The Pride Alexi Kaye Campbell wants to believe in utopia, a world that turns out right. His beautifully pained and subtle play shuttles versions of a trio of characters between 1958 and 2008. The 1950s chaps are dapper and constrained: ties, cuff links, sleeve garters. When Oliver, a children’s author, meets Philip, his illustrator’s husband, their silences buckle under covert desire. In this era, avowals seem threatening (“Stop saying these words!”), but concealment breeds cruelty. “Life,” shudders Philip’s wife, “becomes a little like some horrible fancy-dress party.” In the unbuttoned present, Oliver is a gay journalist losing love in lechery. Repression and abundance can both sabotage happiness. Richard Wilson’s revival is staged in flinching proximity and superbly played by Daniel Evans (tumultuously chipper), Claire Price (creamy and confused) and Jamie Sives (all panicky gravity). Slightly older than the original cast, they find a deeper undertow of melancholy. It’s a bereft play: loneliness hangs thick in the air. Yet, despite aversion therapy, there’s no cure for love. DJ
Lullaby Barbican It’s not often you pack pyjamas to go to the theatre. Plenty of people will be enticed by the prospect of a sleepover at the Barbican, but the Duckie troupe’s ability to dream up appealingly quirky ideas isn’t always matched by the coherence to follow them through. Audiences book beds, not seats, for Lullaby, and hunker down to watch a show before getting some zzzzzs. So far, so good, but the late-night spectacle is haphazardly assembled, all mood and no illumination. The experience is strangely akin to watching a baby’s mobile: performers dressed as cuddly critters dance around in a circle, singing lilting ditties. As B&B, Lullaby is decent value. As theatre, it’s insistently cosy and a little indolent, though the chirruping wake-up call is delightful. It probably won’t infiltrate your dreams or induce a state of childlike reverie, but it may make you consider buying a new mattress. MS
Doctor Faustus Hell is an exuberant spectacle here: Matthew Dunster has a field day with costumes and puppetry in his busy staging of Marlowe’s play. The director works hard to distract us from the drama’s lack of narrative push after Faustus strikes his bargain with the devil, bringing on skeletal dragons, a hag whose nether regions spit fire, a demon that pops out of a man’s backside, and more. Yet the production cranks up the comedy at the expense of tragedy, neglecting to stoke much dread about eternal damnation. Arthur Darvill’s Mephistopheles is merely an efficient functionary. Paul Hilton’s self-satisfied Doctor gives us little sense of the character’s anguished tussle with his own soul. Gluttony and the unspeakable things he does with a cream bun stay with you. What’s lost is the bubbling horror beneath Faustus’s pact. MS
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The Beggar’s Opera The sylvan setting of the Open Air Theatre doesn’t look so appealing with a huge gallows on stage. Men stand in the stocks. Women are chained to poles, but the poles are decked in flowers. Maypoles and nooses. William Dudley’s brilliant designs for John Gay’s ballad opera perfectly illustrate its combination of sweet popular tunes and boisterous political satire, based in the criminal underworld. The strength of Lucy Bailey’s production is that it creates a Hogarthian portrait of money-grabbing 18th-century London. The big boss, Peachum, given oily authority by Jasper Britton, controls who should hang and who should be freed for a price. When his daughter marries a highwayman named Macheath, he is determined that his son-in-law (a too clean-cut David Caves) will swing. Beverly Rudd seethes and wheedles as the infatuated gaoler’s daughter, Lucy Lockit. Bailey’s unexpected twist on Gay’s ending is a reminder of the arbitrary nature of 18th-century justice. JE
Passion and Ecstasy Carmina Burana (1995) was David Bintley’s first piece for Birmingham Royal Ballet, set to Orff’s thwacking choral numbers. Three seminarians rip off their clerical collars and leave the cloisters, hellbent on frothy pleasure. One gets jilted, one gets smashed, a third is dumped in his pants. Virtue is dreary, but the world is mean and greedy — for all its dash, Bintley’s ballet offers a sour morality tale. It is relieved by Philip Prowse’s bravura designs and some vigorous, tumbling ensembles. A hen party at the Saturday matinée may have been drawn in by Iain Mackay clinging to his Calvins while entangled by remorseless Fortune (the strong-jawed Victoria Marr). Allegri Diversi (1987) offers a contrasting frame to Bintley’s innate elegance, through vivacious Rossini and the clarinet’s burbling runs. In this scrumptious, softly exuberant piece, the leads perform sunny trelliswork with arms and feet, Jenna Roberts and Joseph Caley achieving a stream of gleam. DJ
Sol Pico The dance artist Sol Pico arrives from Barcelona in a Catalan clatter. El Llac de les Mosques is like a noisy dollop of early Almodovar: a slight, messy confrontation with ageing, gusting with comic riffs on a cluttered stage. The 44-year-old’s body is defiantly in denial, performing in baby-doll tutu with glass in hand, or rattling off flamenco on the tips of her red pointe shoes. Graceful decline be damned: backed by a raucous band and a washing machine, her grabby duets with a towering bloke give them the air of a couple who have been banned from every bar on Las Ramblas. Yet, for all her insubordination, the prodigious dancer ends up entombed in plaster. DJ