AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮✮ Stan Sakai's Usage Yojimbo Southwark Playhouse | London adapted for the stage by Stewart Melton directed by Amy Draper As the old Japanese proverb probably doesn’t go, the life of a samurai ain’t easy. First there’s the obligatory Karate Kid apprenticeship – archery, meditation, gardening, tea ceremonies, and, of course, calligraphy. Lots and lots of calligraphy. Not to forget getting your head around the traditional Eastern naming of the times of the day. When your sens

✮✮✮ Ayad Akhtar's The Invisible Hand New York Theatre Workshop | NYC directed by Ken Rus Schmoll Ventriloquising media-vilified terrorists could turn any author mealy-mouthed. Dave Eggers stumbled with his non-fiction book Zeitoun, which eulogised a New Orleans man whose wife has now spoken out over his violent stalking of her and her child. Here, Ayad Akhtar’s patchier follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced in 2012 moves the scene from a bourgeois dinner party to

✮✮ Jack Thorne's Hope The Royal Court Theatre | London directed by John Tiffany “We live in the age of cutting cunts,” deputy Council leader Mark (Paul Higgins) announces near the start of Jack Thorne's new, highly topical comedy about the swingeing public sector spending cuts this country has suffered since the Tories – sorry, the Coalition government – came to power in 2010. Mark's X-rated language is worthy of that most memorable satirical political character of recent yea

✮✮✮ Jüri Reinvere's Peer Gynt Norwegian National Opera & Ballet | Oslo Sigrid Strøm Reibo | John Helmer Fiore Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is an unlikely national hero. Rake, liar, charmer, crook, he is fiercely independent and consummately Norwegian. Though Grieg’s musical take on the ne’er-do-well is the most famous, a number of other composers have written Peer Gynt operas. Estonian composer Jüri Reinvere, commissioned by the Norwegian National Opera, is the most recent to take on t