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.

One tiny movement

Hitch, Camden People's Theatre, London

‘This is me,’ he says as he stands, stiff and frightened, at the side of the stage. At the beginning, he crouches whilst he talks. As he grows up – this is coming of age story at heart – he stands upright and speaks strongly.

Money’s impossible grip

Crunch, Camden People's Theatre, London

McNair kicks of with an impressively lucid narrative on the history of money and the emergence of currency. With a few deft strokes, McNair describes the transition from stone age transactions (‘Who wants this ‘ere carcass?’), to the first discovery of gold and the eventual adoption of paper money.

Their own beautiful mess

Three Kingdoms, Lyric Theatre, London

Don’t look at the front of the stage, they seem to be screaming silently. Don’t look for the obvious. Maybe, just maybe, if you look beyond the surface, you might get a little closer to understanding us and discovering the truth.

More bewildered than bedazzled

Make Better Please, BAC, London

The actor’s painful catharsis feels too much, though, and a gap opens between the audience and the action. This gap widens, as the warped music envelops us and the actors crack up completely, storming around with strange props, including a massive penis, attached to their flailing bodies.

A foghorn of despair

'Richard III, Globe Theatre, London

Mandarin is quite a hard-hitting language – packed with monosyllabic words – and the cast’s delivery sounds a little monotonous. It’s hard to make out those elegant swoops, dips and swerves in Shakespeare’s text.

Wispy and blank

The Chair Plays, Lyric Theatre, London

It all feels frustratingly and wilfully dry. Bond’s desire to write a highly stylised and starkly symbolic piece has ripped the guts out of his writing. ‘The Under Room’ never throbs with the kind of thick danger that wraps its way around his other, better and meatier plays.

From knock-kneed sweetness to knees-up knockabout

Chalet Lines, Bush Theatre, London

Lee Mattinson’s characters and events are larger than life. Its gags are slick and its sentiment is unabashed. Characters often voice the themes of the play. All this smacks of a writer siding for flair and entertainment over truthfulness. That’s fine; there are good plays like that. But they can’t make nuanced, near-contradictory sociological points.

An attic full of life’s flotsam

Autobiographer, Toynbee Studios, London

Melanie Wilson makes theatre as spa-treatment. Her work seeps through you, washes over you and leaves you refreshed. You exist alongside it, surfing moment by moment, completely outside out of everyday time. Autobiographer is experienced entirely in the present, just as the Floras (and the rest of us) live life.

The thumping excitement only theatre can muster

Misterman, National Theatre (Lyttleton), London

Rain pours from the ceiling. Odd little crucifixes flash up, initially comforting but quickly threatening. Thunder rumbles, lightning flashes and music, outside of Magill’s control, envelops everything. The effects grow bigger, madder and wilder, as Magill loses his grip on his story and his sanity.

Dead inside and deeply frustrated

Long Day's Journey Into Night, Apollo Theatre, London

Many reviews of this show have included the slippy caveat: ‘This is not an easy viewing experience’. This phrase is often slipped in as an afterthought, following a careful exploration of all the cerebral pleasures, to be mined from said misery fest. And yet, what this phrase really means is: most of the audience will not enjoy this.

Permanent psychological damage

Big and Small (Gross and Klein), Barbican, London

Cate Blanchett is an incredible force on stage and the production would be so much less without her. She manages to make her character, Lotte (wearing pastel pink, Alice in Wonderland-themed costumes), both bafflingly innocent and wearingly knowing.

‘There have been fights in here’

30 Cecil Street, Forest Fringe at the Gate Theatre, London

Canham prowls, thoughtfully, around the stage, placing scraps of masking tape on the floor and across the walls, as stolen conversations rumble around him. A blueprint of the theatre gradually emerges, breaking up the space into three distinct areas. Now all that is needed, is to colour in between those white lines: that’s where the dancing comes in.

A pathetic little word

Jimmy Stewart, An Anthropologist from Mars, Analyses Love and Happiness in Humans (And Rabbits), Forest Fringe at the Gate Theatre, London

Tassos Stevens is a storyteller and, as he narrates the tale of Jimmy wandering across the earth and wondering about human feeling, he uses every opportunity he can to crack open the concept of love and examine its individual parts.

A saggy miracle

Made Up, Soho Theatre, London

The trio - Brian Logan, Alex Murdoch and Neil Haigh - also makes clever, comical use of their own limitations. Often, the most pathetic, ant-climatic lines are the funniest. It is the pause, as an actor attempts to summon up a sharp quip and finds himself wanting, that creates the biggest laughs

An air of premeditation

The Duchess of Malfi, Old Vic, London

Eve Best is the one free spirit in this over-marshalled production. She enters in a celestial glow of light but, once released from this formal introduction, is utterly her own creation. Spirited and strikingly ‘normal’, her Duchess of Malfi would make sense in any production.