Matt Wolf

Indeed, there’s a paint-by-numbers feel to much of the writing, not least as it pertains to these Americans’ view of London: the weather (tick), the food (huh?). A Brexit reference feels irrelevant to our focus on a marriage built on shifting sand into which both husband and wife are sinking, though the leading players chart their shared uncertainty appealingly and well. Heusinger – a veteran of this role – deserves special praise for coming in at the 11th hour in what marks the Juilliard graduate’s West End debut.

And though the entire company is first-rate, Haj Ahmad provides an eviscerating evening’s emotional centre as a kind man pressed into service as a translator and, by extension, into the smouldering inferno around him. There’s “nothing left to garden,” we’re told simply but plaintively near the end in a play whose scorched-earth sensibility sends you reeling into the night.

You do long for more detail about both these people and the place they inhabit. But point these kids towards the raise-the-roof rebelliousness that informs the production's clamorous close, and you may well find yourself on the show’s likably raucous side.

How could a show about such an outsize hero as Hercules be so lame? That’s the question hovering over a Disney-backed musical that arrived at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, in London on Tuesday, just nine months after the playhouse waved goodbye to “Frozen,” another screen-to-stage cull from the Disney catalog.

Like so much Sondheim, the show makes demands on an audience - but "not demands you can't meet," as an earlier lyric from the same composer (in Merrily We Roll Along) puts it. There's fun to be had in wordplay about " a lotta latte" that could only come from this composer-lyricist's pen, and the triple rhyme of "duck / luck / fuck" is quintessential Sondheim. More pertinent is the show's embrace of darkness, which Mantello's genius manages somehow to keep as featherweight as Marianne's outfits. (The surpassingly witty designer is David Zinn.) Gazing ominously above, as if waiting for an Into the Woods-adjacent Giant, Ferguson's Paul cowers under the absence of the very Eden blithely insisted upon by Marianne. And the smitten young lovers sing unabashedly of "the end of the world", leaving the more philosophical Bishop to ruminate upon "matter that matters, or not".

I admired director-turned-author Mark Rosenblatt’s playwriting debut upon its Royal Court premiere last autumn. But I wasn’t prepared for the seismic jolt that Nicholas Hytner’s production now delivers. The drama, set 40 years ago but blisteringly topical to our times now, has been seasoned by the deepening of John Lithgow’s altogether astonishing performance as Roald Dahl and the terrific addition to the cast of the American actress Aya Cash, taking over from Romola Garai as an adversary of considerable proportions and power.

Florez’s ambitions are laudable. Not many people would transmute the raw material for a gross-out comedy into a study in aberrant psychic behaviour that tilts the play towards the realm of Art and God of Carnage: dual studies by Yasmina Reza of civility under stress.

I'm with James and Jamie and Edmund in awaiting every footstep of Mary, whether she is actually in the room or lowering overhead, unseen, within the claustrophobic Monte Cristo Cottage in Connecticut where this Nobel laureate's play is set. (The home is referenced in the text as 'this shabby place'.) And as the day turns to night and the characters' demons emerge, you're once again reminded of the formidable power of this woman at her most fragile: the tyranny of the weak restored once more to tremulous life.

I confess to not being prepared for the range Parker displays here, and her gift for walking a tightrope between wise-cracking wit and wistfulness that at times really did put me in mind of Chekhov, the master whom Simon admired and upon whom he deliberately modelled his own 1973 play, The Good Doctor. She's in tremendous form in the piece that makes up the first half – 'The Visitor from Mamaroneck' – in which she plays Karen, an excitable wife approaching 50 who has arrived early at the suite so as to prepare for a giddy anniversary celebration with her husband, Sam (Broderick).

There’s certainly no faulting Harrelson or colleagues Andy Serkis and Louisa Harland, all of whom fully inhabit the play’s freefall from satire to something deeply savage. At a time when people watch their language more than ever, Ireland knows how to wound with words. I’ve rarely heard laughter in the theatre so regularly punctuated by gasps.

The performances could not be better. I last saw Evans on this same stage in Rent Remixed, but nothing in my experience of him so far suggested the layers of feeling that he brings to this sleekly coiffed purveyor of bravado whose ego gets rather dramatically punctured. Time away from theatre may have made Evans a film name, but seems also to have amplified his connection to the stage. Wilton returns often to the theatre and deserves credit for a portrait that is light on its feet, not least in the various scenes in which the Queen Mother and Billy come together to dance. (Note a fascinating programme interview between the costume designers about capturing the necessary sartorial look.) Entirely aware of 'people like you' (that's to say, gay), the Queen Mother is all tolerance, but only up to a point. And those who might dismiss Backstairs Billy as so much heightened gossip would do well to heed its warning about societal divides that on this evidence can never be breached.

The production feels like an accomplished rhetorical exercise that doesn’t run deep, when this, of all plays, needs to rattle the soul. The litmus test of any “Lear” is whether you emerge from the theater moist-eyed, and my cheeks were dry throughout.

To answer that question, Old Friends really is bliss. It’s less a reprise of the one-off gala concert that caused a sensation some 18 months ago than a deepening of material. The director-choreographer Matthew Bourne, working with Britain’s leading Sondheimian, Julia McKenzie, has given this cavalcade of song a fluidity matched only by the elegance of the design and the astonishing clarity of conductor Alfonso Casado Trigo and his orchestra. (The Merrily We Roll Along entr’acte is itself nearly worth the price of admission.)

'Hell hath no fury like an angry Goth,' we’re told late in the blistering new production of Titus Andronicus, soon to be joined by The Winter’s Tale in repertory at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. If that line is itself invented, there’s no denying the show’s fidelity to the nihilistic power of Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, which is presented here without a drop of red dye only to acquire an eerie power through its own determined stylisation.

Its newfound elan is thanks to a sizzling cast led by the sublime Janet McTeer and a bolder take on the piece from Rourke, who previously directed it last winter at the Donmar Warehouse, her London home. Whereas McTeer previously had to do the thespian heavy lifting, this Broadway version - entirely recast except for her - features a stronger ensemble.

Keira Knightley doesn't say much during Thérèse Raquin...For much of a grimly deliberate evening, Knightley appears shoulders hunched, indrawn, her eyes darting about as if in search of escape...Knightley's commitment to this latest part is never in doubt. Making a measured entrance at the very start that doesn't give a clap-happy Broadway public the chance to applaud, she communicates the sullen intensity of a woman not easily given over to cheer...the venture certainly looks like a million bucks...Beowulf Boritt's arresting (and restless) designs embrace painterly abstraction and an onstage river as well as a detailed Parisian abode that at one point looks as if it is going to swallow Therese whole.

One can't fault the know-how of director Diane Paulus, a proven hit-maker with revivals (Hair, Pippin), here marking her first original Broadway musical. The tale is of how an unhappily married Barrie (a bearded, convincingly Scottish-accented Morrison) came upon the widowed Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Hampshire's Laura Michelle Kelly, in shimmering voice) and her four young sons. It gives audiences the back story of sorts to Peter Pan in much the same way as the musical Wicked functions as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz.

The Seinfeld creator and Curb Your Enthusiasm star's venture into new found territory at age 67 has clearly intrigued an avid public, but is the play itself any good? Possibly, if you want to watch a celebrity from one medium reprise material from another: a 'pretty ... pretty' reference arrives late in the second act to cheers from an adoring crowd fully au fait with its TV provenance. Others may wonder whether so scattershot a piece of writing would have got this far without its physically rangy, bespectacled star attached. On stage, David's Norman Drexel forever looks as if he's going to teeter backwards, his notably large hands sawing the air for comic effect...The narrative moves on from the familial rancour that often attends funerals to a rampant smuttiness that exists in deliberately dubious taste...There are jokes about balls and boobs, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Gaza, the second of which brings down the house. But for every line that sticks...numerous others don't...Perhaps it's left to Fish in the Dark to suggest that this is our adulthood: one mean-spirited, sour gag or situation after another -- in which case please pass the beef.

The Real Thing...has led a charmed life on Broadway -- up to this point, at least...And here it is again, this time in an only partially successful staging from the American director Sam Gold...Out of this cat's cradle comes a dissection of the byways of desire that finds neither Gyllenhaal nor McGregor ideally cast. One yearns for the over-coiffed McGregor to loosen up: the likeable Scotsman seems a tad stolid playing the so-called 'Henry of Mayfair', a role to which his lanky, rangy predecessors were suited down to the last hyper-articulate quip. Gyllenhaal has her moments, especially near the start, but she doesn't come naturally by the effortless sensuality needed to play a grown-up minx. There's good work from Cynthia Nixon as Henry's canny, crisply spoken first wife...This production has put something primally affecting about the play on mute.

In the long and ongoing parade of movies-turned-stage musicals, none of Woody Allen's work has made that transition - until now. And of Allen's nearly 50 films to date, it makes sense that Bullets Over Broadway should first reach the destination referred to in its title. The film honours the theatre in all its vainglorious splendour, so why not bring Allen and Douglas McGrath's Oscar-nominated screenplay home, as it were?

As one might deduce from an ironically titled play whose 'realism' is open to debate, Eno is interested more in the byways of speech and silence than in actual plot. Not a lot happens during The Realistic Joneses beyond the coming together of two couples, both called Jones, who inhabit a small town where such activity as there is involves a balloon festival and local fair that pointedly don't involve them. Any friends or relations? Forget it: these four are one another's world - perhaps even the world - and that's that.

Would Washington bring the energy and intensity required to play the dreamy, often feckless Chicago chauffeur? The answer, for the most part, is yes. So much so that early on you cease to worry about the age gap of only five years between Washington and the formidable LaTanya Richardson Jackson (wife to Samuel L), who plays Walter Lee's God-fearing mother, Lena. 'That's acting,' Washington said in a recent interview, speaking of the challenges posed by the casting. And if the double Oscar-winner is no longer quite the 'lean' presence indicated in the text, he fully inhabits the self-described 'volcano' that is Walter Lee, waiting to erupt.

Would Washington bring the energy and intensity required to play the dreamy, often feckless Chicago chauffeur? The answer, for the most part, is yes. So much so that early on you cease to worry about the age gap of only five years between Washington and the formidable LaTanya Richardson Jackson (wife to Samuel L), who plays Walter Lee's God-fearing mother, Lena. 'That's acting,' Washington said in a recent interview, speaking of the challenges posed by the casting. And if the double Oscar-winner is no longer quite the 'lean' presence indicated in the text, he fully inhabits the self-described 'volcano' that is Walter Lee, waiting to erupt.

YOU have to applaud Daniel Craig, a film icon (thank you, James Bond) who began in the theatre and returns there still. Across the Atlantic, he's been the best thing about his two New York stage ventures to date, and when Craig is allowed to feast on the emotionally famished world of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, audiences at this Broadway season's most-anticipated offering are unlikely to feel let down.

In some ways, the original innocence of the piece has been lost. There's a harder-edged quality to the New York staging: the general tenor is louder and more exaggerated, and the Gilbertian finesse of composer Tim Minchin's astonishing lyrics didn't translate for my companion, a first-timer to the show. At the same time, Bertie Carvel, making his Broadway debut, seems to have adjusted his award-winning termagant of a Trunchbull up a notch...But the tremendous heart and intelligence of the piece remains undimmed, and among the new recruits, special kudos must go to Gabriel Ebert's Mr Wormwood.