Regular reviews of new London theatre, from the West End and the National Theatre to the fringe, plus occasional dispatches from around the UK and beyond.

Haunting the heart

You Look Like Ants and Uri & Me, Courtyard Theatre, London

Silver’s words kept leaving Cheshire cat’s smiles hanging in the air behind them, the full philosophical wit and insight only hitting us with a delay of a few seconds, or even re-emerging many hours later during a tube journey or a lunch-break walk – ‘I depend on people empathising with me in order to read my own mind’; ‘when I grow up I want to be a pilot; or a member of the cabin crew; or a passenger’.

Swathes of subtext

Random, Royal Court Theatre at Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre, London

This is a different London, a different family but a deeply personal, powerful and convincing piece. Green’s play boasts a resounding performance from Seroca Davis (a real talent), alongside poetry that is truthful rather than symbolic, situations that are emotional but not sentimental and characters that are believable, flawed and unforgettable. 

The dark Clerkenwell mist

Avant! Noir, Toynbee Theatre, London

Avant! Noir happily managed a smooth equilibrium of media and styles, music and words and images all melting into each other, suggesting further shapes and colours, stretching the genre without straining it.

Synesthetes of us all

The Catastrophe Trilogy, Barbican Pit, London

The mode is rigorously spare and yet never sparse. Each piece has a huge depth of tone, thanks to precise attention to atmosphere and, most importantly, rhythm. Lone Twin pitch their pacing deliberately out of sync with the world and, through repetition, force us to abandon everyday timeframes. They draw out sonic textures from movement – footfalls and breath, claps and clicks – and stretch them until you snuggle in and your blood pumps in time.

Whistling that pierces the heart

Sweet Nothings, Young Vic, London

Tom Hughes’ Fritz is heart-breakingly young and puffed out and summons up the atmosphere of a son anticipating a hearty hiding from his dad. It is tricky to tell if any of the characters, despite the promise of a duel between Fritz and harrowed husband, recognise the real danger they face. Indeed, this is what makes Fritzs’ wilful embracing of his fate so hard to witness

Shiny red shoes

Promises Promises, Soho Theatre, London

Promises Promises is not at all a play about an issue, nor a tirade against the follies of dumbed-down multiculturalism. Instead, it is a voyage to the centre of Miss Brodie, which moves swiftly and masterfully from comedy to gothic horror story, passing through Miss Brodie’s projection into six-year-old Rosie (or Nadifa), with a definite touch of doppelgänger motives.

A man most notoriously absolved

Measure for Measure, Almeida Theatre, London

This is a production driven by canny characterisation rather than design. What it offers, even where some are less persuasive than others, are interesting subversions of classic roles.

The not-too-subtle symbolism of the suitcases

Heldenplatz, Arcola Theatre, London

‘The Viennese are Jewhaters and will remain Jewhaters to all eternity’; ‘this Austrian stupidity is utterly repulsive’; Austrians are nothing else but ‘six and half million feeble-minded raving mad people/screaming incessantly at the top of their voices for a director’ - and the director, who had already come once, will come again and ‘give them the final push down the abyss’.

Youthful, innocent and free

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rose Theatre, London

Judi Dench’s playfulness is systematic of the light, whimsical feel to Peter Hall’s absorbing Rose Theatre production. The show is underpinned by a desire to have fun with Shakespeare; a quality that is sometimes lost in more ‘complicated’, modern-day productions.

The only thing that could ever reach me

Adisa 1968: the year that never ended, Barbican, London

The sense is more one of self-belief, but one which can at times genuinely push out into the world. A touching moment is when this young man discovers new types of music, reggae, afrobeat…classical!

The comedy (and tragedy) of class

The Gambler, Royal Opera House, London

Alexei starts with unrequited love and a social situation that leaves him few options. Babulenka starts with gambling for (whisper it) sheer fun and then loses her fortune almost wilfully to spite her callous relatives. Are these stories not more interesting and more believable than broad-brush comparisons with zoo animals?

‘A slumber-party vibe’

Jonny Sweet: Mostly About Arthur, Soho Theatre, London

Indiscriminate and meandering it may be, but Sweet just about manages to pull it together somehow. Perched firmly on the spectrum, he fidgets his way around the stage, shattering social conventions and manhandling his audience like a safari chimpanzee.

Roundabout cabaret

Tim Key: The Slutcracker, Soho Theatre, London

In an assortment of petite poems and mumbled musings, Key offers a pointillist portrait of modern, urban existence. ‘Tanya googled herself / Still nothing,’ reads one. Others cover thrill-seeking colleagues skinning eels in their lunch-break, the moments in which relationships crack, and ‘the thorny issue of dew’.

Physical incarnations of commas and dots

Knives in Hens, Arcola Theatre, London

Jodie McNee, as the curious, fervently religious and yet independently-minded Sarah, is the force to be reckoned with. She proceeds with eyes and palms wide open, looking for names to everything under the sun and relentlessly examining life’s minutiae, eventually discovering how to fully inhabit her own force: ‘I know now I must find out the names for myself’.

Pulsating with pluralism

11 & 12, Barbican, London

I found the particularities of less import than the abstract archetypes underpinning them. To exert too much effort into the narrative is almost to lose sight of the pointed philosophy beneath. The preaching, in other words, has more resonance than the preachers.