AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮ Brian Friel's Faith Healer Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Judy Davis Frank makes his living as a faith healer, travelling all over Britain with a performance that showcases his charismatic arrogance, and sometimes actually miraculously healing people in the process. There are serious troubles in private however, but none of his energy is put into finding a cure for the suffering at home. Brian Friel’s play is meandering and often obscure, with its Rashomon style

✮✮✮ 1/2 Tony Kushner's iHo Hampstead Theatre | London directed by Michael Boyd Tony Kushner's first play at the Hampstead Theatre since Slavs! is a cacophony of ideas with several dramatic high points, but the action is spread too thinly over three and a half hours with two intervals. This was too much for several people sitting near me who made it through the first two parts but did not return to their seats after the second interval. They missed out because the ending bring

✮ David Hare's The Red Barn National Theatre | London directed by Robert Icke Big names mean big excitement. Given the former you long for the latter in David Hare’s stage adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel La Main, presented here as The Red Barn and directed by Robert Icke. How could you not – Hare is a living legend, one of our social champions, and Icke was the director du jour with 1984 and Oresteia. Ears pricked at portentous dialogue, eyes peeled for visual cues and

✮✮✮ Shakespeare's Othello Bell Shakespeare Company | Sydney directed by Peter Evans As the saying goes, “well behaved women seldom make history”. Desdemona and Emilia are slaughtered by their respective husbands after displaying only wifely devotion, as well as prudent decorum to all and sundry in Othello. It is not a battle of the sexes in the play, for there is nothing that resembles a level playing field, but an examination of tyrannical brutality against women, and the tr

✮✮✮✮ Peter Shaffer's Amadeus National Theatre | London directed by Michael Longhurst “If everybody owes God a death,” wrote Anthony Burgess, “then the hard-working artist owes fate an occasional physical or mental breakdown: he cannot build so many new worlds without damaging his own fabric.” Amadeus explores the symbiotic breakdown of two such artists: composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The play is a masterwork of author Peter Shaffer, who passed away thi

✮✮✮✮✮ Ella Hickson's Oil Almeida Theatre | London directed by Carrie Cracknell We live in the age of oil. We have never lived without it, and we take it for granted. Ella Hickson’s fiery new play addresses the importance of renewable energy, but includes a hell of a lot more in its wide scope. Hickson examines the background of oil through history, the cost of imperialism and attitudes towards progress, including, notably, the rise of female independence. We first meet May (A

✮✮✮✮✮ Katori Hall's The Mountaintop Young Vic | London directed by Roy Alexander Weise This is what it’s all about. They say good theatre should leave you feeling as giddy as a bottle of wine: this production does just that. You may even need a bottle of the real stuff after JMK Award-winning director Roy Alexander Weise takes you on his rapturous historical rollercoaster. It may have only been six years since Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop premiered in London and won its Oliv

✮✮✮✮✮ Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant Old Fitz Theatre | Sydney directed by Shane Bosher

✮✮✮ 1/2 Kemp Powers' One Night in Miami... Donmar Warehouse | London

✮✮✮ Barney Norris's The Rest of Your Life Bush Theatre | London directed by Miranda Cromwell It’s almost closing time. Nick (Waj Ali) is just about to cash up when Hannah (Rakie Ayola) walks in. She only wants a filter coffee and promises to be no bother, so he lets her stay while he closes up the café. However, Hannah has no intention of sitting quietly. What starts as seemingly innocent chitchat gives way to something more sinister; it transpires that Nick and Hannah are no