Clementine Scott

The premise of What I’d Be is disarmingly simple: two estranged sisters sit on a bench in a small town, and talk. In one unflinchingly cathartic hour of theatre, they’ve ricocheted from outright resentment to reconciliation.

If anyone still thought Terence Rattigan a staid drawing room playwright, his 1963 play Man and Boy ought to put an end to that. Anthony Lau’s version doesn’t always elevate the source material to its full potential, but it presents a case for giving the text another look.

The opening tableau of Miles sticks in the mind: a man writhes atop a piano, as though something long-dormant within him is being woken up. Similar sequence recur throughout the show, conveying a man both at one with his music and at war with it.

Despite its title, Elton John is far from the central focus of Henry Naylor’s blisteringly paced one-man show, Monstering the Rocketman. Instead, the target of Naylor’s pen is British journalism, and specifically the thriving 1980s tabloid press.

“Domestic matters are more your domain than mine,” a husband says to his wife in the middle of her working day, echoing a thousand gaslighting, supposedly liberal men who’ve come before and since. There are audible gasps from the audience.

The Tempest is perhaps the most metatheatrical of Shakespeare's plays: the plot takes place in real time, and Prospero asks the audience to “free” him with their applause. So who better to direct than the king of theatrical deconstruction himself, Tim Crouch?

MAGA womanhood is a curious paradox, observed with interest across the pond after a third of women under 30 voted for Trump in 2024. How can so many women not only tolerate but actively promote policies that seek to harm them, and how can the general public recognise their grift for what it is?

Haven’t we all wanted to have a chat with our inner child at some point? And what if the inner child is not quite as faultless and innocent as we may think?

The stage is immediately set for a confrontation. We the audience are looking down the length of a Victorian dining table, lit from beneath, poised perfectly for domestic rows to erupt before the meal is even served.

Opera as a whole may be too reliant on museum pieces, on endless identikit revivals designed to secure bums on seats. But in the case of Richard Eyre’s 1994 La traviata, the old adage might be true: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Lyle Kessler’s Orphans was first performed in 1983, but you wouldn’t know that from this production. The tiny stage feels overcome by Sarah Beaton’s design, retro but not too retro, a space immune to the passing decades.

Twenty or so dancers parade before an oversized Art Deco clock, to the familiar strains of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ from a brass band offstage. In other words, the stage is set for a reassuringly old-fashioned taste of the Golden Age of movie musicals.

Indian Ink is not among Tom Stoppard’s greatest plays. The tale of a literary darling moving to 1930s India is awkwardly structured and hamfisted in its messages about Indian identity. Yet this revival breathes new life into the lesser-known work.

An ominous small town tension, the lingering fear that something rotten lies beneath the wholesome community spirit, pervades KENREX, which transfers to London after an acclaimed Sheffield Theatres run.

We’re in a room straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest, two couples sipping Scotch on mid-century chaise longues. Like most plays set entirely in someone’s living room, though, fault lines amidst the middle-class domestic bliss soon emerge.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula can actually be quite funny. There’s the cowboy who’s inexplicably present in 19th-century Yorkshire, and how Jonathan Harker sees nothing wrong with doing routine real estate transactions at a remote Transylvanian castle. Unfortunately, Dracapella has channelled precisely none of this.

In an age of transphobic fearmongering about any drag queen daring to perform in front of children, acknowledging the fact that British family entertainment has always been queer feels more important than ever. He’s Behind You takes this one step further, extending the concept of queer adult panto to its full, glorious potential.