Winterlong & Mogadishu, London
Two plays that shared the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting ? launched by the Royal Exchange in Manchester and now the biggest national competition for playwriting ? receive their London premieres over the next two weeks. At the Soho Theatre, W1 (Wed to 12 Mar) there's Andrew Sheridan's Winterlong, the story of Oscar from birth, when he was abandoned by his parents, to growing up with his stern grandparents and becoming a teenager in a fractured society. Sheridan, who says he's been influenced by Simon Stephens, David Eldridge and Robert Holman, asks whether someone with such a difficult start in life can ever achieve or find love. On its northern opening it had mixed reviews by dint of its graphic, brutal nature and challenging structure. However, Mogadishu, at the Lyric Hammersmith, W6 (3 Mar to 2 Apr), East End teacher Vivienne Franzmann's debut play exploring youth, class, race and justice in an inner-city school, was widely praised for its realism.
Mark Cook
Oedipus, Liverpool
Steven Berkoff directs his own version of Greek tragedy and his Oedipus, played by Simon Merrells, is a very modern man. Merrells, who played down-on-his-luck boxer Terry Molloy in Berkoff's collaboration with Nottingham Playhouse, On The Waterfront, a West End success, is the king whose moral blindness brings down catastrophe on his family and future generations when he kills his own father and marries his mother. Berkoff's version should be suitably muscular as it tears away the rhetoric that so often blights the play to reveal the real tragedy of a man who sees but who cannot see the truth. The production transfers to Nottingham Playhouse (23 Mar to 9 Apr) after this Liverpool run.
Liverpool Playhouse, to 12 Mar
Lyn Gardner
Edward Fox: Trollope In Barsetshire, London
If you happen to have seen actor Edward Fox of late, you'll have noticed that he has grown a ginormous bushy beard. It's because he will be portraying Anthony Trollope in a new one-man show about the Victorian best-selling novelist, which brings to life some of his most colourful characters: Dr Grantly, The Bishop, the hypocritical Obadiah Slope and Mrs Proudie among them. As well as revealing how the author's observations on human nature are still relevant, Fox will play the man himself and tell of his life. Who knew that the writer worked for the Post Office, working his way up from the bottom to the top rank, and came up with the idea of the red post box?
Riverside Studios, W6, Tue to 2 Apr
MC
The Deep Blue Sea, Leeds
The Rattigan centenary celebrations continue apace, with Sienna Miller lined up for Flare Path in the West End, directed by Trevor Nunn; Anne-Marie Duff in Cause Celebre at the Old Vic; and the Royal and Derngate in Northampton nabbing In Praise Of Love. But West Yorkshire Playhouse has the plum, in Rattigan's great masterpiece inspired by his own unrequited passion for a young man. Back in the 1950s, Rattigan couldn't write about gay love for the stage, so he channelled his emotional and creative energies into the story of Hester, a respectable judge's wife who has left her husband for Freddie, a young second world war flying ace. But the affair that began in passion fizzles out and Hester has to face up to her future.
West Yorkshire Playhouse, to 12 Mar
LG
Age Of Arousal, Edinburgh
Linda Griffiths's play, inspired by George Gissing's The Odd Women, has already been seen widely in North America, but it gets its UK premiere in a production by Stellar Quines, directed by Muriel Romanes. Set in 1885 as the suffragette movement gathered pace and passion, it tells of Mary Barfoot and her lover, Rhoda, who set up an in-demand school where young women can learn typing, helping to make them independent from fathers and husbands, the latter much in short supply at the time. Escaping conditioning and Victorian values while kick-starting a sexual revolution proves more difficult than expected, and the path to good intentions is littered with petticoats.
Royal Lyceum, to 12 Mar
LG
The Breath Of Life, Sheffield
David Hare is enjoying a major retrospective of his work in Sheffield, which includes two of his best plays: the post-second world war drama, Plenty, and Racing Demon. The third play in the season may well turn out to be the most intriguing because, on its London premiere, this story of two women united over 40 years by their love of the same man, got lost behind the star casting of two very grande dames indeed: Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. The fact that Peter Gill, that most delicate and nuanced of directors, is at the helm bodes very well, and he has two fine actors on board in Isla Blair and Patricia Hodge, who should give the drama a chance to breathe and critics an opportunity to see if this play really does have legs.
Lyceum Theatre, to 26 Feb
LG
A Dish Of Tea With Dr Johnson, On tour
Samuel Johnson was the man who suggested that mountains got in the way of the view, but he said ? and wrote ? a great many other things, some of which you can hear in this show from Out Of Joint. Max Stafford-Clark directs an evening of witty repartee that celebrates the life and work of the 18th-century essayist, poet and compiler of the first English dictionary. Ian Redford, who has previous form playing the sometimes grumpy Dr Johnson in A Laughing Matter, plays the man of letters and Russell Barr plays characters including Johnson's biographer, James Boswell, painter Joshua Reynolds, and Johnson's unrequited love.
Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, Tue & Wed; Balcony Theatre, Burnham Overy Staithe, nr Sheringham, Fri
LG
Marilyn, Glasgow
What did Marilyn Monroe and Simone Signoret have in common? One was a Hollywood pin-up who had survived a poor, unhappy childhood to become a worldwide sex symbol married to playwright Arthur Miller. The other was a cultured and very serious French actress who, along with her husband, Yves Montand, was a darling of the French arts scene and well known for her support of leftwing politics. But in the summer of 1960, two years before Monroe's death, the pair found themselves living side by side in the Beverly Hills Hotel while Montand and Monroe filmed Let's Make Love together. In Sue Glover's new play, a joint production between the Citizens Theatre and Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum, where it transfers after this Glasgow world premiere, the two women form an unlikely and uneasy friendship under the watchful eye of their hairdresser, Patti. Philip Howard directs.
Citizens Theatre, to 12 Mar
LG
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/feb/19/this-weeks-new-theatre
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