew, John Heffernan, Paul Jesson and Amit Shah are among the cast of 15 for Caryl Churchill's latest play, Love and Information. Almost as if she'd seen the Royal Court Downstairs' flair in recent years for lightning-fast scene changes and wanted in on the action, Churchill gives us essentially a fast-paced sketch show format. On what looks like the same white box, endless configurations of people and settings appear, to perform vignettes no longer than a couple of minutes at most, some lasting only seconds; a couple of them with barely any dialogue. The significance of some of the scenes is occasionally hard to pinpoint but overall a picture builds up of information in modern life: The demand for it (the opening scene is of Shah demanding a secret from Amuka-Bird,) the overload of it (he soon regrets asking,) and where emotions and individuality fit into a world made up of endless streams of data, both useful and useless.