Alice Saville

With a glut of roles from Hamlet to Gandalf behind him, 84-year-old Ian McKellen has absolutely nothing left to prove. He’s clearly on stage for the pure joy of it, and that sense of delight shines through in mischievous gay romcom Frank and Percy, where he and Roger Allam have a ball, playing friends-turned-lovers. McKellen pulls on a tiny rainbow-coloured tutu, strikes mock-alluring poses to disco anthems, and has the audience in fits with knowing comments about a “dextrous tongue” that’s schooled in saucier purposes than Shakespearean couplets. Writer Ben Weatherill’s wry comedy is a precision-tooled vehicle for McKellen and Allam’s talents, one that’s motoring into London after a hit premiere at Theatre Royal Windsor in June.

Yanagihara’s perspective seems to be that abuse messes you up for life, making emotional intimacy almost impossible and suicide the only way out. Van Hove’s production reinforces that, creating a production that’s so painful to watch that, like Jude, you wish it would all just stop. But it’s both a hugely irresponsible message, and a false one. Real-life suffering is more complex, interspersed with moments of joy, care and healing – and recovery is too precious to give up on.

With sex so firmly in the foreground, everything about this story shifts. In traditional productions, boy-crazy farm girl Ado Annie is pure comic relief. When she sings ‘I'm just a girl who can't say no!’, it's a straightforward excuse for some jolly old-timey slut-shaming. But here, Georgina Onuorah plays an Annie whose desires can't be so easily laughed at: she tenderly cradles her more prim and proper friend Laurey (Anoushka Lucas) in her arms as she sings about loving that's ‘sweeter than cream’, centimetres away from a kiss. And this Laurey is rapt, not judgemental.

In the wake of mega hits ‘Hamilton’ and ‘Emilia’, it feels like a hip hop suffragette musical is what theatre fans are crying out for. But despite a dynamite cast, ZooNation director Kate Prince’s ‘Sylvia’ probably won’t get audiences rioting in the streets. Retooled after an Old Vic run in 2018 that was hastily restyled as a work-in-progress, it’s now polished but painfully polite, steering clear of political rabble-rousing in favour of a historically faithful trundle through early twentieth-century politics.