Lyn Gardner’s theatre tips

Another packed long weekend, with the outdoor season getting underway in Norfolk and festivals kicking off across the country Another long weekend ahead – and while there’s nothing on the scale of last week’s The Passion to tempt you, the theatres are open and there are plenty of shows you should see. In London that list very definitely includes Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm , a brutally tender dance of love and death at Southwark Playhouse, and Chekhov in Hell at Soho. Although I still haven’t caught up with it, London Road at the National should by all accounts be in your diaries too. At the Roundhouse, Fat Girl Gets a Haircut is a brave and beautiful piece of participatory work made by Mark Storor and a group of teenagers. I’ll be heading to Cambridge over the weekend for Junction Sampled , a two-day festival of performance featuring work from RashDash , Deborah Pearson , The Other Way Works , Non Zero One , Michael Pinchbeck and a raft of interesting theatremakers. Also in Cambridge this week, at the Arts theatre , is the Abbey’s production of Mark O’Rowe’s Dublin story, Terminus, until Saturday, followed by the hugely moving first world war drama Journey’s End . With the High Tide festival of new writing kicking off this weekend and the Norfolk and Norwich festival at the end of the week, there’s a great deal going on in the east of the country. The latter has a number of pieces worth your attention, including Ontroerend Goed’s extremely creepy A Game of You and Hilary Westlake’s Dining With Alice. NNF also marks the start of the outdoor theatre season: Graeae’s take on Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man and Wired Aerial’s As the World Tipped both take my fancy, and can also be seen in other settings over the summer including the Greenwich and Docklands International and Stockton International Riverside festivals. Head further north to Hull for Slung Low’s Mapping the City , a show that – rather like their previous piece, Anthology in Liverpool – has audiences following different stories around a city in a promenade performance. Also of interest is Gary Bridgens and Phill Gregg’s 100-mile performance journey, Vagabonding , following in the footsteps of 1920s showman Walter Wilkinson, which sets out from the historic Piel Island in Cumbria on Tuesday as part of the Lakes Alive programme. That has some good stuff coming up, including Harmonic Fields in early June. If you’re thinking of going to the Manchester International festival , don’t forget that booking for Punchdrunk’s first children’s show, Dr Who-inspired The Crash of Elysium , which opens on Wednesday. Faye Draper invites you to discover what it’s like to be a northern lass in Tea is an Evening Meal , which sets off on tour this week, stopping off at Stockton ARC and Leeds Met Studio. David Morrissey stars in Macbeth at the Liverpool Everyman, while Terry Hands directs The Taming of the Shrew at Clywd Theatr Cymru. This weekend is your last chance for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Northern Stage and Arthur Miller’s The Price at the Stephen Joseph in Scarborough. Over in Northern Ireland, the new Lyric theatre in Belfast reopens with perhaps Arthur Miller’s greatest play, The Crucible , in a production directed by Conall Morrison. In Scotland, the Mayfesto Season at the Tron in Glasgow includes Dead Liberty, an evening of political comedy. On Thursday 5 May the Traverse in Edinburgh hosts an election special called Welcome to the Hotel Caledonia , directed by David Greig and with contributions from Peter Arnott, Rona Munro, Alan Wilkins and others. Mike Bartlett’s My Child can be seen in a double bill with Linda McLean’s One Good Beating at the Arches in Glasgow. Heading south, Metta theatre is in cafes in London and Oxford this week with Pirandello’s The Man With the Flower in His Mouth , and the scurrilously satirical Love, Love, Love by Mike Bartlett stops off at the Drum in Plymouth. Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory’s superb The Comedy of Errors makes a guest appearance at the down-but-not-out Northcott in Exeter for a couple of weeks from Tuesday. Idle Motion ‘s delightful account of the early pioneers of flying, The Vanishing Horizon, is at the Theatre in Chipping Norton. On Thursday, Mayfest gets underway in Bristol with a fantastic range of work including Little Bulb and NIE. You really, really don’t want to miss it because it generates a real sense of celebration. Probe’s May , a dance-theatre love story, will be at the festival the following week but stops off at the Place in London this week. Also in London: rare Tennessee Williams with Kingdom of Earth opening at the Print Room; rare JB Priestley with They Came to the City opening at Southwark Playhouse, rare Ibsen with Little Eyolf opening at Jermyn Street in a production starring Imogen Stubbs, who was so good recently in Private Lives in Manchester. All’s Well that Ends Well opens at the Globe and Propeller’s Pocket Dream kicks off the Udderbelly summer season on the Southbank. Bette and Joan at the Arts has Greta Scacchi and Anita Dobson as Davis and Crawford, and Pandora’s Box at Oval House is Ade Solanke’s family story about a British-Nigerian mother on holiday with her son in Lagos. The Union scores another transfer with Darren Murphy’s tale of brothers and blood ties in Irish Blood, English Heart, which goes into Trafalgar Studios 2 . Enjoy your weekend everyone, and let me know what’s catching your eye. Theatre Lyn Gardner guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 29, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.