The Kitchen

Based on his own experience, Arnold Wesker's 1959 work place play boasts a cast of 30, a clash of nationalities and a faltering romance as the Tivoli restaurant's staff slave away feeding the diners and lining the boss's pockets.

Tempers blaze, the temperature rises, and although pans sizzle and gas rings flare, Bijan Sheibani's busy, carefully choreographed production captures the repetitive drudgery without quite achieving the sweaty, frenetic frazzle the dialogue demands.

Olivier at The National, South Bank, SE1 9PX Tube: Waterloo nationaltheatre.org.uk Until Nov 9 (£12-£30)

Street Scene

There are just a few days left to catch the London return of the Opera Group/Young Vic’s revival of this powerful production which garnered an Evening Standard Best Musical Award in 2008.

A fruitful collaboration between German-Jewish immigrant Kurt Weill (music), Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Elmer Rice (book) and the black writer and social activist Langston Hughes (lyrics), this gritty 1947 American Opera is structured more like a Broadway musical than conventional opera, with spoken dialogue and sung lyrics given more or less equal weight.

With the temperature soaring and the gossips out in force, this slice of urban life boasts musical styles – arias, jazz, blues - as varied as the ethnicity of the occupants of the brownstone East Side tenement where it is set.

Unhappily married, middle-aged Anna Maurrant sets tongues wagging by seeking the affection from the milkman which her heavy-drinking stagehand husband will not supply. Her daughter, Rose, is pursued by her married boss (who wants to set her up in a place of her own) but is in love with bookish, Jewish Sam (excellent Paul Curievici with a voice I want to hear more of). A single-parent family lives under the constant threat of eviction, a jovial Italian music teacher (his German wife regretfully childless) buys ice-creams all round, and an expectant dad eagerly awaits the birth of his first baby.

The orchestra occupies street level of designer Dick Bird’s multistorey set, whilst good time girl Emma (Charlotte Page) and her latest conquest (John Moabi) kick up their drunken dancing heels on the walkway which crisscrosses the playing area.

Frustratingly, the lyrics aren’t always clear, but with a massive cast of 80 (including a chorus of locals and a batch of enthusiastically playful school kids) and its dramatic climax, this ambitious staging is well worth catching before it sets off on tour.

Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ (0207 922 2922) youngvic.org Tube: Southwark / Waterloo Until: 1st October then on tour until 15th October (£10 - £29.50)

The Absence of Women

In just 70 minutes Irish playwright Owen McCafferty sums up a lifetime’s regrets as two elderly, alcoholic labourers from Belfast are nudged into private reminiscence by thoughts of mortality and the route to East Finchley’s cemetery.

Exiles in London –and temporarily on the wagon – they each recall, in flashback, how things might have turned out had it not been for a single misjudged choice.

Peter Gowen and Ciaran McIntyre convince completely as this battered, bickering, blustering yet interdependent pair who owe a debt to Beckett but have a vulnerability all their own in Rachel O’Riordan’s poignant production.

Tricycle, Kilburn High Road, NW6 7JR (020 7328 1000) tricycle.co.uk Tube: Kilburn Until: 8th October (£12 - £22)

Decade

Marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Headlong’s director Rupert Gould integrates contributions from 19 writers in a site-specific commemoration, set in a recreation of the ill-fated Windows on the World and accessed via air-port style security.

Scott Ambler’s urgent choreography and the annual meetings of three widows, their black dresses mantled with ash, link the diverse narratives – some with a strong factual element, some fiction - relating to the legacy of the blue-sky morning when the twin towers crumbled.

A swapped day off and an eyewitness account, widespread suspicion of anyone Muslim and a brick through a shop window, a gift shop employee with a 20 per cent score rate with the emotional young women touring Ground Zero are just some of the vignettes (most of them successful) in an engrossing but respectful memorial.

Commodity Quay, St Katharine Docks, E1W 1AZ (020 7452 3000) Tube: Tower Hill (decadeheadlong.com) Until October 15 (£35)

The Wild Bride

After a rather disappointing foray into the West End with their adaptation of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, artistic director Emma Rice and her Cornwall based Kneehigh company are happily back on wickedly enchanting form with a characteristically quirky version of the Grimms’ fairytale The Handless Maiden.

A seemingly harmless pact has disastrous consequences for a young girl when her impoverished father promises the Devil that, in exchange for countless riches, he can take whatever he wants from his backyard– realising too late that that’s where his only valuable possession, his beloved daughter, happens to be at the time.

Repelled by her purity, Stuart McLoughlin’s lanky Devil (who towers over his petrified intended) forces her reluctant father to cover her in dirt, then to chop off her hands. But he still can’t overcome the virtue of her soul, and returns again and again to try and claim his prize.

Rice has drawn talent from the world of dance (Etta Murfitt of Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures choreographs now with a gentle synchronicity, then with a wild abandon) and circus (Audrey Brisson, who plays the youngest and most bewildered of three versions of the Bride, has worked with Cirque du Soleil as both performer and vocalist) and the result is beguiling and gruesome, desperately sad and upliftingly joyful.

The cast sings, dances and plays Stu Barker’s bluesy music on a host of musical instruments, whilst Stuart Goodwin is on fine comic form as both the distraught dad and a kilt-clad Scottish prince who rescues the wild and handless girl when she steals pears (lightbulbs!) from his orchard. And a special mention, too, for Patrycja Kujawska who lost her feet in Kneehigh’s recently revived The Red Shoes and returns to the company to lose her hands, but (until the Devil intervenes once again) still finds true love.

Lyric Hammersmith, King Street, W6 0QL (0871 221 1726) lyric.co.uk Tube: Hammersmith Until: September 24 (£12.50- £30)

The Tempest

Ralph Fiennes makes a commandingly resonant and troubled Prospero at the heart of Trevor Nunn’s slowly unfolding, traditional production of Shakespeare’s late play.

Paul Pyant’s atmospheric lighting adds an otherworldly glow to the exiled Duke’s island kingdom where an androgynous, airborne Ariel executes his master’s magic and ethereal music fills the air as Miranda and her schoolboyish Ferdinand fall in love, Nicholas Lyndhurst’s lanky Trinculo gets walloped by Clive Wood’s equally inebriated Stephano, past wrongs are pardoned and even Giles Terera’s raging Caliban (here a black slave) is reconciled.

Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, SW1Y 4HT (0845 481 1870) Tube: Piccadilly Circus (trh.co.uk) Until October 29 (£11.00-£60.00)

Anna Christie

The dialogue is often overblown, and the accents are as strong as the central performances, but Rob Ashford's powerful production succeeds in making the melodramatic ring almost true in this rarely revived 1921 Pulitzer prize-winner by Eugene O'Neill.
Set in a dingy waterfront saloon and a sea-going coal barge (convincingly realised in Paul Wills' planked design which tilts and rises steeply to the accompaniment of Adam Cork's evocative shanty soundscape) it features, like several of O'Neill's works, a ‘fallen’ woman, a virile, rough-mannered man and a troubled history. It's been 15 years since Swedish seafarer Chris Christopherson last saw his daughter. Benign but wrong-thinking, he convinced himself that the then 5 year old Anna would be safer staying with her farming Minnesota cousins, blaming that old devil sea (rather than himself) for his failure even to visit.
And Anna, too, has maintained her own fiction – her letters failing to mention that she long ago exchanged the countryside for the whorehouse.
Tough, but with an underlying vulnerability, Ruth Wilson's damaged Anna feels almost healed by the sea when she finally joins her father on his barge, but the tension between David Hayman's weather-beaten Christopherson and shipwrecked Irish stoker Mat Burke forces her to reveal a past which is likely to sabotage the unexpected chance of redemption she so longs for.
All beard and rippling muscle, Jude Law's Burke is compelling from the moment he hauls himself aboard. Drenched, glistening, fearless, he's first enthralled by the unexpected blonde vision, then driven to explosive anger by Anna's revelations. One can understand his disillusioned rage – and her father's refusal to believe that his little girl has strayed from the straight and narrow – but, as O'Neill makes abundantly clear, their own behaviour has been far from virtuous.
Donmar (This is London)

The Faith Machine

Though admirable in several respects, award-winning Alexi Kaye Campbell’s intelligent and witty new play addresses too many heartfelt topics to completely satisfy.

American adman Tom (Kyle Soller – definitely a name to watch) chooses career over conscience and reaps the financial rewards, whilst his idealistic English lover (Hayley Atwell) follows in the footsteps of her principled father (excellent Ian McDiarmid) an Anglican bishop whose championing of gay rights costs him dear before his sardonic ripostes are cruelly curtailed by a series of strokes.

It’s an ambitious, well-acted and thoughtful production – but a little more discipline and a little less contrivance would strengthen this exploration of the relationship between faith and capitalism.

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS (020 7565 5000) Tube: Sloane Square royalcourttheatre.com Until October 1 (£10-£28)

truth and reconciliation

Despite the large cast of over 20, a sense of emptiness and loss pervades debbie tucker green’s short, powerful and hauntingly poignant new play which she also directs. Seated on hard wooden chairs (some inscribed, tombstone like, with the names of casualties) the audience surrounds the gravel-strewn oval playing space to hear fragmented testimony and the anguish behind it.

Inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in South Africa at the end of Apartheid, it casts its net further afield – embracing Rwanda in 2005, Northern Ireland in 1999, Bosnia in 1996 and Zimbabwe in 2007 as, accompanied by friends and family, the victims come to confront their former aggressors.

A South African woman has spent 22 years wondering what happened to her teenage daughter. No matter how painful, a Tutsi widow desperately needs to know details about her husband’s death at the hands of a Hutu killer. A pair of Serbian ex-soldiers comes face to face with the Bosnian woman one of them impregnated. An antagonistic Northern Irish mother shows no regret for the actions of her son.

Committed performances and sparse, fragmentary writing highlight the emotional complexity inherent in these attempts at restorative justice, leaving questions and stories hanging in the air, and, in the space of 60 minutes, add to the sense of hurt and damage which time has not yet healed.

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS (020 7565 5000) Tube: Sloane Square royalcourttheatre.com Until September 24 (£20, Mondays £10)

Bussey Building, 133 Rye Lane, SE15 4ST (020 7565 5000) Rail: Peckham Rye thebusseybuilding.com September 29 - October 15 (Pay what you like on the door or £10 in advance)

Wittenberg

With more than a nod to Tom Stoppard, American David Davalos’s knowingly entertaining comedy takes us back to Germany in 1517 where, as an already indecisive student, Hamlet (quoting freely from Shakespeare’s text) comes under the conflicting influences of Sean Campion’s charismatic, hedonistic Dr. Faustus, lecturer in philosophy, and his unlikely friend, academic colleague and ideological sparring partner, the ascetic (and constipated) theologian Martin Luther (Andrew Frame).

Davalos’s wittily playful rearrangement of fact, fiction, literature and history is bloated with allusions and references, but its sheer inventiveness – and Christopher Haydon’s lively direction – keep the cleverness buoyantly afloat.

Gate Theatre, Pembridge Road W11 3HQ (020 7229 0706) Tube: Notting Hill Gate gatetheatre.co.uk Until October 1 (£20, matinees £10)

A Dish of Tea With Dr Johnson

I’d have loved to have seen this likeable Out of Joint production when it was staged earlier this year in the garret of Johnson’s House, the very place where this literary colossus spent 9 years compiling his famous dictionary.

Since then, it’s been on tour and to Edinburgh before settling in for the current short season at the small (though not as cosy) Arts theatre.

There have been more changes since that opening night as, unfortunately, Russell Barr ( who not only co-wrote the script with director Max Stafford-Clark and fellow performer Ian Redford, but also took on the parts of his friend and biographer James Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George III and a host of others) has had to withdraw due to illness, taking with him the (sadly unreplaced) Katie, his rescued Jack Russell who suffered the canine indignity of playing Johnson’s beloved oyster-eating cat, Hodge.

Never mind, there’s still much to enjoy in the current staging (seen at the final preview) in which Luke Griffin bravely steps into Barr’s shoes, donning a wig and period costume - and a pinny, too – and, at short notice, copes admirably with the variety of characters who featured in Johnson’s life.

Adapted from Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson” and “The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides”, this 80 minute show portrays a man of great intelligence and wit, prone to fits of “melancholy,” kindly, yet with a quick temper.

Redford relishes the role, delivering the lexicographer’s aphorisms in a Staffordshire accent.

At some performances, Trudie Styler, dolled up to the nines in her 18th century dress, makes a late appearance as his last unrequited love, but the addition of a third actor feels somewhat superfluous as Griffin takes on all the other female roles - including Johnson’s blind housekeeper, an intelligent but increasingly tetchy Welshwoman who served as both intellectual companion and tea-maker for this distinguished man of letters.

Arts Theatre, Great Newport Street, WC2H 7JB (020 7907 7092) Tube: Leicester Square artstheatrewestend.com Until September 24 (£20-£37.50)

South Pacific

Though unquestionably enjoyable, Bartlett Sher’s substantially recast hit Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 musical of miscegenation and war time manoeuvres seems to have lost a touch of magic on its transatlantic journey.

There’s seriousness as well as larking about, and praise to Samantha Womack’s engaging Nurse Nellie Forbush, defying a broken toe to “Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.”

But it’s the gorgeous melodies – some eminently hummable (like “Happy Talk” delivered with calculating persuasiveness by Loretta Ables Sayre’s Tonkinese Bloody Mary), others (including “Younger than Springtime”) lush and heartfelt – which, along with the thrilling baritone of Paulo Szot as an exiled French planter with two mixed race children, really make this show.

Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS (020 7638 8891) Tube: Barbican barbican.org.uk Untill October 1 (£15.00 - £85.00)

Bernarda Alba

Garcia Lorca’s 1936 classic gets a musical makeover from Michael John LaChiusa whose off-Broadway version manages to both substantially cut the running time of the original and adds songs to this hothouse drama.

Confined within the walls of their all-female household (a rampant stallion, virile farm labourers and a faithless lover are spoken of but never seen) the five, black-clad daughters of twice-widowed Bernarda Alba ooze frustration and repressed sexual desire.

Beverley Klein plays the tyrannical matriarch with a bitter force, whilst folk tunes and the stamp and swirl of flamenco intensify the brooding sensation of a tragedy waiting to happen.

Union Theatre, Union Street, SE1 0LX (020 7261 9876) Tube: Southwark uniontheatre.biz Until September 17 (£16)

Lullabies of Broadmoor - A Broadmoor Quartet

These four hour-long plays set in England’s first criminal lunatic asylum have taken playwright Steven Hennessy almost a decade to compile. With a background working in mental health, dipping into Broadmoor’s historic archive must have proved as irresistible to him as were the strychnine-laced chocolate creams which resulted in the death of a 4 year old boy in 1871.

Christiana Edmunds, the young Brighton woman responsible, is the focus of Venus at Broadmoor (the first of the quartet, though the most recently written) and whilst never condoning her crime, Hennessy sets out the background to her ultimately fatal poisoning spree – an affair with a married doctor – with compassion.

The Demon Box constructs an imaginary meeting between patricidal painter Richard Dadd and former American Civil War surgeon William Chester Minor, whilst The Murder Club brings together the two least sympathetic characters – a jealous actor who stabbed his more successful former benefactor and a conman who killed a prostitute in this very road.

Finally and most intriguingly, Wilderness (the original play, dating from 2002) returns to the case of Chester Minor – the childhood and wartime experiences which shaped him, his repentant relationship with his victim’s widow and, unexpectedly, his substantial contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary during his years spent incarcerated in the comparative comfort of the “Gentleman’s Wing” of the hospital.

Four actors do a sterling job tackling all the roles, with Violet Ryder particularly convincing. And although the writing sometimes tends to the overblown, Hennessy makes it clear that the criminally insane can, on occasion, be victims as well as perpetrators.

Finborough, Finborough Road, SW10 9ED (0844 847 1652) Tube: Earl’s Court ticketweb.co.uk Until October 1 (£10 - £14 for each pair of plays)