With Edinburgh creeping ever closer there’s a sense of winding down in London, with far fewer new productions opening than in previous weeks. The Almeida Festival enters its second work with new weak from the TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment). Their last show, Mission Drift, a myth of origins, performed Las Vegas style, was one of the stand-outs of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe and their new piece RoosevElvis dives deeper into the waters of American iconography.
Following the accusations of questionable gender politics – or even, in some places, outright misogyny – that dogged Simon Stephens last play Three Kingdoms (a debate which led to this Exeunt critical four-way), his next project is a new version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House to be directed at the Young Vic by Carrie Cracknell with a cast including Hattie Morahan as Nora.
There’s more Ibsen at Jermyn Street Theatre where Anthony Biggs is directing St John’s Night, an early play loosely based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which has never been seen in the UK before now; and, as Exeunt’s Simon Thomas explains in his preview, “so great a rarity is the work that it’s the only script by the Norwegian writer that’s almost impossible to get hold of in English.”
Robert Chevara presents the first London revival of Vieux Carre, a rarely performed work by Tennessee Williams, at the King’s Head, and following last year’s production of Jason Robert Brown’s Parade at Southwark Playhouse (which impressed many, if not us), director Thom Southerland returns to the venue to stage Jerry Herman’s Mack and Mabel in The Vault.
Following Made in China’s rooftop clarion call Get Stuff Break Free, non zero one will present their new work, You’ll see [me sailing in Antarctica], amid the concrete towers that top the National Theatre. Theatre Re’s The Gambler draws on the experiences of real gambling addicts in a piece combining performance and live music at Jackson’s Lane. Matthew Bourne’s 2002 piece Play Without Words is revived at Sadler’s Wells as part of the of the 25th anniversary celebration of Bourne’s company, New Adventures.
The Yard’s Theatre of Great Britain Festival continues with Siddhartha Bose’s new work, London’s Perverted Children, a poetic collage of nocturnal stories from Hackney, and Dominic Francis’s Younghusband, an exploration of mysticism and inheritance.
Inua Ellams’ latest spoken word piece Knight Watch, a four-part verbal tapestry, is on tour at various outdoor spaces around London and the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond grapples with contemporary themes with Mottled Lines, a response to last year’s London riots by Archie W Maddocks.
The London Literature Festival also enters its second and final week with talks by Mark Haddon (whose Curious Incident will be staged by the National Theatre in August) and the first ever European staging of an unpublished dramatic work by Don DeLillo, The Word For Snow, starring Jasper Britton and directed by Jack McNamara.