Noël Coward Theatre

Kip Williams is not a massive name in British theatre (yet), but the Aussie writer-director is starting to make some serious waves over her. His dizzyingly high tech, Sarah Snook-starring one woman Dorian Gray was a big West End hit last year, this autumn he directs a version of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the Donmar. It seems questionable as to whether we’ll get part two of his one woman Victorian horror trilogy over here – a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde received mixed notices Down Under – but part three is coming our way in the new year as his take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula lands on our shores. In her first full London stage role since her career making turn turn in The Color Purple over a decade ago, Cynthia Erivo will return home to (hopefully) triumphantly take on 23 different roles in a tech enhanced solo romp through Dracula that plays clever visual homage to the early years of horror cinema.

If you thought Jamie Lloyd’s hipster, prosthetics-free production of Edmund Rostand’s classic play had killed off the classic big-nosed take on Cyrano de Bergerac, you’d be very wrong. Nonetheless, to suggest this RSC production from director Simon Evans just an old school trad take would be off the mark. Co-adapted with writer and poet Debris Stevenson, it won glowing review in Stratford-upon-Avon for its bitter intensity and moreover for superb lead performances from Adrian Lester as the dazzlingly witty but physically ugly soldier Cyrano, and the wonderful Susannah Fielding as his love Roxane, unaware that the poetic letters purportedly sent to her by her hunky suitor Christian are in fact written by Cyrano.