Shrek the Musical

Nigel Lindsay’s portly, green-faced ogre and Amanda Holden’s pretty as a picture Princess Fiona are amiable enough as they bond over a bout of flatulence in this likeable musical stage adaptation of the DreamWorks animation film.
The colourful fairy tale characters and tap-dancing rats are fun, too, though Richard Blackwood’s Donkey misses a trick.
But the real highlights of this entertaining, family-friendly show are the lovesick dragon which flies over the audience with fluttering eye-lashes and a knock-em-dead voice (courtesy of Landi Oshinowo) and Nigel Harman’s vertically challenged Lord Farquaad. Underhand, desperate to wed, and barely half the height of his intended, he gives what must be one of the best comic performances of the year, scuttling furiously across the stage on his knees with fake yellow puppet legs flapping.

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Catherine Street, WC2B 5JF (0844 871 7615) Tube: Charing Cross/Covent Garden
ambassadortickets.com Until October 21 (£20.00- £65.00)

For Once

Slipping into the smaller downstairs space for a regrettably short run, visiting company Pentabus has come up with a poignant little gem in the immaculately crafted shape of Tim Price’s 80 minute three-hander.
Something serious has happened to disturb the equilibrium in the household of forty something Gordon, his schoolteacher wife April and their 17 year old son Sid. Price introduces us to his characters with a humorous touch which makes them instantly likeable. And, for them, personally, it could have been so much worse – Sid has lost an eye in a car accident, but his three closest friends lost their lives.
Addressed directly to the audience, their overlapping monologues reveal their current thoughts as well as recalling the events which preceded the crash. It soon becomes clear that, despite surface appearances, fracture lines were already forming before the tragic incident pushed them into a temporary unity.
Geraldine Alexander is extraordinary as April, sipping wine from a large glass as she goes about the mundane business of ironing her husband’s shirts, her face a myriad of expressions, whilst Patrick Driver is no less convincing as Gordon, a fundamentally decent man who finds himself irresistibly pulled elsewhere. And, completing the impressive trio (all trapped in different ways by the limitations of their small rural town) is Jonathan Smith’s Sid, as protective of his mother as she is of him, and trying to make sense of what has happened to him, his family and to the pointlessly bereaved parents of three teenage lads.

Michael Frayn Space at Hampstead, Eton Avenue, NW3 3EU (020 7722 9301) Tube: Swiss Cottage hampsteadtheatre.com Until July 30 (£12)

In the Penal Colony

Palestinian theatre company ShiberHur returns to the Young Vic with an intense version (lasting just over an hour) of Kafka’s disconcerting short story, written in 1914 but only published, in revised form, 5 years later. It’s a piece which creates all sorts of staging difficulties, focussing as it does on an elaborate execution machine which, over a period of hours and to the accompaniment of sepulchral music, inscribes the condemned man’s offense on his naked body. Designer Ashraf Hanna flanks his (not always convincing) three tier device with sunflowers on one side and chairs stacked high on the other - under the auspices of the previous unseen commander of this unspecified military zone, the execution of a prisoner used to draw crowds of spectators, there to observe the consequences of misdemeanour.

Now, under a new regime, only the Executioner wants to maintain this system. As he prepares to carry out the sentence that he himself has imposed on Taher Najib’s shackled, emaciated Prisoner, a Visitor arrives to watch and assess.

Performed in Arabic, with English surtitles, Amir Nizar Zuabi’s production raises questions about justice, torture and the situation in Palestine itself. And the acting is faultless, with Amer Hlehel fanatically proud of the elaborate instrument of torture he is about to use on a man who did nothing more serious than fall asleep on duty, and Makram Khoury calm but troubled as the Visitor who finds himself drawn into a barbaric procedure.

Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ (0207 922 2922) Tube: Southwark/Waterloo youngvic.org Until July 23 (£10)

Betrayal

****

Harold Pinter’s 1978 account of a faded adulterous affair, told more or less backwards, is both touching and intimate in Ian Rickson’s sensitive production.

At its heart is Kristin Scott Thomas, growing younger gracefully as Emma, gallery-running wife of publisher Robert (Ben Miles, conveying the pent-up potential for violence beneath a cultured exterior) and, for seven years, mistress of literary agent Jerry, her husband’s oldest – and married – friend.

Douglas Henshall’s Jerry struggles to convey the subtleties of his character, but this detracts only marginally from an emotionally acute 90 minutes (based on Pinter’s own adulterous liaison) which travels back through layers of deception – from stilted small talk to the first portentous kiss nine years earlier.

Comedy, Panton Street, SW1Y 4DN (0844 871 7622) Tube: Piccadilly Circus betrayaltheplay.com Until August 20 (£20 - £49.50)

Being Shakespeare

***

Simon Callow has a personality big enough to fill any stage. He’s been acting for almost four decades, directed plays and a movie, written several books and already performed one man shows about Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens.

But this often most flamboyant of actors is in comparatively subdued, though still enthusiastic, form as he tackles William Shakespeare, following him from cradle to grave in Shakespearian scholar Jonathan Bate’s well-structured combination of biographical detail, speculation and extracts from the Bard’s works.

Keeping to the timeline of the famous Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It, Callow entertains us with snippets of information about Shakespeare’s parents (his father was a glovemaker), his childhood, early marriage, career and death, interspersed with illustrative examples from his texts.

Slipping in and out of character, Callow gives us not only a schoolboy William but also an ageing Falstaff, not only Romeo but Juliet too. Callow is a fine actor and a well-informed guide with obvious fondness for his subject, and although it can’t - and doesn’t - penetrate too deeply into the psyche of the famous playwright himself, this simply staged evening has something to offer both the Shakespeare aficionado and the tentative novice.

Trafalgar Studios 1, Whitehall, SW1A 2DY (0844 871 7632) Tube: Charing Cross ambassadortickets.com/trafalgarstudios beingshakespeare.com Until 23rd July (£20- £45)

Danger: Memory!

****

Running at well under an hour each, these two short one act plays from the pen of master playwright Arthur Miller are immaculately performed and infused with poignancy.

In the first - “I Can’t Remember Anything” - real-life husband and wife David Burke and Anna-Calder Marshall are retired, arthritic engineer Leo (his brain struggling to complete the calculations he used to find so simple) and sad, whisky-downing, widowed Leonora, whose failing memory is even more wayward.

They’re the last survivors of what was once an extensive group of partying, politically principled New England friends. Now even their shared memories are at variance, their tempers short and their bodies weak. Yet when they dance together, briefly, one glimpses momentarily the essence of their former vibrant selves.

“Clara” focuses on the immediate aftermath of the murder of a young woman as a time-conscious detective (Roger Sloman) tries to prise details of her ex-offender boyfriend from her traumatised father. The bereaved parent (a compelling Rolf Saxon) either cannot or will not divulge his identity to the increasingly impatient policeman, fearful, at some deep level, that by doing so he will compromise his own liberal principles.

Written in 1987 when Miller was already in his 70’s, both plays demonstrate all the sensitivity of an older man’s experience of the tricks memory plays on us, and Ed Viney’s absorbing production proves another feather in the cap of this intimate theatre

Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1Y 6ST (020 7287 2875) Tube: Piccadilly Circus jermynstreettheatre.co.uk Until 23rd July £18

Emperor and Galilean

***

Ibsen thought this his most important play, but with a potential running time of eight hours, you’re unlikely to get the chance to see it again.

So all credit to the National for putting on Jonathan Kent’s mixed dress production (a British premiere) of this 1873 epic, cut to three and a half hours in Ben Power’s lucid version.

The magnificent staging makes full use of the revolve and 50-strong cast. Andrew Scott is magnetic as the fanatical Julian (AD331 - 363) who was raised a Christian but, encouraged by Ian McDiarmid’s mystic Maximus, embraced pagan beliefs well before his brief, tyrannical reign as Emperor of Rome.

However it’s still a long haul as Julian searches for truth from Constantinople to Gaul to the Persian desert – and one with only limited appeal.

Olivier at the National, South Bank, SE1 9PX (020 7452 3000) Tube: Waterloo nationaltheatre.org.uk In rep till 10th August (£12 - £30 as part of the Travelex season)

The Beggar's Opera

***

Even the damp and intermittent drizzle of a dull summer evening couldn’t dampen the ardour of philandering highwayman Macheath in Lucy Bailey’s rambunctious revival of John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera.

Bare chested and swearing devotion to Polly Peachum, his secretly wedded new wife, he’s next seen cavorting with a bevy of brazen hussies, then later facing up to the excellent Beverly Rudd’s furious Lucy Lockit whom he’s already impregnated.

But it’s not all fun and frolics in this lively satire of corruption punctuated with extended snatches of contemporary ballads (played by the City Waites on a host of instruments ranging from commonplace guitar and harp to obscure curtal and cittern). A gibbet, nooses swinging, dominates William Dudley’s set of upturned tumbrels, and the threat of hanging hovers darkly over the proceedings. For Polly’s parents, in cahoots with Lucy’s gaoler dad, have a profitable business going – turning in criminals for big rewards – and their daughter’s recent spouse is high on their list.

It takes a while for the rather threadbare plot to take off, and there’s sometimes a bit too much fussy business which (on press night) hadn’t yet settled, but a hair-pulling catfight between rivals Lucy and Polly, the athletic dance sequences (movement courtesy of Punchdrunk’s Maxine Doyle) and the sheer energy of the crowd scenes carries this Hogarthian portrayal of London lowlife played out in the shadow of the gallows.

Open Air Theatre Inner Circle, Regents Park, NW1 4NR (0844 826 4242) Tube: Baker Street openairtheatre.org (£19 – £39, premium seats £46) Until 23rd July

Dream Story

****

Director Anna Ledwich has no need of the resources which Stanley Kubrick had at his disposal when he transferred Austrian Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story to celluloid and renamed it Eyes Wide Shut. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the content, his disconcerting extravaganza of erotic fantasy and humiliation signalled the end of the relationship of its stars, Tom Cruise and his then wife Nicole Kidman.

With the help of designer Helen Goddard, Ledwich has created a darkly claustrophobic world of sexual misadventure where Luke Neal’s Fridolin, a troubled Viennese doctor, confronts the carnal desires he has kept firmly under wraps until his wife Albertine (Leah Muller) admits to a seemingly harmless fantasy and forces an equivalent confession from him.

Instead of the psychoanalytic theory one would expect from his contemporary, Freud, Schnitzler graphically charts Fridolin’s subsequent nightmarish journey (in which it is never clear how much is real, how much imagined) which threatens the apparent stability of his marriage.

The dreamlike quality is accentuated by the doubling of roles, the anonymous sadism of a masked ball held in the early hours, and the ambiguous, fluctuating nature of the characters whom he encounters on his odyssey – the women (a bereaved daughter, a whore and a prostituted young woman) played by Rebecca Scroggs and the men by a sinister Jon Foster.

With its sliding marital bed and shadowy exits and entrances, this foray into the private, sordid mindscape of a respectable man – and his growing fear of the hold it has on him - proves both uncomfortable and compelling.

Gate, Pembridge Road W11 3HQ (020 7229 0706) Tube: Notting Hill Gate gatetheatre.co.uk Until 16th July
£20

The Village Bike

****

From Victorian male fantasy figure on the small screen to 21st century object of lust on stage, Romola Garai seems to be capturing the market in young women moulding themselves into the clandestine extra-marital image their adulterous men desire.

In Penelope Skinner’s acute, explicit new drama she plays frustrated thirty-something teacher, Becky, whose husband (now that she’s in the early, as yet unnoticeable, stage of pregnancy) would rather discuss the organic meat for tomorrow’s lasagne than have sex or watch porn DVDs with his increasingly desperate wife.

With time on her hands during the summer vacation, it’s no wonder she’s susceptible to the dubious charms of Dominic Rowan’s Oliver when he turns up on her doorstep, fresh from amateur dramatics rehearsals in his dashing highwayman’s outfit, to deliver the second hand bike he’s selling.

It’s meant to be a no-strings affair, but (as Skinner shows in an often very funny script overflowing with innuendo) sexually liberated or not, the female body can’t always function independently of the heart.

Alexandra Gilbreath contributes a fussing neighbour whose effusiveness hides a deep well of unhappiness, and Phil Cornwell is used and bemused as the widowed plumber who comes to fix the juddering “sweaty” pipes. But the indelible image of Joe Hill-Gibbins immensely entertaining production is of Garai’s Becky, hair flying freely, as she pedals blissfully along the country lanes into the thrusting embrace of her lover – before coming crashing miserably down to earth and reality with her growing bump.

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS Tube: Sloane Square (020 7565 5000) royalcourttheatre.com Until 30th July (£10-£20)

Butley

***

One can only hope that the late Simon Gray’s students fared better than the fictional ones assigned to tutorials with his alter ego, Ben Butley, in this caustic 40 year old comedy.

Sharp of tongue, slovenly of dress, Butley’s life is falling apart in a lazy miasma of whisky, cigarettes and fracturing relationships sabotaged by his distorted notion of having “fun”. In odd socks purloined from his gay protégé and housemate (Martin Hutson), The Wire’s Dominic West’s rumpled, probably bi-sexual academic disparages his colleagues, his estranged wife, homosexuals, the undergraduates he despises.

You wouldn’t want to share your life with him, and the play shows its age. But for a couple of hours or so, the deliberately offensive bluster of this lonely, self-destructive man makes for watchable, if wordy, entertainment.

Duchess, Catherine Street, WC2B 5LA (0844 412 4659)Tube: Covent Garden/ Charing Cross butleyLondon.com Until August 27 (£26 -£49.50)

Derren Brown: Svengali

****

Surely even Derren Brown can’t guarantee precisely where a Frisbee flung up to the grand circle or a balloon lobbed into the stalls is going to land?

So the mystery remains – how, in a theatre seating close on 1,500 people, could this master of manipulation and illusion possibly deduce which foolhardy young chap had admitted, on a folded scrap of paper, to... well, I daren’t really say as Brown makes things difficult for the critics too.

How to review a show when you’ve explicitly been asked not to divulge what you’ve witnessed? So suffice to say that the experience of one volunteer demonstrated the power of susceptible mind over matter, paintballing will never be the same again for another couple of randomly picked spectators, and a mechanical automaton (the Svengali of the title and, according to Brown, dating back to the 18th century and lovingly restored by him before it goes on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum) manifests creepily supernatural abilities.

Brown spends perhaps too much time building the atmosphere of each new display of his powers, but there’s no doubting that he’s the consummate showman – still slightly sinister despite the charismatic patter, he keeps the audience on tenterhooks as his skilful show dovetails in a complex, neatly tied-up finale. A great night out.

Shaftesbury Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, WC2H 8DP (020 7379 5399) Tube: Holborn/Tottenham Court Road shaftesburytheatre.com Until 16th July (£26- £51)

Lend Me A Tenor

***

Lend me A Tenor began life as a comedy by Ken Ludwig which premiered in the West End in 1986, in the very same theatre which now hosts this sprightly musical version with added contributions from Peter Sham and Brad Carroll.

A deft combination of song, farce and bonking in the bedroom, it’s old-fashioned but undemanding entertainment, with a knock out number in each act and enough laughter to keep it going in between.

Set in Cleveland Grand Opera House in 1934, the action revolves around world famous opera star Tito (flown in by manager Henry {Matthew Kelly} in a desperate attempt to boost finances) and unprepossessing prompter Max who’s getting nowhere with fiancée Maggie (Henry’s daughter) or his own ambitions to sing on stage.

When Tito’s exasperated wife Maria (Joanna Riding with a heavy accent and fine comic timing) walks out on him, it looks as though the show cannot go on - until Max takes off his glasses and gets into costume.

Director Ian Talbot keeps things moving swiftly in Tito and Maria’s lush, lilac multi-doored hotel suite, where (in the first half) Aussie Damian Humbley’s Max bonds with Michael Matus’s distraught Tito and discovers his voice and (in the second) Sophie-Louise Dann’s diva Diana whizzes through the repertoire, from Bizet to Puccini by way of Wagner, in a determined attempt to impress.

Add a quartet of twirling bellhops and housemaids, a trio of ex-wives and as many blacked-up Otellos and the evening passes enjoyably enough in a swirl of creditability-stretching, light-hearted nonsense.

Gielgud, Shaftesbury Avenue, W1D 6AR (0844 482 5130) Tube: Piccadilly Circus tenorthemusical.co.uk delfontmackintosh.co.uk Booking until November 19 (£10.00 - £62.50)