Donmar Warehouse

Change at the top can completely alter a theatre’s character. But there is something quite lovely about the fact that the great US playwright Lynn Nottage and our own fast-rising directing superstar Lynette Linton have done a play together for each of the last three Donmar artistic directors.  Josie Rourke’s reign ended with the monumental working class tragedy Sweat, which did much to establish both Nottage and Linton’s UK reputations. For Michael Longhurst there was Clyde’s, Sweat’s beautifully redemptive, almost magical realist sort-of-sequel. Now Linton moves on to Intimate Apparel. Where Sweat and Clyde’s were both UK premieres, Intimate Apparel is an older Nottage work that was her first US hit back in 2003 and had a very decent UK premiere a decade ago. But more Lynn Nottage is always a good thing. It’s a period drama, following a selection of characters in New York City, 1905. The story centres on Esther (Samira Wiley), a hard working but shy and emotionally repressed Black seamstress who specialises in ‘intimate apparel’ – that is to say underwear, which in 1905 includes a lot of fancy corsets.  Neither Nottage’s play nor Linton’s production really gives a sense of what the wider city – or indeed country – was like at the time, and that’s the point. Each of Nottage’s characters exists on some sort of margin, or we only see the marginal side of their existence. So there’s Esther: shy, self-doubting but determined in her passion for her work. There’s her friend...

Prolific and mercurial, playwright Mike Bartlett had a semi-dud earlier this year with his bland West End throuple comedy Unicorn. But the thing about Mike Bartlett plays is that there’s always another one along soon. It’s intriguing, howveer, to note that Juniper Blood shares not only a director – James Macdonald – with Unicorn, but both seem to be comedy dramas about couples exploring new ways of living. Here the action centres on Lip and Ruth, who’ve quit the city in favour of a quiet life on a farm – but the big city has a way of catching up with them. Will it prove to be Bartlett’s version of The Good Life? That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, surely. Terique Jarrett, Hattie Morahan, Nadia Parkes, Jonathan Slinger and Sam Troughton star.