Theatre review: 1536

Anne Boleyn looms large over Ava Pickett's 1536, although she never actually makes an appearance*: Instead we're in a field in Essex with three regular young women, who we catch up with over the course of a few weeks as gossip reaches them of the queen's arrest for treason, increasingly lurid accusations of sexual impropriety, and eventually her execution. In the process we see them deal with the slow, horrifying realisation of just how precarious their lives are as women in Tudor England. Central to the story is Anna (Siena Kelly,) whose outlook on her own body and sexuality is very modern - she enjoys her power over men as much if not more so than the actual sex, doesn't particularly care if she's got a reputation in the village, and is currently hooking up with Richard (Adam Hugill,) even when she discovers he's about to enter into an arranged marriage with her best friend Jane (Liv Hill.)

Theatre review: The Seagull

Hot on the heels of a Three Sisters that found a bit more humour than usual in one of the bleaker Chekhovs comes a Seagull that focuses on the melancholy of one of the ones that's officially a comedy. Duncan Macmillan and director Thomas Ostermeier's adaptation keeps all four acts in the al fresco location where only the first usually takes place: The lakeside dacha of retired civil servant Peter Sorin (Jason Watkins,) whose insistence that the fresh country air doesn't agree with him helps him and everyone else ignore just how bad his health actually is. Spending the summer there as usual is his sister Irina Arkádina (Cate Blanchett,) a famous actress, with her new boyfriend Alexander Trigorin (Tom Burke,) a bestselling novelist. But we begin with Arkádina's son Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee,) an aspiring playwright who's premiering an experimental play he's convinced is the future of art.

Theatre review: She Stoops to Conquer

Tom Littler continues to find his own stamp on the Orange Tree's traditional money-spinning revivals with Restoration Comedy given a 1930s twist: One of the most famous examples of the genre, Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, gets set in a rural pub at Christmas, with Anett Black and Neil Irish's design adding tables and stuffed animal heads, to reflect a story about a posh county house that could easily be mistaken for an inn. It's a conceit that's set up early so that Charles Marlow (Freddie Fox) and George Hastings (Robert Mountford,) lost on their way to meet their prospective spouses, can be tricked into thinking they're taking shelter in a roadside tavern, when in fact they've reached their destination: The home of Mr Hardcastle (David Horovitch,) an old friend of Marlow's father, whose daughter Kate he's been sent to meet and court.

Theatre review: A Mirror

In an unnamed totalitarian state, Jan Čelik (Jonny Lee Miller) is Director of the Ministry of Culture, tipped to become the next Minister and, unlike the current one, actually interested in culture: He strongly dislikes the Ministry's nickname of "censorship bureau," and prefers to think of himself as someone who nurtures promising artists and hones their talents into something that can be used for the glory of the Motherland - like the national treasure playwright Bax (Geoffrey Streatfeild,) whose success Čelik takes a lot of credit for. He thinks he's found the next big thing in mechanic and former soldier Adem (Micheal Ward,) whose debut play violates almost every censorship guideline in the book, but whose naturalistic style shows promise Čelik thinks he can mould. In fact the play is even less artful than the Director realises: Adem has a form of photographic memory, and the unconnected scenes in the play he's submitted are actually verbatim transcripts of conversations his neighbours have had, that he's heard through the building's thin walls.

Theatre review: Scenes with Girls

With #MeToo, #TimesUp and other related hashtags popular themes in new plays over the last few years, there's no question theatre has engaged with the fact that women's position in society is long overdue a shake-up. But Miriam Battye's Scenes with Girls deals with the tricky question of just how easy it'll be to figure out what that new position is. For two best friends since high school, and now flatmates, it's all about taking the language and ideas of feminist forums and applying them directly to their own lives, but they've got very different interpretations of this: Lou (Rebekah Murrell) isn't interested in a relationship with a man but wants to have sex with a lot of them without feeling slut-shamed about it; she treats it like a man stereotypically would, proudly tallying up the number of her sexual conquests. (She has considered a relationship with a woman in theory, but is worried she'd be so prone to letting her have her way out of feminist solidarity that she'd become a doormat.)