What both David Eldridge’s Holy Warriors at Shakespeare’s Globe and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus at the Chichester Festival Theatre share is the sense of works sprung richly from the imagination of their creators but ostensibly steeped in historical `fact’.

It’s been a long time coming but the RSC are finally waking up to the idea that perhaps over the past fifty odd years there has been a bit of a gender disparity in its stable of writers and directors.

A First World Problem. Great title, an inversion of the usual glib, `third world’ moniker applied to anything outside the leading western and US economies! The problem as seen by Milly Thomas and director Holly Race Roughan is that of the education and development of some of the most elite girls in the Uk – the posh girls educated at Britain’s best.

The Miners’ Strike of 1984 split the country, from top to bottom. Chances are that Beth Steel’s Wonderland, tracing the lives of some of those involved may do the same.

  You don’t have to be a climate change fanatic to see the point of Red Forest.  But then again, you do have to applaud the very existence of Red Forest, coming as it does from the Belarus Free Theatre, a company whose founders and performers have had to run the gauntlet of political censorship(…)

  This is something of a coup for the small Southwark Playhouse at Elephant and Castle.  A European premiere of a widely praised work by Canadian, Hannah Moscovitch, East of Berlin was Moscovitch’s first full length play.  Widely praised when it opened in Toronto in 2009, it’s since been revived across the country.