AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮ Jennifer Haley's The Nether The Royal Court Theatre | London directed by Jeremy Herrin In one of Isaac Asimov’s usually prescient imaginings he envisions spaceships designed to dart through the stars – for the sole purpose of delivering letters. So explosive has been the advent of the internet that not even our greatest speculative genius seemed able to foresee it. It’s near impossible to guess what the World Wide Web will throw at us next, but boy is it fun to try. “Don’

✮✮✮ 1/2 Shakespeare's Richard III Trafalgar Studios | London directed by Jamie Lloyd After a successful string of productions, Jamie Lloyd – a man with one heck of a résumé and the Artistic Director behind Trafalgar Transformed – opens his second season with a piece of casting that’s had not just theatre-goers but fans of The Hobbit and Sherlock titillated with anticipation. Martin Freeman, aka Bilbo Baggins and Dr Watson, is a BAFTA award winner, and here leads the cast as t

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 Seneca's Thyestes in a version by Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, Simon Stone & Mark Winter Holland Festival | Amsterdam directed by Simon Stone If at this moment in time you believe theatre within the British community is exciting, fresh, challenging and most importantly, life-changing, I’d beg to differ. With a few exceptions, such as Marianne Eliiott and Simon Stephens’ The Curios Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, British theatre has the tendency to reside on the

✮/✮✮✮✮ August Strindberg's Miss Julie Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy Chichester Festival Theatre | Chichester directed by Jamie Glover A summer short of a half-century cornerstone celebration, here again is Kenneth Tynan’s paring of two modern classic one-act plays which opened at Chichester Festival Theatre back in 1965. Peter Shaffer, the playwright at the heart of this year’s festival, wrote Black Comedy in accordance with Tynan’s wishes for a companion piece to August Strin

✮✮✮✮ Peter Brook's The Valley of Astonishment Young Vic | London directed by Peter Brook & Marie-Hélène Estienne The human brain is a mighty mansion, and for those who would open its doors to an audience the temptation must be to give them the full whirlwind tour, right down to the last neurological nook. The Valley of Astonishment resists any such real estate puffery. Instead we are offered a bare square within a stage, house lights at a purr, a few chairs and a coat-stand.

✮✮✮ 1/2 Ibsen's Hedda Gabler Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Adena Jacobs Not every audience member would know what Ibsen’s story is about, but virtually everyone who enters the Belvoir Street venue would be aware, even before the show commences, that the title role on this occasion is played by a leading man. Gender subversion remains controversial in the twenty-first century. On a deeply personal level we all invest in gendered concepts that are applied to our daily

✮✮✮✮ Jesse Briton's Enduring Song Southwark Playhouse | London directed by Jesse Briton “This is the WORST play I have ever seen,” scrawled one audience member on their feedback form after a scratch performance of Enduring Song at Bristol Old Vic's new writing festival a couple of years back. Maybe they were being sarcastic, but if not then this play – performed in-the-round at the scuzzy-chic Southwark Playhouse – has come massively far in development because it is highly or

✮✮✮✮ Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice Regent's Park OpenAir Theatre | London directed by Nadia Fall Below waving trees, rustling in the breeze, Hobson’s boot merchant is a sturdy red brick outfit. In this open-air production of Harold Brighouse’s play, a bright 1960s setting upends the 1880s nostalgia of the original as surely as platform and patent fashions would demolish this shop’s dour products. Bringing out the text’s wish-fulfilment feminism in a rush of technicolour

✮✮ Carousel Arcola Theatre | London music Richard Rogers lyrics Oscar Hammerstein II directed by Luke Fredericks After a poor display in this year’s 2014 World Cup, England go home bowing their heads, not in shame, but in promise. Witnessing the English mentality of flippant support for yet another big competition reminds me of our subjective nature as a nation. Steven Gerrard for one reinforces what it means to be a loyal Liver Bird – and to utter the motto, 'You’ll Never Wa