Theatre

Phones don’t belong centre stage. The play’s the thing

A technically overloaded adaption of Jean Genet’s The Maids is a symptom of our digital obsession

The Line of Beauty is an almost great gay play

The Almeida’s adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel about 80s queer culture and class division misses the book’s hilarious shifts from formality to filth

Why the ‘fun nerds’ of improv comedy are having a moment

Stage shows and classes are selling out as people crave interaction with real human beings

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

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

‘What you choose to participate in is always a political decision’

After a string of ‘good guy’ roles, the Detectorists star returns to the stage as Shakespeare’s toxic villain Iago

Chancellor could learn from new play’s about banking’s demise

Make It Happen satirises the RBS collapse of 2008. It’s too close to real life for comfort

The rumours are true: Stereophonic’s debt to Fleetwood Mac

It’s this year’s big West End hit but the co-producer of the classic album thinks the play is secondhand news

Onstage orgasms, live tattooing, ‘embracing our mucky parts’

The month-long festival can be an endurance test for many its performers, as they confront their emotional and physical boundaries

Michael Morpurgo: ‘I don’t read much – that surprises people’

The author and playwright, 81, on the book that changed his life, enduring love and how he rediscovered singing

Riders to the Sea and Macbeth – a thrilling play-pairing united against tyranny

Druid Theatre company’s spirited, soul-touching double bill conveys a powerful message

Of course, mothers are always to blame

Inter Alia, the play of the summer, gives us Rosamund Pike channelling all the ‘mum guilt’ tropes but skips tough questions about how men shape their sons

How Sarah Kane ‘ripped down the veil on the abyss’

The playwright took her own life at 28 in 1999. Now those closest to her talk about a restaging of her final play

Remembering Pierre Audi, visionary founder of the Almeida

Unassuming and innovative, his work across boundaries and frontiers created the space that allowed others – from Philip Glass to Yuri Lyubimov – to shine