The latest transatlantic transfer is curiously esoteric, concerning as it does an obscure period in the lives of two great men: Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. The centenary of the latter’s birth makes this an apt moment for the European premiere of Austin Pendleton’s Chicago-originating 2000 play, but its appeal may not extend beyond dedicated students of theatre history.It’s 1960, and critic Kenneth Tynan (Edward Bennett) is determined to unite his beleaguered heroes, persuading the declining Welles (John Hodgkinson) to direct out-of-step Olivier (Adrian Lukis, pictured below) in Read more ...

Is there more than one Michael Longhurst? As sometimes happens in theatre, a rising young director seems to be everywhere at once. His calling card is the modestly universal Constellations. Directed with clarity and simplicity, Nick Payne’s romantic two-hander with multiple narratives has travelled from the Royal Court via the West End to New York, before touring the UK and heading back to London this week. Longhurst may need to clone himself in order to be in two places at once: his production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number is also opening at the Young Vic.And if that’s not enough Longhurst Read more ...

If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is content to skim the play’s sunny surface – the comedy manqué that Shakespeare didn’t quite write. It’s a decision that makes sense of a difficult work on the Globe’s own terms, playing to a summer crowd, but one that also generates its own confusions and inconsistencies.The heat on press night only added to the Breugel-like spirit of Dromgoole’s opening – a smoky, sweaty, bawdy portrait of Vienna lost in lechery Read more ...

Geoffrey Rush has done it, Gyles Brandreth has done it, Stephen Fry came close to doing it, and now David Suchet is giving it a go – donning drag and a perpetually disgusted expression to play everyone’s favourite drawing-room gorgon, Lady Bracknell. Having completed its tour around England, Adrian Noble’s affectionate production of The Importance of Being Earnest now sets up home in London’s Vaudeville Theatre, cucumber sandwiches at the ready, hoping to charm summer audiences with an English classic that’ll tick boxes for any tourists not quick enough to get tickets for Wimbledon.There’s a Read more ...

The brackets around {150} are ambiguous, almost apologetic. The 150th anniversary of Y Wladfa (The Colony), the semi-legendary "oasis of Welshness" in the Patagonian wilderness has given occasion in Wales for the celebration of a most unlikely story. One hundred and fifty men, women and children left their homes all over Wales and created a new life for themselves, against all the odds, at the other end of the world. Sixty-six came from the villages around Aberdare and Mountain Ash in a valley 15 miles north of Cardiff.The Royal Opera Stores, a hangar-sized warehouse on an industrial park Read more ...

Of all the art forms, theatre has been most attentive to the story of HIV/AIDS. Leading the way in America there was Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991). In the UK the most resonant exploration of the virus’s devastating impact was Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg (1994). While all have been revisited - Kramer's play was filmed for HBO last year, when the Donmar Warehouse revived Elyot's masterpiece - as a subject for new drama HIV/AIDS has somewhat dropped off the theatrical radar, which is why a play by Shaun Kitchener is an intriguing Read more ...

Kafka and Jones, the names above this little shop of horrors, would be a marriage made in off-kilter theatreland had the Czech genius written any plays. He didn’t, so Nick Gill has made a well-shaped drama out of the assembled fragments of which The Trial consists. It offers an exhaustive role for Rory Kinnear, never offstage for the unbroken two-hour duration, and lets director Richard Jones revert from the warm humanity he’s most recently been unable to resist in Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West back to his favoured world of discomfort and Read more ...

Gruff Rhys has called it the Great Welsh Media Gang-Bang. This year everyone who is anyone (who can get funding) has hopped on a plane for Argentina to follow in the footsteps of the 150 Welsh men, women and children who emigrated to Patagonia 150 years ago – broadcasters, musicians, politicians, journalists, comedians.Meanwhile, back in Wales, the 150th anniversary has occasioned the first ever collaboration between Wales’s two national theatres: National Theatre Wales and its Welsh-language sibling Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru. The production is called {150} and it is the brainchild of Marc Read more ...

Hamlet instructs his players to "hold...the mirror up to nature”, advice taken literally in this arresting 120-year anniversary staging of Chekhov’s homage to the Bard. Jon Bausor’s set is dominated by a vast angled mirror, offering an appropriately bird’s-eye view and lending cinematic scope to this familial tale. It’s also the perfect encapsulation of a group who need their image reflected back at them through the admiration of others in order to satisfy their egos. The lakeside country house might be teeming with passions, but this love, notes Torben Betts’s pithy free adaptation, “is all Read more ...

Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham was a huge hit, a small-budget British film that in 2002 unexpectedly found an international audience way beyond its setting in suburban west London, and made stars of its two young leads, Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra. Now the director (with her husband, Paul Mayeda Berges) has written a stage musical version, with music by Howard Goodall and lyrics by Charles Hart.The story has undergone some tweaks to bring it to the stage, but the setting – Southall in 2001 – remains the same. Jess Bhamra (Natalie Dew), an 18-year-old girl of Punjabi Sikh Read more ...

The play I have just seen is not the play you will see. Of course, one of the draws of live performance is that no two nights are the same, but that idea is taken to a mesmerising extreme in Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, celebrating its 10th anniversary. Every night, a new guest actor – who has never seen the show nor read the script – joins Crouch in this two-hander; past playmates include Sophie Okonedo, Christopher Eccleston, Frances McDormand and Roger Lloyd Pack. There’s no wacky improv, with Crouch instructing and marshalling his scene partner, but each distinctive interpretation provides Read more ...

Can we really distinguish between experience-based judgement and personal bias? Caroline, the social worker at the centre of American writer Rebecca Gilman’s latest "issue" play, trusts a gut instinct informed by her 25-year career, but those decisions – which shape the lives of her young charges and their families – are gradually revealed to be subjective in the extreme. The passion that fuels her commitment to an arduous, under-appreciated job is also the reason she might not be suitable to perform it.It’s a refreshing subversion of the traditional "caring people versus intractable system" Read more ...