This is the third Emlyn Williams piece to be presented here in a decade: The Druid's Rest in 2009 was followed by the enormous success of Accolade, directed by Blanche McIntyre, two years later.
Of all the groups you probably wouldn’t want to be part of, surely the hyper-adrenalised, hardscrabble populace of The Wolf of Wall Street, the Jordan Belfort memoir made into an amphetamine rush of a film by Martin Scorsese, must rank near the very top. And yet here, against expectation, is an immersive theatre adaptation of the non-fiction memoirs that spawned the 2013 movie.
Nostalgia for things that probably never were is an animating theme in politics these days.
It took no time for Elena Ferrante's two Neapolitan friends to join the ranks of great literary creations: Lenù as successful writer-narrator, critical of her past ambivalence; Lila the unknowable fascinator, her brilliance often diverted into poisoned channels. Four volumes amounting to over 1500 pages offer a psychological complexity four acts of fast-moving theatre can't begin to match.
Family dramas are a staple of British new writing, but as well as talking about our nearest and dearest, can they also say something about the wider society? The Arrival, by director turned playwright Bijan Sheibani, who won an Olivier award for Bola Agbaje's Gone Too Far! in 2008, has ambitions to be a study of masculinity in crisis. After all, Agbaje's play was about brothers, and both of his recent directing hits – The Brothers Size and Barber Shop Chronicles – were pungent with testosterone.
We all remember that moment when we walked through the back of the wardrobe: the heaviness of the fur coats, that first crunch of the snow underfoot. It’s an extraordinary moment of childhood that has also become too normal because shared memory has made it so. What does it really mean to walk through a door and emerge in another world entirely? That’s inevitably one of the questions involved in staging The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and Sally Cookson’s production rises magnificently to the challenge.
No Joan of Arc means no Henry VI Part One. France, where we left the victorious Henry V - the superb Sarah Amankwah, a shining light of this company - in the Globe's summer history plays, only figures briefly in the last act of a candelelit, intimate stepping-back to the more problematic saga.
It’s bright, it’s brash, it’s a gazillion times camper than Christmas: but is it such stuff as theatrical hits are made on? If that misquotation is already making you cringe, then this glittery pop juggernaut probably isn’t for you – but it is, unashamedly, Shakespeare for the generation that grew up on TV talent shows. Created around the back catalogue of Swedish songwriter Max Martin, it’s a reworking of Romeo and Juliet that gives the tragic teenage heroine’s story an irreverent, 21st-century spin.
Aladdin, Prince Edward Theatre ★★★ Disney's latest blockbuster film-turned-stage show remains airborne – just
Come From Away, Phoenix Theatre ★★★★ 9/11-themed musical crosses the Atlantic, capacious heart intact