The Copenhagen Ring cycle is fundamentally anti-Wagnerian. The composer employed timeless myths, but director Kasper Bech Holten has miniaturised the piece by converting it into a family saga. While Wagner constantly transfers our sympathies from one character to another - from Wotan to Siegmund and Sieglinde, then on to Siegfried, and finally to Brünnhilde - Holten sees through Brünnhilde's eyes alone.

During the overture to Das Rheingold the heroine appears [...]

The Changeling has something for all the family: three murders, a brutal rape, the amputation of a finger from a corpse, self-inflicted castration, lunacy (real and feigned) and more deceit than you will find even in a dodgy dossier. It is also, intentionally, very funny.

The piece, therefore, seems like a mishmash. The strong principal storyline coexists with a counter-plot that goes nowhere very much. Beatrice-Joanna is a lustful woman [...]

"As to the rumours of my retirement, I am not retiring yet." This defiant assertion, which might have issued from the Downing Street bunker in recent days, raises a titter of recognition from the audience at Breakfast With Mugabe. The playwright Fraser Grace puts the words into the mouth of the Zimbabwean president back in 2001. Five years later, Robert Mugabe is still in office. Surely our own leader, accomplished [...]

The Voysey Inheritance is a witty, hundred-year-old satire on middle-class hypocrisy. To the humilia-tion and shock of his son Edward, old Mr Voysey reveals that for many years he has run his solicitor's practice, in which Edward is a partner, fraudulently. The clients' capital has been systematically pilfered and the crime covered up by crediting their accounts with the correct payments of interest.

Edward faces a dilemma when he learns [...]

Noël Coward's play Hay Fever has the flimsiest of plots but is none the less a masterpiece of comic writing. Four members of the highly eccentric Bliss family - father, mother, son and daughter - get themselves into a muddle when each, without consult- ing the others, invites a weekend guest for some romantic dalliance at their country house in Cookham. Bizarrely, they then pair off with a member of [...]

Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca empire is fascinating history. He achieved it with fewer than 200 men, who were as brave as they were ruthless and greedy for gold. The decision by the emperor-god Atahualpa to allow Pizarro to march unhindered on Inca roads across Peru ranks as perhaps the most bizarre and catastrophic military blunder of all time. Pizarro's ambush and kidnap of Atahualpa in the city square [...]

"Half your family has pissed off to Spain and the other half is just pissed off." This line, deliv-ered by Dawn French in Carmel Morgan's first stage play, sums up the basic plot of Smaller. French is Bernice Clulow, who for 25 years has looked after her widowed and handicapped mother, while Bernice's sister, Cath (the singer Alison Moyet), lives a life of hedonism in southern Spain.

The relationship between [...]

Within a couple of years of Samuel Beckett's death in 1989, the Gate Theatre, Dublin, mounted a festival in which all 19 of his plays were performed over three weeks. London's Barbican performed the same body of work in 1999, and followed up in 2001 with a Beckett film festival. Now, celebrating the centenary of the playwright's birth, the Barbican is presenting the Channel 4 series of films of all [...]

Now that our lattes bear inscriptions such as "The liquid in this container may be hot", it is perhaps not surprising that Pimlico Opera's guidance to patrons attending its production of Chicago inside a women's prison advised them not to bring firearms. We were also obliged to leave our mobile phones behind, and were frisked by female officers using what they call, theatrically, a wand. There was intense interest in [...]

Admirers of the golden age of American theatre, which illuminated the mid-20th century, have enjoyed a feast in London over recent years. Now the Almeida is reinforcing that renaissance with one of Tennessee Williams's least-known plays. Period of Adjustment premièred in 1960. Its first production in London in 40 years does not call for a reassessment of its place in the canon, but it does demonstrate that, even at his [...]