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)