All the right moves ... Pierre Rigal in Press. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
However exhausting your week has been, in my experience you only have to see one really terrific piece of theatre to lift your spirits. This week, for me, it was Thomas Ostermeier's version of Hedda Gabler at the Barbican. Like his version of Sarah Kane's Blasted, you will either love it or hate it. I can't imagine that anyone could be indifferent to his aggressive aesthetic and merciless gaze. It's only on until tomorrow, and even if you loathe it (and don't buy the premise of a 21st-century Hedda who has none of the social or legal restraints of Ibsen's original), this is a piece of theatre that will make you sit up and take notice.
In what has been a rather disappointing week (I didn't like Theatre Alibi's Spies or Frantic Assembly's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein quite as much as I expected), I've been riding high on the memory of Press at the Gate. You really must see Pierre Rigal's astonishing one-man show, a devastating account of someone trying to resist the inevitable fate of being crushed to nothing.
In the coming week I'm going to see Summer (Strallen) arrive in The Sound of Music, pop down to Plymouth to catch Lucinda Coxon's Nostalgia and see the much hyped A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians at the Soho. If you haven't caught it yet, the Lyric's impressive version of Kafka's Metamorphosis is at Northern Stage in Newcastle this week. The RSC's Noughts and Crosses stops off at the Lighthouse in Poole, and in Scotland there's still time to catch Six Characters in Search of an Author at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh and Godot at the Citizens in Glasgow.
Looking ahead, the Barbican's Do Something Different weekend on March 8-9 offers a wide range of activities as well as an opportunity to take part in Rotozaza's Etiquette, which was fascinating in Edinburgh. The following week, the National Student Drama Festival takes place in Scarborough and still has both day and weeklong tickets available. It's a brilliant opportunity to see the work of young theatre-makers and join in some of the 120 workshop sessions run by practitioners such as Mark Ravenhill, Gecko's Al Nedjari, Stephen Unwin, Chris Thorpe from Unlimited, Alan Lane from Slung Low and Roy Williams. It was insane that the Arts Council thought to cut the funding of this organisation - this is the future, and it works.
Other things worth putting in the diary are Hoipolloi's adaptation of Edward Gorey's The Doubtful Guest at Watford Palace and touring, and Grid Iron's tale of a textile mill, Yarn, in Dundee.
