Theatre

Puppets
Visible everywhere from ‘His Dark Materials’ at the National, via Anthony Minghella’s ‘Madam Butterfly’ at the ENO, to the resurgent Little Angel theatre in Islington, puppetry has sprung out of its kids’-show ghetto. Its most exciting practitioners include Canadian marionettist Ronnie Burkett and Minghella’s collaborators, Blind Summit.
Also Harold Pinter

Queueing
Queues are sadly part of the theatregoing experience. There’s the queue on the phone, the queue for tickets, the one at the bar and, for women, the never-ending queue for the loos. As for drinking: the old pros behind the bar can work through a queue like greased lightning, but it only takes one novice to clog things up. Given the prices theatres charge, though, it’s best to take a hip flask. Feature continues

Ravenhill
Political playwright Mark Ravenhill (famed for ‘Shopping and Fucking’) can make directors feel nervous by turning up to rehearsals with an unfinished script. This Christmas he directs his first pantomime at the Barbican.
Also Ian Rickson, Royal Court

Site-specific
Theatre in theatres is so last century. These days, the most thrilling performances can take place far from the nearest proscenium arch: in the back of a moving Audi (Hush’s ‘A Mobile Thriller’), on an allotment (Cartoon de Salvo’s ‘The Sunflower Plot’) or on a NorthLink ferry to Shetland (the National Theatre of Scotland’s ‘Home’).
Also Shared Experience, Soho Theatre, Max Stafford-Clark, Simon Stephens, Tom Stoppard

Theatre de Complicite
Now known as Complicite, this is the company that thrust alternative theatre into the mainstream. Simon McBurney’s ensemble has made several of the most astonishing shows of the last quarter-century, including the rustic, magical John Berger adaptation ‘The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol’ (1994) and ‘Mnemonic’ (1999), a play that evoked all human history since the ice age using only a collapsible chair.
Also Theatre 503, Told by an Idiot, Tricycle Theatre, Debbie Tucker Green

Underground
Shunt’s early shows in a dingy Bethnal Green railway arch were the hippest theatre hits of the early noughties – abstract underground performance for the club-going classes. Then the Time Out Award winners moved from the figurative to the literal underground: the massive subterranean network of vaults under London Bridge station that hosted ‘Tropicana’.

Verbatim
The current boom in documentary theatre was triggered by the Tricycle Theatre’s tribunal plays – edited transcripts of the Stephen Lawrence and Hutton inquiries, brought forensically to the stage. Now the technique is far more widely applied, both to entertain and inform.
Also Variety

Warner
Rigorous director Deborah Warner invariably creates a splash whether by placing angels in a tower block or marshalling hundreds of people as the crowd in ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Barbican.
Also Roy Williams, Wooster Group, Ben Whishaw

X-rated
Ever since censorship was abolished in 1968, theatre has revelled in its ability to stage offensive pieces, including ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’, which ran without incident at the National before a TV showing provoked protests.

Young Vic
Safely back home.

Zadek
German director Peter Zadek can rile the Edinburgh International Festival crowd. He presented ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ as an ageing couple whose love had long since faded, while ‘Peer Gynt’ was played with the house lights on.