Monday
Jamie Wood’s utterly delightful O No! begins a brilliant week of theatre in the Orbit festival at Home in Manchester. A south London family’s secrets are excavated in Torn, which continues at the Royal Court Upstairs. It’s your last chance this week for the Young Chekhov season at the National Theatre. Kerry Ellis stars in Murder Ballad, a story of lust and murder at the Arts theatre in the West End. The Bush’s This Place we Know, a season of short plays performed in unusual spaces along the Uxbridge Road, continues this week with Barney Norris’s The Rest of Your Life performed in a bar and Kenny Emson’s Terrorism, staged in the old Shepherd’s Bush Palladium.
Tuesday
Karen Hobbs’s show about cervical cancer, Tumour Has It, is part of Camden People’s theatre’s Calm Down Dear, a festival of feminism which includes an unprecedented number of shows by men. Frantic Assembly’s tale of family life Things I Know to be True arrives at Oxford Playhouse. Bea Roberts’s delicate study of a dying way of rural life, And Then Come the Nightjars, is at the North Wall in Oxford and on tour.
Wednesday
Jess Thom’s brilliant Backstage in Biscuit Land is one of the shows on offer in the Dublin theatre festival – which this week includes Death at Intervals starring Olwen Fouéré and Raymond Scannell, Brokentalkers’ The Circus Animal’s Desertion and a new version of The Seagull by Michael West and Annie Ryan.
Thursday
A hotel room in 1964, on the night that Cassius Clay won the heavyweight boxing title, is the setting for Kemp Power’s One Night in Miami directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah at the Donmar, London. The Isango Ensemble bring the refugee story A Man of Good Hope to the Young Vic. The latest from Christopher Brett Bailey, Kissing the Shotgun Goodnight, mixes hardboiled storytelling with a live musical score at Ovalhouse in Kennington. Z-arts in Hulme hosts Divergency, an evening featuring tabletop performances, installations and shows presented by Word of Warning, STUN and Black Gold Arts. The latest from Told by an Idiot, Heads will Roll, is a story about delusion, corruption and the search for El Dorado. It’s at the Drum in Plymouth.
Friday and the weekend
Writer Ella Hickson and director Carrie Cracknell drill deep into our relationship with the black stuff in Oil which is at Islington’s Almeida. Rachel O’Riordan revives Conor McPherson’s spooky The Weir at the Sherman in Cardiff. And it’s one night only at the Hub in Leeds for Rhum and Clay’s layered and enjoyable 64 Squares.
