National Theatre

‘Jack Absolute Flies Again’ is a very funny play. But it’s not an especially great one, or to be fairer, its greatness is definitely not in proportion to how funny it is. It’s relentlessly chucklesome, but almost aggressively lacking in wider purpose as co-authors Richard Bean – who wrote ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ – and Oliver Chris – who starred in ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ – transpose Sheridan’s 1775 classic comedy ‘The Rivals’ to the romantic goings on in a squadron of RAF pilots staged at an English stately home during the Battle of Britain. There’s maximum focus on the gags – minimum focus on emotional weight or satirical message. In some respects that’s fair: as various fourth wall-breaking characters remind us – most especially Kerry Howard’s hard-bitten maid Lucy – Restoration comedies* are pretty dumb. Dumb and less amusing by modern standards than ‘Jack Absolute’, which maintains the basic structure of the original while amping it up. Thus Caroline Quentin’s Mrs Malaprop still mangles up her words, but a lot more smuttily: at one point she inadvertently describes another character as ‘the cunt of Monte Cristo’. (*There is an extremely strong argument for ‘The Rivals’ being written almost a century too late to be a Restoration comedy, but it’s in the style of, and that’s what ‘Jack Absolute’ actually refers to it as, so whatever). Did I say it’s funny? It’s funny! As is James Corrigan’s Bob Acres, a dopey Australian fighter pilot who the play’s eponymous hero Jack Absolute

Whether or not it’s literally accurate to say that director Simon Godwin and designer Anna Fleischle have come up with a production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ themed around Wes Anderson’s 2014 opus ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, then that’s effectively what they’ve done. Here the goings-on in Shakespeare’s archetypal romcom are relocated to an Art Deco hotel in 1930s Italy, in which the staff sport cute pastels, the women wear an endless succession of chic frocks, suits and headwear, and the quirkiness is dialled up to max. Okay, the sundry soldiers who frequent the Hotel Messina would presumably be soldiers of Mussolini’s fascist government. But it’s whimsical vibes only here (let’s just say it’s an alternate non-fascist Italy where everyone speaks in sixteenth-century English and move on). Crucially, it’s a hoot. Whatever Godwin and Fleischle’s real inspirations, the whole thing looks like a dream and the decision to amp up the various characters’ eccentricities is a smart one. Productions of ‘Much Ado’ can fall into a comfortable pattern of centralising the witty clashes of on-off lovers Beatrice and Benedick as if their sparky repartee was the main point of the whole play. Here, Katherine Parkinson and Jon Heffernan play them as weirdos in a world of oddballs: she’s a dippily diva-ish film-star type, forever mining amusing new intonations and emphases from Shakespeare’s words; he’s a misanthropic loner, an object of amusement to his nominal BFFs Claudio and Don Pedro. Their

Performer-turned-playwright Francesca Martinez’s bold, sprawling investigation of disability starts with a powerful reversal. We're so used to seeing disabled people receiving care. But here, Martinez plays Jess, a therapist with cerebral palsy who’s forever looking after people around her, starting with her vulnerable clients. Bullish alcoholic Aidan (Bryan Dick) doesn’t believe that someone with cerebral palsy could possibly help him, but soon, they build up a witty, teasing rapport. At home, Jess looks after her pregnant lesbian friend Lottie (Crystal Condie), listening as she figures out whether to go back to her partner. But Jess's endless patience is challenged by 21-year-old Poppy (a wonderfully fiery Francesca Mills), who’s fed up with everything disabled people are expected to put up with: especially after her PIP assessment cuts her night-time care, forcing her to go to bed at 9pm in a nappy. Gradually, Poppy chips away at Jess's doormat ways. Why shouldn't disabled people be able to go out partying at night? Why should they have to beg for every crumb of help?  ‘All Of Us’ seethes with righteous anger. It’s huge and ambitious, stretching out to encompass many different kinds of disabled experiences. The main thing these people have in common is that they’re all being screwed over by a government that would rather they didn’t exist. It builds to a climactic confrontation with the local Tory MP who’s totally in thrall to the ideology of austerity, wilfully ignoring t

If the National Theatre under Rufus Norris has steered relatively clear of straight versions of canonical classics by anyone other than Shakespeare, then a massive revival of Arthur Miller’s seminal allegorical drama about the Salem witch trials never goes amiss: there’s not been a really big London revival of ‘The Crucible’ since Yaël Farber’s sturm und drang 2014 Old Vic take.  This one is directed in the Olivier by always worthwhile NT regular Lyndsey Turner in what we’re promised is an ‘urgent new staging’ that will star Brendan Cowell (best known for playing opposite Billie Piper in the Young Vic’s ‘Yerma’) as the play’s troubled hero John Procter, and ‘The Crown’s forever youthful-looking Eric Doherty as Abigail, the ‘possessed’ young woman calling out witchcraft in the small Massachusetts town.

Bush Theatre boss Lynette Linton’s pandemic-delayed NT debut is a rare and welcome opportunity to see African American playwright Pearl Cleage’s 1995 drama. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, it follows four friends whose lives are upended when. a stranger from Alabama arrives. Samira Wiley, Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo, Osy Ikhile, Sule Rimi and Olivier-winning ‘Hamilton’ man Giles Terera star.

Hamed and Hessem Amiri’s book ‘The Boy with Two Hearts’ is a gripping true account of how their family fled a pre-US invasion Afghanistan after their mother spoke out against the Taliban. It details the gruelling journey through Russia and Europe that followed, and their experiences with the NHS after they arrived in the UK with their older brother Hussein, who required urgent surgery to alleviate a life-threatening heart condition. The novel was adapted for the Wales Millennium Centre last year, and now Phil Porter’s Amit Sharma-directed stage version transfers to the National Theatre’s Dorfman with its original cast of Afghan and Iranian performers intact.

The National Theatre’s new-ish deputy Clint Dyer hasn’t actually yet directed much for the NT outside of his ‘Death of England’ trilogy – itself a big undertaking, plus he’s been busy with the Bob Marley musical ‘Get Up, Stand Up’. Here’s his next project, though: the first National Theatre production of ‘Othello’ to be helmed by a Black director; possibly the first Shakespeare play at the National Theatre to be helmed by a Black director. His production of the Bard’s tragic tale of racially charged jealousy and revenge will star Giles Terera in the title role, with Rosy McEwen as Desdemona and Paul Hilton as the villainous Iago.

This all-singing adaptation of the Sleeping Beauty myth that raised a few eyebrows when it was announced in 2021 for being written by NT artistic director Rufus Norris (on lyrics) and his wife Tanya Ronder (book) alongside Jim Fortune (music), with Norris directing. Accusations have ranged from nepotism to the NT being desperately skint, but it seems more likely that after two chaotic years, they needed to pull a reasonably bankable Christmas show out of the hat in markedly less time than it takes to pull the average musical together. So they revisited one Norris revisiting one had made earlier - ‘Hex’ is in fact a reworking of a version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ he did for the Young Vic way back in 2002. As it turned out, ‘Hex’s inaugural run was so disrupted by the first wave of Omicron that it never actually had a press night: what was salvageable was simply counted as a big preview. But it should finally open to press as it returns for the Christmas of 2022.  Casting is TBC, but fingers crossed that some of the original cast – headed by Rosalie Craig, Tamsin Carroll, Kat Ronney and Michael Elcock – return.

April de Angelis’s gentrification satire is part of the huge slate of plays the National Theatre announced in February 2020, that was intended to form its body of work over the next year but have come out in dribs and drabs ever since ‘normal’ programming was restored at the NT from June 2021. Here it finally comes, and it sounds very enjoyable, with Fay Ripley – most famously of ‘Cold Feet’ – starring as the eponymous Kerry, who wears her working-class roots as a badge of honour as she tries to make a success of her tapas restaurant in rapidly fancifying Walthamstow.