The Oresteia, Manchester
Those Greeks just keep on flooding our stages. There are two versions of Medea currently playing in London (at Gate Theatre and the Almeida), and now Blanche McIntyre directs the third major revival of Aeschylus’s great tragic masterpiece to be staged this year. With Robert Icke’s brilliant version still at Trafalgar Studios (to 7 Nov) and Rory Mullarkey’s new version recently seen at the Globe, McIntyre turns to Ted Hughes’s tried-and-tested take, cutting it back to condense the three plays into one streamlined and potent drama. The chorus will be drawn from the citizens of Manchester, who will comment on the action as events unfold and an apparently unstoppable cycle of slaughter and revenge rips across the stage, filtering down through the generations.
Home, Fri to 14 Nov
LG
Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company Season, London
Actors and directors mounting West End seasons of theatre with starry names are now a common occurrence, but in 1988 it was Kenneth Branagh who revived the actor-manager tradition, and now he returns with a promising programme. It kicks off with The Winter’s Tale, with Branagh as Leontes and Judi Dench as Paulina. It runs alongside Terence Rattigan’s rarely seen comedy Harlequinade (24 Oct-13 Jan), in which a company attempts to stage The Winter’s Tale and Romeo And Juliet (also in Branagh’s season next year) as their own personal disasters and peccadilloes impinge on the theatrical matter at hand. Harlequinade will be paired with Rattigan’s monologue All On Her Own, never seen before in the West End, in which Zoë Wanamaker plays a woman alone in London at night with a burdensome secret to share.
Garrick Theatre, WC2, Sat to 16 Jan
MC
The Deal Versus The People, Bradford
Common Wealth, the politically inclined theatre group, joins forces with Daniel Bye for this show that exposes the trade negotiations being conducted behind closed doors by the EU and the US. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will have a major influence on everyone’s lives, covering issues of environmental legislation, digital privacy laws and banking regulation. More than 2 million people have protested against the deal’s threat to democracy and the secrecy surrounding it. This site-specific production asks what individuals can do, and considers civil disobedience and theatre as a force for change.
Bradford City Hall, Wed to 24 Oct
LG
The Edge, Folkestone
As part of Folkestone Quarterhouse’s Salt festival, Transport Theatre presents a love story about two people from different continents that has been inspired by real-life stories from people living on the Kent coast and West Bengal in India. Drawing on the expertise of an oceanographer, this piece about migration and climate change boasts a score by Raymond Yiu and fuses text, movement, storytelling and projection as it details the effects of rising sea levels. After Folkestone, the show tours the south-east and Wales, and while some of the places may be landlocked, it should be a reminder of how lives and myth grow from the areas where land and sea meet.
Folkestone Library, Wed to 24 Oct
LG
The Hairy Ape, London
Bertie Carvel can expect some hisses from the audience after playing the philandering husband in the recent BBC1 drama Doctor Foster. The actor, who came to fame with his award-winning Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, takes another interesting turn with this expressionist Eugene O’Neill drama. The theatre is returned to its traditional proscenium arch format for The Hairy Ape, in which Carvel plays Yank, a brutish stoker on a transatlantic ocean liner who, faced with an identity crisis, wanders Manhattan to find out where he fits in. For more O’Neill, try Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1, for The First Man, (to 31 Oct) an early autobiographical family drama of the type that made the playwright famous.
The Old Vic, SE1, Sat to 21 Nov
MC
The Magna Carta Plays, Salisbury
Celebrating 800 years since the signing of the Magna Carta, this bold piece of programming takes the form of four short plays about justice, human rights, power and corruption. In Howard Brenton’s Ransomed, a copy of the Magna Carta goes missing from a cathedral and must be found. We Sell Right, by Timberlake Wertenbaker, considers abuses of power in the 13th century and draws parallels with abuses happening today in international business. In Kingmakers, Anders Lustgarten focuses on dissent and how it is quashed, and in Pink Gin, Sally Woodcock looks to 21st-century Africa, where global investors are purchasing land for development.
Salisbury Playhouse, Thu to 7 Nov
LG
