Polar Bears, Donmar Warehouse

Mark Haddon's stage-writing debut is a riveting psychological thriller

Mark Haddon is rather making a habit of writing about mental-health issues. His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was about a boy with Asperger’s and his TV drama Coming Down the Mountain had a character with Down’s syndrome. He charts similar territory with Polar Bears, which also features a character with a mental-health disorder.

Serenading Louie, Donmar Warehouse

Little-known Lanford Wilson served up with anomie to spare - and excellent acting

American spiritual anomie, that beloved realm of cultural enquiry that has fuelled the likes of Revolutionary Road and Ordinary People and much else besides, gets its latest theatrical airing in the form of Serenading Louie, a Lanford Wilson play that is almost as infrequently seen States-side as it is here. Now, here it is at the Donmar, in a mournful, acutely pitched production from the director Simon Curtis (Cranford) that doesn't shrink from confronting head on the abyss into which the characters are falling fast. Hang on for what is a flawed but, if you stick with it, mesmerising ride, featuring several of the finest performances currently to be found on a London stage.

Red, Donmar Warehouse

Alfred Molina skilfully embodies 20th-century art giant Mark Rothko

He was the biggest hitter in an A-team of mid-20th-century American painters: Jackson Pollock, Barnet Newman, Willem de Kooning. Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkovitz in what has become Latvia, was Abstract Expressionism's shaman, its restless thinker and febrile poet, an artist who fashioned from an investigation into the power of pure colour a philosophy of art as potent as Crick and Watson's contemporaneous unravelling of the double helix.

Life is a Dream, Donmar Warehouse

A Spanish drama of the Golden Age is given bright new life

A play featuring false imprisonment, family members losing and re-finding each other, fathers and sons, forgiveness and reconciliation: it sounds like late Shakespeare. Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream is indeed just post-Shakespeare - from 1635 - and hails from a culture, Golden Age Spain, which determinedly pushed drama on from where Shakespeare left it,  producing over decades a torrent of story-rich plays at a time when England seemed to have given up the dramatic ghost.

Sam Mendes back on the (American) road

Away We Go is further proof of Mendes' Americanisation

Away We Go is the name of Sam Mendes's fifth film, released in Britain this week. But the title could also serve as the buccaneering mantra of a Cambridge-educated Englishman whose career continues to shed any whiff of his home country. On stage or screen, the director is continually drawn to stories culled from across the Atlantic, where he now lives. And why not? If you had directed a first film called American Beauty that would lead to five Oscars and America eating out of your hand, you, too, might well return for more. Mendes's output isn't merely a reflection of his taste, although that part of it is important, too; it's common sense.
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