Theatre review: Jubilee

I have to admit, Chris Goode's Jubilee didn't appeal to me when the Lyric Hammersmith first added it to their programming, and I only changed my mind about booking it when I found out the cast included Lucy Ellinson - she's someone whose performances I try not to miss. So I approached the show cautiously, but hoping to be pleasantly surprised. But while there's some good moments, this attempt to transplant the spirit of punk into the 21st century falls curiously flat. Derek Jarman's iconic 1978 film, set the year before during the Queen's Silver Jubilee, gets relocated to 2018 and framed - for reasons I'm still not entirely clear on - by a different Queen Elizabeth: Toyah Willcox, from the original film's cast, appears as Elizabeth I, who makes a Faustian request for divine knowledge, and is granted a vision of a group of genderqueer squatters four centuries into her future.

Theatre review: Three Sisters (Southwark Playhouse)

Until the last couple of years there was a dearth of Chekhov productions that offered anything other than a naturalistic period setting. Yet even before directors started to get a bit more adventurous around him, there was one play I'd only ever seen in modern dress. It's rather depressing that the play people always seem to think remains most relevant is Three Sisters, a play so bleak even Chekhov didn't try to pass it off as a comedy. Anya Reiss is another writer to bring the sisters bang up to date, although she does have previous - and her Seagull was also directed by Russell Bolam, so their return to Southwark Playhouse is a bit of a dream team reunion. The names of the characters haven't been Anglicised, but in other respects Reiss has tested the story's contemporary relevance by giving it a whole new context: The story is now set among British ex-pats in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

Theatre review: Vieux Carré

Tennessee Williams' later work is ripe for rediscovery: Like Terence Rattigan, he fell out of favour with critics and public alike, but unlike Rattigan he doesn't seem to have let this get to him, and continued to have a prolific output. Having been rehabilitated as one of the greatest 20th century playwrights after his death, his early hit plays are now frequently revived, but perhaps due to lack of familiarity these little-loved, at the time, later works remain obscure but worthy of reevaluation. Dating from 1977, Vieux Carré, which is revived by Robert Chevara at the King's Head, has much in common with those early hit melodramas. But where The Glass Menagerie sees a Williams-substitute character in a family context, here the playwright's alter-ego, a nameless young Writer (Tom Ross-Williams) has fled the nest to New Orleans, to a crumbling boarding house in the titular district.