Scottish schoolchildren are brought up on Robert Burns but other British students aren't so fortunate. We may know snatches of the great man's work – “Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie”, “O, my Luve's like a red, red rose” and so on – but few of us could recite even a stanza of Tam o' Shanter.
Les Dennis may have started his career as a comic, and then as a presenter of cheesy, family-friendly television game shows, but of late he has been plying his trade as a very decent actor. And so it proves again in Tony Staveacre's one-man play about a washed up Liverpudlian club comic.
The ever-libidinous Guy (Jason Durr) is "as subtle as a fire engine" when it comes to sex, or so we're told during the course of Volcano, and it's difficult not to feel that this belated Noël Coward discovery could be similarly described in theatrical terms. Never performed during Sir Noël's life, the 1956 play will constitute essential viewing for completists of the Master who want a further sense of how this protean talent's singular career evolved.
Miss Julie is pretty full-on at the best of times but in Yael Farber’s striking new version, Strindberg’s themes of class and gender are given a shocking modern makeover. In transposing the action to present-day South Africa, she has written a story about the divide that still exists between the haves and have-nots, and the crippling emotional history that has yet to be overcome by the young nation.
It’s brave to take Shakespeare into the West End in midsummer – and in this of all summers. Greg Doran’s all-black, African Caesar certainly doesn’t lack for impact, colour, zest, urgency. It takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and rams the play down our throats. The concept is impressive. The set, half Roman amphitheatre, half Nazi bunker dominated by a giant effigy, its back towards us with arm raised in totemic salute, summons up TV images of dictators who eventually come crashing down, from Stalin to Mubarak and who knows how many more to come.
Is it the greatest story ever told, or the most indulgent nativity ever staged? The return of the York Mystery Plays – this summer’s blue-ribbon theatrical spectacular in the North – begins by beguiling, ends up bemusing, while in between is a sacred story about the eternal battle of good and evil, from Creation to the Last Judgement. The show’s subject matter is as epic as its telling, which involves more than 1700 volunteers (including 500 cast members) and takes place in the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey. It is the UK’s largest outdoor theatre production this year.
In the 1990s Rosie Wilby was lurking on the outer edges of Britpop with her band Wilby, whose giddy career highlights included opening for Tony Hadley (he evacuated the entire room for the soundcheck), being clamped outside the venue while supporting Bob Geldof, and getting their own plastic name tag in the racks of Virgin Megastore.
National Theatre Wales like the word “us”. It was there in Michael Sheen’s Passion of Port Talbot – its film adaptation was called The Gospel of Us – and it is here, prominently, in the multi-layered title of Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes’ latest site-specific offering. The team that brought Aeschylus’ The Persians to the Brecon Beacons military range have now commandeered a disused aircraft hangar a few miles outside Cardiff to stage an experimental version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, sprinkled with Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished version Coriolan.
The curators encourage you to come to Bush Bazaar with an open mind to explore the value of theatre. But I found this cluttered evening a lesson in the value of saying no. Twenty companies – 100 emerging artists in all – have taken over the building to sell their wares, including a dinner party, a cleansing treatment and one to one with Justin Bieber (hard to resist). After paying £10 to get in, you decide what to see and how much more to pay the artists. Sometimes before their show.
When Complicite conceived their beautiful A Disappearing Number they gave maths energy, drama, and above all watchability, but they never quite brought the heart. In Simon Stephens’s new adaptation, A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has it in abundance (as well of course as a dead bee, a live rat, three beer cans and 20-odd metres of model train-track). When you can persuade an audience to stay behind after the curtain-call for a mini maths tutorial you’re doing something right; when you can reduce them to tears with it you’re doing something miraculous.