George Hull

Merrily We Roll Along (Menier Chocolate Factory, until 9 March) lets you escape the winter cold to a showbiz party in a Bel Air beach house. Still, despite its summery setting, Stephen Sondheim’s musical has a stock-taking feel that suits it to a run at the changing of the years. ‘How did you get to be here?’ the opening chorus asks Hollywood mega-success Franklin Shepard (played with charisma by Mark Umbers), who has alienated his friends and lost the will to live. George Furth’s book answers with a stepwise journey back in time from 1976, putting meticulous reverse engineering to touching effect. A wistful tune Franklin picks out on the piano turns out to be from his first hit — before he sold out.

Pontius Pilate is deciding the fate of Ha-Notsri (aka Jesus) in Herod’s palace. In Stalin’s Moscow, meanwhile, the Devil (aka Woland) stalks the streets. One man, the Master (aka Mikhail Bulgakov), can reconcile these opposing cosmic forces. But he is languishing in a mental asylum. Bulgakov’s Manichaean acid trip avant la lettre, The Master and Margarita, has been brought to life by Complicite at the Barbican (until 19 January). With spectacular video projections, and making clever use of satellite maps, Simon McBurney’s production whisks us from Moscow to Yalta, back to 1 AD, into the epicentre of the Procurator’s headache, and over into the fifth dimension.

Wilton’s, the crumbly music hall in London’s East End, has been dressed up as a crumbly Prohibition-era speakeasy. And a good job they’ve done of it, what with the bootlegger types in the foyer, foxtrotters on the upstairs landing, and an Irish giant who ushers us into a side chapel where his friend’s corpse is laid out (is that normal in speakeasies?). The Great Gatsby, adapted by Peter Joucla, is on, too (until 19 May). But this feels like something of a pretext. The speakeasy theme spills into the auditorium and even onstage, in the form of — you’ve been warned — audience participation. To be fair, there is a link with the plot: one of the rumours surrounding Jay Gatsby is that his vast wealth comes from liquor smuggling.

Absent Friends is the least technically adventurous of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays. Yet Jeremy Herrin’s revival (Harold Pinter Theatre, booking until 14 April) seems determined to display all its workings. The fact that the action unfolds in real time is thrust in our face with a big clock on the back wall, and an even bigger one on the curtain (lest we forget during the interval). Of the three couples who meet for a reunion, one is flattened into a caricature, with David Armand overplaying John’s fidgetiness, while Kara Tointon’s Evelyn (above) takes taciturnity to an exhibitionistic extreme. And then each awkward conversational pause is held just enough seconds too long for it to seem that the play is acting the actors, not the other way around.

Plays used to end in marriage. Then they anatomised the highs and lows of life as a couple. Now — at least in Neil LaBute’s latest London première — the relationships are all either over or heading that way fast. Reasons to Be Pretty (Almeida, until 14 January) gives a spot-on depiction of those no-man’s-land months following a break-up, when relations between exes are loaded with an electric ambiguity, and contradictory feelings alternate with bewildering rapidity. After an apocalyptic row in the first scene, estranged Greg and Steph keep bumping into each other about town.

Have you ever felt the urge to rush backstage, brushing aside the objections of minders, and introduce yourself to a favourite actor? Or perhaps you’ve fantasised about dressing up in the old clothes of a Hollywood star? Don’t blush and walk away! We can reveal exclusively that you have nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, the future of British theatre could well be in your hands… Starting out as a producer of big commercial shows like Yes, Prime Minister or South Pacific is a hazardous business. It takes not just an eye for a good idea, and a firm managerial hand, but a hefty capital investment to boot. And if putting money into new arts projects seems foolish to private investors at the best of times, at times like these it can easily appear deranged.

L.A. The Eighties. Hard rock is alive and well. Two smalltown hopefuls, Drew and Sherrie, arrive on Sunset Strip, as a German property developer is threatening to flatten it. Both find work in the same bar, and Drew has just plucked up the courage to tell Sherrie, ‘I think you’re really rad,’ when jaded rock star Stacee Jax (Shayne Ward) comes between them — just because he can. Waitresses in bodice and suspenders pelvic-thrust to rock classics, oblivious. Rock of Ages (Shaftesbury Theatre) has more layers than your average musical. There are some witty Family Guy-style cutaways, and parts of Simon Lipkin’s versatile narration seem on the point of founding a new genre: the mockumusical.

If you ever experienced the adrenalin of a Quasar or Alien War birthday party as a child, part of you is going to love Our Days of Rage, a play by the winners of the Write to Shine competition, at the Old Vic Tunnels (until 15 September). ‘Security guards’ hustle us in, then lead us from cavern to cavern, past hanged prisoners and corpses in bathtubs. One moment we’re in Tripoli, guiltily leaving the scene as a dissident journalist is dragged away kicking and screaming. The next we’re in London, pinned between pro- and anti-Gaddafi protestors, riot police blocking our escape. This is brilliantly done: all the thrill of danger — without the danger. The pretext for our adventure is less inspired.

Take one chip pan full of cooking oil, one crippled old lady and one strong-framed Irishwoman in her prime. Let the younger one heat the oil till it’s scalding, and pour it on to the older one’s trapped hand so she screams and screams (make the older one her mother, for good measure...). When she has the information she needs, have the torturer casually toss the remaining oil in her victim’s face and walk away. Now get every soul in the auditorium rooting for the daughter. Not possible? Go to see The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Young Vic, until 3 September) — and think again. In Martin McDonagh’s tightly woven little masterpiece, the hilarious and the spine-chilling are uncomfortably well blended.

Lay Me Down Softly (Tricycle Theatre, until 6 August) is set in Delaney’s Travelling Roadshow, sometime in the 1960s, in the middle of the Irish countryside — even the characters don’t know where. A string of exciting crimes of passion is being committed at the rifle range, in Paddy Hickey’s Mercedes and by the bumper cars. But we only hear about these. Our view is dominated by the boxing ring, which Theo Delaney (Gary Lydon, above) himself admits is a sideshow. We don’t even see the fights, as these take place in the blackouts between scenes in which Roadshow staff pick up chip papers, swap unsparkling banter and talk over each other about the remote past. Life, it seems, is elsewhere.

In a bleak St Louis tenement, the Wingfields are buckling beneath the Depression and their mother’s old-fashioned aspirations. A framework of fire escapes and raised walkways provides convenient perches from which Tom (Leo Bill) can narrate and look on with foreboding as his lame sister is dressed and groomed for the long awaited ‘gentleman caller’. In a bleak St Louis tenement, the Wingfields are buckling beneath the Depression and their mother’s old-fashioned aspirations. A framework of fire escapes and raised walkways provides convenient perches from which Tom (Leo Bill) can narrate and look on with foreboding as his lame sister is dressed and groomed for the long awaited ‘gentleman caller’.

‘We’re a beastly family, and I hate us!’ laments Sorel Bliss in Hay Fever. And at first it seems all four Blisses share that sentiment. ‘We’re a beastly family, and I hate us!’ laments Sorel Bliss in Hay Fever. And at first it seems all four Blisses share that sentiment. Each has invited a guest to their house in Cookham, and appears to be hoping not just for a weekend of feverish passion but also for a permanent escape: as much from themselves as from the others. When the guests arrive, however, the Blisses taunt and ignore them by turns. As for feverish passion, it seems readily transferable.