On Sunday 13 April, I was standing in a pen with thousands of other people. We were all greased with Vaseline and clad in singlets. A few of us were in fancy dress: Snow White, a fully togged-up morris dancer, a Womble, a Masai warrior. Actually, the Masai warriors were in their normal clothes. The London Marathon is habitually called a "festival". I suspect this accolade is given by those [...]

What's necessary in a Christmas show? Entertainment, naturally. A feel-good message, perhaps, and something visually arresting to gawp at. Children's theatre is particularly strong this Christmas, but then it should be. If there was ever a season to welcome tots in round-collared coats into the foyer and to hear delighted giggles emanating from the auditorium, it's this one.

So much has already been said about War Horse (National Theatre, London [...]

Perhaps as a reaction against his acclaimed version of Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother, for which the stage was crammed with transvestites, mothers, nuns, daughters and divas, Samuel Adamson has decided to prune everything back for his new play, Some Kind of Bliss. In fact, there is only one person on stage - Rachel (Lucy Briers), a "small-time hack and seeker of minor adventure". The play, which lasts a [...]

Why is it that whenever someone has a successful, but obviously irreproducible idea, everyone rushes to imitate it? Mamma Mia! is a blissful show that inventively uses Abba hits to tell a cheesy tale about mothers and daughters. To date, that idea has been ripped off by musicals offering the back catalogues of Madness, Culture Club and Boney M in various silly ways. Yet, compared with Desperately Seeking Susan, they [...]

Since London theatres are currently full of somewhat youthful audiences, it was almost with a sense of nostalgia that I saw those attending Henry V at Stratford-upon-Avon's Courtyard Theatre were resoundingly middle-aged. This is the way things were when theatre was unhip and resolutely traditional. Indeed, when the Chorus (Forbes Masson) begins Michael Boyd's period-dress production, one could almost sense a pleasurable inhalation of untroubled expectation.

Indeed, at first [...]

Simplicity, and a growing sense of horror, are the two key notions arising from an utterly compelling production of Peter Weiss's The Investigation, by a Rwandan company, Urwintore. Seven actors, all Rwandan, take to the stage. Speaking clearly and calmly, mostly in French (with English surtitles), and an occasional moment in African dialect, they give eye-witness accounts of a genocide, from the arrival of bewildered prisoners at the extermination camps, [...]

Power play and the time-wasting antics of a reluctant workforce come under the spotlight in Five Tanks, a new play by Lab Ky Mo set on one day in a call centre somewhere in London. Four hapless telephone interviewers, their supervisor and their boss are stuck in a sweaty basement. The callers are paid £7 an hour to cold-call interviewees all day; there are targets to meet and bonuses to [...]

Can you really put a comic strip on the stage? Many people have tried, and here at the tiny Arts Theatre Robert Bathurst, last seen playing an MP in Whipping It Up, makes the latest attempt with his depiction of the waggish financier Alex Masterley. Alex, the creation of Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor, appears every day in black and white on the pages of the Telegraph (having started at [...]

Just before The Country Wife (written in 1675 by the Restoration wit William Wycherley) kicks off, the entire stage is veiled by a giant curtain showing a naked woman atop a cow and holding a piglet. She is surrounded by a traffic jam that appears to be on the M25. So here we go again. Restoration comedy, à la moderne. This spring, the National Theatre produced George Etherege's The Man [...]

For those of you who don't already know the short, sinister stories of Edgar Allan Poe, ten of which are supposedly the basis for Punchdrunk's giant piece of drama at the Battersea Arts Centre, don't worry. The show bears about as much relationship to the 19th-century Gothic author as Siouxsie Sioux does to a bona fide Native American. Directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle with remarkable thoroughness and detail, [...]