AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮✮ 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

✮ 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

✮✮✮✮ 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

✮✮✮✮ Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea National Theatre | London directed by Carrie Cracknell Hester Collyer, the central character in Terence Rattigan’s 1952 classic, has more than just a hint of Mrs. Dalloway about her. Hester is slowly revealed to us through the events that unfold over one single day, as Clarissa Dalloway is in Virginia Woolf’s novel. Both women keep themselves tightly composed; both concerned with how they appear to others and weighed down with expecta

✮✮✮✮ Annie Baker's The Flick National Theatre | London directed by Sam Gold There is something unsettling about entering a theatre and finding yourself confronted with rows of empty seats, pretty similar to the ones you are sitting on, instead of the set stage you were expecting. The dingy cinema auditorium of Annie Baker’s Pulitzer-prize winning play feels less like a theatre set; rather more like a mirror, reflecting our own mundane lives back at us. This is unlike a tradit

✮✮✮✮ Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs National Theatre | London directed by Yaël Farber Standing ovations at the interval as well as at the end on press night tell you all you need to know about the ongoing power of Lorraine Hansberry's dizzying interrogation of white colonialism versus black freedom-fighting, and the deeply moving quality of this excellent production, entrallingly directed by Yaël Farber. The clapping and cheering were a welcome release of tension. Funny line

✮✮✮✮ Patrick Marber's Three Days in the Country after Turgenev National Theatre | London directed by Patrick Marber Patrick Marber's condensed version of Turgenev's long-winded, novelistic A Month in the Country begins slowly, excruciatingly slowly, like most classic Russian plays. After about half an hour it suddenly fizzes into life, its intriguing mix of tragicomic plot, sub-plot, counter-plot (and counter-counter plot) gripping the audience's attention until the curtain c

✮✮✮✮1/2 Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Motherf**ker with the Hat National Theatre | London directed by Indhu Rubasingham The ‘C’ word here being nothing more flagrant than ‘commitment’. And yet, as words go these days, almost as controversial. Commitment to our romantic relationships, yes, and therein lies the plot – but also commitment to ourselves, to that intangible sense, barely more than a hunch, of the self that dwells somewhere between past mistakes and tentative fidelity t

✮✮1/2 Patrick Marber's The Red Lion National Theatre | London directed by Ian Rickson "Is it illegal? Is it a bung?" talented young semi-pro footballer Jordan asks his manager as dodgy arrangements, "sweeteners," are put in place to facilitate his transfer to another club. "It's football," the gaffer replies. "It's the wild west down 'ere. Unregulated." Welcome to the world not of corrupt FIFA officials and World Cup bids but grassroots, non-league football. The common link?

✮✮✮✮ Everyman National Theatre | London a new adaptation by Carol Ann Duffy directed by Rufus Norris From start to finish (or cradle to grave, to crowbar in a theme) this is an incendiary opening salvo from the National Theatre’s new artistic director Rufus Norris. Fast-paced, engaging, funny and precise, it delivers in every anachronistically delicious way you expect a Medieval morality play to – yet by addressing our modern addiction to self-gratification it achieves much m