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.

Theatre review: Network

It’s been a week of US TV stars on stage for me, with Mr Robot on Monday, Sideshow Bob on Tuesday, and now the big one: The dad from Malcolm in the Middle (he’s also done some… slightly edgier stuff since then.) Very much the director all the big names want to work with now, Ivo van Hove brings Bryan Cranston to the London stage for the first time to play Howard Beale in Network, Lee Hall’s adaptation of the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film. Beale is the lead news anchor on a poorly-performing TV network, and the news is struggling more than anything. When he’s told he’s being replaced Beale, taking advantage of the fact that nobody’s really paying attention to him, announces that he’ll commit suicide live on air during his final broadcast. It turns out to be exactly the thing to give his ratings a boost.

Theatre review: Les Blancs

It was left unfinished on playwright Lorraine Hansberry's death, but the National saw enough merit in Les Blancs to get adaptor Robert Nemiroff and director Yaël Farber to create a stageable version of this African epic: In an unspecified post-war, colonial African country, a European mission operates a very basic hospital. The influential pastor is unseen, off on some apparently regular trek into the jungle, but his blind wife Madame Neilsen (Siân Phillips) is there to meet American journalist Charlie Morris (Elliot Cowan,) there in search of the real story of a country whose decades of foreign rule have finally led to increasing black-on-white violence. Not satisfied with only getting the white side of the story, he focuses on a trio of brothers, all of whom are outsiders in some way, who've returned to the area for their father's funeral; particularly middle brother Tshembe (Danny Sapani,) who's spent years travelling the world and has a white wife in London.

Theatre review: Love's Labour's Lost (RSC / RST)

The RSC's six-year run through the Shakespeare canon now comes to a pair of comedies that possibly share a greater connection than is immediately apparent: There's a theory (one that I personally find very likely,) that the "lost" play Love's Labour's Won is in fact simply an alternative title for one of the extant comedies. The most likely candidate is Much Ado About Nothing, as its warring lovers Beatrice and Benedick could well be older versions of Rosaline and Berowne, the sparring partners separated at the end of Love's Labour's Lost. To test the theory, the two plays are being paired in productions by Christopher Luscombe at the RST, with Michelle Terry and Edward Bennett playing the lovers in both. They also see the RSC make their own contribution to the First World War centenary, as they're being set either side of the Great War, which is here what parts the couple.

Theatre review: but i cd only whisper

There were cheers when it was announced there would be major improvement works done to the Arcola's unloved new building. Less so when it turned out the biggest changes would be to Studio 2, pretty much the only part of the theatre that was liked by audiences the way it was. The smaller studio has been relocated to the basement, directly below its previous home (which is now the bar.) The good news is that if the first show to be staged there, but i cd only whisper, is anything to go by, the transition has been fairly smooth. Kristiana Colón's play is set in an American city in 1970, and looks at the experience of black Vietnam veterans through a character study of a particularly damaged one: Following a dishonourable discharge from the army, Beau Willie Brown (Adetomiwa Edun) has committed an unnamed but seemingly appalling crime since his return home.

Theatre review: The Duchess of Malfi

The Old Vic's baroque Duchess of Malfi is clearly not going to be the venue for another wedding disco, thus bucking the trend for Jacobean tragedy this year. Of course, the wedding in question being a closely-guarded secret (a secret that somehow survives several years and three children) the chances of the cast doing the "Tragedy" dance were always going to be slim. Instead Jamie Lloyd gives us an epic production of John Webster's best-known work, on Soutra Gilmour's sumptuous set of arches, walkways and candles. The Duchess of Malfi has recently been widowed, and her two brothers advise her not to remarry. Obeying them on the surface, she in fact secretly marries her young steward. When it all finally comes out, her brothers deal with the class-defying relationship in typically bloody fashion.