Cindy Marcolina

The Last Five Years meets Gravity to introduce their unfortunate lovechild. Daniel steals a spacecraft and leaves Earth; his ex-girlfriend, Emily, is left behind.

“This book is about portraying a safe and dramatically effective staged fight using rapier and dagger,” so begins Roger Bartlett's latest volume.

Kit Withington writes a lightweight exegesis of grief, briefly touching upon what it means to grow up and leave home. Technically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with Heart Wall. It’s just a tad too sprawling and prosaic. Withington makes a few good points in her reflection, and Katie Greenall tends to its directorial needs well. From the bittersweet aura as Franky mourns the loss of feeling at home to the harrowing realisation that you might have fallen behind in life, the play prods a dull ache in all of us.

A corrupt lot steeped in scandal puppeteers the economy. Unreasonable taxes are plaguing the people. Violence is rampant. All the while, a megalomaniac is gaining more traction by the day. Did we turn on the news, or are we watching Bertolt Brecht’s merciless satire? Seán Linnen transforms the allegorical German classic into a riotous, electric, exciting romp with music by Placebo. Translated by Stephen Sharkey, it follows a fictional mobster who, appealing to the masses, reaches enormous power in 1930s Chicago. Brecht wrote the play as a response to Hitler’s ascent to dictatorship, specifically including direct references and relevant information about the timeline. Now more than ever, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is both a parable and a warning.

It takes just under ten hours to appreciate J. R. R. Tolkien’s masterpiece if you watch Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy one film after the other. For many fans, it’s a yearly occurrence to gather with friends to re-watch Frodo and his band of brothers fighting evil to save the Shire. This year you can do things differently. The Royal Albert Hall rings in the 25th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring with a celebration of their own, showing Jackson’s magna opera in its entirety, accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Choir, and the Trinity Boys Choir. As far as movie marathons go, you can’t beat the glamour of attending one of the most iconic franchises backed by a live orchestra in a magnificent setting like the Hall.

Caryl Churchill meets ‘il dolce far niente’ in this reimagined production of her 2016 play Escaped Alone. Italian companies lacasadargilla and Piccolo Teatro present a timid adaptation written by Monica Capuani and directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni. It’s a pity that the quintessentially bleak English approach of Churchill’s four ageing women as they spend their summer between tea and gossip fails to translate. Caught between the shackling boredom of retirement and a desire to maintain their identities, they reminisce and dig up the past, unearthing a few uncomfortable truths. In all this, Mrs. Jarrett slips into apocalyptic speeches that detail environmental disaster and societal collapse.

An awkward school reunion between childhood friends turns into a seething, horrid thriller in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm 's play The Wasp . The long-term

A virus has decimated the entire population, turning them into zombies. Or has it? Whilst all hell breaks loose, a man is isolating in a bunker alone. Deep underground, his thoughts are his only company and entertainment. His reality slowly alters. Why do we keep going in the face of hardship? Is the fight for survival enough to define a life? Jishik Kim and Seungyeon Kwon’s hit musical hails straight from South Korea in a re-imagined version with Jethro Compton at the dramaturgy and Daljung Kim at the direction. Led by Lex Lee (who shared the role with Nabi Brown through the run), it’s a spunky, bleak, compassionate, riveting piece of solo theatre.

Art imitates life, and life imitates art in Sarah Ruhl’s 2014 play Stage Kiss. When two ex-lovers are cast in the same show, their on-stage relationship bleeds into their off-stage one, and vice versa. The weight of their baggage threatens to ruin their relationships, but Ruhl is excessively compassionate and wholly unoriginal.

It might still be some time until Death Becomes Her hits London, but the West End was ablaze with its spirit this past weekend, when Megan Hilty graced the stage of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.