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Nicole Kidman is back on the London stage for the first time since baring her all in David Hare’s The Blue Room in 1998. In this new play by Anna Ziegler, she plays Rosalind Franklin, the woman who first cracked DNA and who subordinated her personal life to science. Michael Grandage directs.
- From 5 September at Noël Coward theatre, London. Buy tickets at theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330 333 6906
The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil
The first professional production in more than 20 years of John McGrath’s legendary musical play, first produced by 7:84 Scotland in 1973, that takes the form of a ceilidh as it explores the history of Scotland and its economic exploitation from the Highland Clearances to the oil boom of the 1970s. The play was hugely successful when it was first produced, and it’s time may well have come again in a more politically engaged Scotland with the SNP in the ascendant. It will certainly be a good night out.
- From 9 September to 26 September, Dundee Rep (01382 223530)
Hangmen
Martin McDonagh’s first UK play in over a decade is set in a pub in Oldham and deals with the dilemmas facing a professional hangman on the day that capital punishment is formally abolished. David Morrissey and the League of Gentlemen’s Reece Shearsmith star in Matthew Dunster’s production.
- From 10 September at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, London . Buy tickets at theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330 333 6906
Pomona
Dystopian drama meets gaming in Alistair McDowell’s sinister, violent yet comic play in which a young woman searches for her lost twin sister and finds all roads lead to a hole in the centre of Manchester, a concrete island called Pomona. First seen at the Orange Tree last year, the play is revived at the NT before heading to Manchester and it is as fierce and as tender a portrait of lost souls and broken hearts as you could hope to find, full of moral ambiguities and startling images including an octopus-faced god of evil.
- From 10 September to 10 October, NT Temporary Space, London (020-7452 3000); and from 29 October to 21 November, Royal Exchange, Manchester (0161-833 9833)
Hecuba
As part of the current fascination with everything Greek, Marina Carr gives us a new take on Hecuba, the Trojan queen who finds herself imprisoned by the victorious Agamemnon and seeking to protect her daughters. Derbhle Crotty, last seen playing Shakespeare’s Henry IV in Galway, and Ray Fearon lead the cast in Erica Whyman’s RSC production.
- From 17 September at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon (0844-800 1110)
Waiting for Godot
There are times when it feels as if Beckett’s play about waiting in which nothing happens twice is becoming less of a play and more of a celebrity actor double-act. But the pairing of those two very fine actors Brian Cox and Bill Paterson, as Vladimir and Estragon, should not only kickstart the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company’s 50th-anniversary celebrations in style but also provide a partnership that gets to the heart of Beckett’s play and the human condition: that there is nothing to be done but we’ll keep on trying anyway.
- From 18 September to 10 October, Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (0131-248 4848)
Tipping the Velvet
Sarah Waters’s audacious novel about a girl who falls in love with a male-impersonating Victorian music-hall star has already been seen on TV. Now Posh’s Laura Wade has adapted it for the stage, Lyndsey Turner directs and Sally Messham, fresh out of drama school, and Laura Rogers play the erotically intertwined central couple.
- From 18 September at Lyric Hammersmith, London (020-8741 6850)
Iliad
Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes’s collaborations for National Theatre Wales on The Persians and Coriolan/us have been epic theatre, and now the pair set their sights on Christopher Logue’s poem War Music, inspired by Homer’s account of the last years of the Trojan war. This is a show that will be big in every way – from the cast and design to a running time of eight hours, split into four shows, that can be seen individually or in two marathon performances either all day or overnight.
- From 21 September to 3 October, the Ffwrnes, Llanelli (nationaltheatrewales.org; 02920 371689)
Medea
More Greeks, with the revival of Euripides’s ever-popular play about a heroine who gets her revenge on the faithless Jason by murdering their two young sons. Rupert Goold’s production of Rachel Cusk’s new version concludes a fascinating season devoted to the Greeks – and the fact that Medea is played by Goold’s wife, Kate Fleetwood, lends a certain spice to the occasion.
- From 25 September at the Almeida, London (020-7359 4404)
The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead
Poet and playwright Simon Armitage and director Nick Bagnall worked together on Armitage’s The Last Days of Troy, and they are reunited for this new play with an ancient twist. Colin Tierney plays a government minister sent on a diplomatic mission to Turkey. When events take an unexpected turn, he tries to get back to the UK, but the long voyage home presents many challenges including Sirens, a Cyclops and whirlpools.
- From 25 September to 17 October, Liverpool Everyman (0151-709 4776). Then touring nationwide to 28 November
Platonov / Ivanov / The Seagull
A rare chance to see the formation of Chekhov’s genius in his three earliest plays in new versions by David Hare directed by Jonathan Kent. A 22-strong ensemble, headed by Anna Chancellor, James McArdle and Samuel West, appears in all three plays which, on certain orgiastic occasions, you’ll be able to see in a single day.
- From 28 September at Chichester festival theatre (01243 781312)
Monsieur Popular
A season of French farce kicks off with a rare sighting of a play by Eugene Labiche: one that shows a group of bourgeois husbands thrown into panic when the philandering hero threatens to jettison their wives. The versatile Jeremy Sams not only provides a new translation and directs but ensures that song and dance, vital to Labiche’s vaudevillian farces, strongly feature.
- From 1 October at Ustinov Studio, Bath (01225 448844)
Fierce festival
The UK premiere of the latest piece from Chris Goode is one of the highlights of this year’s festival that combines cutting edge theatre with live art, dance, music and installation. Goode’s Weaklings is inspired by the notorious blog of writer and artist, Dennis Cooper. There are also shows from Ursula Martinez, Fernando Belifore, and a piece called Happiness Forgets, exploring what happens when our past becomes tarnished and which involves re-enacting the opening dance sequence of all seven series of The Cosby Show from the 1980s.
- From 7 to 11 October, various venues, Birmingham and Coventry (wearefierce.org)
The Hairy Ape
Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 expressionist masterpiece was last seen in a spectacular staging by Peter Stein imported from Berlin. Now Richard Jones revives this extraordinary play about a ship’s stoker, Yank, who embodies the alienated individual in a world of technology and capital. Bertie Carvel, fresh from his triumphs as the beskirted Miss Trunchbull and Euripides’s Pentheus, plays the eponymous hero.
- From 17 October at Old Vic, London. Buy tickets at theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330 333 6906
The Winter’s Tale
The Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company kicks off a year-long residency with a revival of Shakespeare’s unbearably moving study of sexual jealousy and redemptive love. With Branagh himself as Leontes and Judi Dench as Paulina, the box-office is likely to be besieged for a season that also brings us plays by Terence Rattigan, John Osborne and Francis Veber.
- From 17 October at the Garrick theatre, London. Buy tickets at theguardianboxoffice.com or call 0330 333 6906
The Oresteia
Blanche McIntyre’s staging of Aeschylus’s trilogy may be bringing up the rear in a year that has already seen Robert Icke’s extraordinary version – currently in the West End – and another at Shakespeare’s Globe, but last doesn’t have to mean least. McIntyre who has proved herself a hugely exciting and often daring director is using a pared-down version of Ted Hughes’s translation. A community cast of local people will provide the voice of the citizens as a bloody cycle of murder and revenge is unleashed.
- From 23 October to 14 November, Home, Manchester (0161-200 1500)
Spill festival
Thirty-five events taking place in theatres and other spaces all across London including the streets, on a rooftop and even in a hidden temple. Watch Heather Cassils self-immolate using techniques borrowed from Hollywood stunts, take part in a séance banquet in a Masonic temple, see legendary US performance artist Karen Finley perform her Aids requiem, Written in the Sand, and catch innovative work from rising UK live artists FK Alexander, Jamal Harewood and Ria Hartley.
- From 28 October to 8 November, various venues, London (spillfestival.com)
Are we not drawn onward to new erA
A show which like the title is a palindrome that can be read both forward and backwards, the latest from Belgian theatrical whizz-kids Ontroerend Goed heads to the Adelaide festival following its three days in Plymouth. The second part of a trilogy exploring the world and its four billion years of history through the prism of Kierkegaard’s dictum that “life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards”, this is a piece that asks whether our impact on the world is irreversible. Or can we right the wrongs and heal the wounds of the past?
- From 17 to 19 November, Theatre Royal, Plymouth(01752 267222)
Sleeping Beauty
Who says that great theatre can’t be for Christmas as much as at any other time of the year? Not director Sally Cookson, who has created a string of gorgeous and gloriously inventive shows that have premiered around the festive season but which have often had much longer lives. They include the fabulous Cinderella: a fairytale, Peter Pan and last year’s utterly loveable 101 Dalmatians. With her staging of Jane Eyre opening at the National Theatre this week, Cookson is riding high and this inverse version of the famous fairytale – it’s the Prince who has fallen into a 100 years slumber – should be a cracker.
- From 27 November to 17 January, Bristol Old Vic (0117 987 7877)
