Theatre review: Cymbeline (RSC / RST)

What better way to mark the Coronation than with Shakespeare's late romance about a forgettable king with a dead first wife and a panto villain second wife? The last time the RSC staged Cymbeline they gender-swapped the King and Queen to avoid the cliché of the wicked stepmother. For Gregory Doran's final show as Artistic Director things stay very much as written, because that particular cliché - and the play's extended collection of weird bad guys in general - feed into the production's feel of a dark fairytale. Peter De Jersey plays Cymbeline, the King of Britain who gets all but written out of his own play when he starts to fall ill, suspiciously soon after the new Queen starts brewing him a mysterious health tonic. Alexandra Gilbreath goes full Cruella as the Queen who also advises that the princess Imogen marry her son Cloten (Conor Glean,) so he can inherit the throne should the King suddenly die for some reason.

Theatre review: Troilus and Cressida (RSC / RST)

The thing about committing to doing the entire works of Shakespeare with no repetition is that at some point you have to knuckle down and do Troilus and Cressida. If you're the RSC you've also got the added pressure of hoping it doesn't get overshadowed by the memory of the last time you attempted it. Artistic Director Gregory Doran has taken the job on himself with a bombastic production that plays a few weeks in the middle of the "T" season, the high concept being that designer Niki Turner has taken inspiration from Mad Max (presumably the Tom Hardy rather than Mel Gibson version, as Agamemnon doesn't take time out to blame the Jews for the Trojan War) and composers Evelyn Glennie and Dave Price have created a cacophonous, percussion-heavy soundtrack that's meant to evoke the noise of a war dragging on indefinitely in the background. It's a clanging, crashing noise that Troilus (Gavin Fowler) is not so much haunted as irritated by after seven years of siege.

Theatre review: Cymbeline (RSC / RST & Barbican)

Shakespeare's fevered crack dream of Roman Britain, Cymbeline has come back into vogue lately; the programme notes for the RSC's latest take suggest it's because the context of England in an uncomfortable co-dependent relationship with mainland Europe strikes a chord in the year of the EU referendum. And so director Melly Still and designer Anna Fleischle conjure up a dystopian near-future in which, left to its own devices, Britain has used up its natural resources, the only remaining hint of nature in Cymbeline's court the trunk of a chopped-down tree encased in glass (now a 2016 theatrical meme, what with the similar idea in Elegy.) Innogen (Bethan Cullinane,) daughter of Queen Cymbeline (Gillian Bevan) has secretly married childhood sweetheart Posthumus (Hiran Abeysekera,) a match that enrages her mother, who promptly banishes her new son-in-law.

Theatre review: Julius Caesar (RSC / RST, Noël Coward Theatre & tour)

Though I've seen the odd good production, Julius Caesar has never been one of my favourite Shakespeare plays. There's an awful lot of surreptitious plotting, and for years all attempts to get away from the play's togas-and-sandals image seemed to turn the conspirators into identikit business-suited politicians. In recent years slightly more diverse interpretations seem to have been given a chance again, and Gregory Doran, in his penultimate RSC show as Chief Associate before he officially takes over as Artistic Director, turns Rome into a turbulent African nation. The set is a town square whose concrete seems to have had some bomb damage, overshadowed by a huge statue of Caesar. A community chorus has been enlisted to help fill the stage, and as we enter the party is in full swing, celebrating his victory over Pompey.