Blood and Gifts **** TNT

Considerably expanded from a short slot in the Tricycle's 2009 The Great Game season, U.S. playwright J.T. Rogers’ simply staged new version takes a serious, critical – but often very funny – look at American, British and Russian involvement in the ongoing troubles in Afghanistan from 1981–1991.

He paints an almost exclusively male world of diplomatic double-dealing, unlikely friendships and questionable alliances where guns are the gift of choice and language isn’t the only barrier to understanding.

At the centre, Lloyd Owen impresses as the new CIA operative, covertly plying his mujahideen “asset” with munitions, money and chart-topping tapes in exchange for information about his Pakistani counterpart, and Adam James’ garrulous MI6 spook runs the risk of being more hindrance than help in their mutual efforts to oust the Soviet troops.

Lyttelton at the National, South Bank, SE1 9PX (020 7452 3000) Tube: Waterloo tube
nationaltheatre.org.uk In rep until at least 2nd November £10 - £44

Aliens *** TNT

There’s not a lot happening in American Annie Baker sparse new play – and she even goes so far as to specify that at least a third of it is silence. But thanks to the carefully tuned acting, and Peter Gill’s sympathetically detailed direction, there’s much to savour – and unexpected gentle comedy - in this tiny slice of New England life.

In the off-limits, fenced-in staff area behind a Vermont coffee shop, scruffy thirtysomethings Jasper and KJ lounge around aimlessly smoking, drinking magic mushroom tea and getting high. They look and sound like two of life’s damaged losers, purposeless and unfocussed. Jasper’s girlfriend has left him for another man. College dropout KJ, on medication following a breakdown, has gone back to live with his New Age mum.

They once had a band - sort of - which went by various names including The Aliens. Drawn to their company is 17 year old summer temp Evan who is fascinated by the two older men and joins their low-key Fourth of July celebrations.

Olly Alexander captures, winningly, the teenager’s constant state of embarrassment as he tries to please his new “friends”. Ralf Little (with a tangled rope of unwashed hair and given to gnomic utterings) is equally convincing as laidback KJ, whilst Mackenzie Crook is perfectly cast as troubled, self-confessed “trailer trash” Jasper with his volume of Charles Bukoswki poems and aspirations to write his own novel.

None of them really belongs – but one’s left with the hope that maybe, just perhaps, young Evan might still find his way when summer comes to an end and school and his Jewish family background reassert their conventional influence.

Bush Theatre, Shepherds Bush Green, W12 8QD (020 8743 5050) Tube: Shepherds Bush
bushtheatre.co.uk Until 16th October £20, Saturday matinees £15

Les Miserables **** TNT

It’s 25 years since Boublil and Schonberg’s musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s epic 1861 novel, Les Miserables, first hit the Barbican stage, but a quarter of a century later (with a host of productions having been seen worldwide and another playing simultaneously in the West End) this restaged, slimmed down touring anniversary version still has the power to bring an audience to its feet.

It’s hard to believe that early reviews were mixed. It’s got everything to capture the imagination and stir the soul – a Dickensian sensibility of injustice and the plight of the poor, a pure love story, protesting students, a persistent villain who will not give up his pursuit of the story’s hero over several decades, and a comic duo of innkeepers who’ll do anything to line their pockets. And that’s before you add in the mix of rousing and poignant melodies and the new computerised projections inspired by the author’s own paintings. (The escape through the sewers is particularly effective).

At the centre is John Owen-Jones as the former convict Jean Valjean who served 19 years on a chain gang for stealing food to feed a starving child and narrowly avoids reimprisonment every time he does a good deed. It’s a powerhouse of a performance, well-matched by Earl Carpenter’s obsessed Javert, the policeman intent on tracking him down. Pop Idol runner-up Gareth Gates makes a rather too boyish student Marius, Lynne Wilmot a lusty pantomime Madame Thenardier. And although the siege at the barricades is a bit short on dramatic impact, Paule Constable’s lighting adds an evocatively painterly glow to One Day More, Bring Him Home and a potent production which has lost none of its capacity to thrill.

Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS (020 7638 8891) Tube: BarbicanUntil 2nd October £15 - £85

Death Trap *** TNT

For most seasoned theatregoers Simon Russell Beale can’t put a foot wrong. So, although Matthew Warchus’s atmospheric resurrection of Ira Levin’s self-referential 1978 comedy thriller is unlikely to spark a major revival of the genre, there’s much to enjoy in this far-fetched tale of blocked, once successful Broadway playwright Sidney Bruhl who contemplates murder when a former student (Glee‘s personable Jonathan Groff) sends him the sort of script he wishes he could still produce.

Just about everything about the plot is preposterous – from the heavily accented psychic neighbour to the lethal armoury which decorates his converted Connecticut stable. But the twists and turns are deftly (if not totally convincingly) handled and the ever-watchable Russell Beale, in perfectly-timed low-key mode, invests Bruhl with far more layers of subtlety than he deserves.

Noel Coward, St. Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4AU Tube: Leicester Square (0844 482 5140) Leicester Square
deathtraptheplay.com Until 22nd January £19.50 - £49.50

Love On The Dole **** TNT

Written from the heart and performed with passion, Beckie Mills’ revival of this 1930’s social drama would do credit to a much larger production house than the tiny Finborough.

Co-adapted by Ronald Gow and Walter Greenwood (who wrote the original novel whilst he himself was searching for work during the Great Depression) it paints a vivid and depressing picture of working class life in Hanky Park, an industrial suburb of Salford, Manchester where cramped conditions and (if you were lucky) poor rates of pay were the norm.

With the mills closing, proud men like Greenwood’s Mr. Hardcastle found themselves out of a job and unable to support their families, humiliatingly forced to rely on whatever their sons and daughters could contribute to the household.

The next generation dreamt of a better future and escape from a life of skimping and scraping to make ends meet. But although romance might be the answer to everything in the movies, real life isn’t quite like that as his daughter Sally (Emily Dobbs) and teenage son Harry find out all too soon. She chooses a socialist activist Larry (Carl Prekopp) over the shady but wealthy bookkeeper Sam Grundy, and Jack Monaghan’s young Harry, proud as punch in his first new suit, learns that love comes at a cost.

Janie Booth’s pragmatic old biddy of a neighbour (who’d never turn her nose up at a fat belly so long as it had a gold chain hanging on it) gets some of the best lines and provides much of the humour, William Maxwell’s seething Mr. Hardcastle epitomises all the pent up anger and frustration of a decent man brought low through no fault of his own and (although it takes a leap of imagination when Sally and Larry’s hike over the moors is restricted to a clamber over the kitchen sink) Olivia Altaras’s detailed design, worn out dishcloth and all, admirably conveys the clean but claustrophobic conditions of the period in this enduringly hard-hitting drama.

Finborough, Finborough Road, SW10 9ED Tube: Earl’s Court (0844 847 1652) finboroughtheatre.co.uk
Until 2nd October £11 - £15

Wanderlust **** TNT

Sex, sex and more sex – everywhere except in the marital bedroom where middle-aged parents Joy and Alan just aren’t getting it together anymore.

It’s not often that the Royal Court warns its audience about adult content – but Nick Payne’s embarrassingly funny, surprisingly touching new play (staged in the more intimate auditorium) begins as explicitly as it means to go on.

We’re never told precisely why GP Joy has gone off sex, but teacher Alan’s pretty fed up with constant rejection. Meanwhile their fifteen year old son Tim has enlisted the help of his more experienced classmate Michelle to show him in precise detail exactly what he needs to know before he asks out an older schoolgirl he fancies.

Payne (who won a most promising playwright award last year) stresses the distinction between lust and intimacy, and is pretty tough on the marriage counselling advice Joy tries to put into practice in a cringe-makingly disastrous attempt to rekindle conjugal relationships. It does rather seem, though, that dressing up as a schoolgirl to fulfil Alan’s fantasy when she’s the one who’s lost interest, is unlikely to help much.

But full marks to the commendably uninhibited cast in Simon Godwin’s swift, very enjoyable 90 minute production, including James Musgrave’s inquisitive Tim and Isabella Laughland’s obliging Michelle, Pippa Haywood’s saddened Joy and - although they both commit the cardinal sin of keeping their socks on in the bedroom – Stuart McQuarrie’s frustrated Alan and Charles Edwards as old flame Stephen who turns up in Joy’s surgery with suspected thrush.

Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS (020 7565 5000) Tube: Sloane Square
royalcourttheare.com Until 9th October £10 - £15

Bedlam *** TNT

It’s a madhouse at the Globe – but Nell Leyshon’s diffuse new play (the first written by a female playwright to be produced at this theatre) doesn’t get to the heart of either the fictional institution or the inmates in a sprawling meander which provides information but doesn’t have much of a soul.

Leyshon has done her homework, and it shows, but despite the detail, she fails to engender much sense of compassion for the suffering of the inmates - a motley (but far from over-crowded) bunch of the mentally incapacitated who find themselves subjected to a crude “one size fits all” treatment regime involving bleeding by leeches, shaved hair, cold baths and blood-letting.

A posturing poet pays his penny along with London’s curious to view the incarcerated unfortunates and becomes infatuated with a beautiful farm girl who lost her mind when she lost her lover.

The man in charge, Dr Carew, encourages the voyeuristic visitors to prod as well as gawp, and has a fondness for gin - as well as for the buxom wench (Ella Smith) who sells it. And his refined wife finds a like-minded ally in the newly appointed Governor with his zest for reform and understanding.

But despite the period songs, the bawdy comedy and hints of authenticity, it’s too loosely plotted to engage. Ultimately it’s little more than a superficial romp – well suited to the open air stage, but a disappointing disservice to those who spent their lives locked up in an 18th century asylum.

Shakespeare’s Globe, Bankside, SE1 9DT (020 7401 9919) Tube: London Bridge tube shakespeares-globe.org
Until 1st October £5.00 - £35.00

Clybourne Park **** TNT

Bruce Norris’s sharp, succinct and lethally funny satire is full of surprises – from cartoonish beginnings with a white middleclass Chicago housewife packing up their home as her husband sits dejected in his pyjamas, to a precise half century time leap to 2009 when the location is the same but the neighbourhood is now predominantly and proudly black.

Dominic Cooke’s production elicits pitch-perfect performances from the eight-strong cast and ensures that every nuance of prejudice, sadness and downright disgraceful behaviour hits home.

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS (020 7565 5000) Tube: Sloane Square tube
www.royalcourttheatre.com Until 2nd October £10-£25

Earthquakes in London This is London

Hamlet famously opined that ‘The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king’. Mike Bartlett's new climate change play, though doubtless sincere, is chiefly memorable, not for its warning content, but for its eye-catching design and direction.
For this co-production with Headlong, Miriam Buether has transformed the National Theatre's smallest space into a bar-like catwalk, a scorching orange-red snake book-ended by a pair of small raised stages which house the more sedate scenes and flanked by video projections of London.
The audience stands in the playing area or sits either perched on swivel stools or in the gallery as the actors suddenly emerge from the crowd. Theatre doesn't come much more in-yer face than this.
Bartlett focuses on three sisters and their estranged father (a cold Bill Paterson), now a harbinger of doom, but in his younger years, back in 1968, a climatologist who sacrificed scientific integrity for monetary gain. Now, in various ways, his daughters are paying the price. The oldest (Lia Williams' serious Sarah) is LibDem minister for the environment, trying to reduce air traffic in a new coalition government as her marriage crumbles; Anna Madeley's heavily pregnant Freya wanders distraught across London, the music from her i-pod providing the soundtrack to her life as she frets about bringing a baby into a world on the verge of catastrophe; and Jessica Raine's out-of-control Jasmine is an unhappy, uninhibited student grabbing at each moment in case there's no future.
Director Rupert Goold maximises the impact of Bartlett's uncharacteristically epic play (his previous work at the Royal Court - My Child , Contractions and the award-winning Cock – has been on a much more intimate and claustrophobic scale) merging each scene swiftly into the next and dazzling with visual surprises.
There are excellent performances all round (including Geoffrey Streatfeild as Freya's concerned husband and Tom Goodman-Hill as Sarah's disintegrating spouse) and although Bartlett is less
than convincing by the time he eventually reaches 2525, this is still one of the theatrical highlights of the summer.

Cottesloe, National Theatre until 22 September.

Tiny Kushner TNT

Tony Kushner made his name in the early 1990’s with the audacious AIDS era epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. It was long, unforgettable - with its flights of fancy and sense of outrage – and garnered the playwright a batch of well-deserved awards.

This latest offering consists of five self-contained one-act plays, performed with verve (perhaps a bit too much) by the all-American cast from the Guthrie Theater under the direction of Tony Taccone.

Kushner’s political conscience is still very much in evidence, but he’s also in playful mode in these imagined scenarios.

In Flip Flop Fly!, the deposed Queen of Albania and a perpetually smiling former beauty queen turned entertainer, both dead, meet on the moon and end up dancing in unison.

Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or “Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein” or Ambivalence (the title is almost a play in itself – Kushner is not known for his brevity) and Dr Arnold A Hutschnecker in Paradise both feature psychotherapists. Hutschnecker, a specialist in psychosomatic illnesses, was Richard Nixon’s shrink and J.C. Cutler contorts himself into a frenzy of twitches as, in a neat bit of countertransference, he develops the former US president’s physical ticks.

East Code Ode to Howard Jarvis: a little teleplay in tiny monologues is a clever idea but it goes on far too long in its celebration of an absurd tax avoidance scam which flustered the revenue with claims from “non resident, non-immigrant aliens”. Jim Lichtscheidl delivers a single-handed tour de force, but we get the point way before the welcome interval.

Most effective of all, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall be Unhappy sees former First Lady Laura Bush reading Dostoyevsky to the invisible pyjama-clad ghosts of innocent Iraqi children as her conscience starts to trouble her more and more. It’s touching and thought-provoking, but illustrates, yet again, that Kushner never knows when enough is enough.

Tricycle, Kilburn High Road, NW6 7JR (020 7328 1000) Kilburn Tube tricycle.co.uk
Until 25th September (£10 - £20)

Shirley Valentine & Educating Rita **** TNT

Willy Russell’s thematically linked plays from the 80s feature two trapped Liverpudlian women at different stages of their lives. Both realise time is passing them by and that, if they don’t grab the moment, opportunities will be lost.

Meera Syal’s middle-aged housewife Shirley, talking to the wall as she prepares her stick-in-the-mud husband’s egg and chips supper, flies off to Greece where she blossoms in the liberating (if temporary) embrace of a charming local lothario.

Spirited twenty-something hairdresser Rita (Laura Dos Santos) broadens her horizons tackling an Open University literature course under the boozy tutelage of failed poet Frank (Tim Pigott-Smith). All three performances are first-rate and Russell writes with enduring warmth and wit.

Trafalgar Studios 1, SW1A 2DY Tube: Charing Cross (0844 871 7632) Until October 30 From £15

How To Be An Other Woman TNT

Natalie Abrahami’s adaptation of American writer and academic Lorrie Moore’s 1985 cautionary tale proves playful and attractive even if it fails to yield any fresh insight into a situation that will be uncomfortably familiar to far too many.

Four actresses (in identical black skirts and white blouses) share all the roles including that of Charlene, a New York secretary who buys an expensive beige raincoat from a swanky store and, after “four movies, three concerts and two-and-a-half museums” is totally seduced by the stranger with a confident swagger who stopped to ask her for a light.

A simple set of racks, hangers, coats and shoes is effectively transformed from boutique to street and to the bedroom where Charlene first sees the photo of the other other woman who is already firmly established in this rotter’s life. Following the inevitable trajectory of so many affairs, Abrahami’s fluid, physical production is all over in less than an hour - a swift, elegant portrayal of the pursuit of a doomed dream enhanced by carefully chosen music, deftly choreographed movement and an understanding of what it is like to be the one who isn’t in control.

Gate, Pembridge Road W11 3HQ (020 7229 0706) Tube: Notting Hill Gate
gatetheatre.co.uk Until 2nd October £11-£16

The Secret Of Sherlock Holmes ** TNT

Rushed in to fill the gap left by the early departure of The Fantasticks, Robin Herford’s revival of Jeremy Paul’s two-hander starts off promisingly but swiftly runs out of steam in a whistle-stop account of the relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduringly famous creations – ultra observant Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson.

Told through Watson’s eyes, it dashes through first meetings, shared bachelor lodgings at 221B Baker Street (atmospherically evoked by designer Simon Higlett), the obsessive detective’s destructive habits (injecting cocaine) and foibles (banning Watson from his personal chair), then marriage for the amiable doctor - all leading up to Holmes, in pursuit of arch enemy Moriarty, crashing to his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls. But it’s downhill after that, with Paul’s attempts at digging into Holmes’ psyche proving neither particularly interesting nor convincing.

Robert Daws’ tubby Watson is a likeable chap, loyal, devoted, sensible and built for matrimony. Peter Egan (despite a strong stage presence) fares less well as the melancholy supersleuth, often allowing a hammy, out-dated delivery to take over his character.

At its best, this 1988 play reveals (though only in passing) the deductive skills which made the fictional Holmes such a fascinating character – but there is far too little of the man in detective mode, and by the time the somewhat tenuous “secret” of the title is revealed, this short duet had already started to feel far too long.

Duchess, Catherine Street, WC2B 5LA (0844 412 4659) Until 11th September £20 - £40

In The Blood TNT

Originally scheduled for just half a dozen performances, the run of Suzan-Lori Parks’ urban drama of abuse and deprivation, has been expanded to fill the gap left by the unfortunate postponement, through illness, of The Drawer Boy.

Inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 “The Scarlet Letter", this European premiere, by the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, relocates Hester Prynne (the adulterous heroine of his novel) from 17th century Boston to a street beneath a bridge in present day New York. Here, renamed Hester La Negrita, she’s a homeless black woman struggling to bring up five children by five different absent fathers, none of whom is prepared to acknowledge his paternity nor contribute to their welfare.

Illiterate, impoverished and with her offspring her only “treasures” she’s despised by society and exploited by the very agencies which are meant to help her. The doctor who treats her occasionally accepts payment in kind and recommends that, like an animal, she should be “spayed”. The smug, superior social worker is equally culpable, and the minister (an ex-alkie who used to sleep rough) now collects money to build a new church but denies responsibility for the son, her youngest, which he secretly fathered.

Parks’ language is powerful, poetic, direct, and she paints a disturbing picture of the underbelly of America, where charity comes at a cost and naïve hopes are snuffed out again and again. Natasha Bain’s Hester convinces both in her misguided optimism and her ultimate despair, whilst the rest of the cast (doubling as her children and the adults who have affected her life) swap seamlessly between roles in Daniel Burgess’s vivid but ultimately bleak production.

Finborough, Finborough Road, SW10 9ED (0844 847 1652) Tube: Earl’s Court finboroughtheatre.co.uk
Until 4th September £11 - £15

Into The Woods **** TNT

There are moments of pure magic in this inspired revival of Stephen Sondheim’s gloriously witty musical twist on the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm.

The leafy theatre provides the perfect backdrop for the adventures of the Baker and his barren Wife who go in search of the ingredients needed to lift the curse of Hannah Waddingham’s vindictive Witch. Their story (here rewardingly conceived as a runaway schoolboy’s re-enactment) intertwines with those of Beverly Rudd’s plump Little Red Riding Hood and a sexually predatory Wolf, Rapunzel, Cinderella and their respective Princes (“raised to be charming, not sincere”) and Jack and his beanstalk.

Things get much darker in the second half with its salutary reminder that getting what you wish for doesn’t guarantee happiness – but this inventive production proves an unmissable summer treat.

Open Air Theatre Inner Circle, Regents Park, NW1 4NR (0844 826 4242) Tube: Baker Street £20-£42.50
Until 11th September