After massive TV success in the US, the creator of Gavin & Stacey is about to appear on the London stage. But why do British audiences find him so hard to love?

James Corden is back in the UK and characteristically busy. Last year, the 45-year-old left his job as Los Angeles-based chat show host of The Late Late Show on CBS. A Christmas special is planned for Gavin & Stacey, the acclaimed BBC sitcom he created with co-star Ruth Jones. There’s talk of reviving One Man, Two Guvnors, the National Theatre’s critically lauded hit ­comedy that transferred to Broadway, winning Corden a Tony award in 2012.

And later this month, Corden will appear at London’s Old Vic in a short run of Joe Penhall’s new play, The Constituent, helmed by the ­theatre’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus. Corden’s first stage role since One Man, Two Guvnors, it’s seen as ­something of a departure (a gamble) for Corden – a serious work about the escalating risks of public service in politics.

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© Photograph: NBC/Nathan Congleton/Getty Images

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© Photograph: NBC/Nathan Congleton/Getty Images

It’s a shame the cost of theatre tickets is out of the reach for so many people. Cinema is the cheaper option

A friend started working at the fancy cinema chain Everyman. One of his perks is that he gets free tickets, which can cost over £20 each.

I’ve never been, but apparently it’s a luxury experience: comfy chairs, food and drinks delivered to your seat. Still, £20 feels steep. There are London cinemas where a ticket costs less than a tenner. And surely the point of going to the cinema is to enjoy the film itself rather than the experience of watching it? But when I think about theatre tickets, my complaints dissolve. Some plays charge over £200 for a seat: £20 seems like peanuts.

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© Photograph: Wavebreakmedia/Getty Images/iStockphoto

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© Photograph: Wavebreakmedia/Getty Images/iStockphoto

George MacKay and Léa Seydoux star in a epoch-traversing sci-fi romance, while the latest Star Wars spin-off has a mystery-thriller twist

The Beast
Out now
Léa Seydoux (Blue Is the Warmest Colour) and George MacKay (Femme) star as the couple at the heart of this arthouse sci-fi epic, loosely based on Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle and spanning three time periods, from director Bertrand Bonello (House of Tolerance).

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© Photograph: Carole Bethuel

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© Photograph: Carole Bethuel

The Brazilian artist’s show The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella provokes debate – but, she insists, it doesn’t take a toll on her

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The audience responses to Carolina Bianchi’s startling new stage show have varied. Some have walked out mid-performance. Others, among those who stayed, have broken down in sobs by the end. But the Brazilian artist has also had people send messages of how her performance touched them, how they spent all night discussing it. Normally, she says, “the reactions come slowly”. This is a piece you need time to sit with.

“I know it’s not an easy piece,” Bianchi says. “I think it provokes a lot of debate and conversation … and also I’m not making work that is about being ‘good’ or ‘bad’.”

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© Photograph: Clement Mahoudeau/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Clement Mahoudeau/AFP/Getty Images

Chichester Festival theatre
The performances are strong, but can’t rescue a convoluted adaptation of Jamila Gavin’s award-winning novel about foundlings and orphans sold to criminals for a shilling

This adaptation of Jamila Gavin’s award-winning children’s novel about 18th-century foundlings plays out under an aspic glow. But beneath the handsome, period-drama optics lie ugly Georgian attitudes to poverty and dispossessed children. Orphans are sold for a shilling, babies are buried alive and desperate mothers give up their infants to a criminal posing as a philanthropist’s assistant.

But the potency of this central theme becomes buried itself under a bulging plot and inconsistent pacing. The story revolves around the landed Ashbrook family and interweaves below-stairs drama. Young Alexander Ashbrook (Louisa Binder) wants to pursue a career in music after falling in love with Handel’s compositions but is expected to take over the estate and is disinherited by his father for his disobedience. His fate is tied to the central intrigue of the criminal baby racket, led by the villainous Otis Gardiner (Samuel Oatley).

At Chichester Festival theatre until 15 June

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© Photograph: Manuel Harlan

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© Photograph: Manuel Harlan

Arcola theatre, London
While the costumes are delightful and the characters cheekily drawn, the full epic potential for this cabaret is never fully realised

Welcome to the monstrous cabaret, where the women outsmarted by Odysseus seethe and sing. The Arcola’s basement studio serves as our vengeful trio’s glitter-filled underground cavern. Charybdis, Siren and Scylla take turns performing their stories, gnashing their teeth for fresh blood. “We used to kill,” they croon, “now we cabaret.”

Some of Ismini Papaioannou’s costumes are delightful, with Siren’s white ruff and crinoline cage echoing her charming character and the rich voice of Jazz Jenkins. Our preening host, Charybdis (Hannah van der Westhuysen), is full of mirth and smirking rage, dressed in layers of sea-swirling iridescence. Scylla (Kate Newman), the show’s resident furry, sheds over the carpet and has a coat and matching nipple-tassels made of tattered human hair.

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© Photograph: Sophie Giddens Photography

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© Photograph: Sophie Giddens Photography

Our series on transformative theatrical discoveries continues with the moving 1984 show exploring our buttoned-up approach to mortality

I had been brought up in Newcastle where the RSC used to come for a season every year. I thought theatre was Shakespeare. But this was something else, this was magic.

The story was about all the officialdom and desperate politeness around death, everybody having to pretend they are absolutely fine. It made you laugh, and cry, so hard: Marcello Magni’s dextrous and inimitable clown routine in the office for registering births and deaths. Jos Houben making a flickering fire with his fingers. A scene by the grave with them slowly, sadly, sinking as they walked away across the churchyard to leave. Simon McBurney alone at the grave at a loss for words. We lost brilliant Marcello in 2022 and so A Minute Too Late now feels ever more poignant.

Blizzard is at 59E59 theatres, New York, 12-30 June.

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The 2018 hit about a cleaner who dreams of becoming a star in Nashville will begin theatre run in Edinburgh

Wild Rose, the award-winning movie about a Glasgow country singer, is to be turned into a musical. Writer Nicole Taylor is adapting her 2018 screenplay and working with John Tiffany, the director of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The show will begin at the Royal Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh in March 2025, with further dates expected to be announced.

Taylor adapted the recent Netflix hit One Day, and her other small-screen credits include Three Girls, The Nest and The C Word. She said she always believed in the dramatic potential of Wild Rose: “I held on to the rights, even though as a first-time writer I had no negotiating position and I’d never written a word for theatre. I knew it would take theatrical form at some point.”

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© Photograph: entone group

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© Photograph: entone group

Bren Pointer says the American pianist Keith Jarrett was right to disallow photography during his performances. Plus letters from Barry and Joy Norman, Meirion Bowen and Joan Lewis

Your editorial about mobile phones in concert halls reminded me of the very strong stance taken by Keith Jarrett, the American jazz and classical pianist, who insisted that no photography was allowed during any of his performances (The Guardian view on phones in concert halls: what engages some enrages others, 19 May). This was expressed before the concert by the promoters and by Jarrett’s manager.

Sadly, on many occasions, a flash from a phone in the audience would happen and subsequently either the concert would come to an abrupt end or there would be a lengthy delay before the performance would resume. The wishes of the musician were not respected.

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© Photograph: Mafalda/Alamy

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© Photograph: Mafalda/Alamy

The Winter’s Tale is retold with a virtual reality plot set in Silicon Valley and hardly any lines from the original, staged at a bold Latvian theatre elevating English talent

John Malkovich is directing Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, there are dramas by Dennis Kelly and Duncan Macmillan, Sarah Ruhl adapts Eurydice, and The Play That Goes Wrong is packed to the rafters. You might well be surveying London-wide theatre listings but this is the singular programme at Dailes theatre in Riga, Latvia’s capital where, alongside some American heavyweights, British talents are at the forefront this season.

Among them are writer-director Jeff James and designer Rosanna Vize with an eye-popping version of The Winter’s Tale, commissioned by Dailes’s artistic director, Viesturs Kairišs. It opens with Hermione pleasuring herself to VR porn, reimagines Bohemia as a deadly video game and turns theatre’s most famous stage direction into the supporting character of a hot-headed panda.

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© Photograph: Marcis Baltskars

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© Photograph: Marcis Baltskars

Norwich Theatre Royal
Brew revisits the car crash at the beginning of his ballet career that killed his three companions and left him paraplegic

Not quite dance, not quite theatre, An Accident/A Life is more like a multimedia, queasily hallucinatory staging of a story that puts the body of a dancer at its centre. That dancer is Marc Brew, and the story revisits the traumatic turning point in his life when, at the beginning of his ballet career, the car he was in was hit by a drunk driver. All three of his companions died; Brew survived but was left paraplegic, aged 20. The story he tells is harrowing, touching, brutal and tender, but what makes this feel like a work of almost classical tragedy – you will absolutely experience fear, pity and catharsis – is its notably unclassical treatment of the staging, the body and its voice.

The set is simple, symmetrical, and devastatingly effective: two screens flank a car that first sits impassively on the ground and is later hoisted up to hang perilously above the stage, like a traumatic memory that defines everything around it. Two figures in crash dummy costumes serve both as supplementary characters (clinicians, nurses, even alter egos of Brew’s fragmented self) and as stagehands, moving around bits of set, or using hand-held cameras to relay scenes on to the screens.

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© Photograph: Filip Van Roe

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© Photograph: Filip Van Roe

An ex-ENO artistic head and the director who staged War Horse working on a contemporary opera about drug addiction crisis

The opioid crisis is to be the subject of a new opera by a former artistic director of English National Opera (ENO) and the man behind the stage adaptation of War Horse.

The Galloping Cure would tell “a lurid tale of the greed surrounding the tragedy of the opioid crisis”, said Tom Morris, its director.

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© Photograph: Paul Kolnik/ASSOCIATED PRESS

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© Photograph: Paul Kolnik/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Duke of York’s, Shakespeare’s Globe; Young Vic, London
Jamie Lloyd’s youthfully intense staging gives us a Juliet for the ages; Michelle Terry’s king rises above the disability row; and a Broadway musical’s European premiere rocks but doesn’t soar

The theatrical air has lately been heavily charged with argument. Some of it horrible. Soon after announcing that Francesca Amewudah-Rivers had been cast as Juliet, alongside Tom Holland’s Romeo, the Jamie Lloyd Company put out a statement explaining that she had been subjected to a “barrage” of racism and misogyny online. Strong support for Amewudah-Rivers, who is black, came quickly, in an open letter with more than 800 signatories. But what really crushes the pathetic bullies is her performance. She is one of the best Juliets I have seen.

And what a production of Romeo & Juliet from shake-them-by-the-scruff-of-their-neck Lloyd, constantly turning expectations inside out. It is a marvellously young cast – Freema Agyeman’s cracklingly vivid Nurse is no clucking matron, but more like Anita in West Side Story; in his stage debut, Daniel Quinn-Toye brings wide-eyed pathos to unfortunate Paris – yet the predominant note is not exuberance but intensity. There is no clambering up balconies: some of the play is spoken without movement. Fights are blacked out (Jon Clark’s lighting is low, dusky) so that there is nothing between the flashpoint and the result: blood-drenched vests and an inert figure. There is no declamation, much intimate whispering (everyone is miked), yet never silence: sound design wizards Ben and Max Ringham send a drone, a note of constant low-level anxiety, throughout the action, sometimes quickening the alarm with a drumbeat.

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© Photograph: Marc Brenner

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© Photograph: Marc Brenner

The actor on an electrifying production at the Old Vic, her favourite TV show since Succession and one of the best plates of spaghetti she’s ever had

Born in Chennai, India in 1987, Anjana Vasan grew up in Singapore before relocating to the UK to study drama. She has starred in films including Mogul Mowgli and Wicked Little Letters; her stage credits include Tanika Gupta’s production of A Doll’s House (Lyric Hammersmith, 2019) and Rebecca Frecknall’s A Streetcar Named Desire (Almeida, 2022-23), for which she won an Olivier award and an Evening Standard theatre award. Vasan has been nominated for Baftas for her TV work in Black Mirror and Nida Manzoor’s comedy We Are Lady Parts; series two returns to Channel 4 on 30 May.

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© Photograph: David Reiss

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© Photograph: David Reiss

The Mad Max: Fury Road heroine gets an origin story, while Channel 4’s Muslim female punk band returns for a second gig

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Out now
One of the year’s most anticipated movies sees director George Miller return to the post-apocalyptic world he and Byron Kennedy first created in 1979 with Mad Max. Both spin-off and prequel to 2015’s Fury Road, this new adventure unveils the origins of Imperator Furiosa, with Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role.

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© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

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© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

Royal Court, London
Emma D’Arcy, Ben Whishaw and Kayla Meikle narrate and act out Nelson’s dark meditations from their own film-making booths in Katie Mitchell’s intriguing experiment

Maggie Nelson’s book-length meditation on the colour blue comprises 240 short, non-sequitur paragraphs that flit from the loss of a lover to the injury of a friend and the protagonist’s descent into depression, along with abstract reflections on colour.

It is fitting that such an experimental text should get experimental treatment in its staging. The director, Katie Mitchell, uses microphones, cameras and screens to turn it into theatre as overt and contemporaneous film-making.

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© Photograph: Camilla Greenwell

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© Photograph: Camilla Greenwell

Jazz hands and big ballads are out and ‘writing about real emotions’ is in, as a new wave of musicals exploring body issues, bullying and queer identity hits the capital’s biggest stages. What’s behind this taste for introspection?

A new breed of musical theatre is rising amid the jukebox singalongs and well-worn classics of the West End stage. It is the mental health musical, an all-singing, all-dancing genre bringing identity and personal crises to the fore. This means many new musicals are preceded by trigger warnings that the performance to come may feature suicidal teens and sexual assault such as in the case of Spring Awakening; bullying and queer identity in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie; high school violence in Heathers the Musical;, and even a bipolar mother undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in Next to Normal.

How did such dark, introspective material establish itself in the West End and why is it gaining such traction with audiences? Musicals are, after all, predicated on song and dance, not exactly conducive to explorations of difficult and intimate mental health issues, especially within the modern British tradition led by the big, balladic sounds of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh’s West End shows.

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© Photograph: Marc Brenner

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© Photograph: Marc Brenner

Duke of York’s theatre, London
The Spider-Man star and his spikily charismatic Juliet, giving a heroic performance after all the abuse she faced, are perfectly cast in Jamie Lloyd’s turbo-stylised production

It is not often that a celluloid superhero transforms into a tragic hero before our eyes. Tom Holland navigates the transition from Marvel’s Spider-Man to Shakespeare’s Romeo smoothly, his wan, sinewy lover instantly at home on stage (in spite of the distracting audience whoop when he gets there).

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers brings her own spiky charisma as Juliet, all the more heroic given the backdrop of social media racial abuse she has received. Holland and Amewudah-Rivers are perfectly cast, wired with an awkwardly cool teen energy, she a mix of innocence and streetwise steel, he jittering with sweaty-palmed earnestness.

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© Photograph: Marc Brenner

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© Photograph: Marc Brenner

Belgrade theatre, Coventry
Siana Bangura’s play follows three west African women in Coventry who are cajoled into the water – and find themselves surfacing from grief

They say water has the power to heal. So, in Siana Bangura’s new play, three west African women dealing with grief and change turn up to their local pool in Coventry for weekly swimming classes. Ama has convinced her two friends from church, Blessing and Fatu, to “think about what’s good” for their bodies and give lessons a go. What she hasn’t told them is that she’s signed them up to take part in a group open-water relay race.

This production, directed by Madeleine Kludje, follows the women through their learning process, but it runs at the pace of a slowly flowing stream. Scene changes are swollen out, unnecessarily; there are segments that could be deleted en masse. The swimming instructor Danny is affectionately played by Sam Baker-Jones with a thick Brummie accent, but he feels like half a character, his story unfinished.

Swim, Aunty, Swim! is at Belgrade theatre, Coventry, to 1 June

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© Photograph: Nicola Young

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© Photograph: Nicola Young

Sherman theatre, Cardiff
Conceptually brilliant, with complex characters and a fearless cast, Azuka Oforka’s debut play is a remarkable examination of women under colonialism with contemporary resonance

The Women of Llanrumney is a blistering full-length debut play by Azuka Oforka. Conceptually dexterous and containing four astute and fearless performances, it marks Oforka as an urgent and important voice in Welsh theatre.

While the Llanrumney sugar estate in St Mary, Jamaica, was real, the narrative of Oforka’s historical play reimagines it under the ownership of the unwed and independent Elizabeth Morgan (Nia Roberts). Housekeeper Annie and her pregnant daughter Cerys (Suzanne Packer and Keziah Joseph) are enslaved in her service, but when the sugar crop begins to fail safety becomes brutally conditional for all three.

The Women of Llanrumney is at Sherman theatre, Cardiff, until 1 June

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© Photograph: An Pinto/Ana Pinto

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© Photograph: An Pinto/Ana Pinto

Soho theatre, London
The comic traces a path from Arizona to Manhattan with a musical set that never quite lands

The comedian as self-fascinated ego-monster is quite the pose these days. Kate Berlant, Leo Reich and Catherine Cohen recently entered that territory where self-disclosure blurs into grotesque solipsistic caricature. Now Greta Titelman follows them with a show that found some success at last year’s Edinburgh fringe. Like Berlant and Cohen an alumnus of hipster comedy Search Party, Titelman’s hour professes to recap her life story, from bullied nine-year-old dork to grownup Manhattanite bludgeoning down her trauma with joyless threesomes and narcotics.

It works, moment to moment: Titelman is a mesmeric performer, her delivery swooping and soaring from whispers and butter-wouldn’t-melt sing-songs to shrieking into the faces of the front row. The show is top-loaded with the sweet-little-girl shtick, as Titelman plays the blushing junior ambushed by parental discord and a friend at boarding school introducing her to opioids. She is the faux-naif in these scenes, wide-eyed at the discovery of her flair for drug-taking, blithely blackmailing her adulterous dad for a Hervé Leger dress.

At Soho theatre, London, until 25 May

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

A new musical regarding the life and works of Tom Lehrer (still alive - previously, an extremely comprehensive post by filthy light thief) debuts in London next week. It is sold out, but the playwright Francis Beckett writes about the effect Lehrer has had on his life and his unsuccessful attempts to contact him while doing research - ultimately indirectly providing the musical's title.

Playwright Zinnie Harris and composer Louis Barabbas’s adaptation of the novel will open at Leeds Playhouse and tour in 2025

Neil Gaiman’s award-winning novella Coraline is to be turned into a musical that will tour the UK in 2025. The children’s fable, which found a new audience 15 years ago as a stop-motion animation by Henry Selick, has been adapted by playwright Zinnie Harris and composer Louis Barabbas.

Harris fell in love with Gaiman’s dark fantasy when reading it to her children and quickly saw its potential for the stage. Over a 12-year period, she has developed the script with James Brining, artistic director of Leeds Playhouse. They recruited Barabbas, the Skye-based frontman of the Bedlam Six, to write songs that Harris described as “dark, spangly, clever, quirky and beautifully melodic”.

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© Photograph: Photo Credit: Courtesy of Focus

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© Photograph: Photo Credit: Courtesy of Focus

Shakespeare’s Globe, London
Michelle Terry portrays the king as a playfully antic sociopath in a lively production full of effective performances

Has there ever been a more contested Richard III? Michelle Terry’s self-casting as Shakespeare’s “rudely stamp’d” king has led to an explosion of anger, with charges against the Globe’s artistic director of “cripping up” and taking opportunity away from disabled actors who might more authentically play the part of the would-be king.

There is a legitimate conversation to be had on whether actors should be free to play any characters, irrespective of identity, or if that abstracted ideal is disingenuous in the face of real-world inequalities. But it is irrelevant here because Terry’s Richard is not rudely stamp’d at all, though he is determinately villainous.

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© Photograph: Marc Brenner

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© Photograph: Marc Brenner

Fall, who currently runs Theatre Royal Stratford East, will succeed Kwame Kwei-Armah in January

The Young Vic, one of London’s foremost theatres, has appointed Nadia Fall as its new artistic director, succeeding Kwame Kwei-Armah. Fall, who currently runs Theatre Royal Stratford East, will join the organisation in January and also become the Young Vic’s joint chief executive alongside Lucy Davies.

Fall said she was thrilled to be returning to the theatre “where I was first taken into the fold as a young student director”. She said the Young Vic was “not afraid to ask the difficult questions, and it’s particularly exciting to me that its audiences have an appetite for that provocation”.

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© Photograph: Peter Searle/Photo by Peter Searle

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© Photograph: Peter Searle/Photo by Peter Searle

A year after the singer’s death, Katori Hall – whose musical is now also touring – says the show is like ‘one last concert’ for fans

She is still celebrated as the queen of rock’n’roll but, one year after Tina Turner’s death aged 83, the barnstorming singer’s legacy includes a “fierce transparency” about her trauma, said the writer of the bio-musical Tina.

Katori Hall met Turner many times at the star’s home while writing the book for the musical, which opened in 2018 and has become the longest-running show ever at the Aldwych theatre in London.

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© Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns

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© Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns

When she first went moshing, Rachel Ní Bhraonáin couldn’t stop giggling. Now she has made a dance show about the ‘gorgeous community’ she encountered

Walking into a basement club in Camden, the sound of the guitar hits you in the gut, along with the singer’s full-throated, death-metal growl. In the middle of the crowd is a circle of thrashing bodies, hair flying, limbs everywhere, bouncing off each other. The mosh pit. “I got flung about five feet earlier tonight but people pick you back up,” one of them, Jake, tells me. “It’s a good way to get out the stress of the week.”

“Friendly violence,” is how gig-goers James and Angelina describe the energy of the pit. “Achy feet, chafing, people’s sweat dripping from the ceiling,” adds their friend Sam wryly. “It’s not altogether pleasant, but it’s just what you’re compelled to do when you hear the music.”

Mosh is at Epic Studios, Norwich, 23-25 May. Norfolk & Norwich festival runs until 26 May.

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© Photograph: Szymon Lazewski

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© Photograph: Szymon Lazewski

Theatre Royal Plymouth
Drew McOnie’s version of the Oscar-winner is a visual treat, with expressive physical movement, lustrous dance routines – and an irrepressibly waggy puppet dog

Lightning has struck twice for Michel Hazanavicius’s irresistible 2011 homage to Hollywood silent cinema. The Oscar winner is now reframed as an effervescent and delightfully inventive stage show, which anticipates a longer life after a short run in Plymouth. Directed, choreographed and co-adapted by Drew McOnie, it retains the old-school charm and wit but goes beyond a retread, makes unexpected additions and more emphatically celebrates the transition to the talkies.

McOnie combines theatre and prerecorded film throughout a production that unfolds within set designer Christopher Oram’s glowing art deco proscenium arch and has a superbly integrated video design by Ash J Woodward. As in Hazanavicius’s near-wordless original, the narrative is driven through title cards, almost constant music (newly composed by Simon Hale, with standards from the era), distinctive Variety-style headlines and expressive physical gesture.

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© Photograph: Mark Senior

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© Photograph: Mark Senior

The case of a German ballet director who attacked a critic with faeces has loosely inspired a satire about the relationships between creators and critics

Among the spikier offerings at this year’s Theatertreffen, the annual festival of drama in Berlin, is a play whose dramatis personae may ring familiar. There is an angry ballet director, a female reviewer who gives his show a critical mauling and an adjacent dachshund. Their paths converge in the same lurid way as happened in real life last year, when the head of Hanover State Opera’s ballet company, Marco Goecke, attacked dance critic Wiebke Hüster with dog excrement in response to a negative review.

Die Hundekot-Attacke (“the dog poop attack”) is conceived by Dutch company Wunderbaum and devised by an actors’ collective from Jena. The play has a plot that features a group of actors from Jena devising a provocative play based on a real-life hundekot-attacke, in a desperate bid to draw critics to their provincial theatre – a big idea from a small-town ensemble.

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© Photograph: © Joachim Dette

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© Photograph: © Joachim Dette

Aviva Studios, Manchester
Daisy Johnson adapts a 1970 TV play into a poetic and disturbing exploration of childbirth’s physical and emotional impact

John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast is one of those episodes of Play for Today that is rooted in its era. It is a quintessentially 1970s mix of stagey acting and on-the-nose social issues (cohabitation, contraception, abortion), spiced with a creepy infusion of English folklore. It is idiosyncratic and unnerving, and you can see why they call it a precursor to The Wicker Man. The plot follows Norah Palmer, a TV writer who retreats to the countryside where the locals’ interest in paganism seems to go beyond the harvest festival. All evidence suggests they are after her firstborn.

The episode is little enough known to allow the collaborators of new company Music, Art, Activism and Theatre (MAAT) to take it in their own direction. Writer Daisy Johnson is less interested in the cultish horror than in what these folk traditions say about women and motherhood. If the name Norah reflects the proto-feminist Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, here – with the story stripped to its earthy fundamentals – the character has as much in common with the transgressive leads in Strindberg’s Miss Julie or Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. On stage, the woodsman Robin (Tyler Cameron) is a voiceless object of pure lust, while Nora (Maxine Peake) follows her primal sexual instincts.

At Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 26 May

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Set for revival at the RSC, this perfectly structured revenge comedy has an earthy vitality that no aristo or scholar could have created

I have a question for those theatrical luminaries (and I’m looking at you Sir Mark and Sir Derek) who doubt the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Do they seriously believe that a capricious aristo such as the Earl of Oxford or a legalistic scholar like Francis Bacon could have written The Merry Wives of Windsor? In case they have forgotten, this brilliant comedy – about to be revived by the RSC – shows the middle classes getting their revenge on a knightly predator, Sir John Falstaff. It could only have been written by someone who understood the intricacies of a close-knit, provincial community.

What strikes me about the play is its quintessential Englishness, and you see this in myriad ways. One is in the earthy vitality of the language. There is a classic example when Anne Page, offered the prospect of marriage to a preposterous Frenchman, says: “Alas, I had rather be set quick i’th’earth / And bowled to death with turnips.” It is an extraordinarily vivid image and one of the play’s rare excursions into verse: 90% of it is in prose. But the language throughout has a localised vigour that stems from a writer steeped in English life. At one point Mistress Ford urges her servants to take the buck-basket containing Falstaff and “carry it among the whisters in Datchet Mead.” The “whisters” were the bleachers of linen who could be seen by any English river bank including the Avon.

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon
The RSC’s European premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer prize-winning play tailors its intriguing characters a little too neatly

Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey’s opening season as co-directors of the RSC continues with a second first. After “a carnival adaptation” of Hanif Kureshi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia, co-written by the author along with director Emma Rice (and reviewed by my colleague Susannah Clapp), is this European premiere of Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer prize-winning play, English.

Anisha Fields’s set is, unmistakably, a classroom: a frosted-glass wall, neon strip lighting, metal-legged tables, plastic bucket chairs and a whiteboard next to a door. Into the space strides Marjan. Beneath the heading “TOEFL – Test of English as a Foreign Language”, she writes: “English Only”, then underlines the words, once, twice, three times. Lightly played by Nadia Albina, this is deliciously funny. As the action progresses, however, the imperative instruction becomes a motor for identity crises and personality clashes among the characters (who speak English throughout: fluently when communicating in their native Farsi; haltingly in the target language).

English is at the Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 1 June, then transfers to the Kiln, London, 5-29 June

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© Photograph: Richard Davenport

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© Photograph: Richard Davenport

The novelist on the continuing relevance of Ibsen, the joyful quilt art of Faith Ringgold and where to find British scotch eggs in New York

Born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1966, author Claire Messud studied at Yale University and the University of Cambridge. Her first novel, 1995’s When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner award; her 2006 novel The Emperor’s Children was longlisted for the Booker prize. Messud is a senior lecturer on fiction at Harvard University and has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, literary critic James Wood; they have two children. Her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, is published on 23 May by Fleet.

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© Photograph: Rick Friedman/The Observer

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© Photograph: Rick Friedman/The Observer

The actor and his son on fun memories, toxic masculinity and Saltburn spoilers

Born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, in 1974, Shaun Dooley’s acting career began on soap operas such as Coronation Street and EastEnders. Now a leading actor on film and TV, Shaun has mastered the art of complex characters and had roles in Broadchurch, Doctor Who, It’s a Sin, Black Mirror and as Michael Rudkin in Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He is married with three daughters and a son, Jack, 19, who is a camera trainee and a student at Manchester University. Shaun performs in Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California at the Harold Pinter theatre until 15 June.

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© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

John Krasinski and Ryan Reynolds go family-friendly in their new imaginary-friends comedy, while the singer swaps introspection for lust on her long-awaited new album

If
Out now
In what has to be one of the more enviable showbiz lives, John Krasinski has played Jim in The Office, married Emily Blunt, and written and directed acclaimed horror franchise A Quiet Place. Now he turns his hand to family entertainment, writing and directing this part-animated fantasy about imaginary friends made visible with a little help from Ryan Reynolds and Steve Carell.

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© Photograph: Photo Credit: Jonny Cournoyer/Jonny Cournoyer

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© Photograph: Photo Credit: Jonny Cournoyer/Jonny Cournoyer