Merrily We Roll Along, which dates from 1984, famously tells the story of musical theatre composer, Franklin Shepard (Johan Samuelsson) and his rise to success which of course includes his collaborations and personal relationships. It’s a highly accessible piece although the imaginative way the story is unfolded backwards from 1980 to 1957 in ten scenes was clearly too much for the restive, chatty quartet of men in front of me who left – to my relief – in the interval.

Rosalind Philp is very convincing and plausible as Mary, Franklin’s writer friend who secretly loves him, supports him through many dips and troughs before finally succumbing, in despair and hopelessness, to the ugliness of drink. She turns in a bravura performance with some fine singing. None of this cast, incidentally, has a radio mic but, given the vocal strength of the performers and the intimate acoustic of the studio theatre it works very well without.

Samuelsson and Brett McHarge who plays his librettist, Charley Kringas, are both new to Artform and I hope the company manages to coax them back for more. Both men sing with real passion and panache and they spark adroitly off each other whatever the mood – and there are plenty of mood changes and shifts in Merrily We Roll Along. Each is a naturalistic actor and talented singer.

Danielle Dowsett has a lot of fun as the merciless diva, Gussie Carnegie. Her Musical Husbands number is quite a showstopper. And there’s impressive work from Rosalind Killpack as Beth Spencer. Her soprano singing is of professional standard and she can be very funny especially in the slick witty Bobbie and Jackie and Jack number with Samuelsson and McHargue.

A word of praise too for Jo Robinson who plays a whole battery of minor roles. She’s a talented, professionally trained dancer but this is her first musical theatre performance in eighteen years and I hope it won’t be the last. Her performance as the interviewer with Samuelsson and McHarge in a TV studio is like a mini masterclass in acting as the situation slips out of her character’s control.

The small playing space in the studio theatre is quite limiting but choreographer Kemal Ibrahim (also new to the company) makes the very best of it with several compelling movement routines. It’s a good idea to seat the band – led by MD Paul Harrison and making an excellent sound – on a bridge too because it is acoustically effective as well as freeing playing space below.

This show is another success for director, Sheila Arden, and Artform which has continued to produce an ever higher standard work since its relaunch in 2012.

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Gail Louw’s new play presents former South African president Jacob Zuma (Andrew Francis) and white freedom fighter Ronnie Kasrils (Jack Klaff) as old men. They are each waiting for minor treatment in a hospital cared for by Nurse Thandi (Bu Kunene who also plays other roles as the two men reflect on the past). It’s tight, edgy, powerful and very intelligent.

Francis has clearly studied Zuma carefully. He has the mannerisms and the voice perfectly along with the capricious mood changes and bombast. He wheedles, boasts, cajoles, mocks, roars and makes grandiose, outlandish claims. It’s a well judged performance.

Klaff is a splendid foil too. The two men have known each other for a very long time and have a lot of shared baggage. Klaff listens intently before delivering his barbs as the two men richochet between pretended good humoured camaderie over a game of chess and venomous disagreement.

Kunene meanwhile makes a good job of representing the new post-apartheid generation. “We have problems that we feel we carry on our own back because old men and old women in power don’t understand our problems” she says with impressive, quiet assertiveness at the end of the play. She has a nice portfolio of accents too.

The play is really a lament for the idealism and determination which drove the anti-Apartheid movement for so long. Once Mandela had gone corruption, the play alleges, set in as new less scrupulous men assumed power, and this is what Klaff condemns so roundly in man he once worked with.

“You diverted millions, billions that should have gone to improving the living conditions of the …” he tells Zuma before he is interrupted, going on to refer to Zuma’s castle “with its countless rooms, cattle kraal, its dove cote, its amphitheatre” and “arms deals for benefactors”. The history is, of course, so recent that most audience members will remember these events unfolding

This interesting, arresting piece is yet another triumph for Jermyn Street Theatre. If ever there were a small, fringe theatre which consistently punches above its weight, this is it.

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Given the spacious grounds surrounding Chichester Festival Theatre, a short-season spiegeltent makes perfect sense. It is also an ideal setting for a visceral, powerful, topical revival of Roy Williams’s 2002 hard-hitting play. Joanna Scotcher has created a very plausible pub set within the tent in which a disparate group meet, ostensibly, to watch the October 7th 2000 football match in which England played West Germany and lost.

Actually, of course, this fine play isn’t about football at all. It’s about racial tension simmering just below – or sometimes discernibly above – the surface. And, although I’ve seen this play before (it has enjoyed a number of revivals in its 17-year history) I had forgotten how it ends and, thanks to a fine, well directed (Nicole Charles) cast I was swept away in horror by its truthfulness and inevitability.

Sian Reese-Williams is outstanding as Gina, the feisty publican strutting about trying to keep order and usually succeeding. She conveys decency and reasonableness and when, in the end, her personal world caves in she ensures that we really do suffer with her. There’s a splendid performance from Michael Hodgson as Alan too. Alan is a member of a fascist party who talks and talks making every ugly word sound hideously plausible. He never shouts and he’s very articulate. We’ve all met him.

Williams is a master of realistic dialogue and the rest of this 14 strong cast, some in quite small roles, bat insults and ideas at each other like a fast paced game of tennis (or I suppose, football), often coming together to chant or sing when the game hots up. Much of what they say to each other is deeply offensive but it rings horribly true which is where the real horror lies.

The crucial scenes in the gents are neatly staged through an upstage screen with overhead CCTV so that we can see clearly what’s going on.

This is pretty riveting, warmly recommended theatre. Get there if you can and expect to think very hard about how little has changed since 2002 on the way home.

Photo: Manuel Harlan

Dervla Kirwan and John Simm in MACBETH at Chichester Festival Theatre. Photo: Manuel Harlan

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Well, it’s good to see a Macbeth which starts on a blasted heath with three pretty sinister witches emerging from the rocks. I’ve seen plenty of versions of this play in which I’ve spent the first ten minutes wondering anxiously whether I’ve made a mistake and come to the wrong show. And what a heath! Simon Daw’s design gives us a huge semi-transparent glass disc with rocks and vegetation below – and it sometimes splits to create a diametric crevasse. Behind that is an upstage mirror screen behind which some of the action takes place and blurred things can happen.

Paul Miller’s directorial debut in his own home town (he runs the Orange Tree at Richmond for a day job) is a rather grown up, measured take on Macbeth. Much of the text which is often cut is restored and the show runs nearly three hours. GeneraIly I like that although the very wordy, action-light English scene could have done with a good prune.

Dervla Kirwan gives us an intelligent, plausible Lady Macbeth whose attractiveness and reasonableness makes what she is saying seem even more horrifying. And her sleep walking scene is one of the best I have ever seen – chilling and pitiful. John Simm manages Macbeth’s descent into tyranny (seems very topical) well. There’s a moment “O! Full of Scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” when Simm makes sure that you hear and see the madness and irrationality setting in and the leisurely pace at which most of the text are delivered gives you time to reflect on it.

In the support roles Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo is strong as Ross and Harry Peacock gives us a pretty straightforward but quite memorable porter. Beatriz Romilly – a female actor – uses her femininity to make Malcolm seem young but poised and initially frightened although she develops the character pleasingly.

It isn’t all great though. There were some audibility problems – which didn’t bother me much because I know the text of this play almost by heart but there is a downside to a very large cast on a thrust stage playing against an almost continuous rumbling sound track (by Max Pappenheim). His video designs don’t add much either. We really don’t need blood spattered across a screen, for example, to tell us that McDuff has killed Macbeth. And why, by the way, does Michael Balogun as Macduff use a somewhat incongruous south London accent when almost everyone else is speaking RP?

And sometimes the story telling gets lost. In Lady Macbeth’s first scene she is – famously – reading a letter from her husband. No one seeing the play for the first time would understand that from this version. Flashing up the odd word on the screen behind as she speaks just feels peculiar. There are minor characters whose identity seems incomprehensible too – too much walking on and off for no apparent reason.

John Simm and Dervla Kirwan in MACBETH at Chichester Festival Theatre. Photo: Manuel Harlan