Theatre

Berlusconi: A New Musical, an excellent title, has opened at a new venue in south London, Southwark Playhouse Elephant. The show begins with the former Italian prime minister preening triumphantly on a white marble set that resembles the Capitol in Rome where Caesar was murdered by rivals who’d grown sick of his power lust. Berlusconi

Accidental Death of an Anarchist has been performed all over the world with varying degrees of success. Written by Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame, the script was inspired by an actual case of police brutality in 1969 when a train driver with anarchist leanings was found dead beneath the open window of a

The murderous odyssey of Bonnie and Clyde is a tricky subject for a musical because the characters are such loathsome wasters and their grisly ambition is to fleece poor people at gunpoint during the Great Depression. They’re famous for stealing from banks but they changed tack once they realised that grocery stores and funeral parlours

Further than the Furthest Thing is an allegorical play set on a remote island populated by English-speakers from all over the world. Dialect experts will have a ball unscrambling the set-up. First we meet Auntie Mill, a white Scotswoman whose husband, Uncle Bill, is a black fisherman with a West Country accent. Their nephew, Francis,

Rupert Goold’s new show, Women, Beware the Devil, has great costumes, sumptuous sets and an intriguing chessboard stage like a Vermeer painting. Impressive to look at but that’s where the good news ends. Dramatist Lulu Raczka should have thought twice before writing a script about witchcraft, which was bound to invite comparisons with The Crucible,

Winner’s Curse is a hybrid drama by Dan Patterson and Daniel Taub which opens as a lecture by a fictional diplomat, Hugo Leitski (a dinner-jacketed Clive Anderson). Leitski offers to teach us the subtle art of negotiation. An expert diplomat, he explains, must convince each side that they’re the winners in the negotiation and that

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is an ode to a monstrous carbuncle. The atrocity in question is a concrete gulag, Park Hill, built by Sheffield council in the 1960s as a punishment for hard-up locals who couldn’t afford to buy a house. The show is a propaganda effort on behalf of bossy, big-state, high-tax Labour

Simon Stone claims that his new comedy, Phaedra, draws on the work of Euripides, Seneca and Racine. In fact, the porn-mag narrative resembles a passage in Alan Clark’s diaries where the priapic scribbler seduces a mother and daughter in rapid succession. That’s what happens to Sofiane, a homeless Moroccan lecher, aged 41, who has the

A romcom with an irritating title, Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, has opened at the HP Theatre starring Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner. Telly addicts will recognise their names. They play two London yuppies, Oliver and Bernadette, who are struggling to communicate properly. Out of nowhere, the state imposes a gruesome new ‘Hush Law’ that

Sound of the Underground is a drag show involving a handful of cross-dressers who spend the opening 15 minutes telling us who they are. Then, rather ominously, they announce: ‘We’ve written a play.’ But they haven’t really. The scene shifts to a kitchen where the drag queens meet to discuss their pay and conditions, and

The Unfriend is a smart new family comedy which opens on the sunlit deck of a cruise ship. Peter and Debbie, a boring middle-class couple, are introduced to a clingy American tourist, Elsa, who worms her way into their affections. Before they know it, they’ve agreed to let her visit them at home after the

Watch on the Rhine is the curiously misleading title chosen by Lillian Hellman for a wartime family drama that became a film starring Bette Davis. The location is not Europe but America and the show opens with Fanny Farrelly, a member of the New England gentry, arriving in her sumptuous drawing room for breakfast. The

The National’s new comedy by April De Angelis is a clever and amusing attempt to deliver that most elusive artefact, the state-of-the-nation play. It’s easy to pan this production because the plot lacks surprises and the script is overly indebted to Abigail’s Party. The two lead characters are formulaic creations who reflect political polarities: left

Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed skirts and woolly cardigans, and they comply with current diversity targets. There’s a white Woolf, a black Woolf, a mixed-race Woolf, an East Asian Woolf, and a male Woolf with a deep voice who seems

A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing special – certainly not spectacular. Your neighbour is struggling to stay awake. The reception, however, is tumultuous. The audience is on its feet, squealing, whistling and whooping as though someone has just found the cure

Crude eccentricities damage the potential brilliance of Othello at the National. Some of the visual gestures seem to have been approved by crazies from the neo-fascist fringe. The Moor is first seen doing a work-out with a punch bag but he doesn’t strike the bag, he grabs a broom handle and uses it to perform

Elf opens with an unbelievable premise. Buddy was abandoned as a baby and adopted by Santa’s elves and he spent a happy childhood making Christmas gifts in their factory at the North Pole. The action begins when Buddy decides to track down his real father in New York, but when he arrives he finds a

A heroic Asian woman parachutes into occupied France to work for the resistance and help overthrow the Nazis. This sounds like a fictional yarn but the story of Noor Inayat Khan is true. Her family were well-educated Sufi Muslims, who counted Gandhi among their friends, and they raised Noor as a pacifist intellectual who spoke