AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮✮ Rajiv Joseph's Guards at the Taj Bush Theatre | London directed by Jamie Lloyd What a canny choice of play to celebrate the Bush’s revitalization of their hundred-year-old library venue. Theatre’s new gateway to the West opens with a piece about the jewel of Mughal architecture in the East. The happy difference here is that the smaller of these buildings didn’t involve the bloodshed of its builders (one hopes, at least). Because if you type “Did Shah Jahan…” into a searc

✮✮✮✮ Simon McBurney's The Kid Stays in the Picture The Royal Court Theatre | London directed by Simon McBurney Is it a play? Sort of. Is it a movie? Again, sort of. The English language needs a new word to describe Complicite's rip-roaring, multi-sensory staging of movie mogul Robert Evans' bestselling 1994 autobiography, which was also once made into a film. With up to four screens on stage projecting clips from classic movies as well as live camera shots, plus a pulse-racin

✮✮✮✮ Shakespeare's Roman Tragedies Barbican Theatre | London directed by Ivo van Hove Politics can be murder. In the current climate of Brexit and Trump, we’ve seen first hand the effects of politics on the ‘people’, two camps, two sides, two stories and no real winners. Placards in hands, petitions, riots, uprisings we have a voice and we want it heard (even if we don’t get what we want). The Toneelgroep’s spectacular 6-hour epic, Roman Tragedies, is about neither but oh doe

✮✮✮ Shakespeare's Hamlet Almeida Theatre | London directed by Robert Icke Nothing quite divides the camps like a starry Hamlet, and the past few years have seen many. Battle lines seem to be drawn along whether it is the star or the vehicle, the man or the machine, that takes precedence. Shakespeare’s greatest play is indivisible from its title role, yet the world of the play matters to an audience – if we don’t believe in it, we can’t believe Hamlet’s torturous relationship

✮✮✮✮ Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Young Vic | London directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play within a play, or in Joe Hill-Gibbins visceral and visual reimagining a dream within a nightmare. This production delves head first into some of the more uncomfortable themes within the text, dark, disturbing and violent. It doesn’t hold back. The stage (superbly realised by Johannes Schütz) is a muddy-pit, uneven, wet and dirty – not dissimilar from

✮✮✮ Ella Hickson's Boys LOST Theatre | London directed by James Thacker The party is over and the flat is a mess – a bigger mess than usual, thanks to a refuse strike in the city, which means the rubbish is left stagnating in the flat. The boys all have a different attitude to this. Benny (Alex Bird), worrier and complainer who spends a good deal of his time sat on the top of the fridge, finds it extremely unfair. He wants to phone the council, the landlord, anyone – and get

✮✮✮✮ Lucy Kirkwood's The Children The Royal Court Theatre | London directed by James Macdonald The first line of award-winning playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s new play sets the tone for what is to come: slightly ominous, slightly accusatory, tension hidden under a blanket of small talk. The question is for Hazel (Deborah Findlay), a fussy, yoga-practising retired nuclear scientist who lives in an isolated cottage on the coast with her husband (Ron Cook) in the aftermath of a power

✮✮✮✮ Shakespeare's King Lear Barbican Theatre | London directed by Gregory Doran Glenda Jackson's must-see Lear at the Old Vic may be getting all the headlines right now, but Greg Doran's Stratford-to-London RSC transfer is the better production. I'd rank Doran's husband Antony Sher above even my two favourite Lears of recent years: Jonathan Pryce at the Almeida and Derek Jacobi at the Donmar. Also, I've never seen the play's complicated sub-plots staged with such compelling

✮✮✮ Shakespeare's King Lear The Old Vic Theatre | London directed by Deborah Warner Glenda Jackson is King Lear! Two-time Oscar winning actress turned politician returns to the stage after 25 years to play King Lear. However, the worrying feeling is that maybe the rest wasn’t so well thought out. ​ In a nutshell King Lear is to split his kingdom between his three daughters, the parts will be divided up based on how much they love their father. Goneril and Regan (Celia Imrie a

✮✮✮✮ James McDermott's Rubber Ring The Pleasance | London directed by Siobhan James-Elliott Sixteen-year-old Jimmy is sulking in the safe (yet smelly) confines of his bedroom in Sheringham, Norfolk. He is desperate to escape his mundane, small-town existence. He wants to experience the thrill of city life – he wants to go to London. But more importantly, he wants to see Morrissey at the O2. After unsuccessfully trying to steal the money he needs, Jimmy decides to ‘choose adve