Theatre

The Globe’s new chatelaine, Emma Rice, has certainly shaken the old place up. It’s almost unrecognisable. Huge white plastic orbs dangle overhead amid plunging green chutes like rainforest vines. The back wall is smothered in a blinding rampart of explosively coloured saffron petals. Up top, partially concealed by pillars, lurks a rock band togged up in a blend of Elizabethan casuals and modern gear. Presiding over everything is an Indian matriarch, seated in cross-legged solemnity, playing an electric sitar whose headstock (the bit with the tuning pegs) resembles a Fender bass. What are we supposed to make of this weird, druggy, space-age Bollywood mash-up? Nothing much. Except that Shakespeare belongs

T.E. Lawrence is like the gap-year student from hell. He visits a country full of exotic barbarians and after a busy few months rescuing them from their spiritual frailties, and helping them emulate their Western superiors, he returns home and never stops boring on about it. ‘How much I learned from them,’ he gushes, when what he means is, ‘How much they learned from me.’ That’s always been the view of Lawrence’s critics, among them fellow British army officers, who saw him as a reckless, attention-seeking fantasist. Howard Brenton’s new play offers a more charitable portrait of Lawrence as a brilliant, sensitive, rootless genius. The action opens with him newly

Great excitement for play-goers as a rare version of a theological masterpiece arrives in the West End. Doctor Faustus stars Kit Harington, a handsome, bearded bantamweight with round glasses and rock-star curls. We first meet him wearing a grey hoodie and lounging in a bedsit surrounded by cheap Catholic statuary. The druggy clothes and the religious iconography suggest a criminal Jesus-freak, possibly of Mexican origin, hiding out from cocaine dealers. Marlowe’s creation is somewhat different. Dr Faustus is a medieval potentate, a scholar of genius, a rich and celebrated German polymath admired by emperors and cardinals, who decides to exchange his earthly ambitions for the chance to wield supernatural powers

Down and Out in Paris and London is a brilliant specimen from a disreputable branch of writing: the chav safari, the underclass minibreak, the sojourn on the scrapheap that inspires a literary monument. Orwell’s first book was turned down by Faber boss T.S. Eliot, who received the script under its original title, Confessions of a Dishwasher. New Diorama’s dramatisation brilliantly captures the raffish sleaziness of Paris in the 1920s. Orwell’s crew of thieves, parasites and drifters come across as comradely and charming in this magnificently squalid setting. The austere lighting and the ingenious stage effects are done with tremendous economy. There are flashes of bleak humour too. Orwell’s anvil-faced landlady

In this much-heralded Shakespeare anniversary year, one might expect a certain respect for the works to prevail. In Holland it’s different. Under the tutelage of a Belgian, Ivo van Hove, a huge slice of Shakespeare’s history theatre has been filleted for the stage into something that might sit nicely on HBO alongside Game of Thrones. It opens at the Barbican on 22 April, a day before the official Shakespeare-death day four centuries ago. And it’s all in contemporary Dutch verse — four hours of it… Kings of War starts with a photo, on a video-screen, of little Prince George. His infant form is followed in rapid succession by that of

Les Blancs had a troubled birth. In 1965 several unfinished drafts of the play were entrusted by its dying author, Lorraine Hansberry, to her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, who mounted a debut production in New York in 1970. Nemiroff has created a fresh version with the help of a ‘dramaturg’ (or ‘colleague’, in English) named Drew Lichtenberg who believes not only that this ramshackle script is a masterpiece but also that Hansberry belongs in the first rank of dramatists alongside Ibsen, Sophocles and Aeschylus. This does not bode well. But the result is surprisingly good. Or good-ish. The setting is a nameless African colony populated by do-gooding Europeans, angry freedom fighters

Sunset Boulevard is a tale of fractured glory with Homeric dimensions. The movie presents Hollywood as a never-ending Trojan War that attracts fresh generations of dreamy youths in search of conquest and treasure. The lead characters have retired from battle, wounded. Joe Gillis, like Odysseus, is a vagrant warrior ensnared in the island-mansion of Norma Desmond, who plays the role of broken-queen-turned-sorceress. These fabulous elements are preserved in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version. So is the Norma-Joe affair, with its distasteful emotional template: mother-son, boss-slave, mistress-poodle, crone-toyboy. The lovers are linked by nothing but neediness and failure, and each desires the mirage that the other represents. In all, it makes

Sir Ken’s excellent West End residency continues with a sugar-rich confection. Sean Foley has adapted and updated an elderly French farce about an assassin who befriends a needy depressive. Hitman Ralph rents a hotel suite overlooking a courtroom where his target is due to make an appearance. The neighbouring room is occupied by a mopey Welshman, Brian, who wants to hang himself from the light socket. Ralph discovers Brian’s plan and realises that Brian’s death will fill the hotel with cops and ruin his assassination attempt. So Ralph must save Brian from suicide. It’s a pretty clunky scenario and the logistics are frankly incredible because the design postulates two adjacent single

Miss Atomic Bomb celebrates the sub-culture that grew up around nuclear tests in 1950s America. The citizens of Nevada would throw parties and stage barbecues to coincide with the latest nuclear detonation in the desert. This musical has a lot going for it. The melodies are strong, and well sung. The high-kicking chorus lines are easy on the eye and the show has a zippy, innocent spirit. But the storyline gets sidetracked in a mass of contradictory directions. The main theme follows a homesick farm girl who becomes involved with a runaway soldier whose brother runs a Vegas nightclub where a beauty contest is being held that the farm girl

The Maids is a fascinating document. Written in 1947, Jean Genet’s drama portrays a pair of serving girls who enact sexually loaded fantasies while dressed in the clothes of their employer, Madame, whose murder they are secretly plotting. This macabre sketch still resonates because it analyses and presages the key social transition of the 20th century, namely the overthrow of privilege by the underclass. And it boasts extra layers of erotic chic because the sexually inquisitive maids are sisters and because Genet suggested that the girls might be played by men in drag. This delicate, subtle work is as firmly rooted in its historical era as another classic political allegory,

Laurence Fox has this week joined an increasing band of actors hitting back at misbehaving audience members who seem to forget that they are in public rather than their own living room. He ramped up the drama by launching a foul-mouthed attack on a heckler before storming offstage during a live performance at a London theatre. During the play, The Patriotic Traitor at the Park Theatre, he was heard to say: ‘I won’t bother telling you the story because this cunt in the front row has ruined it for everybody.’ The audience member had been muttering and heckling during the play and apparently became so loud that, for Fox, it was impossible

Big fuss about Cleansed at the Dorfman. Talk of nauseous punters rushing for the gangways may have perversely delighted the show’s creators but I’m firmly with the exiteers. This is barely a play and more a thin, vicious pantomime with an Isis-video aesthetic. The minuscule plot follows Grace (Michelle Terry) as she visits a prison hospital to receive news of a tortured relative. She’s immediately roped in as a victim and we’re treated to a sequence of gougings, knifings, electrocutions, rectal penetrations and tongue extractions which are bizarrely interspersed with scenes of lustful romance. Alex Eales’s design stands out. The duck-egg blue paint of the smashed-up hospital peels away to

Director Robert Icke has this to say of Chekhov’s greatest masterpiece: ‘Let the electricity of now flow into the old thing and make it function.’ He uproots ‘the old thing’ from its natural setting and drops it down in no-man’s land. It all feels modern. Aircraft buzz in the heavy summer air. A thunderstorm sets off a car alarm. English names have displaced their Russian originals. Telegin has turned into Cartwright. The childless but priapic Uncle Vanya has been renamed after a latex prophylactic, Uncle Johnny. Perhaps appropriately. These alterations create huge uncertainties of class, location and era. Who are these Bohemian dropouts swilling vodka in a nameless English shire