Theatre review: More Life

Billed as a sci-fi gothic horror, Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman's More Life is a riff on Frankenstein (something it acknowledges several times) set in 2075, when medical advances have allowed those who can afford them to slow down the ageing process by a couple of deacdes, but haven't quite eliminated human mortality altogether yet. But the next step towards that might just have been taken: Alison Halstead plays a synthetic human that doesn't need to eat, sleep or breathe. Vic (Marc Elliott) and his assistant Mike (Lewis Mackinnon) now need to find the right consciousness to animate it, out of many brains donated to their shadowy organisation over the years. Many can't handle the realisation that they've died and been brought back in a new body, but eventually the scientists find Bridget, a young woman who died in a car crash in 2026 (caused by one of the company's own prototype driverless cars.) A few adjustments to the code that stores her consciousness, and she's ready for a new life.

Theatre review: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

I've not really enjoyed Complicité's work much so their latest, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, was an easy one to skip; until Kathryn Hunter was announced as the lead, making it a much more exciting proposition. Unfortunately Hunter has been taken ill, with Amanda Hadingue taking over the lead role of Janina for tonight's performance, which leaves me back where I started, with a Complicité show and no real selling point. And as it turns out, Simon McBurney and the company's adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk's eco-thriller is almost entirely narrated by its leading lady, so while Hadingue delivers a strong and likeable performance, having her perform the three-hour show with three teleprompters feeding her her lines is no substitute for Hunter's unique talents.

Radio review: Doctor Faustus

The last time the RSC tackled Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the concept of the damned scholar and his demon servant as a two sides of the same coin was played with by having two actors alternate the roles of Faustus and Mephistopheles, with both actors and audience only finding out who would play whom at the start of the performance. Radio is a medium that allows for the idea to be taken easily to the next conclusion, so adaptor/director Emma Harding gives us hot Heff-on-Heff action: John Heffernan plays both roles in this recent Radio 3 broadcast. Faustus is a Wittenberg scholar frustrated by the limits of human knowledge found in the approved books; he expands his horizons to forbidden tomes on demonology, and manages to summon Mephistopheles. Despite the demon himself warning him against it, Faustus signs a contract to sell his soul to Lucifer in exchange for 24 years of Mephistopheles giving him any knowledge and power he desires.

Theatre review: Antony & Cleopatra (National Theatre)

Ralph Fiennes has a tendency to use his fame to get himself cast in roles he's always wanted to play - his Richard III was something he himself pitched to the Almeida, and this time it's the National staging a huge production at his request. This one's a bit more of an unusual bucket list role though, as he's always wanted to star in Antony & Cleopatra - and not as Cleopatra. Instead Fiennes is Antony, a male lead notorious for being completely overshadowed by his female counterpart (Nothing Like A Dame even features a whole conversation about how none of the Dames know an actor who didn't hate playing him.) Instead it's Sophie Okonedo who gets the plum role of Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen who'd already taken Julius Caesar as her lover before doing the same with his successor. The affairs might have been motivated by politics as she sought to keep the powerful Roman Empire on her side, but as Shakespeare sees it at least, the relationship with Antony turned into something real.

Non-review: Common

My concerted efforts in the last couple of years to avoid booking for shows I’m not likely to enjoy have been reasonably successful. Failing that, I’ve also let myself feel less self-conscious about leaving at the interval if a show I went for in high hopes turned out to be a dud. So I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed that one of my favourite current playwrights, DC Moore, has choked so badly when let loose on the Olivier stage. His new play for the National and Headlong, Common, is set in the early 18th century, a time when the Enclosures Act took what had until then been common farming land and divided it up into private plots – an early example of privatisation, then. The local Lord (Tim McMullan) is due to start enclosing the land in Hampstead when Mary (Anne-Marie Duff,) who’d left some years earlier and was presumed dead, returns to cause havoc.

Theatre review: Twelfth Night (National Theatre)

For most plays, having seen another production within four years would seem very recent, but the most popular Shakespeares come along a lot more often than that, and avoiding Twelfth Night for three full calendar years feels like an achievement - and one I was keen to make, because however fresh a director's twist on the story, there's only so much you can do to overcome familiarity. Realistically it would take a lot longer to forget a play I know this well, but under the circumstances this is pretty good going, and at least I break my run with a production I was looking forward to: The big selling point of Simon Godwin's production for the National is that Tamsin Greig plays a gender-flipped Malvolio. Now called Malvolia, she's housekeeper to the wealthy Olivia (Phoebe Fox,) the last in her family and as a result in a declared state of permanent mourning, any romance officially ruled out.

Theatre review: The Tempest (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Although he's shown a lot of inspiration in his time running Shakespeare's Globe, Dominic Dromgoole hasn't been afraid of a cliché either, and so for his final production in the Swanamaker he directs The Tempest, a play dubiously seen as Shakespeare's farewell to theatre (a farewell so final, he co-wrote at least three more plays after it.) A decade or so after being ousted from the Dukedom of Milan, Prospero (Tim McMullan) has become master of a smaller domain: An island with only two other human inhabitants, his daughter Miranda (Phoebe Pryce) and his slave Caliban (Fisayo Akinade.) In all the years that he was neglecting his dukedom Prospero was studying magic, and it's with these powers that he plans to get it back: When the people who deposed him, including his brother Antonio (Brendan O'Hea,) happen to sail close to his island, he conjures a storm to shipwreck them into his power.

Theatre review: Hapgood

Howard Davies looks around the Tom Stoppard back catalogue and finds something of an oddity in Hapgood, a Cold War spy drama that opens with a dead letter drop in a swimming pool's changing rooms, with multiple briefcases and identically-dressed men making it look less like an exchange of secrets, more like a game of Find the Lady. Hapgood, codenamed Mother (Lisa Dillon,) is the British spymaster in charge of this operation, and when it goes Hapwrong it becomes obvious that someone on the team is betraying them. Suspicion seems to rest firmly on Ridley (Gerald Kyd,) but Hapgood's boss Blair (Tim McMullan) seems to think he can only have done it if she was in on it too. Or maybe he doesn't suspect her at all - the characters are all constantly trying to trip each other up in a series of traps and bluffs.

Theatre review: Man and Superman

Simon Godwin seems to be the director the National Theatre immediately thinks of when there's a very long play to be staged at the Lyttelton - a couple of years ago he took on Strange Interlude, which was pretty strange but far from a mere interlude; now it's Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, a play so hefty its third act is usually omitted entirely. Not here though, as Ralph Fiennes leads a modern-dress production that comes in at over three-and-a-half hours. Fiennes plays Jack Tanner, a radical author notoriously fond of the sound of his own voice, and particularly prone to diatribes against marriage. There's plenty of these when he and Roebuck Ramsden (Nicholas Le Prevost) are unexpectedly made joint guardians of an old friend, the heiress Ann Whitefield (Indira Varma,) and Jack has much to say against his smitten friend Octavius' (Ferdinand Kingsley) hopes to propose to her. In fact it's Jack himself Ann has her eye on, and he's willing to go a long way to avoid that.

Re-review: King Charles III

When it opened at the Almeida in the spring, Mike Bartlett's King Charles III instantly felt like a classic, so Rupert Goold's production transferring to the West End was not only a much-deserved chance for more people to see it, but also gave me an excuse for a repeat visit. For the story of this "Future History Play" and my initial thoughts you can read my original review. To start with the whole of the Almeida cast followed the show to Wyndham's, although prior commitments mean Oliver Chris has now been replaced as Prince William by Rory Fleck Byrne, whose portrayal of the next in line to the throne emphasises even more how much of a pawn he is to the Lady Macbeth-like Kate (Lydia Wilson.) And this recasting also means the balance is now redressed to make Richard Goulding's Harry the hotter prince. Unfortunately this isn't the only cast change at the moment as Tim Pigott-Smith has broken his collarbone, so the title role is being understudied by Miles Richardson, with Tim McMullan taking on Richardson's usual role as royal press secretary James.

Theatre review: Fathers and Sons

Concluding the Spring season at the Donmar Warehouse is a revival of Fathers and Sons, Brian Friel's adaptation of the Turgenev novel. Two outspoken St Petersburg students spend their summer returning to the rural homes they grew up in: First the recently-graduated Arkady (Joshua James) goes to his father's country estate, bringing with him his flatmate Bazarov (Seth Numrich.) Things aren't quite as Arkady remembered them - his father Nikolai (Anthony Calf) has a new baby with one of the servants, Fenichka (Caoilfhionn Dunne,) and on confirming that his son's happy for him prepares to marry her. Meanwhile Nikolai's lack of flair for managing his farm has led him to ask for advice from a neighbour, the wealthy widow Anna (Elaine Cassidy.) She and her sister Katya (Phoebe Sparrow) will catch the eye of the two young men, with very different results.