Although playwright John Pielmeier, who has written this stage adaptation of The Exorcist, reckons that “I adapted the novel, not the film,” the indelible images from William Friedkin’s 1973 movie were always bound to define an audience’s expectations. The spinning head and green projectile vomiting have entered collective folklore, and the film’s extensive use of prosthetics, elaborately sinister sound effects and subliminal imagery conspired to earn it the reputation of being the most terrifying movie of all time.However, this isn't even the scariest play this week. Designer Anna Fleischle Read more ...

The Second World War is central to our national imagination, yet it has been oddly absent from our stages recently. Not any more. Nicholas Wright’s new play, an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel about lonely English women and American servicemen which premieres at the Hampstead Theatre in north London, effortlessly evokes the world of the Home Front deep in the middle of total war. Yet adapting novels is a risky business, mainly because their tone is so hard to convey without using paragraph after paragraph of prose, and Wright struggles to give us a convincing stage version of a Read more ...

Terry Johnson's award-winning 1982 play Insignificance hasn't been seen in London since the playwright directed a 1995 revival at the Donmar (though Sam West staged his own production a decade later in Sheffield). But even the intrigue inherent in finding Johnson's own daughter, Alice, in the pivotal role of the unnamed actress who is clearly Marilyn Monroe can't steady director David Mercatali's reckoning with the play this time out.Four hugely distinct icons of American history are thrown together during one eventful 1950s night in Albert Einstein's New York hotel room as he finds himself Read more ...

Given the rather uneven record of the National Theatre at the moment, there’s already a certain nostalgia for the days, which came to an end two years ago, when it was run by the two Nicks: Nick Hytner and Nick Starr. Together, they transformed this flagship theatre, offering the world some gloriously entertaining and mega-successful plays, from War Horse to One Man, Two Guvnors. Now at the helm of a brand-new theatre, the Bridge (located next to City Hall on the south side of Tower Bridge), the two Nicks are opening their 900-seat venture with a new comedy about a young German migrant, Read more ...

With mentions of Theresa May, cricket jumpers and DMs, Trump slurs and a host of characters with Northern accents, The Old Vic's return version of Dr Seuss' The Lorax, proves itself to be poles apart from the recent, popular Universal Pictures movie.There are no zany Hollywood tricks here – no reliance on anything other than a strong cast, oodles of imagination and the artistic licence allowed by Dr Seuss that creates a cacophany of colours, sound and kooky characters. The entire script is spoken in rhyme; big song numbers burst out of the poetic verse, and dance steps lurk just Read more ...

Some site-specific theatre feels like a really good fit. You could say, in this case, that it seems like poetic justice. Agatha Christie’s 1953 play, Witness for the Prosecution, used to be a rep standard, and now gets a compelling new production in the echoing surrounds of the Council Chamber at London County Hall, which is situated on the South Bank, next to Westminster Bridge. The drama, which the Queen of Crime adapted from her own short story of the same name (originally published in 1933), centres on the trial of Leonard Vole for the murder of Emily French, a wealthy older woman who has Read more ...

A new baby is like an alien invasion: it blows your mind and it colonises your world. For any couple, parenthood can be both exalting and devastating, with the stress hugging the relationship so tightly that eventually all its lies pop out. In his new play, which opened tonight at the Bush Theatre, Chris Thompson takes this idea and chucks it at a broody gay couple and their surrogate mother: Daniel, a 46-year-old lawyer, and his husband Oliver, a 32-year-old freelancer, are having a baby with their best friend, Priya.As the story begins in their classy Shadwell flat, Priya is due any day, Read more ...

What a profoundly beautiful play is Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. It stands in relation to the earlier, relatively confined A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Rosmersholm as Shakespeare's late romances do to the more claustrophobic tragedies. And with what apparent ease, art concealing art, do director Kwame Kwei-Armah, the Young Vic’s next Artistic Director, and the diamantine new performing version by Elinor Cook transport us in the Donmar Warehouse from a Norwegian fjord in the 1880s to the Caribbean of the 1950s.Nothing is lost of the play's essence, the race issue only brushed in with the Read more ...

In David Ireland's new hour-long two-hander – a co-production between Soho Theatre and west London's Orange Tree – two strangers, Janet and Dermot, meet for a casual hook-up arranged over the internet. The glitch, or at least surprise: she appears dressed as a mouse. That opening gambit won't surprise those who saw Ireland's earlier Royal Court entry Cyprus Avenue, in which protagonist Eric is so convinced his granddaughter is Gerry Adams that he scrawls a beard on her face to prove himself right. And in this considerably more modest entry, Ireland's penchant for Read more ...

A hit on Broadway, David Ives’s steamy two-hander now boasts Natalie Dormer and David Oakes, well-known for their screen work, in its West End cast, with Patrick Marber on directing duties. That plus the tabloid panting over Dormer’s skimpy S&M attire should certainly sell tickets, but Ives’s piece has also gained spikiness from recent interrogation of the casting couch and the murky intertwining of sex and power.Actress Vanda (Natalie Dormer) arrives late to audition for a new play by writer/director Thomas Novachek (Oakes) based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s kinky 1870 novel Venus in Read more ...

Prolific writer Mike Bartlett is the most impressive penman to have emerged in British theatre in the past decade. The trouble is that his work is so uneven. Although he wrote the amazingly imaginative play, Earthquakes in London, and the Shakespearean West End hit, King Charles III, he has also been responsible for the preposterous improbabilities of the second series of the BBC’s Doctor Foster. Is his new play, a three-hour state-of-the-nation epic billed by the Almeida Theatre as the story of one woman searching “for seeds of hope”, a triumph or another trawl through improbability?Albion Read more ...

Since its inception in 1997 Fierce, Birmingham’s International Festival of Live Art & Performance, has championed the work of performance makers not often seen in Britain. The pantheon of body artists under Mark Ball’s era as director included the likes of Franko B, Ron Athey and Kira O’Reilly. Under the helm of previous director duo Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison came experimental European choreographers and theatre-makers such as Eva Meyer-Keller, Kate McIntosh and Lundahl & Seitl. Many of these artists have made significant contributions to the art form but for some reason Read more ...