Theatre review: The Tempest(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Shakespeare's Globe's winter season is one they can't really make a profit out of due to the Swanamaker's size, so traditionally it's been the one where less obviously commercial choices are made. In the past this has tended to mean expanding the repertoire to less famous Jacobean playwrights and beyond, but for the 2025/26 season it involves two of the more popular Shakespeare plays getting eccentric reinventions. And unlike Holly Race Roughan's Midsummer Night's Dream, which simply took the common trope of finding the play's dark side to its natural extreme, Tim Crouch's look at The Tempest is grounded in ideas I've seen applied to the play a lot less frequently. It is very recognisably Crouch's work, even without the fact that he also appears in it, because in a theme that runs through a number of his plays it takes place in a theatre - specifically this one.

Theatre review: Electra

The current in-the-round configuration at the Old Vic is a suitably exposed setting for a good, but stark production of Sophocles' Electra. Perennially one of the most popular Greek Tragedies, it takes place near the end of the saga of the House of Atreus, so by the time we join the story it comes with a lot of baggage, well into a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. Before the Trojan War, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to secure the Greek army's fortunes. Never forgiving him for it, his wife Clytemnestra (Diana Quick) waited for his return then murdered him, with help from her lover Aegisthus (Tyrone Huggins.) Now they rule together, to the continuing dismay of her eldest daughter Electra. Driven mad by grief, she haunts the palace making threats; forbidden to leave or marry because of her continuing loyalty to her dead father, she vows revenge when her brother Orestes is old enough to return and carry it out.