London theatre reviews

A fascinating feminist hybrid of EastEnders, Samuel Beckett and Wolf Hall, Ava Pickett’s 1536 is set in some marshland on the outskirts of an Essex village in – you guessed it – 1536, the year Anne Boleyn was executed. Not that this is a by-the-numbers Tudor drama: the story focuses on three young women who never come within a sniff of the royal family.

Following in the vein of 2016’s The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, Mischief Theatre – they of The Play That Goes Wrong – are now aiming their slick brand of ever-escalating theatrical farce at the spy genre in this West End premiere. When a top-secret file is stolen by a turncoat British agent, a deeply mismatched pair of KGB agents and a CIA operative and his over-enthusiastic mother collide in pursuit of it – along with an over-the-hill actor and a young couple – at the Piccadilly Hotel in London in swinging 1961. General chaos ensues.

Everyone loves a grifter. From Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley to Anna Delvey, we’re suckers for the charming anti-hero, the confidence artist who plays by their own rules. So it’s no surprise that House of Games — David Mamet’s 1987 film, adapted by Richard Bean for the Almeida in 2010 — still exerts a certain pull. Restaged at Hampstead Theatre, Bean’s revival invites us back into an underbelly of sleaze, scams, and high-stakes hijinks.

Stephen Sondheim didn’t finish his final musical Here We Are, something we can easily determine by the fact there aren’t any songs in the second half. He did however give his blessing for it to be performed. And so here we are.

Time Out doesn’t as a rule review shows that aren’t in London. But I am so aggressively smack bang in the centre of the Venn diagram of ‘people who like Shakespeare’s 1599 play Hamlet’ and ‘people who like Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief’ that when the opportunity to attend the Manchester opening night of the stage mash-up Hamlet Hail to the Thief came up I felt obliged to go.

Doing something genuinely original with Romeo and Juliet is no mean feat. Contemporary productions all tend to try and modernise it; that Sean Holmes’s latest Globe version refuses to go down this path at all should be commended in and of itself. Instead, it transposes fair Verona to the rootin’ tootin’ American West, the cast donning stetsons and petticoats befitting a trad production of Oklahoma! as the sighs of our star-cross’d lovers are scored by a banjo and intercut with the odd ‘yee-haw!’

General advice is to stay away from hornets’ nests, especially if you are the West End and you want people to have a nice time and pay lots of money for a ticket. Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play goes against general advice. In fact he finds the biggest hornets’ nests he can and prods at all of them, and sees what comes flying out. What does come out is pretty spectacular.

Patrick Marber’s reputation as a playwright was sealed with 1997’s Closer, but wowee his debut Dealer’s Choice is good, a hugely enjoyable drama about masculine desperation that follows a single eventful night at an after hours poker game.

Ibsen’s original Master Builder is a weird, stodgy play, and US playwright’s Raicek’s celebrity-studded new version does a lot to address its issues, even if she’s created new problems of her own in trying to ‘fix’ the story.