Theatre

The Unbelievers is a swirling study of catastrophe

Nicola Walker is extraordinary in the Nick Payne drama

Campus drama Safe Space tackles the statue wars head-on

Jamie Bogyo’s promising but unrefined debut play explores the political climate of the 2016 Yale protests

James Brining’s The Seagull delivers laughs but lacks heft

A production at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum takes Chekhov at his word when he called the play ‘a comedy’

Mary Page Marlowe is a disappointing play

Despite a vivid performance from Susan Sarandon, Tracy Letts’s portrait of a woman at different stages of life lacks detail and heart

Bad Lads is a theatrical call for justice

A play about abuses at Medomsley Detention Centre in County Durham is deeply affecting, but needs wider contextualisation

A high-speed Hamlet is too fast and too flat

Tragedy teeters on the brink of comedy in the National’s racing, relentless production, redeemed by Francesca Mills’s triumph as Ophelia

Lost Atoms has spectacular staging but the drama is underdeveloped

Frantic Assembly’s 30th anniversary co-production, with Curve, shows the touring company’s weaknesses as well as its strengths

London’s new directions

Nima Taleghani’s bold yet diffuse take on Euripides launches Indhu Rubasingham’s first season at the National. At the Young Vic, Nadia Fall’s opening production is less entertaining than it should be

Why Cabaret sank across the pond

In London, the extravaganza has been a one-in-a-generation theatrical success. But is the party over across the pond?

Alan Ayckbourn has a question for you

The playwright’s 91st play, Earth Angel, implicates the audience in its interrogation of trust in human goodness

Simon Stone’s 21st-century Ibsen

This refreshing rewrite of The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge takes a classic text and shakes it till audiences hear the rattle of new resonance

Alice Birch’s bold, baffling history of masculinity

Men go in search of self-knowledge in this era-spanning saga whose meaning is frustratingly elusive

What should we make of Mrs Mary Whitehouse?

Maxine Peake stars as the Christian moral crusader in a play that asks us to pass judgment without having the facts straight

Haywire: an entertainingly meta take on The Archers

Plus, the squelchy sounds of rural life in Cow/Deer at the Royal Court

Marlowe and Shakespeare are the ultimate double act in Born With Teeth

A lusty Ncuti Gatwa and restrained Edward Bluemel make for a riveting duo in this vivid new drama

The new pastoral

In Mike Bartlett’s Juniper Blood and Ralph Fiennes’s As You Like It, rural life shifts and swirls

Brigadoon is proof musicals are not just about the music

Lerner and Loewe’s classic show about a Highland village only has one good song – but that doesn’t hinder a whimsical staging at Regent’s Park Open Air

Sami Abu Wardeh: “Laughter is restorative”

The Irish-Palestinian comedian on Palestine: Peace de Resistance, his ambitious, genre-bending response to the war in Gaza