Christmas plays are a seasonal curse of British theatre. But there are alternatives to pantos and Dickens monologues. At the Royal Court Theatre, there is a tradition of more edgy Christmas fare, with plays by outstanding writers such as Joe Penhall, whose Haunted Child was here at the end of last year. This time, the seasonal production — written by the ever-inventive Martin Crimp and directed by the outgoing artistic director Dominic Cooke — can only be described as an anti-Christmas play.The drama has three sections, each of which has an overtly political name: the first is called “The Read more ...

Is discretion really the better part of valour? This question arises in a particularly acute form in this new play, which looks at Danny, a gay primary school teacher who decides to come out — despite the risk of being seen as a paedo. But although it is great to enjoy EV Crowe’s follow up to her 2010 debut Kin, which was an account of a posh girls boarding school in the 1990s, does her latest — which opened last night — have a lesson to teach us about the meaning of courage in daily life?Danny’s choice is not ideological: it comes about almost by accident. He lives in a civil partnership Read more ...

Nick Payne has already made quite a mark. In 2009 he won the George Devine award for Most Promising Playwright with the intriguingly entitled If There Is I Haven’t Found it Yet at the Bush. Wanderlust followed at the Royal Court and now with his second Court commission, transferred to the Duke of York's from Upstairs at the Royal Court, he’s come up with bees and multi-universe theories, love and death.It’s funny how bees and quantum physics seem to go hand in hand. Charlotte Jones’ Humble Boy buzzed along similar lines with huge success a decade ago. So it proves again in Payne’s dazzlingly Read more ...

London theatre loves plays about the media. Is this because we spend so much time flicking through magazines, visiting websites or watching television? Or is it because this venue’s trendy metropolitan audience is as cynical and world-weary as a media ad buyer? Either way, Lucy Kirkwood’s lively new play is both a hilarious account of lads’ and girls’ mags, and an indictment of their effect on all who come too close to them. But is her argument so obvious that anyone would agree with it?First, the title: NSFW stands for Not Safe For Work, which means online material that you might not want to Read more ...

In the non-Olympic sport called “Name Britain’s greatest living playwright”, most of the contestants have always been men. Nowadays, that is all changed and the odds-on favourite would be Caryl Churchill, who has been creating provocative and boundary-busting drama for four decades. Her plays Top Girls, Cloud Nine and Serious Money are curriculum classics, and her recent work — Far Away, A Number and Drunk Enough To Say I Love You — triumphantly proved that her originality remains unimpaired with age.The same can just about be said of her latest. The play has no named characters, and consists Read more ...

With the American presidential election campaign now in full swing, the search is surely on for cultural expressions of the two nations that the candidates represent: white rich people versus the rest. Okay, maybe an exaggeration, but who says I’m unbiased? Anyway, a new play from Tarell Alvin McCraney, one of the most innovative black American playwrights of his generation, runs the risk of being seen as a metaphor for Obama’s first term in office. But does this burden the new play with too many expectations?At first sight, maybe so. The setting is the Charles R Drew Prep School for Boys, an Read more ...

“I'm here because I'm concerned,” says scientist Stephen Emmott in direct, measured tones. “I'm concerned about the state of our planet. I think the situation that we're in right now can rightly be called a planetary emergency, an unprecedented planetary emergency.”Emmott, 52, a professor of computing at the University of Oxford and head of Microsoft's Computational Science Laboratory in Cambridge, takes to the stage alone in director Katie Mitchell's latest project. Billed as “a new kind of scientific lecture”, Ten Billion examines the state of our planet when the population Read more ...

A powerful trend in contemporary theatre is the family play. But the families usually depicted tend to be of the standard two-point-five variety, while other more complex forms — families as they actually are — tend to be ignored. So initially the good thing about Vivienne Franzmann’s new play is that it focuses on a family where the child is adopted. More controversially, it is about a white man who adopts a black girl from Africa.The story takes place in today’s Hampstead but has roots in the past. Joseph is a news photographer whose images of war and atrocity are world famous. Since the Read more ...

The best playwrights have an antenna-like ability to pick up, and respond to, the new conflicts and fault lines that appear in society. Over the past five or so years, the antagonism between the baby-boomer generation, who are now parents with everything, and their kids, who have nothing but debts, has increasingly intensified. And no play articulates this conflict better than Mike Bartlett’s latest, which opened last night, in a production starring Victoria Hamilton and Claire Foy.The curtain comes up on a pair of contrasting English brothers, one young and hippyish (Kenneth) and the other Read more ...

There is nothing quite so exciting as witnessing the debut of a fresh new voice. But young writers can be rather frail creatures, and their exposure in the high-profile Royal Court Young Writers Festival might sometimes highlight their failings as much as their virtues. In actor Hayley Squires’s first play, which opened last night, there is plenty of evidence of a fiery new talent coming into the world, but also some doubt about the writer’s ability to mould her insights into a compelling story.The situation is distressingly common. Bobby, a young soldier from Kent, has been killed in Read more ...

Playwright Martin Crimp is one of British theatre’s best-kept secrets. Although his neon-lit name appears in the theatre capitals of Europe, with his work a big hit at festivals all over the continent, here he is better known to students - who love his 1997 masterpiece Attempts on Her Life - than to ordinary theatregoers. The crowds that saw the 2009 West End revival of his present-day version of Molière’s The Misanthrope will remember how Keira Knightley and Damian Lewis spoke the witty text, but would they now recall who wrote it? Likewise, I wouldn’t mind betting that few of those buying Read more ...