Theatre review: Titus Andronicus (RSC / Swan)

There's splashguards for the front row of the Swan and grates have been installed on the voms to drain off a variety of bodily fluids, it must mean Titus Andronicus is back at the theatre where I first saw it. This time, a few decades after Actor Brian Cox famously advised him to play the role, it's finally Simon Russell Beale's turn to take on the Roman General who finds out to his (and his family's) cost that the trouble with hanging out with mad emperors is that they're mad, and also they've got the power of emperors. Titus is given the casting vote on who should be the next autocrat of Rome, and chooses Saturninus (Joshua James,) who instantly decides to abuse his power by demanding the hand (in marriage) of Lavinia (Letty Thomas,) his own brother's (Ned Costello) fiancée. When she refuses, her whole family are considered to have offended his honour, and as he's her father that instantly takes Titus from kingmaker to pariah.

Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing(National Theatre)

The year's third major Much Ado About Nothing is the starriest, courtesy of John Heffernan and Future Dame Katherine Parkinson as Benedick and Beatrice at the Lyttelton. The National's go-to Shakespeare director Simon Godwin was best-known for directing new work when the RSC hired him to give a fresh eye to The Two Gentlemen of Verona nearly a decade ago, and while that was the start of a major change of direction for his career, he's still bringing that outsider's attitude to one of the most beloved comedies of all. Dialogue has been cut, moved, assigned to different characters, and while it's all Shakespeare's work it doesn't all necessarily originate in this play (there's even the best part of a sonnet bulking up Hero's role.) At heart the play - and its most famous couple - remain the same, but the irreverent treatment of the text yields results in making many of the plotlines and characters less problematic.

Stage-to-screen review: Crave

With Crave I've now seen all of Sarah Kane's inevitably small canon of theatrical work; originally premiered under a pseudonym to avoid being judged on the playwright's notoriety, her penultimate play marks a shift of direction into a more abstract poetic style. It famously has no stage directions and the characters are lettered rather than named, leaving it up to the actors and director to find characters in the stream of words (by the time of her de facto suicide note 4:48 Psychosis, Kane had also dispensed with telling us which character says which line, or indeed how many characters there are.) It's a piece that defies an easy summary of what it's about, although like its successor it's built on despair - though rather than that wider existential horror this is more specifically rooted in having despaired of love. There's a failed relationship at the heart of Crave, an intense and highly sexual one and almost certainly abusive to some degree, although whether this is the voice of the abused or the abuser is as fluid as anything else here.

Theatre review: The Welkin

After adapting Chimerica for TV Lucy Kirkwood returns to the stage for a play that feels equally epic in ambition, even if instead of spanning continents this one is largely set in a single room. It does have its thoughts on the stars though, as The Welkin takes place in Suffolk in 1759, the year in which Edmond Halley had predicted the comet that would eventually bear his name would appear. It's a scientific discovery that's captured the imagination of people even in remote, small towns like this one, with everyone regularly mentioning it, hoping they might catch a glimpse of the celestial body. But if human knowledge is expanding to include the heavens, women like midwife Lizzy Luke (Maxine Peake) find that progress closer to home is much slower than they would like. Summoned grudgingly away from her laundry, Lizzy's expertise has had her requested by a local judge to take part in one of the few areas of Georgian law left to the judgement of women.

Theatre review: Top Girls

Which five people, living or dead, real or fictional, would you invite to your dream dinner party? To most people that’s a creaky old conversation-starter, but to Marlene (Katherine Kingsley) it’s the perfect way to celebrate a promotion, in the famous opening act of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. It’s 1981, Marlene’s become the first female Managing Director of Top Girls Employment Agency, and she’s gone to a trendy restaurant with five women from history and legend who embody a female ideal - or at least someone’s idea of it. Victorian adventurer Isabella Bird (Siobhan Redmond) and 13th century Japanese concubine, Buddhist nun and author Lady Nijō (Wendy Kweh) made their own way in a man’s world while others, like Pope Joan (Amanda Lawrence) and Brueghel’s soldier-woman Dull Gret (Ashley McGuire) took on masculine roles, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Theatre review: Describe the Night

Rajiv Joseph’s Guards at the Taj took its inspiration from a false, but widely believed, legend about the building of the Taj Mahal; for Describe the Night he mixes real historical figures and events with fiction of his own invention, in a play that looks at Fake News in a context that made an art form of it: Soviet Russia. His story ranges over 90 years and could be described as the journey taken by a diary, written by journalist and novelist Isaac Babel (Ben Caplan) in 1920. Following the Russian army to Poland, he was employed to write the official dispatches, but also kept this personal journal to record his reactions and descriptions of places and events. In 2010, a plane crash near Smolensk killed the Polish president and much of his cabinet on the way to a memorial service, inspiring conspiracy theories about the Russian government’s involvement. When Feliks (Joel MacCormack) finds the wreckage, a dying woman gives him the diary.

Theatre review: Snow in Midsummer

A few years ago the RSC got caught up in a controversy over not casting enough British East Asian actors in classic Chinese play The Orphan of Zhao - a controversy that now looks very minor compared to the recent Print Room shitshow - but they now seem to be trying to make amends with a new ongoing project of translations of classical Chinese theatre. Of course the RSC's tendency to announce instantly-forgotten projects is notorious - how's that plan to stage the Shakespeare canon in the RST in 5 6 8 years with no repeats going? - but if the opening production is any indication, we have to hope this one has legs. Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's Snow in Midsummer is a free adaptation of a 13th century classic, Guan Hanqing's The Injustice to Dou E That Moved Heaven and Earth.

Theatre review: Boy

Last year director Sacha Wares and set designer Miriam Buether transformed the Almeida for Game, the design becoming the clear star of a show that would have floundered without it. Leo Butler's Boy fills its hour-and-a-quarter a lot more confidently in its own right than Mike Bartlett's play did, but there's no denying the cleverness of the staging is one of the things that stands out - possibly, at times, to the detriment of the script. Liam (Frankie Fox) is 17 and, as the publicity describes him, "a boy at a bus stop, easily missed." For the audience he's the focal point of the 75 minutes, but for everyone else on the stage with him he might as well be invisible, except at those times where they're going out of their way to ignore or dismiss him. Boy opens with him visiting a doctor (Wendy Kweh,) with a concern he's too inarticulate to express, so she can't find anything physically wrong with him.

Theatre review: You For Me For You

Junhee (Katie Leung) and Minhee (Wendy Kweh) are literally starving, but to admit anything was less than 100% perfect in their lives could invite even bigger problems. That's because Mia Chung's You For Me For You takes place in North Korea, and the walls, and maybe even the trees, have ears that could get them reported if the sisters deviate from the script that says they live in The Best Nation in the World. Minhee always seems to trick her younger sister into eating what little food they have, meaning she herself is becoming very ill, so Junhee hatches a scheme for them both to escape the country. But as the Smuggler (Andrew Leung) helps them flee the reluctant Minhee falls down a well, and Chung's already quirky story becomes an Alice in Wonderland fantasy of East, West and two very different paths in life for the two women.

Theatre review: Image of an Unknown Young Woman

In an unspecified country with a poor human rights record and a corrupt government, a woman wearing a yellow dress offers no resistance when the police attack and shoot her. Her identity and fate are unknown, but the attack is being filmed and the clip soon goes viral worldwide - as the story begins, a chorus of Oliver Birch, Emilie Patry and Isaac Ssebandeke send each other the link and react with a mixture of horror and voyeuristic excitement. Elinor Cook's Image of an Unknown Young Woman follows the repercussions of the image becoming public, both in the country itself where it sparks protests that could even become a revolution, and internationally. Although the character names suggest we're in a Middle Eastern country, the colourblind casting and stark, industrial design in Christopher Haydon's production at the Gate lend the story a universality - and unpredictability.