Alexandra Coghlan

There are few absolutes left in contemporary theatre. Fourth walls have long since crumbled underfoot; site-specific and immersive theatre experiences have further done away with divides between theatre and world, performer and audience. The one principle you can rely on is that consciousness is generally a good thing — that a play capable of putting you to sleep is bad. Oh, and that turning up to an opening night in your pyjamas is guaranteed to get you sent straight home again. Step forward maverick theatre company Duckie and their new show Lullaby, hoping to change all that.

There are few absolutes left in contemporary theatre. Fourth walls have long since crumbled underfoot; site-specific and immersive theatre experiences have further done away with divides between theatre and world, performer and audience. The one principle you can rely on is that consciousness is generally a good thing — that a play capable of putting you to sleep is bad. Oh, and that turning up to an opening night in your pyjamas is guaranteed to get you sent straight home again. Step forward maverick theatre company Duckie and their new show Lullaby, hoping to change all that.

Familiar to most as “the one with the bed-trick”, All’s Well That Ends Well has never found the popular favour of Shakespeare’s other Problem Plays. That this should be the new Globe’s first production is telling, a testimony to the work’s unsettling comedy, unlikeable hero, and the sheer density of its verbal contortions. In the hands of John Dove and his team, however, chafing edges are rounded, complexities untangled. The result is charming but callow, the smooth-cheeked younger brother of Shakespeare’s dark, adult comedy.

Debuted in 1999, Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s Parsifal has, in age, acquired something of the mythic sheen of the Grail itself. Returning to English National Opera after lengthy international touring, its legend arrived by way of vanguard — swathing the opening night in expectations and recollections. While Wagner’s final opera is generous in its harmonic warmth, inviting the listener in with luminous themes whose repetitions and reworkings invest them with welcoming familiarity, there is nothing warm about Lehnhoff’s production. The spiritual comforts of Christianity — the dove, the Eucharist, the resurrection — are all denied us here in this Beckettian, post-religious world.

Gilbert and Sullivan season wasn’t due to kick off at English National Opera for another few weeks. Too bad that Mike Figgis and the team behind Lucrezia Borgia didn’t get the memo. Padding Donizetti’s second-rate opera (in which neither poisoning nor passion can be dramatised without recourse to rhyming couplets, 4/4 time and a major key) with a series of short-films proved to be the latest in a series of spectacular misfires from first-time opera directors at the Coliseum. A charitable description of Figgis’s cinematic interludes would have them as ‘stylised’, an overblown period homage to Visconti. Less kindly spectators might see these soft-porn episodes as a rather too literal attempt at fleshing-out a fossilised corpse of a very dead opera.

Directing an Oscar Wilde play is rather like being a chaperone at a party: at best you are invisible, at worst actively intrusive. Marshalling Wilde’s politicos, dandies and duchesses through An Ideal Husband, Lindsay Posner is quick to lose himself among the elegant riot of gilded sets and gorgeous dresses. Faithful to the letter (pink-papered, naturally), the production plays it straight, relying on the skills of a splendid cast.

It is a tale of two directors at present at English National Opera. We’ve had the company’s season opener — a new production of Gounod’s Faust directed by Broadway darling Des McAnuff — and also a revival of Christopher Alden’s surreal take on Janacek’s The Makropulos Case. One is an accomplished success, the other a monumental failure.

The British tradition of sitcom is a noble one; Fawlty Towers,Yes Minister, Blackadder and The Office are all familiar favourites. But The Merry Wives of Windsor? According to Christopher Luscombe and his persuasive team at the Globe, Shakespeare’s sunniest comedy is where it all began.

The Bridge Project — trans-Atlantic theatrical brainchild of Kevin Spacey and Sam Mendes — is once again in residence at the Old Vic. Following the success of last year’s Chekhov/Shakespeare lineup, a new company of American and English actors steps up, this time with an all-Shakespeare programme of As You Like It and The Tempest.

You know it must be summer when three productions of Carmen are being staged simultaneously in London. Alongside the all-singing all-dancing cast-of-thousands extravaganza at the O2 Arena, and Francesca Zambello’s livestock-filled show at the Opera House (which features a horse and some chickens together with the more conventional stars) is the more modest production at Opera Holland Park. Touted among those in the know as the ‘one to watch’, its impeccably authentic staging would be hard to beat, even without the fantastic intimacy of the Holland Park Open Air Theatre.