Harold Pinter theatre, London
This Ranevskaya feels of our time but Conor McPherson’s plain-speaking adaptation, co-starring Stephen Mangan, doesn’t always hit you emotionally

There have been several starry Madame Ranevskayas in recent times. The prodigal Russian landowner, returning to her beloved estate and cherry orchard, was searingly played by Nina Hoss in 2024 and less memorably by Helen Hunt this summer. Now here is Kristin Scott Thomas, who brings a hard-edged modernity that you believe in. She feels of our time, despite the references to dachas and peasants, and could be an upper-middle-class Chelsea mother or minister’s wife, stewing in regret and an unfulfilled life.

Ian Rickson’s elegantly directed production uses a plain-speaking new adaptation by Conor McPherson. The pair have previous form on Chekhov, from six years ago, when they brought a pitch-perfect version of Uncle Vanya to the West End. This too is handsome and engaging, the crumbling drawing room of Chloe Lamford’s set design bearing damp patches and a faded grandeur.

London film festival
McKellen and Allam reprise their roles for the film version of Ben Weatherill’s play in a star-filled bittersweet comedy about finding love later in life

There is a tender sweetness to this silver-years romance of new experiences and new ideas – and also some sugary sentimentality, an autumnal woodwind score telling us how to feel, and a bit of sitcom-cartoony characterisation in the all-star gallery of supporting turns. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. But the movie’s easy-going good nature wins out – and there’s a terrific contribution from Joanna Lumley, playing Belinda, an elegant woman poignantly suffering from early onset dementia. Screenwriter Martin Sherman adapts the two-hander stage-play by Ben Weatherill in which Roger Allam and Ian McKellen originally starred. They return here for the expanded movie version and Sean Mathias once again directs.

Allam plays Frank, a retired history teacher whose wife died of cancer a few short years ago (Belinda is his sister-in-law) and who now likes to walk his dog Toffee on Hampstead Heath. McKellen is Percy, an academic sociologist and climate scientist who can be found there too, with his dog Bruno. Percy is rather acrimoniously separated from his now ex-partner, a waspish and querulously self-pitying figure gamely played by Stephen Fry.

Shakespeare’s bloody revenge-fest is full of horror and grotesquerie but the camaraderie of performing it with a youth theatre had an upbeat effect

Titus Andronicus has to be among William Shakespeare’s worst plays. In fact TS Eliot called it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written”. Yet it holds a very special place in my heart. It’s a bloody revenge-fest in which each act of violence is more grotesque than the last. Titus Andronicus returns from war with “barbarous” Tamora, “Queen of the Goths”, as his prisoner. She stealthily proceeds to kill and destroy his family, and when he discovers this, he murders her sons and serves them up to her in a pie. The play ends with gudgeons of fake blood and a sea of carnage. In Shakespeare’s day it was a huge hit, a kind of slasher film of the 16th century.

Plays are very powerful things and I have spent my life watching them and writing them. Some have been revelatory but none has affected me like Titus Andronicus. It was the first play, outside of school, that I was ever in – so I suppose this is about the transformative power of youth theatre.

Audiences in Manchester will be asked to wear smart glasses for An Ark, which debuted in New York this year

Ian McKellen will star in a groundbreaking new play that gets its UK premiere in Manchester next spring. But the veteran actor will not set foot on stage.

The Lord of the Rings star is taking part in An Ark, a “mixed reality” play that had its debut in New York earlier this year. Theatregoers are asked to wear smart glasses, which project the actors into the room.

As the Oscar-winning Stasi surveillance film hits the stage, Knightley and co-star Luke Thompson talk about the paranoia at its heart, the cost of theatre tickets nowadays – and their fury at ringtones in the stalls

Unpacking assorted tubs of carrot sticks and salad, Keira Knightley winces apologetically. “I just realised I’ve got very crunchy food,” she says. How apropos that she should consider the impact that her lunch might have on my audio recording when we are here to discuss The Lives of Others, a new play in which the characters are divided between the spies and the spied-upon.

Based on the Oscar-winning 2006 film and set in East Berlin in 1984, the play stars Knightley as Christa-Maria, a theatre actor in a relationship with a playwright, Georg, played by Luke Thompson. Earwigging on them is Wiesler (Stephen Dillane), the Stasi officer whose principles are gradually challenged and weakened by his round-the-clock exposure to this cultured couple.

Battersea Arts Centre, London
Women up for a role as Chekhov’s aspiring actor navigate their meetings with a needling director in a tense show

Smile. Introduce yourself. Say you’re such a big fan. Now do whatever he tells you. These are the unspoken rules the women follow as they take turns auditioning in Caroline Williams’ discomforting, rage-fuelled production about men and power and rotting winged roadkill.

The women are auditioning for the role of Nina, the aspiring actor in Chekhov’s The Seagull, in an experimental production directed by sombrely pretentious wunderkind Goran (a brooding Rowan Polonski). Using live-feed cameras in his show, he is the type of director to dismiss the need for an intimacy coordinator while claiming credit for having one in the room.

As she leaves the Traitors castle to star in The Pelicot Trial and receive a lifetime achievement award, the actor has highlighted ‘a loss of regional identity’ caused by funding pressures on UK theatres

There has been “a loss of regional identity” in the stories on stages around the UK due to the challenging circumstances facing theatres, according to Julie Hesmondhalgh.

The actor, who last week was the fourth contestant to leave The Celebrity Traitors, observed that for financial reasons regional theatres are increasingly making co-productions with other venues. This can lead to a “generic” product, she said, rather than a show that specifically says something about the local area.

Peter Flannery’s 90s TV drama classic is getting a theatre reworking in Newcastle. The director and cast talk about doing justice to its themes of scandal and decay – and emulating its star-making actors

In a small room at the top of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Live theatre, four actors are bringing to life the principal characters from one of British television’s best-loved dramas. Sitting around a table strewn with coffee cups, water bottles and annotated scripts, Tosker and Geordie have been boozing in a nightclub and weighing up their chances of pulling. Mary and Nicky have been arguing about whether they have a future together.

The scenes are from a new stage version of Our Friends in the North, the landmark nine-episode series first broadcast in 1996 on BBC Two. Set against a backdrop of Labour politics and police corruption, it charted 30 years in the lives of four working-class geordies and made stars of Mark Strong, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Christopher Eccleston. It was a hit with critics and viewers, won awards and regularly makes “greatest ever” lists.

The production marks the Hollywood director’s first play written for the stage, which he will also direct

Sacha Baron Cohen will headline Quentin Tarantino’s play The Popinjay Cavalier when it premieres on the West End in London in March 2027.

The production marks the Hollywood director’s first work written for the stage – which he will also direct.

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Gayle Rankin is funny, sharp-tongued and sexually forthright as Vicky Featherstone’s production ditches 1930s starchiness for the bohemian avant garde

Jean Brodie has entered the classroom of Mr Lowther (Brian Ferguson). She tells the music teacher she will not be a distraction. “Proceed as if I wasn’t here,” she says.

Yeah, right. Nothing can proceed as if Jean Brodie was not there. Played by Gayle Rankin in a drape-sleeved top and figure-hugging leather skirt, she is impossible to ignore. Chloe Lamford’s dust-pink set is a little bit lecture theatre, an awful lot neo-classical staircase; Rankin floats across it like an exotic moth: colourful, distractable, ever present.

Richmond theatre, London
Jump scares, flying furniture and psychological unravelling hurtle towards a climax as a trio of guests investigate supernatural goings on at an abandoned mansion

There aren’t many productions that have the audience screaming within seconds of curtain up. But this is an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s chilling 1959 novel, which Stephen King deemed “as nearly perfect ­­­a haunted-house tale as I have ever read”. It has some seriously spooky shoes to fill.

There is certainly the heart-quickening rumble of threat throughout (even terror, for some – the person in front of me spent the whole performance clutching their neighbour, muttering “No, no, no, I do not like this at all”). This is largely thanks to slick, inventive stagecraft from director Martin Constantine. As a trio of guests arrives at the abandoned Hill House ­– invited by Dr Montague to investigate its rumoured supernatural affliction ­– a soundscape of unsettling music, creaky hinges and unidentified thuds accompanies an intensifying stream of jump scares. Bulbs blow, blankets hover, menacing scrawls appear on walls, and furniture slides about unaided – a disquieting suggestion that even the set changes are the work of ghosts.

Feted for cooking up shows that can be mouthwatering as well as thought-provoking, the artist discusses his fusion of South Korean and European culture

When I meet Jaha Koo in Oslo, where he has just been honoured with the prestigious International Ibsen award, I hand him a congratulatory packet of Haribo. The alternative would be a jar of kimchi but one of the many things you learn from Koo’s captivating theatre shows is that air travel and fermented vegetables can be a disastrous combo. When he moved to Berlin from South Korea with 10kg of his grandma’s finest kimchi, it became “bloated like a dead whale” and exploded on his balcony. His new neighbours were unimpressed.

In Koo’s current touring production, Haribo Kimchi, he examines how this unlikely fusion of two foods represents his cultural identity. He does so while preparing an onstage banquet for two lucky audience members. Despite spending many years in Europe, where Haribo gummies originated around a century ago, Koo still finds himself considered foremost as Korean by Europeans. But when he returns to his original homeland he is not always seen as Korean either.

Royal Court theatre, London
A Black British woman traces her family’s enslaved past in Joy Nesbitt’s supernaturally charged play

Joy Nesbitt’s fantastically chilling play is both a ghost story and a reckoning with the undocumented history of enslaved people. It takes us from present-day America into the past, towards the exact moment when slavery was abolished.

A white couple has turned their South Carolina plantation into a holiday rental. People come for celebrations and weddings, we hear. It is tantamount to slave-plantation tourism, says Talulah (Jodie Campbell), a Black British woman who has traced her family line to this spot. Talulah is trying to channel her descendant Ginnie (Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ) through the ritual practice of “conjuring” – making contact is a way to fill in the gaps of her family’s enslaved past.

Jeremy Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg in Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network, and the Last One Laughing star reckons with divorce in her new standup tour

The Social Reckoning
Out now
The David Fincher-directed The Social Network has only come to seem more canny over time, with the site co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg being held responsible for all manner of social ills. In this sequel from Aaron Sorkin (this time directing and writing) based on the incidents around the 2021 leak of internal Facebook memos, Zuck is embodied not by Jesse Eisenberg but Jeremy Strong.

Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester
Matthew Dunster’s disruptive reinvention of the tragedy merges two roles for its star and at times enters Game of Thrones territory

The TV series Succession was partly modelled on King Lear, the family name Roy derived from the monarchic French roi. Returning the compliment, Matthew Dunster’s production centralises dynastic dynamics among the young as they plot around a splintering figurehead.

The reading is supported by a modern setting – jeans, car keys and handguns for hessian, horses and swords – on an Anna Fleischle set of spangly strings variously dividing the stage into a nightclub, England and France, dungeons and, in the storm scene, serving as shower curtains to keep theatregoers dry.

Barbican theatre, London
With a dual narrative set in Tokyo and a world of dreams, Philippe Decouflé’s epic production is as bewitching as its balletic unicorns

How to stage Haruki Murakami’s epic, dual-narrative novel without leaving the audience in a muddle? Director-choreographer Philippe Decouflé goes big, filling the enormous Barbican stage with a kaleidoscope of dream worlds for Ako Takahashi’s adaptation. It could have become a scramble of stories and inquiries into memory, technological advances in society and the imagination. Instead, it is turned into one long immaculate coup de théâtre.

There are two versions of the protagonist, Watashi (Tatsuya Fujiwara) – one is in Tokyo, the other in a world comprising dreams. The city is noirish while the latter is beautiful but dangerous, with a complicated storyline involving the sundering of humans from their shadows, a walled city, roaming animals and a professor (Narushi Ikeda) who collects their skulls to channel past experiences through sound.

Widespread blackouts have become increasingly common in Cuba since the US imposed energy sanctions in January. Outages frequently surpass 24 hours as the ageing grid fails. The Impulso theatre group has had to adapt as power cuts pose severe challenges for the performing arts

Tom Stoppard theatre, London
Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo leads the grief-stricken 90s musical about friends living under the threat of Aids

Is Rent one of the musical greats? It’s a forever fan favourite – this new production extended its run even before the official opening – and its origin story holds a special place in theatre-kid hearts. Jonathan Larson, Rent’s creator, died just before the off-Broadway premiere in 1996, aged 35 – a poignant echo of its raggle-taggle bohemians in New York, living fast and fearing death will come before their time.

This production is developed by director Luke Sheppard (Paddington: The Musical) from his version at Manchester’s Hope Mill theatre. With onstage seating circling the space, Sheppard cradles the piece in community, knitting together the story’s hopeful vagabonds. Actors watch between scenes, harmonising and dancing in their chairs. The cast even form something close to a prayer circle for the imperishable Seasons of Love.

As we approach the centenary of equal franchise in 2028, it is important to build on the rights that were won by the suffragettes, writes Helen Pankhurst

There was a proud Pankhurst in the audience in Leicester as Sylvia: A Musical Revolution began its national tour (Suffragette cities: blazing Sylvia Pankhurst musical hits the road – in pictures, 3 October). A blazing show indeed – and one that, 98 years after women gained the vote on equal terms with men, asks how much remains to be done, how to do it and how women can bridge their differences to advance their common cause.

As Sylvia Pankhurst’s granddaughter and Emmeline Pankhurst’s great-granddaughter, I honour both women. Their political paths diverged. I seek to reconcile their legacies through Centenary Action, the cross-party coalition that I lead, in a shared cause: dismantling the barriers to women’s participation, selection and retention in politics.

Charing Cross theatre, London
Büchner’s jagged masterpiece about a soldier’s descent is told with enchanting and stirring songs that occasionally defuse its stark terror

When Georg Büchner died aged 23 in 1837, he left behind Woyzeck as a bundle of papers that would be ordered and reordered for years to come, eventually discoloured by treatments used to decipher the playwright’s handwriting. His two dozen scenes, with a handful of extra fragments, form a tragic patchwork that is mirrored, in this musical version, by a similar number of stained pieces of cloth stitched into the stage curtains and by the 27 folk songs that thread the story together.

It remains the downfall of Franz Woyzeck, a desperate soldier sinking into madness who grows suspicious of his partner, but – as the first names of its romantic title suggest – the story seeks to better understand both characters. Büchner’s Woyzeck suffers from visions and hallucinations; here they are joined by traumatic battlefield flashbacks. Franz was a war hero, says Marie admiringly, adding a courageous backstory to Büchner’s downtrodden squaddie and suggesting that she sees a glimpse of Franz’s former vigour in the drum major (here named Varg) who brazenly pursues her. In the play, that leads to an affair, but the musical’s Marie fights off Varg when he attempts to rape her and it is the rumours of infidelity that accelerate Franz’s frenzy.

A musical about a drama group’s pilgrimage and reflections on activist art join an intriguing show about lost languages

In a Dublin theatre festival programme tackling heavy themes of racism, conflict and prejudice, Lourdes! The Musical (★★★★☆) promises something effervescent. Xnthony Ltd, the creators of Oliver Cromwell Is Really Very Sorry, have turned their lightly quizzical gaze to the French pilgrimage town – “a holy Blackpool, a divine Las Vegas” and a site of hope or desperation for five unlikely travelling companions.

Back in his home village in “Countryland”, in 2008, following a diagnosis of HIV that punctures his dreams of Los Angeles, singer-songwriter Matthew (Riain Cash) lends his star power to a parish drama group taking a musical about Saint Bernadette to Lourdes. Interweaving this show-within-a-show and the pilgrimage strands, Xnthony’s lyrics and Matthew Floyd Jones’s score blend pop, club beats and soulful ballads. Directed by Sarah Meadows, the supercharged ensemble joining Cash as, variously, a droll priest (Iestyn Arwel), a terminally ill mother and her transgender daughter (Nichola MacEvilly and Danielle James) and an eager tour manager (Molly Lynch) carry the music’s tonal shifts effortlessly.

Peeing in the sink he shared with Derek Jacobi, making a badger video with Brian May, climbing Everest with Alan Hinkes … as the great actor blasts into his 90s, stars celebrate his ‘loudness and madness’

Emma Thompson

Òran Mór, Glasgow
Blythe Duff and Mark Barrett are excellent as two people helplessly bound to each other in this bitter two-hander

The arrival of a first baby changes everything. It is not just the upheaval of fitting the child into your life: the shift is also psychological. Children become parents. Parents become grandparents. Responsibility and accountability move down a generation.

That is why, in Jonny Donahoe’s knotty, bitter two-hander, a man known only as Son (Mark Barrett) has called on Mother (Blythe Duff) after an eight-month gap. She is spikily indifferent to his appearance, here in her back garden where she is burning family photographs on a bonfire. Despite the frosty reception, he must persist.

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
With a WWE-style wrestling match, playful eroticism and a fine cast including Hamilton’s Jonathan Groff, this is an exquisite production

‘To liberty, and not to banishment,” exclaims Celia to Rosalind, the exile who finds freedom in her disguise as a man. It is a key statement in Shakespeare’s transformative, gender-bending pastoral comedy, just before the usurping Duke Frederick’s court is replaced by the romance of the Forest of Arden. That big reveal brought a prolonged technical difficulty on the opening night of director Daniel Evans’ all-male production, which was paused for well over an hour so it could be fixed. The technical hitch aside, it is a ravishing staging, with stunning visual effects.

There is little comedy or light in the severe court, which contains an intimidating physicality to reflect Duke Frederick’s thuggery, with slaps, shoves and a magnificently constructed WWE-style wrestling match, complete with bunny girls keeping score. It is replaced by Arden’s verdant hills on Anisha Fields’ exquisite set, so beautiful they verge on the voluptuous. The black Elizabethan gowns of the court, Puritan-like but flecked with ornament, and designed by Colin Richmond, are stunning too, as is the chequered shadow-play of the early scenes, in Ryan Day’s lighting design. The breathtaking contrast of the switch between worlds is inevitably lost, following the long wait of the technical problem, but is nonetheless beautifully envisioned.

Bush theatre, London
Mei Leng Yew’s play veers between humour and horror as a young woman ignores her mum’s warning about big life changes during a ghost festival

With shapeshifting performances and smart, heartfelt writing, Mei Leng Yew’s juicily spooky romcom is a seductively assured debut about second-generation family dynamics, the all-in nature of a new relationship, and the internal battles of a young woman trying to work out what she wants.

You must not make any big decisions during the traditional Chinese Ghost festival, our protagonist’s mum warns, or else the hungry ghosts will get you. But Girl (My Neighbour Totoro’s Mei Mac) already has her bags packed to move in with her secret girlfriend of three months and nothing is as powerful as lesbians ready to U-Haul. Except perhaps a third-wheeling ghost with severe attachment issues, played giddily by Bridgerton’s Isabella Wei.

After a phenomenal decade-long run, the Cursed Child two-parter is being pruned. Will it still work? Our writer swishes her cloak, levitates her luggage – and hops aboard the streamlined Hogwarts Express

‘Silencio!” Two dozen tank-topped and T-shirted figures fall quiet, and look expectantly at movement director Nuno Silva. “If you’ve got a cloak, accio it now …” With that summoning charm cast, broomsticks are stowed, wands holstered, suitcases grabbed.

The Harry Potter and the Cursed Child rehearsal room – a creaky church hall whose Victorian wall clock gives a serendipitously Hogwarts flavour – is a near-permanent bustle of activity. A sound technician quickly re-sets cues on her laptop, a costume designer helps an actor into a suspiciously long pair of gloves. Associate director Nicola Samer is quietly running notes with a couple of the leads while the rest of the company preps for the next scene.

Riverside Studios, London
Andy Sandberg’s play gets off to an intriguing start before coming off the rails in spectacular, almost fascinating style. For all the wrong reasons, it’s hard to look away

It starts off with a car crash, and enters its own pile-up before your eyes. There is some initial coherence, at least: Dylan, the son in a filthy rich family, played by Netflix star Noah Schnapp, has killed two people while drink-driving and injured several more. His parents, at their Hamptons home, are hashing out Dylan’s defence with a hotshot lawyer. They deny he did anything wrong – “people died, he didn’t kill them” – and throw money at the problem in hope it goes away. All the while, 16-year-old Dylan plays Nintendo upstairs.

An original legal defence is invoked, along the lines of the poor little rich boy, suffering from “affluenza”, a psychological malaise in which a crime becomes the fault of wealthy parents who have failed to teach their progeny right or wrong. It is an intriguing setup with some parallels to the hit-and-run case involving teenager Harry Dunn and Anne Sacoolas. Its moral dilemma is promising, its echoes of victim culture resonant.