Identity is thorny business. This was the parting thought of Anna X, the play that marked Emma Corrin’s West End debut in the summer of 2021. The same credo governs Corrin’s return to London theatre with Orlando, in Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel about a larger-than-life character hellbent on defying time, sex, and convention.

Opposition (and history) are the apparent mainstays of the ceaselessly busy James Graham, and he conjoins the two to riveting effect in Best of Enemies.

The Bush studio space is proving a fruitful launch pad, not just for new writing but for new performers. It previously showcased actor-writer-musician Anoushka Lucas’s multiple skills in her exciting debut piece Elephant; next up is the similarly multi-skilled Tania Nwachukwu, with The Kola Nut Does Not Speak English, an engaging playlet about her struggles with a split identity.

For his final bow as artistic director of the Orange Tree, Paul Miller has decided to go out with a bang, amid much giggling and snorts of laughter. This isn’t George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man as a barbed but fairly conventional comedy: Miller and his excellent actors are really gunning for it.

What is the best way of talking about the Middle East? Should plays take a documentary or verbatim approach, all the better to educate and inform, or is there another path, with includes entertainment, and that magic ingredient called theatricality?

Just about the three toughest tricks to pull off in the theatre are making a musical, making a family show and making characters so charming that even the most cynical in the house are pulling for the little guy (or not so little in this case). So if it takes the armature of a blockbuster Hollywood movie to buttress the production, who cares?

It begins in darkness. All that can be heard is the sound of a human struggling painfully for breath so that even before the lights go up we have the sense of a life coming to an end. It’s a stark contrast to the triumphalism of the play’s original opening “Oh for a Muse of fire”.

The set at the Arcola for Frank McGuinness’s Dinner with Groucho naturally features a table with two place settings and a backdrop of clouds in a blue sky. Overhead are pendant globe lights that will transform into stars. But the floor is a key feature too, covered in sawdust.

It’s been five years since I saw the Old Vic’s first Christmas Carol, adapted by Jack Thorne and directed by Matthew Warchus, with Rhys Ifans in the lead. It’s since become an annual affair, with a different actor in the lead each year, even beaming – without an audience – from this stage during the pandemic. I’m chuffed, and not a bit surprised to see that it’s lost none of its power and delight. 

Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On reading a couple of fine essays in the excellent programme, I saw the acknowledgement of the production’s sponsor, Pragnell.