1 Sunny Afternoon
Joe Penhall’s musical telling the story of the Kinks has enjoyed a long West End run. Now out on tour, it’s a show that cleverly sends the audience home on a high, but before that it teases out the troubled relationship of brothers Ray and Dave Davies. It also achieves the not inconsiderable feat of being highly watchable even as it mythologises its subject matter.
New Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, Sat; Edinburgh Playhouse, Tue to 17 Sep
2 Yerma
If anyone doubted that Billie Piper was an actor of real power, this is the show to prove it. Simon Stone has taken Lorca’s 1934 tragedy about the terrible pain of childlessness and relocated it from rural Spain to contemporary London. Like his previous wonderful production of The Wild Duck he takes a classic text and dusts it off until it seems newly minted. But it’s Piper who is the main draw and her performance as a woman driven to disaster by her failure to conceive is likely to be at the front of the queue when the awards are handed out.
3 Our Ladies Of Perpetual Succour
If you want to see a production that captures the adrenaline rushes and hormonal crashes of being a teenage girl then this stage version of Alan Warner’s cult 1998 novel The Sopranos should fit the bill. Telling of a group of Catholic schoolgirls from Oban on a choir trip, it’s an evening of mucky exuberance and vigour.
National Theatre: Dorfman, SE1, to 1 Oct
4 1984
In an age when privacy is exploited both by the state and commercial corporations, Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s chilling and pitilessly brilliant reworking of George Orwell’s dystopian novel couldn’t be more pertinent. It’s a very smart piece of work, full of echoes of the past while looking towards the future.
Playhouse Theatre, WC2, to 29 Oct
5 The Sugar-Coated Bullets Of The Bourgeoisie
Playwright Anders Lustgarten wrote his PhD on China’s journey from communism to capitalism and now he’s turned it into a play. If that sounds dull, don’t worry; this production first seen at London’s Arcola earlier this year is full of human interest as it focuses on the people in a village called Rotten Peach, where the residents first deal with the shift from feudalism to collectivism and later find themselves at the mercy of businessmen determined to exploit both land and labour. A big and ambitious play with a fine cast.
