Alexander Cohen

** 'One for the Simone de Beauvoir fans'

How will the Fringe hit land in London?

Elerian's brand of maximalist metatheatre greedily hogs the limelight, a crusade to deconstruct Rhinoceros within an inch of its life.

Ryan Calais Cameron’s tight knit three-hander cuts deeper than a meditation on money or morality.

“Sieged land besieges you” Gazan mother Mariam confides in us in A Knock On the Roof. Her strained humanity is splayed front and centre of Khawla Ibraheem’s psychologically wrenching one woman show.

Cycles of fractured motherhood spin and splinter across generations in Anna Mackmin’s new play. But even with polyphonic performances from veteran thesps Tamsin Grieg and Celia Imre, both at the top of their game, this bittersweet melodrama doesn’t hit as hard as it could.

With a dream-like blend of tender poetry and pulsating humanity Chris Bush has established herself as one of the UK’s most erudite and important writers.

Ozempic can make anyone beautiful and AI will outthink us all. What is left for the human race? That’s the question that’s unravelled in More Life

Mark-Anthony Turnage has a provocative habit of turning unconventional narratives into opera

Critics raved about its initial run at the Almedia last year. Can it make the leap from intimate space to grand West End playhouse?

So why is Daniel Fish’s Elektra such a droning dud?

​​​​​​​It’s difficult to imagine anyone watching Oedipus without having prior knowledge of the story’s brutal twist - especially the case given that a rival production of the same play has just closed in the West End to critical acclaim.

At its worst Inside No.9 Stage/Fright plays out like a greatest hits album. Familiar rhythms rewired into a thank you for the fans, who no doubt will vibrate with delight at some of the references to old episodes. Not much of a criticism when the endlessly inventive original is so salute worthily brilliant.

Shifting identities and hierarchies interweave like a spider’s web in Cymbeline. A pinch of added complication can’t hurt?

A case of never being more than the sum of its parts, even if those parts have promise in themselves.

It’s a mistake to dismiss Claus Guth’s production of Janacek’s Jenůfa as symbolically overwrought and interminably grey. Look closer and you’ll discover a duality to each beguiling appearance.

French dramatist Jean Genet is a rarity on British stages, and I can see why. There are more popular writers that do what he does, only better. Genet’s 1947 The Maids is never stark enough to match the claustrophobic brutality of Beckett, nor darkly comic enough to out menace Pinter.

As achingly monotone as it is aggressively monochrome.