Tim Bano

Vaguely, Corneau and Mansour gesture towards the fact that F Scott used Zelda’s writing under his own name; that she may have driven him to drink, and he may have driven her to a psychiatric hospital. One moment has their daughter scream about how it’s bad that unconventional women get locked up. But they don’t attempt to explore these ideas - or anything else - in any meaningful way. Quickly, a pat ending swoops in telling us that Zelda and F Scott were really in love, and love is great.

Vaguely, Corneau and Mansour gesture towards the fact that F Scott used Zelda’s writing under his own name; that she may have driven him to drink, and he may have driven her to a psychiatric hospital. One moment has their daughter scream about how it’s bad that unconventional women get locked up. But they don’t attempt to explore these ideas - or anything else - in any meaningful way. Quickly, a pat ending swoops in telling us that Zelda and F Scott were really in love, and love is great.

So, yes, that bear. He’s been the subject of much speculation over the last months as people puzzled how they’d conjure him in real life without making him look naff. Designer Tahra Zafar solved the problem. Made up of two performers – James Hameed providing a lovely gentle voice offstage, not unlike Ben Whishaw’s in the film but with an extra naivety, and Arti Shah in a ridiculously cute bear suit with animatronic eyes and mouth – he is uncanny in a very beautiful way. In the few moments the show slackens, you just need to look at the bear to marvel all over again. He’s got to be one of the most wonderful theatrical creations of recent years, up there with the War Horse puppets or the billowing dress during Defying Gravity in Wicked.

It’s Staunton doing what she does well, and has done before. Staunch, slightly terrifying. Every line a masterclass in technical precision, in full commitment. And here, it doesn’t work. She’s in a melodrama while everyone around her is in a pleasant garden comedy. She tramples over the humour, the fun, and that means the serious bits don’t stand out. She tries to make us care too deeply before we’ve even got to know her. That’s partly a problem with Cooke’s sharp scissors, which have removed a lot of Shaw’s bloat, but have also stopped us from spending enough time with the characters to ease into them. And even despite the excisions, the play still manages to drag.

Yes it’s lots of people arguing in a drawing room and god knows the West End has had its fun with plays like those. But something sets it apart, which is Rosenblatt’s willingness to go there. ‘Are you Jewish?’ Dahl asks Stone barely a minute after they meet. From there it’s fireworks, it’s daggers drawn, Dahl a big complex beast either made bearlike by deep compassion for oppressed, injusticed people, or a big child who doesn’t know how to regulate his feelings, so instead throws antisemitic tantrums. And actually the familiarity of the old-fashioned form then butts up against its daring intent, like the play is waiting for the tension and conflict that ripples throughout the audience as some of the lines are spat out, the seizing of shock, the awkwardness, outrage and discomfort.

Linton keeps everything in a square patch on stage, which often revolves, with just a few dreamlike, fantasy-infused moments taking place outside the square. That little shop floor is Walker’s safe space, away from a society where - as he and Buster discuss - he’s only ever seen as ‘a problem’. And though a few threads could be snipped away here and there, Cooke and Linton don’t just revive this finely tailored play. They make it burst at its seams.

There’s a sense of Cox taking Bach and moulding him into Cox: he’s a man full of principle and unafraid to speak his mind, even to a warmongering king. Like a squeeze box he inflates and deflates at will. Some speeches have him puffed up, rage in his eyes, bellowing about war and tyranny (the man can shout like few others). Moments later he crumples, tired and aged, especially in a tender scene which sees his son Carl (an earnest Jamie Wilkes) undressing him.

Jephta plants and uproots all those little shibboleths of middle classdom: what do we mean by ‘decent people’, ‘good neighbourhood’, etc? Stuffed full of amazing lines, and with six super performances, essentially: A Good House is a very good play.

Applause greets Williams as she rises through a trapdoor, and she suits the part, not least because she played such a similar one in Ugly Betty. But there’s a strange gentleness to her performance – a straining for the depth and detail that Meryl Streep brings to the film role – that doesn’t work on such a huge stage. It’s an interesting way of playing it: you’re never quite sure whether her comments, all delivered in a quiet-ish deadpan, are kind or cutting. But it could do with more ice.

With its cheery 1950s palette and poster-paint backdrop, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s production never quite breaks out of its one-dimensionality. Yes, the rhinestones and American flags and guns amass, and there’s a sense of drifting garishly into American nightmare. But, mostly, it has the satirical bite of a Hallmark movie, with the same romantic trajectory.

Every time Starlight Express pulls up to a new theatre it undergoes substantial revisions – it’s the Train of Theseus, barely anything remains of the original – and that’s true here: Control is actually played by a child, rather than a disembodied voice as in previous productions. Gone are the trains with dumb names corresponding to their countries (Espresso for Italy, Manga for Japan), lots of genders have been swapped. But the big thing is that it looks a bit weird in 2024 to be hymning steam trains and booing the electric baddie, so in comes a new character – the Hydrogen train – to be our hero’s helper.

But that’s the thing: there are lots of glimpses of a great play, lots of important themes and lots of great lines. The men who’ve made threats against Monica are being investigated, the police officer assures her, because it’s classed as hate speech. “They can protect me from being hated?” she scoffs. It just never quite gets away from feeling like Penhall went “I want to write a play about violence against MPs” and called some of the arguments “Monica” and some of them “Alec”, and forced a few plot points around them. You want it to settle, to dig more deeply, rather than throw the net more widely. You want the dialogue to flow like these are real people, not ciphers being swallowed up by structure.

Block plays Lilli/Kate with a staunchness and gives-as-good-as-she-gets gutsiness that is absolutely necessary for a role that could otherwise make the gender dynamics even dodgier than they already are. Every time she gets a solo she brings the house down: “So In Love” and “I Hate Men” are models in how to control your voice, invest emotionally in a song and knock the roof off.

By no means is this a perfect production. The stripped-back approach is really exposing, and there are moments when it doesn’t bear up to the scrutiny, especially in the whisky-heavy later scenes. You miss the heft, too, when neither Cox nor Clarkson are on stage – less a criticism of the sons than a testament to the hypnotic skill of the parents – and some scenes in the second half feel really bum-numbingly long. And it’s not exactly an enjoyable night out at the theatre either. What it is, though, is very impressive, often mesmerising and – when it hits right – really profoundly moving.

It’s like Jones has put ‘Pygmalion’ under a magnifying glass and we’re all examining it. He’s not really changed it and he’s not casting any particular value judgement, he’s just enlarged the whole thing, so that what was once light comedy has become broad farce. There’s barrelling, discordant piano music bringing a frantic mood to each scene change, and a cold, not-quite-real set by Stewart Laing of pink pegboard, with doors that open and slam shut with great regularity.

When Michael Balogun’s Emanuel Lehman steps out of the vast glass and steel box in which he, Hadley Fraser and Nigel Lindsay have been telling the story of the three German-Jewish Lehman Brothers from their arrival in America to the firm’s 2008 collapse, there’s a sudden coming together of the worlds of theatre and finance. They’re both entirely reliant on pretending. The world they’ve conjured for two hours is as illusory and fragile as the financial world their characters are describing. Having Balogun break the illusion is just one of hundreds of tricks that Sam Mendes pulls out of his magic box as he transforms three actors and a few packing boxes into the history of America.