Alexander Cohen

Each performance is finely tuned. Phillips maintains icy distance as Valerie, restrained by her grief which slowly smothers her. Vaughan-Lawlor’s Finbar sparks with boyish vivacity, but we sense gently that it masks an inner vacuum beneath the sparky surface. If McPherson falters, it is in his overly wrought direction. Sequences are staged a little too cosily, rhythms a little too predictable, the dark comedy too caricatured. But the play’s spell remains. The Weir is not really about the supernatural at all. It is about the things we try to bury, the regrets that haunt us.

Dazzling hyperrealism soars because each character is an iceberg hiding their true depth. Lucy Karczewski tugs at the heartstrings as immensely talented Diana, riddled with doubt under Peter’s coercive control. Peter’s own scars are gently revealed: an unloving father has shaped Peter into a relentless perfectionist, taking his anger out on everyone around him. Meanwhile, bassist Reg battles addiction with perpetual scene-stealer Zachary Hart capturing his narcotic haziness with tragicomic brilliance.

Cooke’s swift touch direction gently dials up the heat with the gentleness of a paintbrush, but with the momentum of punch to the stomach. It starts garlanded with bucolic pageantry, a Chelsea Flower Show vision of a green and pleasant land, only for a ghostly coterie of Mrs Warren’s prostitutes to maraud between scenes, stripping it back layer by layer, flower by flower, until the stage is empty. The grim truth can fester in its place, and the fist clenched morality is ready to take a flamethrower to everything.

At its worst David Ives’ book is a single punchline Monty Python sketch dragged out into an entire musical – that punchline being that the one percenters barely possess a brain cell between them. I suppose an American audience might find their ignorance endearing. Though I can’t speak on behalf of the entire press night audience, I sense from the stony faces around me that the British counterparts just find them grating.

t should be worn out of a badge of honour – a testament to The Years’s power to magic up emotion from simple ingredients. Bar a handful of dripping red, the abortion scene’s graphicness reverbs through collective imagination, germinating from Ernaux’s precise but velvety language (deftly adapted by Stephanie Bain) and blossoming on stage from an-all-muscles-clenched Romola Garai. Arbo has woven a gorgeous interplay of stagecraft and storytelling that doesn’t just deserve a West End transfer but wholly justifies itself as theatrical adaptation.

Lloyd’s chuck-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-works vision doesn’t help. The auteur’s trademark visual austerity strips the island of specifics, with piles of black ash flecked by glaring crepuscular light forming a planetary hellscape. If you squint, it could almost be a stage version of Dune with its slightly campy sci-fi costumes but especially when a pale-faced Caliban pops his bald head up from the gravel like a sandworm. 

The cast is excellent, helmed by an ice-cold Anne Marie Duff, swaying like a prowling boxer ready for another round. Mark Bonnar's Ben is as graceful as he is evasive, almost balletic despite his razor-toothed cruelty. Steffan Rhodri's Oscar is perfectly tuned as the nebbish middle child Oscar trampled on by his pugnacious siblings. But there isn’t much theatrical glue to hold the ensemble and the wider ideas together. It's a case of not being more than the sum of its parts, even if those parts are well constructed and polished.

I can’t think why this is the right time of year for this. Nor why The Purists belongs in London when it is so culturally tied to a New York-specific melting pot. But there’s enough endearing charm to compensate for it. Hats off to a sparky rag-tag ensemble cast playing up each cartoonish caricature.

But a missing human touch is needed to counterbalance the heavy concepts. The tangled romances between the marines and convicts feel underwritten and overwrought through uncalibrated performances. As individuals the characters lack gravity, they are only ever parts to the whole. It’s why the ensemble sequences really fizzle. Squabbles during rehearsals flecked with self-conscious jabs at pretentious theatre culture effortlessly blossom into the wider politics.

It only premiered last October, but Death of England: Closing Time, the final chapter in Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s state of the nation triptych, not only retains its spine-frosting freshness, but feels more dangerous than ever. Not just because it dives headfirst into the socio-political quagmire of race and identity in 21st Century Britain when the very same dynamics disentangled on stage fuelled violent riots on streets across the country. But because it dares to argue that love shines through storm clouds of hatred.

Essiedu really is a force of nature. Totally at ease, working the audience like a stand-up comic, then, with fox-like agility, backstabbing them with guttural force and working up to a symphonic crescendo. For Michael I noted that Roy Williams’s brilliance as a writer lies in the way he delicately coils loving intimacy into the character’s DNA. Not matter how tempestuous the storm clouds of paranoia and hate are, a ray of light can always shine through. Watching Essiedu find that light is breath taking.

Roy Williams’s brilliance as a writer lies in the way he delicately coils intimacy into Michael’s soul. As much as boiling hated bubbles, he cannot overcome the love that hangs around his neck like a millstone. Coombes’ happy-go-lucky blokey demeanour delivers the knuckle fisted punches, but not all the blows land.

Never mind the sex and nudity (the literal bollocks) - at its core Slave Play is too obsessed with conceptual naval gazing to the extent that it forgets that its characters are human beings. The vast majority of it is stuffed by a overwrought therapy session where the couples whine and whinge about their sex problems – suggested, by harpy-like therapists spouting meaningless therapy jingo, to stem from racial trauma that they must now exorcise.

Watching an Icke production is like having brain surgery. The auteur has made his name with ice cold reinventions of classic plays that sliced straight into you with scalpel like precision. Whilst no stranger to Shakespeare, Player Kings is a step out the comfort zone: there’s still the heavy themes firing together and against each other like synapses, but here it's soaked in bawdy earthiness and barrels of acidic wit thanks to Falstaff.

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Lynn Nottage, pens a syrupy story heavily reliant on the doubling of MJ’s stern father Joseph and his present-day manager Rob, both played by a mercurial Ashley Zhangazha. Jackson is a perpetual victim at the hands of financially ravenous record producers or the vampiric media. All he wants to do is 'Keep the Faith' and 'Heal the World'. Some musicals are pure escapism: step inside and forget your problems. Here you forget Jackson’s problems too. Or at least his estate wants you to.

As much as I admire the fourth wall shattering audacity, I also cringe. The lo-fi set stained in stylish graffiti gibberish on walls, the dad rock playlist and live David Bowie cover, the tacky paint fight, Ostermeier’s production is a bit too eager to be edgy in a midlife crisis sort of way.

It could have risked devolving into campy schmaltz but Kate Trefry, along with Jack Thorne, pen a standalone story that stands strongly on its own two feet. An adventure romp brimming with action and exploding with spectacle, expect a fare few winks to the fans along the way and a healthy dash of horror.

Branagh’s vision is undeniably there, but the execution lacks directorial precision. Nobody doubts his capability as a performer or as a director (see his recent Oscar winning film Belfast). But doing both at the same time does the cast no favours.

Director Mark Gatiss plays gleefully into the shifting power dynamics. From the moment she arrives, Barber's gloriously ostentatious Elsa is in total control both physically and metaphorically of Peter and Debbie. They are wriggling worms under her boot. Shearsmith as Peter is particularly adept at capturing the idiosyncrasies of an awkward dad. There is something a bit Matt Hancock about him in the way he squirms frantically, only to be put in place by his long-suffering judicious wife.