Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Superstar director Jamie Lloyd has had an incredible run of somewhat improbable celebrity-led West End smashes, from Martin Freeman in Richard III to Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard. This gargantuan production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest – the first non musical to play at Theatre Royal Drury Lane for decades – does feel like the point where his luck runs out. By which I mean: bagging the UK stage debut of movie icon Sigourney Weaver feels like a coup on paper, but maybe not so much in practice. She’s not embarrassingly bad or anything, but the role of exiled magician Prospero simply feels beyond her – this is a giant theatre, a tricky role, and she’s not done any Shakespeare since the ’80s. She’s not a good verse speaker, delivering everything in a concerned-mom monotone that fails to hold this big, weird play together. Having her on stage constantly – usually seated in a chair, observing the action – feels like a sop to her celebrity that isn’t borne out by her ability. Setting its star aside, Lloyd’s Tempest is an awesome spectacle, in which the island to which Prospero has been exiled is represented by a hulking black hill, part industrial slag heap, part Denis Villeneuve's Dune. The entire production would seem to be set over a single night, and Jon Clark’s astonishing lighting makes the best of that: when magic occurs it looks incredible, glowing weird and bright, like the aliens arriving in Close Encounters. MVP of the whole thing is Mason Alexander Park’s...

While Jamie Lloyd’s productions often involve mad celebrity casting of the sort you’d never have expected to see in your lifetime – see his imminent US production of Waiting for Godot starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter – he also has go to actors, and it’s a pleasure to see two of them join forces for this middle-aged Much Ado. MCU veterans Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell have never actually shared the screen in any of the Marvel films, but they’ll share the stage nightly for a couple of months in the second half of Lloyd’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane season of Shakespeare, playing bickering lovers Benedick and Beatrice. Hiddleston previously starred in Lloyd’s revival of Pinter’s Betrayal in the West End and Broadway; Atwell has been in two of Lloyd’s earlier productions, The Faith Machine and The Pride.  The remaining cast will largely be made up of the company of The Tempest, the first show in Lloyd’s two-play Shakespeare stand at Theatre Royal Drury Lane: Mara Huf (Hero), Forbes Masson (Leonato), Phillip Olagoke (Friar Francis), Mason Alexander Park (Margaret), James Phoon (Claudio) and Tim Steed (Don John), plus Mika Onyx Johnson as Borachio and Gerald Kyd as Don Pedro.

Occupying the gap left by the mighty Frozen at the huge Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Hercules is a fascinating choice of Disney film for the megacorp to adapt as its new stage musical – although the 1997 film turned a profit, it was only a modest one and it remains one of the more obscure movies of its blockbuster ’90s. Still, the Disney name plus that of the Greek demigod himself is doubtless brand recognition enough to draw a crowd, and moreover word from the German debut of Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s adaptation – with songs by Alan Menken and David Zippel – is that it’s very good. Luke Brady will play the title role in a musiclal that presumably follows the film’s approximate story in explaining how Hercules came to be only half-divine and following his storied hero-ing career and romantic entanglement with the sarcastic Meg.