Lyn's Picks: Apr 18

The Burnt City (One Cartridge Place)

It’s been a long wait for the latest large scale immersive show by Punchdrunk but the company are back, turning their new home in Woolwich into a site to tell the epic story of the fall of Troy set in a future parallel universe. It’s been in previews since late March but opens later this week. Borrowing from Euripides and other ancient Greek playwrights, Punchdrunk will take audiences on a theatrical journey like no other with a show that allows its audience to roam across two vast buildings and follow different characters as they face victory and defeat. Dare you hang out with the Furies? Find yourself with the betrayed and betrayers or dance with the gods. Not cheap but likely to be memorable, and amazingly tickets are now available for a run currently scheduled until the beginning of December but which may last longer than the Trojan war itself.

The Straw Chair (Finborough)

It’s lovely to see the tiny Finborough back in business. Flying on the heels of the recent hit, Bacon, comes Polly Creed’s revival of Sue Glover’s 1988 play set on the remote island of St Kilda in the early 18th century where the virginal Edinburgh raised Isabel arrives to live with her new husband. There she gets to know Rachel, an unconventional woman who was kidnapped by her own husband and imprisoned. But Rachel is unrepentant and ready to teach Isabel a thing or two about men and the way they treat women. Amazingly this is the English premiere of a seminal Scottish play and there is a good chance that this will become the latest in a long tine of Finborough rediscoveries of overlooked plays which make us consider them afresh.

Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare’s Globe)

You know that Spring has really arrived when the Globe throws open it doors with the first play in the summer season. This year that honour belongs to Shakespeare’s rather lovely play of autumnal love sparked by the attractions and antipathies of the witty Beatrice and Benedick in a production directed by Lucy Bailey whose Witness for the Prosecution has become a long stayer at County Hall and who produced a brilliantly gory Titus Andronicus at this address. It’s more likely to be laughter and tears rather than blood that run in this tragi-comedy that is the opener in an enticing season which includes Kathryn Hunter as King Lear, Hannah Khalil’s rewrite of Henry VIII and Charlie Josephine’s I, Joan, which remakes the myths and winkles out the truths about Joan of Arc.

Cover image from The Burnt City, photo by Julian Abrams.