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

Riverside Studios, London
A marathon achievement for its feat of memory, this performance feels like avant garde cabaret at times

Has the solo star-vehicle as epic monologue theatre reached its peak with Eddie Izzard’s one-woman Hamlet? Isabelle Huppert, Sarah Snook and Andrew Scott have all performed their own turns, of late.

This is, in fact, Izzard’s second such dramatic juggling act. The first was the charmingly performed Great Expectations in which she played every part. But where Dickensian drama suits picaresque characterisation and cute delivery, here Izzard, wrestling with 23 Shakespearean roles on an empty stage, butts up against the limits of the form – or perhaps the limit of her own acting skills, which are badly exposed.

At Riverside Studios in London until 30 June

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.