Conor McPherson has set his latest play at an interesting point in Irish – and European – history. It is 1822, post-Napoleonic wars, and Ireland is in an economic mess, with impoverished peasants facing the failure of their crops for the second year in a row, unable to pay the rent to the Ascendancy landlords living in the “Big House”. Lady Madeleine Lambroke (Fenella Woolgar), mistress of the slowly decaying Mount Prospect, is about to marry off her teenage daughter, Hannah, to an English marquis, who will pay off her debts and thereby save the estate.Hannah (Emily Taaffe), who saw her Read more ...

A new play by Mike Leigh is always an event. So there was a palpable excitement in the air at the Cottesloe Theatre (the smallest and most intimate of the three National Theatre auditoria) when his latest opened last night. With a cast that includes Lesley Manville, a regular collaborator who was also in his 2010 film Another Year, the expectation was that this would be an instant classic.Leigh doesn’t so much disappoint expectations as subvert them. Radically. At first, the main pleasure is one of recognition. Oh yes, you think, I know where we are: it’s 1957 and we are in a nice commuter Read more ...

There is somewhere called Leighland, where people may be ineffably sad or existentially cheerful, old or young, live in a high rise or a semi. But they are all recognisably inhabitants of the world famously conjured up over a long period of clandestine development in the now time-honoured fashion. Nothing and everything changes in the work of Mike Leigh (b 1943). However, consumers of his vast oeuvre stretching back to the 1960s will this year have had the chance to do something extremely rare: see a pair of works by Leigh in the theatre.Ecstasy opened at Hampstead Theatre in 1979 and Read more ...

It’s not like we’re short of operas. Thousands of works spanning over 400 years make up the western operatic repertoire. Of these maybe 100 get a regular airing in contemporary opera houses, with only about 20 making it into the popular consciousness. For the rest, a trip outside the archives is rare indeed, with many scores still vainly awaiting their “modern premiere”. So why then, with so many works to choose from, do directors persist in returning to Bach – who famously never composed an opera – for inspiration? It’s a question that Jonathan Miller’s St Matthew Passion only partially Read more ...

It may not serve up all that much to get your teeth into, but Bijan Sheibani’s production of this 1959 play by Arnold Wesker looks fantastic on the plate. Giles Cadle’s saucepan-shaped set is framed by a giant chalkboard, scrawled over and over with daily specials in faded lettering; beyond it, the globular lamps and plate-glass window of the Tivoli restaurant can be glimpsed. But the action is all in the kitchen. Steel utensils clatter and gleam, and ovens roar into life, blue gas flames dancing. Here, as the staff toil in an atmosphere of sweaty industry, we are treated to a kind of Read more ...

It’s not much of an exaggeration to suggest that new plays by up-and-coming talents are something of an Achilles heel at the National Theatre. Even Mike Bartlett’s much lauded Earthquakes in London was a far more exciting production than it was a play, while Greenland proved so devoid of audience that it was pulled early from the schedule. The latter did no favours to anyone by yoking together four dramatists including the impressive Penelope Skinner. Now four more emerging playwrights have been given their head but this time their voices remain distinct in the two double bills that Read more ...

Can Thomas Heywood's prosy Jacobean drama of country folk hunting, card playing, screwing around, sliding aristocratically into debt and harrowing one another to death translate successfully to the aftermath of the First World War? Only, perhaps, as edgy semi-farce, towards which Katie Mitchell's nervy, twilit production sometimes veers, not often intentionally. Acting to make you half believe in impossible characters might have saved it. But here you spend less time focusing on the poor puppets who flap around Mitchell's claustrophobic world than looking at the handsome, haunting set.That's Read more ...

Miracles and omens, blind faith and free will: Ibsen’s epic 1873 drama sinks its teeth into some tough, meaty themes. That it neither breaks the jaw, nor proves totally indigestible in this British premiere is testament to the power of Jonathan Kent’s production and the paciness of Ben Power’s version of the text. It remains rather more demanding than it is rewarding; but it’s hard to imagine how it could be more vividly brought to life.The action traverses Europe and the Middle East and takes places between 351 and 363 AD. Andrew Scott is Julian, nephew of the Christian Emperor Constantius, Read more ...

Dropped trousers, audience participation and an onstage skiffle band fronted by a singer/songwriter boasting specs by way of Buddy Holly: what has become of the National Theatre's Lyttelton auditorium? Well, let's just say that for the entire first act of One Man, Two Guvnors, it's got to be easily the giddiest theatrical address in town. And when the momentum flags, as it does somewhat after the interval, not to worry. By that point, Richard Bean's Goldoni rewrite has generated enough goodwill that you all but float home.That is, if you even feel like leaving, given a show so full of high Read more ...

A stench of decay rises from Howard Davies's production of this 1903 drama by Anton Chekhov. Ranyevskaya’s wooden home, designed with characteristic visual eloquence by Bunny Christie, is quietly rotting. Weeds sprout through cracks, the windows are filthy; an ugly pylon raises its arms in the foreground, its wires stretching into a future of seismic political and social change for which the family – and Russia itself – are so ill prepared.This is a staging of admirable complexity, in which our sympathies are engaged only to be repelled, and tenderness and longing are often met with the most Read more ...

The murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich: it’s hard to imagine a less likely subject for a musical, not least because the memory of the crimes of forklift-truck driver Steve Wright, committed in late 2006, is still so horribly fresh. But there is nothing lurid about this exceptional piece of theatre, created by Alecky Blythe and composer Adam Cork, and directed with restraint, tenderness and potent simplicity by Rufus Norris. It’s moving, fascinating and even funny. And if it is also occasionally shocking, it’s only because of its startling directness and honesty.Blythe habitually uses a Read more ...

“Love is no solution to life,” declares a line from Clifford Odets’s 1938 drama; and in straitened times, then and now, it’s a sentiment that carries considerable doleful weight. And yet every character here is in desperate search of that elusive something to elevate the banal business of day-to-day existence – a personal rocket to the moon. Without it, they are trapped in endless Monday mornings, soul-destroying work that doesn’t bring in enough to pay the bills, and relationships in which they turn into “two machines, counting up the petty cash”.The piece is rarely performed, and it’s not Read more ...