It is at times gripping, tense, funny and joyful but equally there were times when I was impatient for it to move on

There was a moment after the first of two intervals during Fanny & Alexander at the Old Vic when I felt myself sit up straight. Up until that point the play had been entertaining but suddenly it got interesting as well.

Now there is nothing wrong with entertaining - it can be an overlooked element of theatre - but when you've got a play with a running time of 3 hours 45  minutes (when I saw it, it's since had 15 minutes trimmed away) entertaining isn't quite enough.

Fanny & Alexander, Old Vic. Photo: Jay Brooks

The Ingmar Bergman film, from which this has been adapted by Stephen Beresford, was also a bit of a beast in its running time - just over three hours - but I've not seen it so the story was a surprise.

Fanny and Alexander are young siblings growing up in a bohemian apartment block. Their parents Emilie (Catherine Walker) and Oscar (Sargon Yelda) are actors who run a successful theatre.

Their grandmother (Penelope Wilton) is an actress, their uncle Gustav (Jonathan Slinger) is a womaniser and uncle Carl (Thomas Arnold) has married a German woman no one seems to like.

The children take parts in their parents plays and it is a sociable, creative and free upbringing among their extended family and friends.

It is a childhood full of stories, play and fun, despite the various tensions between the adults.

Oscar has a vivid if sometimes macabre imagination - he 'sees' and talks to the grim reaper. Is he just a worrier or is there something more fatalistic about his visions of death?

The latter would appear true when his father Oscar dies suddenly and, still grieving, Emilie, marries Edvard (Kevin Doyle) a widowed bishop.

This was the moment that I sat up. The hour or so up to the first interval is like watching a colourful, animated toy box with its set of ornate furniture and rich, red theatrical drapes.

When Emilie moves with the children into Edvard's home, the set is stark, the box has been stripped bare and painted white. It reflects the austere, strict, authoritarian style of parenting that Edvard employs.

Dust - Milly Thomas. Photo: The Other Richard

Alice wakes up in a hospital, staring down at her own corpse. She is now an outsider in her own life, an invisible shadow in the aftermath of her suicide.

She follows her parents home, visits hers friends and cheating boyfriend, watching how her death affects them all. We get flash backs to her life, her depression, her isolation.

It's a candid frank and witty account, written and performed by Milly Thomas wearing a flesh coloured body stocking with only a shiny metal morgue table and four mirrors for a set - metaphors aplenty. 

Against the vanilla-attired Alice, her friends and family are the colour - her drug-taking, shower-avoiding brother, wealthy and officious aunt and supportive best friend just three.

They are well-drawn and astutely performed by Thomas who flits between multiple characters with ease and pin-point timing. They are also well-observed, as are the reactions and their interactions following her death.

What if Napoleon hadn't died in exile but had escaped using a body double? This is the opening premise of Napoleon Disrobed which has been adapted by Told By An Idiot from the novel The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys.

Ayesha Antoine and Paul Hunter in Napoleon Disrobed, Arcola Theatre. Photo Manuel Harlan

In what is a fun, silly, surreal and quirky piece we see the historical figure, played with brilliant Englishness by Paul Hunter, navigating modern-day Europe, trying to live the life of an ordinary person and not get spotted.

Until, that is, he wants people to know who he really is and that is where his problems really start and where the themes of the play start to bubble to the surface.

His story becomes a series of connected sketches that get more and more random - playing tennis with a frying pan and an inflatable fruit random.

Living in Paris with a melon seller 'Ostrich' (Ayesha Antoine), his friends grow concerned by his increasing insistence that he is indeed Napoleon.

So, they take him to a hospital and, in a nice piece of audience interaction, he is shown all the other people who insist they too are the French statesman.

I love Philip Ridley's plays but this one isn't going to challenge my favourites.

Angry is written as six gender neutral monologues and night to night actors Georgie Henley and Tyrone Huntley switch which monologues they perform.

The suggestion is that there will be gender nuances in the performance or gender tensions in the stories or that it might challenge how you perceived the stories based on your own gender. The suggestion is that it will be intriguing enough that you'll want to watch it another night with the actors performing the alternate monologues.

But the problem is there was no gender tension in these particular stories; in fact there wasn't a single moment when I was curious about how a story would play out performed by the alternate actor. Or where I felt challenged.

Instead it felt merely like a ploy to get repeat visits.

Carey Mulligan's performance is a tour de force, precise, subtle and complex.

Carey Mulligan has a twinkle in her eye. She stands at the front of the stage, hands in pockets, telling the story of how she met her future husband with the precise timing of stand up comic.

Her unnamed character is bright and sassy, she's decided to break out of the shallow fug of drink, drugs and casual sex and take herself wherever in the world the pin in a map lands.

It is on these travels that she spots a man in a queue at the airport whom she takes an instant dislike to.

When the back drop lifts to reveal a modern, smart living room and kitchen Carey Mulligan slips effortlessly into the role of harassed, working mother trying to look after two small children.

You don't need them there for her to convince you that they are, you can almost hear their voices when she negotiates with them.

We'll return to this domestic scene at intervals, always her with her children.

When the backdrop returns she fills in the gaps about her life outside her children, her flourishing career and relationship with her husband.

But this isn't a story of meet, fall in love, get married, have kids. Neither is it story of growing up or of following your dream. Well it is, it is all of those things but there is more to it than that.

Sexy, funny, full of heart and great characters with the added comfort of one of them always putting the kettle on

There is a moment in The York Realist which reminded me of that shower scene with Tom Hiddleston in Coriolanus.

It involves Yorkshire farmhand George (Ben Batt) stripped to the waist and washing in the kitchen sink after a hard day's work but while Hiddleston's shower scene was calculated to show the weary and battle-injured Coriolanus, this scene was all about the look on the face of an observer. 

Ben Batt (George) and Jonathan Bailey (John) in The York Realist at the Donmar Warehouse. Photo by Johan Persson

John (Jonathan Bailey) is the assistant director on an amateur production of the Mystery Plays in nearby York who has come to persuade George to return to rehearsals.

When he catches a glimpse of George's damp, muscular torso it leaves you in no doubt about his feelings.

Another parallel that sprung to mind was last year's film God's Own Country which was also a gay love story set in rural Yorkshire.

The York Realist is far less explicit than God's Own Country, it is all flirtation, all expectation but boy is it sexy. The invisible chemistry is electric. Lines about Vaseline got extra laughs, I'm sure, to ease the tension. 

Philip Ridley’s new play Angry (Southwark Playhouse) has an interesting structure, can you explain how it is going to work?

So Angry consists of 6 monologues that will be performed by both of the actors. However each night we are mixing up which actor performs which monologue.

Both of the actors [Georgie Henley and Tyrone Huntley] will be performing each night but will take turns as to who performs which monologue dependent on which version you see. So you can come and see Version 1 and get a completely different experience to when you come to see Version 2.

Really excitingly Philip has written all of the monologues so that they are gender neutral which means we have been able to really look at what these mean from a male and a female perspective. They come to life very differently.

How did you approach directing a gender neutral piece?

A lot of it stemmed from research that I did for both a female and male perspective but also from the conversations we had as a company. It was really important for the cast to feed in to that because the only way we are going to find truth in these monologues is filtering it through them.

And, how do rehearsals work when the actors are going to be performing the same monologues - is it a collaborative process?

We started off having a couple of days together to discuss all of the monologues and decide the routes we were going to go down with them. We played around with the characters and the interpretations.

It was so useful for us all to understand the different routes we were going to take so that we could push them apart further or bring them closer together dependent on what we wanted to achieve.

After that I was working with one performer at a time in very intense rehearsals. I work incredibly collaboratively so it was a lot of throwing ideas in to the mix and playing before finding what was right between the two of us.

It was then really down to my eye to ensure that things were playing the way we wanted them to.

A feisty, fast-paced play, that delivers some witty one liners and a whole lot to think about

When Sarah Burgess wrote her play Dry Powder about New York-based private equity company it was pre-Trump presidency and yet when I was watching the play I couldn't help thinking 'what would Donald do?'.

At the start of the play Rick's (Aidan McArdle) firm is going through a PR storm because the same day as laying off staff at a company he'd just bought, he threw a lavish engagement party.

Co-founder Seth (Tom Riley) has unearthed a bargain deal which he believes will put the company back in favour with the public eye: A troubled American suitcase manufacturer whom he believes that with the right management could get back on its feet and deliver a healthy return.

Profit or positive PR

His fellow co-founder Jenny (Hayley Atwell) has another plan, one that is less risky, will deliver better returns but won't deliver the positive PR as jobs won't be protected. Jenny doesn't care about PR, she cares about profit.

Seth has (developed?) a conscious about what he does, he wants to create more than profit, particularly given the firms damaged reputation. He's got to know Jeff (Joseph Balderrama), the CEO of the suitcase company and they are seemingly on the same page.

Vanessa Redgrave joins the cast of The Inheritance, Young Vic

Theatre gets me through the dark days of January, here are my highlights from the new play and casting announcements, favourite things I saw (and the low moment).  And, thanks to the Julius Caesar press night, there was a bumper crop of actor, director and writer spots too...

* Forbes Mason, who will forever be known as the Lucifer in pants, thanks to Jamie Lloyd's Doctor Faustus, has been cast in the Almeida's Summer and Smoke which opens later this month. Did I mention how much I'm looking forward to seeing Patsy Ferran, who also stars, in that?

* Josie Rourke announced she is stepping down as artistic director at the Donmar Warehouse next year after eight years in the role. My highlights of her tenure, if you were to ask me for the first things that spring to mind, would be the Tom Hiddleston Coriolanus (incidentally my review of that is my most popular post and has been viewed nearly 15,000 times), the all women Shakespeare series and James Graham's Privacy. There are plenty of others but those are what stick most in my mind.

* Vanessa Redgrave (yes Vanessa Redgrave!) has been cast in The Inheritance at the Young Vic which opens next month. I could listen to her voice for hours. Also announced in the cast are Stan-fav's Kyle Soller, Michael Marcus and Luke Thallon plus a whole bunch of new names I’m looking forward to getting to know over a double play day.

This headline for a Daily Express review of the Bridge Theatre's immersive Julius Caesar production implies that it is for young people, not people like me who are old enough to be a young persons parent.

I have absolutely nothing against encouraging younger audiences. In fact, I much prefer to sit in a diverse group whether it is age, gender and ethnicity - the reaction and response is inevitably going to be more varied and more interesting as a result.

OK so perhaps it's nice to go to Hampstead occasionally and sit in the audience feeling young.

But compartmentalising the generations is like saying that once you get to a certain again you only like Oscar Wilde revivals, productions of Shakespeare performed in ruffs and pantaloons and perhaps some Pinter if you are feeling daring.

I like all sorts of theatre; I love fresh interpretations, new writing, contemporary stories, twists on classics and innovative productions. I'm certainly not a purist or a traditionalist.

Being part of the crowd, standing for Julius Caesar was great fun. I wasn't the only 'older' person, we were a mixed group and that made it better - more representative.

However, if this production is trying to attract a younger audience and I believe it is, then it's somewhat ironic that the standing tickets are referred to as 'promenading'.

I mean this isn't the Victorian age and given that you can be just a few feet away from a murder and end up in the middle of a civil war, it's slightly misleading.