People, Places & Things, London
Denise Gough’s performance in People, Places & Things at the National Theatre was cited by many as the best of 2015. There’s another chance to see her playing recovering addict Emma as Duncan Macmillan’s play opens for a short West End run. There have been plenty of plays about addiction (though Matthew Perry’s lightweight The End Of Longing, at the Playhouse Theatre, WC2, to 14 May, doesn’t bear comparison); but this one looks at rehab and its link with the theatrical process. It follows the protagonist as she breaks down during a performance of The Seagull and goes through detox and therapy, with the play ultimately questioning how addicts can ever hope to cope with the outside world.
Wyndham’s Theatre, WC2, Tue to 18 Jun
MC
Somewhere In England, On tour
Touring to more than 50 towns and villages, this new play from Polly Wiseman takes us back to 1942 and the arrival of the Eighth US Army Air Force in East Anglia. Thousands of GIs were suddenly present in small English villages, sometimes outnumbering the local population by 50 to one. Soon, Hershey bars and jitterbugging to swing bands in the local village hall were familiar sights in what became known as the “friendly invasion”, something that ended up having a long-term impact on the area’s life and culture.
LG
Jackie The Musical, On tour
Back in the days before the internet there was a magazine, published in Dundee, that was a beacon of light in the lives of teenage girls during the 1970s. Jackie dispensed crucial advice about how to navigate sartorial pitfalls, deal with spots and heartache, and make yourself irresistible to boys. It also included plenty of pin-up posters of David Cassidy and Marc Bolan. This new touring musical channels the songs of the era as it tells the story of a fiftysomething divorcee who is revisiting her old copies of Jackie more than 30 years on when she once again finds herself in need of advice. This may be aimed squarely at a certain demographic and playing on its weakness for nostalgia, but if the package is as smartly put together as the magazine, it might well be a hit.
Gardyne Theatre, Dundee, Sat; Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, Tue to 19 Mar; touring to 30 Jul
LG
Hamlet, Stratford-upon-Avon
Paapa Essiedu had one of those “a star is born” moments two years ago when he took over the role of Edmund in King Lear at the National Theatre mid-performance, after an actor lost his voice. Since then, he has shone brightly as Romeo in Shakespeare At The Tobacco Factory’s Romeo And Juliet, both in Bristol and on tour. Now he returns to the RSC, where he played Fenton in the Merry Wives Of Windsor in 2012, to take the title role in Simon Godwin’s production of Hamlet. The entire cast is terrific, with Tanya Moodie playing Gertrude, Cyril Nri as Polonius and Hiran Abeysekera as Horatio, in a version of the play that sees Denmark reimagined as a modern state influenced by the rituals of west Africa.
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Sat to 13 Aug
LG
The Truth, London
It’s quite a feat to have three plays running simultaneously in London – one accomplished by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, JB Priestley and Tennessee Williams in the past – and now a Frenchman has just achieved that accolade, too (admittedly for all of three days). Florian Zeller’s The Mother, about a woman whose empty nest has an extremely adverse effect on her, ends its run at the Tricycle Theatre, NW6, tonight, while the award-winning The Father, which covers dementia and familial love, has returned to the West End (Duke Of York’s, WC2, to 26 Mar). Now, The Truth is at The Menier Chocolate Factory. Again adapted by Christopher Hampton, it involves a pair of couples and an affair between two of the quartet, which unravels with unexpected results.
The Menier Chocolate Factory, SE1, to 7 May
MC
Jumpy, Mold
Parental angst and teenage tantrums feature heavily in April De Angelis’s comedy, in which Hilary, who once protested at Greenham Common, is locked in combat with a sneering adolescent daughter who thinks that Mum is a complete loser. Considering her marriage is on the rocks, she’s lost her job and seems to have mislaid her feminist principles somewhere along the way, maybe she is? Or maybe she’s just doing her best in difficult circumstances. It’s a very funny play, but beneath the sharply comic one-liners something more thoughtful is embedded: an examination of a woman who thought that her life would be vastly different from her mother’s, but who discovered that having it all means losing some things along the way.
LG
