As a regular theatregoer, you learn pretty quickly that there’s no story too bizarre to work as a musical. Cannibalistic murders in Victorian London? Faking a miracle in smalltown USA? The westernisation of Japan? And that’s just Sondheim…
How do you make Bernard Shaw sear the stage anew? You can trim the text, as the director Dominic Cooke has, bringing this prolix writer's 1893 play in under the two-hour mark, no interval. And you can introduce a non-speaking ensemble of women in period bloomers and the like as a silent commentary on the depredations indicated in the text.
A society ruled by hysteria. Lurid lies that carry more currency than reality. There’s no shortage of reasons that Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about witchcraft and revenge resonates so strongly today.
The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter. The Fifth Step, though, is a gentler beast whose humour ends with a simple visual gag. Maybe because this is more personally sensitive territory?
The water proves newly inviting in The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Rattigan's mournful 1952 play that some while ago established its status as an English classic. Lindsay Posner's production, first seen in Bath with one major change of cast since then, takes its time, and leading lady Tamsin Greig often speaks in a stage whisper requiring you to lean into the words. (This is that rare production that, praise be, is unamplified.)
It's one thing to be indebted to a playwright, as Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter have been at different times to Beckett, or Sondheim's latest musical is to Sartre. But Conor McPherson's The Brightening Air – the title itself is derived from Yeats – comes so fully steeped in Chekhov that you may wonder whether this portrait of rural Ireland in 1980s County Sligo hasn't bled into provincial Russia from nearly a century before, or vice-versa.
Ava Pickett’s award-winning début play, 1536, is a foul-mouthed, furious, frenetically funny ride through the lives of three young women living in Henry VIII’s England in the year of Anne Boleyn’s execution. It’s less Wolf Hall than a wolf howl of outrage against the double standards, toxic rumours and patriarchal injustices that plagued the lives of spirited women whether they were living in a palace or the remote countryside.
From the creative team that brought you The Play That Goes Wrong in 2012 (and assorted sequels) comes this spy caper. As ever with Mischief productions, their latest work is a lot of fun and pays its dues to the great age of British farce (and pantomime too) with clever wordplay and physical comedy as things go increasingly awry.
There is so much that is right about Jonathan Kent’s new production of House of Games – the casting, the staging, the direction. But the flaw it can’t overcome is that the 1987 David Mamet screenplay on which Richard Bean based this stage version in 2010 has been transformed from a vicious psychologically tough caper-movie into an almost jaunty puzzle-play, its sharp teeth removed.
You don't have to be greeting the modern day with a smile unsupported by events in the wider world to have a field day at Here We Are. The last musical from the venerated Stephen Sondheim has only grown in import and meaning since I caught its New York premiere some 18 months ago.