AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮✮ 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

✮✮✮✮ 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

✮✮✮✮✮ 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

✮✮✮✮✮ Simon Stone's Yerma Young Vic | London directed by Simon Stone Obsession is one of the inexplicable tics that make or mar our species. It builds pyramids, cracks mathematical problems, puts man on the moon. In modern times this obsession has contracted towards the self: self-actualisation, self-promotion, self-destruction. But the oldest obsession – and the most biologically sound – is the idea of reproduction. It's curious that in this age of science and common sense o

✮✮✮✮✮ Kafka's The Trial Young Vic | London directed by Richard Jones At his first court appearance following his arrest for unspecified crimes, Rory Kinnear's Josef K says to himself, aloud, face contorted with bemused shock and fear: “ee musten proclaim im innocent, an im put all facts before ee judge, im wrong arrest...” This strange language in Nick Gill's excitingly terrifying adaptation of Kafka's nightmarish classic is baffling at first, and won't be everyone's cup of t

✮✮✮✮ Peter Brook's The Valley of Astonishment Young Vic | London directed by Peter Brook & Marie-Hélène Estienne The human brain is a mighty mansion, and for those who would open its doors to an audience the temptation must be to give them the full whirlwind tour, right down to the last neurological nook. The Valley of Astonishment resists any such real estate puffery. Instead we are offered a bare square within a stage, house lights at a purr, a few chairs and a coat-stand.