AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮✮ Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf The Print Room at the Coronet | London directed by Sofia Jupither Sofia Jupither delivers a pointed and pertinent production of Ibsen’s timeless Little Eyolf. Alfred Almers (Kåre Conradi) has returned home from a writing retreat to follow his new vocation, raising his son, Eyolf (Sebastian Sørlie Lamb). But in The National Theatre of Norway’s production (their first appearance in the UK in 18 years), when Alfred first enters he bursts through

✮✮✮✮✮ Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke Almeida Theatre | London directed by Rebecca Frecknall Patsy Ferran won various prestigious new acting talent awards a few years ago. Here, it is easy to see why. Ferran captivates from the second she first appears sobbing and choking into a microphone as the fiendishly complex lead in director Rebecca Frecknall's rare outing for Tennessee Williams' beguiling, poetic exploration of love, desire, repression and pill-popping. Even l

✮✮✮✮ Chekhov's The Seagull Lyric Hammersmith | London directed by Simon Stephens In Sean Holmes’ production of The Seagull the audience are cleverly cast in a vital if silent role: that of the play’s omnipresent lake. We become the backdrop of Konstantin’s experimental play, the place where the titular seagull is shot, the shore along which Nina eventually stumbles back to the scene of her downfall. We are confidants, somewhere for the characters to throw out wry asides, inne

✮✮✮ John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, A Parable Southwark Playhouse | London directed by Ché Walker It’s 1964 and we find ourselves gathered today at the Church of St Nicholas. It’s a school in the Bronx, New York City. However all is not rosy, through manipulation or suspicion or maybe just sweet innocence. The Father of the Parish has been reported to the principal sister. His crime? Well, that’s never explicitly revealed and cleverly left to the depths of our cynical imaginati

✮✮✮ 1/2 Steven Dietz's Lonely Planet Tabard Theatre | London directed by Ian Brown No, Lonely Planet thankfully isn't some cheesy dramatisation of a popular travel guide series. This enjoyable if heart-wrenching UK première of Steven Dietz's powerful 1993 AIDS lament is a welcome tie-in with London's Pride festival. Although everyone this year is rightly celebrating 50 years since homosexuality was legalised in Britain, Dietz's intimate play is a sobering reminder of the trag

✮✮✮✮ Brecht's Life of Galileo Young Vic | London directed by Joe Wright Block rocking' beats from The Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands set your pulse racing (or give you a headache) as you file into designer Lizzie Clachan's ingenious circus-arena-cum-planetarium. The Young Vic is almost unrecognisable in this modern take on Brecht. Trance-like video projections of the universe on the huge domed ceiling captivate half the audience who lie on cushions on the floor beneath. The

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 Tony Kushner's Angels in American National Theatre | London directed by Marianne Elliott Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels In America is a theatrical marathon, and elicits much the same effect: breathlessness, exhaustion, light-headedness – the sense that the experience has enriched you, quasi-mystically, beyond the sum of its parts. Like a 26-mile slog it leaves you a little closer to death and yet inexplicably more alive. In Marianne Elliott’s cornucopia

✮✮✮✮ Barney Norris's While We're Here Bush Theatre | London directed by Alice Hamilton While the Bush’s main theatre is whisking off audiences to Imperial India in Guards at the Taj, its studio space is offering up a two-hander closer to home in every respect. Barney Norris’ While We’re Here may not be a ticket to anywhere more exotic than a Havant living room, but its characters are so tenderly drawn and poignantly performed you almost feel you’ve popped into a new neighbour

✮✮✮ 1/2 Martin Crimp's The Treatment Almeida Theatre | London directed by Lyndsey Turner A young woman sits in an office describing the experience of having her mouth taped. Two others are present: one silent, one pedantically pinning down the details while spectacularly missing the point. Is this a police interview? A therapy session? It eventually becomes clear that we are at sea in even more treacherous waters – showbiz. The woman is Anne, and these producers are banking o

✮✮ 1/2 Ivo van Hove's Obsession English language version by Simon Stephens Barbican Theatre | London directed by Ivo van Hove “Everybody wants passion, and to live a passionate life…[but] passion is a devouring force. Though passion is unliveable, we crave it.” So says Ivo van Hove in the programme for his stage adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s 1943 film, Obsession. Passion is indeed is the force to be reckoned with here in the director-of-the-moment’s latest production – the