Theatre company Spymonkey takes each of the 75 onstage deaths from Shakespeare’s plays and acts them out over a couple of hours. The production asks questions about the nature of theatre, and why we attend plays – to be entertained, or to be intellectually stimulated. . . The annoying thing was that I really wanted to like it. Shakespeare doesn’t want us to be reverential about his work; he wants us to poke fun and be snide and irreverent and play with new ideas and be a bit silly.

Mercury Theatre Colchester has arrived at the Oxford Playhouse this week with their polished, confident, and cringingly funny production of Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. Set in the same suburban American house, with the first act set in the 1950s and the second in the modern day, Norris explores some fairly uncomfortable themes of societal prejudice and resentment with humour and clever, realistic dialogue . . . This is an engaging and hard-hitting play which will have you shifting uncomfortably in your seat.