Theatre review: High Noon

Billy Crudup has returned to the West End, which could be seen as a brave move but at least he's learned his lesson and is doing his own accent this time. And it's the most American of genres, the Western, as Eric Roth adapts the 1952 movie High Noon: Crudup plays Will Kane, the beloved sheriff of a small New Mexico town, who wants to get his oats and so has married a Quaker. Amy's (Denise Gough) beliefs mean she wouldn't agree to marry him unless he gave up his violent job, and the show opens with a double ceremony on a Sunday morning as the couple get married, followed by Will handing in his badge and gun. But no sooner has he done so than news arrives of unnamed politicians pardoning Frank Miller (understudy Noel White,) the outlaw and right-wing comic book writer who terrorised the town until Will brought him to justice five years earlier.

Theatre review: Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow was a legendary American lawyer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a relentless advocate of human rights who represented workers and unions against big companies and black Americans against a racist establishment, and whose barnstorming style in court affected the way all US lawyers have addressed juries ever since. Well, they address them like that in every legal drama I've ever seen, so that's definitely accurate. He's also a character Kevin Spacey has kept returning to throughout his career, most recently in Inherit the Wind at the Old Vic. Now, for his penultimate season running the venue, Dame Kev returns to the role in David W Rintels' eponymous monologue. The theatre is still reconfigured in the round, one of Kev's better ideas and a setup I really like - it fits surprisingly well into the architecture, and gives the large building an intimacy, even from the front of the Lilian Baylis Circle where I was sitting.

Stage-to-screen review: Henry V (BBC Hollow Crown)

The BBC's Hollow Crown series of Histories comes to an end with Henry V, the final play in Shakespeare's quartet. Although I somehow think even if it had been a collection of Shakespeare's romantic comedies it would have somehow managed to end with Henry V - it's been a Henry V kind of year, and even having skipped a couple of productions I could have seen, this is the fourth interpretation I've seen in 2012 so far. Fortunately, each version has had a fairly different take on the story. Tom Hiddleston's Prince Hal is now King Henry V, and on the surface of things he's left his reckless days behind him. But the defining event of his reign betrays that wild side - a bloody campaign against France, based on a spurious historical claim to the French throne. Meanwhile we see how some of Hal's former Eastcheap drinking buddies are getting along since he renounced their company.

Theatre review: The Sunshine Boys

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The performance reviewed is from a little over halfway through the preview period.

Having worked together a few years ago on Equus, Richard Griffiths and director Thea Sharrock reunite in the West End for Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys. For the other half of the titular double act, Danny DeVito plays Willie Clark, and physically at least you can see the two of them as an old-school vaudeville comedy act, so comically mismatched are they in size - it occurred to me at times that you could almost fit an entire DeVito in Griffiths' belly. The elderly Willie lives alone in a small New York apartment, his only regular human contact being weekly visits from his nephew, and terrible agent, Ben (Adam Levy.) When a TV network plans a retrospective on vaudeville, Willie is invited to reunite with his old partner Al Lewis (Griffiths.) The trouble is the two can't stand each other, and haven't spoken in 11 years.