Theatre review: The Cherry Orchard (RSC/Swan)

Kenneth Branagh has a long history with the RSC: Playing Hamlet there; not getting the Artistic Director job; starting a petition to ban anyone who didn't go to RADA from ever being employed there (probably.) Now he's reunited with something else he left behind decades ago: His Belfast accent, as he plays Chekhov's representative of a rising new monied middle class in The Cherry Orchard. SirKenBran's Lopakhin is a voice of brutal pragmatism in a world of aristocratic old romantics who've not quite got to grips with the new Russia that's been growing up around them ever since the serfs were emancipated. Madame Ranyevskaya (Helen Hunt) has just been on a European tour with her daughter Anya (Chumisa Dornford-May,) where she's been spending cash liberally, cheerfully ignoring the fact that her family's fortune is long gone.

Theatre review: Henry V (RSC/RST)

A Henry V that doesn't feel horribly topical when a foreign war is launched to distract from a domestic crisis must be as rare as one that doesn't co-opt something from the Henry IV plays to build its world. Both themes are present together as 50% of the RSC's Artistic Director reunites with Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch: Tamara Harvey's production opens with Enoch's Hal mistaking his sleeping father for dead and prematurely taking the crown. It feels notable that he shoos away a servant as the old king (Valentine Hanson) admits his claim to the throne was tenuous, and then goes on to advise his son to solidify his own position by invading France. This becomes pretty much the whole plot of the play that follows, but Hal's statement that the weight of responsibility led Henry IV to his early grave turns out not to be as relevant to him.

Theatre review: The Constant Wife

Based on a W. Somerset Maugham play that's one year shy of celebrating its centenary, Laura Wade's The Constant Wife gives us a fun but complicated twist on the new, liberated women of the 1920s. Constance (understudy Jess Nesling*) has been married for 15 years, and remains perfectly happy with her husband. But John (Luke Norris) has been having an affair with her best friend Marie-Louise (Emma McDonald) for some time, something everyone but her seems to know about. Her mother Mrs Culver (Kate Burton) and sister Martha (Amy Morgan) disagree over whether to tell her, but things come to a head when Marie-Louise's husband Mortimer (Daniel Millar) finds out about the affair and confronts them. At which point Constance bends over backwards to disprove the truth, not because she doesn't believe it but because she knows all about it and wants to keep the lie going.

Theatre review: Pericles(RSC/Swan & Chicago Shakespeare Theater)

The new RSC team's first season ends with half an Artistic Director finally making a debut as unlikely and understated as the rest of the summer run has been: One of the most obscure plays to just about scrape into the canon, the one Shakespeare himself was so invested in he entrusted half the writing to some pimp he met down the pub. Tamara Harvey hasn't directed at the RSC before, so starting in the smaller Swan also seems a sensibly measured way of getting used to the company's deep thrust stages. In context though there is something audacious about the choice of Pericles as her opening salvo - a play perceived as so unpopular that both her predecessors dealt with it by announcing they were going to stage it, then hoping nobody would notice when they didn't. In this meandering late romance Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch) sets out on a variety of fairytale quests to win princesses with, it's probably fair to say, varying results.

Stage-to-screen review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is a story that's endlessly popular for stage adaptation, although in my experience it always seems to struggle there - perhaps that's why it's the one story Wilde chose to tell as a novel rather than a play or poem. It now surfaces again as the latest pandemic-era streaming production, from co-producers the Barn Theatre, Lawrence Batley Theatre, New Wolsey Theatre, Oxford Playhouse and Theatr Clwyd - filmed largely at the Barn, adapted by the Lawrence Batley's Artistic Director Henry Filloux-Bennett and directed by Clwyd's AD Tamara Harvey, a number of other partner theatres also benefit from one of the more star-studded of the recent online shows. Keeping Wilde's core characters intact but going for a much looser adaptation of the actual story, Filloux-Bennett turns it into a parable about social media that's firmly rooted in last year's events.

Theatre review: Orpheus Descending

We've had the unofficial Arthur Miller festival, now it looks from my diary of upcoming theatre trips like it's the turn of Tennesse Williams. Orpheus Descending seems to be regarded pretty firmly as mid-tier Williams but the Menier Chocolate Factory's production - co-produced with Theatr Clwyd, where it played before the current run and whose Artistic Director Tamara Harvey directs - goes all out to put it up there with the better-known of his brooding Southern Gothic tragedies. A veteran of the playwright's doomed heroes, Seth Numrich returns to the UK to play Valentine Xavier, a drifter who's made a living playing his guitar in bars since his teens, but as he turns 30 decides to try and settle down somewhere - whether or not he's actually hiding from the law is never quite clear. He ends up in a small Tennesse town where Vee Talbott (Carole Royle) takes him under her wing and suggests a job at the general store.

Theatre review: Home, I'm Darling

Laura Wade’s new play opens with a cheesy domestic scene straight out of a 1950s sitcom, as perfectly-coiffed housewife Judy (Future Dame Katherine Parkinson) floats around her kitchen making breakfast for her estate agent husband Johnny (Richard Harrington,) making sure he’s got everything ready so he’s not late for work. But before she can get on with the cleaning and tidying she needs to look up a couple of housekeeping tips on the internet, because Home, I’m Darling takes place in the present day. Having met through their shared love of all things ‘50s, the couple have decked out their house in authentic period designs and goods – even if that means a fridge that only works when it feels like it – decanting all their groceries into period-appropriate containers and, when Judy was made redundant three years ago, decided to take the experiment further by living their daily lives as if it was sixty years earlier, right down to the traditional gender roles.

Theatre review: Elephants

Another family Christmas on stage can only mean another opportunity to reevaluate your own family Christmas and decide it's not so bad after all. In Elephants we're in the comfortable depths of Middle England, where Sally (Imogen Stubbs) has gone all out to embrace the festive spirit. She and husband Richard (Richard Lintern) have invited friends Valerie (Helen Atkinson Wood) and Dick (Jonathan Guy Lewis) to spend the holiday with them, and as everyone arrives on Christmas Eve the mood is upbeat. But this is forced jollity, as the big blowout is Sally's attempt to deal with a darker fact: This is also the one-year anniversary of the brutal murder of their son Christopher (Adam Buchanan appearing in a dream sequence.) Christopher's ex-girlfriend Jenny (Antonia Thomas) has also been invited to what is planned as one last celebration of his life, but when Sally and Richard's daughter Daisy (Bel Powley) arrives, she has other ideas.

Theatre review: Breeders

Opening a new season for young producers at the St James Theatre is Ben Ockrent's new play Breeders, an appealing sitcom with a strong comedy cast. Self-help book writer Andrea (Tamzin Outhwaite) and family lawyer Caroline (Angela Griffin) are a well-off lesbian couple who've recently got married and bought a large fixer-upper house together, but with their biological clocks ticking they're starting to wish for a family to fill it with. Andrea's dream is that they can have what a straight couple does, a baby that shares both parents' DNA, but the only way to do that is for her brother Jimmy (Nicholas Burns) to be the sperm donor for Caro's pregnancy. He says yes, but when they can't agree over what his legal rights to the child will be the plan changes: He and his girlfriend Sharon (Jemima Rooper) will move in with the couple and they'll all raise the child together.

Theatre review: In the Vale of Health: Missing Dates

SIMON GRAY: Hello my agent! Simon Gray here. I've written a play called Japes, it's about some obnoxious, drunk intellectuals fucking.
SIMON GRAY'S AGENT: Well, you're Simon Gray, so that's pretty much what I'd expect. Shall we go stage it in a theatre then?
SG: Sounds like a plan.

(some time passes)

SG: It's Simon Gray again! Remember that play Japes?
AGENT: Yes, we staged it, on a proper stage, with human actors and everything. It was OK.
SG: Well, I was wondering what would happen if I changed a couple of words in the first three scenes - would the story turn out differently?
AGENT: Oh, well that's a wacky thought to have. Bye then.
SG: No, I actually wrote it! It's called Japes Too, and 3/4 of it is indistinguishable from Japes.
AGENT: Hmmm, sounds like staging that within a decade of Japes would be utterly pointless. How about a rehearsed reading? If we're lucky it might rain, and some students might come see it to stay dry.
SG: That'll do!

(some more time passes)

Theatre review: In the Vale of Health: Japes Too

Three quarters of the way through Simon Gray's In the Vale of Health sequence, and all I am is more strongly convinced that staging this quartet is an incredibly elaborate vanity project, and one created for the benefit of someone who isn't even alive to enjoy it. The original stand-alone play was Japes, about a ménage à trois that sees Anita (Laura Rees) married to Michael (Jamie Ballard) for decades while carrying on an on-off relationship with his younger brother Japes (Gethin Anthony.) Then there was Michael, a shorter piece which ditched the first act and retold the second from an ever-so-slightly different angle. And now there's the third (though written second) in Hampstead's series, Japes Too, which aims to follow the characters from the original play, but see how things might have turned out if certain details had been different.

Theatre review: In the Vale of Health: Japes

Simon Gray wrote Japes in 2001 as a stand-alone play; the other installments that make up the In the Vale of Health sequence were later additions to the story of its central characters, when he felt the work as performed didn't say everything he wanted to about them. So Japes should be a play I can easily look at in its own right, but the fact that I saw companion piece Michael last week turns out to make a huge difference to how I react to the original. Here we first join the love triangle in the early 1960s: Michael (Jamie Ballard) lives with his brother Japes (Gethin Anthony) in the house they inherited from their parents. He's starting to fall in love with Anita (Laura Rees) and approaches his brother to ask his advice on whether he should propose to her, even though Japes barely knows her.

Theatre review: In the Vale of Health: Michael

Hampstead Downstairs is staging a quartet of Simon Gray plays in an ambitious project that'd already borne fruit before it even opened: Having quickly sold out, the rep season will transfer to the main house after its run in the studio. Gray's In the Vale of Health project stems from his 2000 play Japes, about a love triangle featuring two brothers. After the play was produced he felt there were alternative avenues to be explored for those characters, and proceeded to write three companion pieces that saw what happened if things had turned out differently. Tamara Harvey's production brings the four plays together, in what is the premiere stage production of the companion pieces Michael, Japes Too and Missing Dates.

Theatre review: From Here To Eternity

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Tim Rice says he doesn't believe in long preview periods, but his producers do so the official reviewers are being kept at bay until next week.

Although based on a novel by James (not Earl) Jones, the film of From Here To Eternity is so well-known it probably qualifies Tim Rice's new musical as the latest in the movie-to-musical trend. Rice has teamed up with composer Stuart Brayson to tell the story of US soldiers stationed in Hawaii in late 1941, knowing that they're bound to be joining World War II sooner or later but not realising the incident that draws America in will come to them directly. In the meantime they're in a limbo state with little to occupy their time. Newcomer Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Robert Lonsdale) is a boxer who no longer boxes, a bugler who no longer blows the bugle, and uninterested in casual sex, which marks him out as different to the other soldiers. He falls in love with Lorene (Siubhan Harrison,) a prostitute who's also uninterested in casual sex, which marks her out out as a woman who makes poor career choices.

Theatre review: Hello/Goodbye

Peter Souter's previous writing credits are all in TV and radio, and there's a definite hint of sitcom to his playwrighting debut - particularly the first act, the "hello" part of Hello/Goodbye. Not that there's anything wrong with sitcom, especially when it's done this well, and with an edge of something deeper creeping in as the story goes on. Having burnt all her bridges with her friends Juliet (Jo Herbert) has rented a new flat. Or so she thinks - a mistake by the estate agents sees her arrive to find Alex (Andy Rush) already halfway through moving his things in. And there's plenty to move in, as in classic odd-couple style her chaotic nature is contrasted with his obsessive tendencies, which include a number of mounted collections ranging from shells and insects to Happy Meal toys - it's not necessarily what's in the collection that interests him, it's the completeness of it.

Theatre review: Blue Heart Afternoon

Nigel Gearing's Blue Heart Afternoon is set in 1951 Hollywood, and he populates it with four archetypes of the period: Ernie (Stephen Noonan,) an Oscar-winning songwriter who wasn't particularly supportive of his colleagues accused of Communist activity, and is worried this will affect his future career; an ageing, sexually-ambiguous German Diva (Sian Thomas,) whose star is on the wane; Harry (Peter Marinker,) a dying studio mogul; and the not-as-naïve-as-she-looks Ingenue (Ruby Bentall,) freshly arrived from Texas. Overlooked by the Hollywood sign they try to make deals with each other that might launch or save their careers.