Monday
The 2016 Chichester season begins with Stiles and Drewe’s musical version of Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt at the Minerva. Paines Plough are at Assembly Roxy in Edinburgh tonight, with Sabrina Mahfouz’s With a Little Bit of Luck, a play with music exploring the legacy of UK garage, touring this week in Sheffield, Lincoln, Bordon and Falmouth. Craig Taylor’s One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, taken from his Guardian column, is at the Watermill near Newbury. Brad Birch captures the age of anxiety and paranoia and the stress of being a teacher in The Brink at the Orange Tree in Richmond.
Tuesday
The high price of love is explored in The Ricochet Project’s brainy and beautiful Smoke and Mirrors, at Jackson’s Lane, north London, as part of CircusFest 2016. Another Edinburgh hit, the quirky Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons is at the Greenbank in Bristol this week, a clever little show about how saying less can be made to mean more. Filter’s Twelfth Night proves that music is the food of love at the Nuffield in Southampton. Right Now is really unsettling – part thriller and part exploration of grief – and it’s at the Traverse in Edinburgh from tonight. New Diorama director David Byrne’s version of Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell was good in Edinburgh last year and should be even better when it arrives at London’s New Diorama. Growing up with depression is the subject of Cheryl Martin’s Alaska, which is at the Albany, Deptford, tonight as part of A Nation’s Theatre. The audience decides what the future will be like in Remote, the latest from the always interesting Coney, at Camden People’s theatre from tonight.
Wednesday
Barely Methodical Troupe had a success with Bromance and they’re back with a new show, Kin, inspired by Lord of the Flies, which is at the Roundhouse in London as part of CircusFest 16. Jack Dean’s Grandad and the Machine, a fairytale for grown-ups, is at ARC in Stockton tonight only. The friendships of a group of men living in a Nottingham hostel are explored in Daniel Hoffmann-Gill’s Kings, directed by Fiona Buffini at Nottingham Playhouse from tonight. It’s your last chance at Shoreditch Town Hall, London, for the Wardrobe Ensemble’s lovely 1972: The Future of Sex. In the main house at Manchester’s Royal Exchange you can see Don Warrington in brilliant form in King Lear, and in the studio you can catch Jon Spooner and Chris Thorpe in Am I Dead Yet?, a cabaret-style show about dying. Chris Hannan’s new version of The Iliad takes to the Lyceum stage in Edinburgh. The Shakespeare in Shoreditch festival begins with responses to Shakespeare’s plays from Lulu Raczka and others.
Thursday
The latest from Will Adamsdale is called The Joke and is about an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman in a theatre, and it is on this week at the Theatre Royal in Margate.
Friday and the weekend
Toneelgroep’s Kings of War, an epic of politics and war hewn from Shakespeare, is directed by Ivo van Hove at the Barbican. Chris Goode & Company premiere new work as part of the Transform festival in Leeds this weekend. Howard Davies directs Hugh Bonneville in An Enemy of the People in preview at Chichester Festival theatre. Improbable has got a new show and that’s always worth celebrating: Opening Skinner’s Box tries to make sense of who we are, and it’s at Northern Stage in Newcastle from tonight.
Also tonight and tomorrow, Summerhall in Edinburgh hosts Other Faces, a mix of club night and experimental theatre. A good weekend at Derby theatre where tonight in the Studio Luca Rutherford’s Learning How to Die explores our inability to accept mortality, and tomorrow Sh!t Theatre entertain with their cabaret-style Women’s Hour. A trip of a lifetime following a diagnosis of motor neurone disease is explored in Cell, by Smoking Apples and Dogfish, which is at the Mumford theatre in Cambridge on Saturday night as part of a longer tour. On Saturday, you can catch the fascinating The Money at the Quarterhouse in Folkestone. There’s a terrific lineup of writers – Caroline Bird, Lulu Raczka, Suhayla El-Bushra and Chris Thorpe – for The Iphigenia Quartet starting at the Gate in Notting Hill on Saturday. If you are near Platform in Easterhouse, Glasgow, on Saturday there is an equally commendable lineup in the Outskirts festival including one-on-one circus, Ishbel McFarlane’s O is for Hoolet, Company of Wolves, and much more. It’s all free too.
On Sunday, the Park theatre in Finsbury Park plays host to Kelly Hunter’s Hamlet, Who’s There? which looks at Shakespeare’s play through the lens of grief.
