Noël coward theatre

Stanley Kubrick’s surreal movie Dr Strangelove is a response to the fear of nuclear annihilation which obsessed every citizen in the western world from the end of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The play’s co-adaptors, Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci, are old enough to recall that fear – but they’ve omitted any sense of collective anxiety from their adaptation. It’s a just a larky tribute to the movie, like a sketch show. Daft not disturbing. It turns out Dr Strangelove is like Father Christmas – more potent as a mythical abstraction than as a reality The story starts with an

Slave Play is a series of hoaxes. The producers announced that ‘Black Out’ performances would be reserved for ‘black-identifying’ playgoers but the ticketing system is colour-blind and these so-called ‘segregated’ shows were attended by audiences of all ethnicities. The PR gambit generated lots of free publicity, but these stunts don’t always translate into ticket sales. The second hour involves screeds of impenetrable psychobabble as the couples bicker and moan The show appears to be a drama set in the Deep South before the American civil war. It opens with a white farmer humiliating his black cleaner, who easily outsmarts him. When he forces her to eat fruit from the dirty

Play-goers, beware. Director Robert Icke is back in town, and that means a turgid four-hour revival of a heavyweight classic with every actor screaming, bawling, weeping, howling and generally overdoing it. But here’s a surprise. Player Kings, Icke’s new version of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is a dazzling piece of entertainment and the only exaggerated performance comes from Sir Ian McKellen who plays Falstaff, quite rightly, as a noisy, swaggering dissembler. Those who imagine ‘Shakespearean comedy’ to be an oxymoron will be pleasantly surprised Small details deliver large dividends. The tavern scenes are set in an east London hipster bar with chipped wooden tables and exposed brickwork. Richard

Flight has been hailed as a new form of dramatic presentation — prefab theatre. It’s great to look at. A set of model boxes containing stick figures and colourful landscapes slides past the seated viewer while a voiceover reads the narrative. No thesps are required, which may be a relief to producers and directors but the acting profession will be in trouble if this experiment catches on. The story, adapted from Hinterland by Caroline Brothers, follows two Afghan teenagers, Kabir and Aryan, who decide to walk to Europe in search of a better life. All they have is $2,000 in cash and a spare pair of trainers each. Along the