Theatre

As I took my seat at the Young Vic, the narrow stage was crowded and noisy showing a 1930s Chinese street with cigarette sellers, beggars, cooked food, shoppers, bullying soldiers and a querulous fine lady carried in a sedan chair. The audience added to the vibrant noise. In 80 minutes this adaptation of Jung Chang's biography of her grandmother, her mother and her own childhood winds through China's turbulent 20th century, ending with her escape and the destruction of all that her parents tried to achieve.

Why is one of the greatest plays of the 20th century more or less unknown? Why hasn't it been filmed? Why isn't it taught in schools? The answer, quite simply, is racism.

Moon on a Rainbow Shawl was part of the new wave of drama in the 1950s, plays which depicted the society of the time and included working class characters. It had beaten almost 2,000 other plays to win a drama competition in 1957. But it was set not in England but in Trinidad. Its characters are a group of poor Trinidadians, living crammed into a small yard around a water tap and speaking Caribbean English.

Written shortly before his murder by fascists during the Spanish Civil War, The House of Bernarda Alba is the last and most powerful of Lorca's plays. In a new production for the Almeida Theatre, this story of repression and resistance has been transposed to rural Iran. Unfortunately, I couldn't help feeling that much of the original play's complexity has been lost in this adaptation. The translation is more or less line by line. As a result, the dialogue often has a painfully stilted feel to it. This undermines Lorca's poetry and his politics.

What makes Juno and the Paycock a masterpiece is that even today it teaches us important lessons about Irish society that should have been learnt nearly a century ago. This tragi-comedy is the second play of Sean O'Casey's Dublin trilogy and was first performed in 1924. It's a grim tale of the Boyle family who live in a tenement in Dublin during the Irish Civil War that began in 1922.

Set in the early 20th century, this darkly comic play explores the fascinations and frustrations of country life. It follows the fate of Christy Mahon, a runaway, who finds himself a guest at the pub belonging to Michael James Flaherty. By confessing to killing his father, he unexpectedly becomes hero of the local town, and the love interest of Flaherty's daughter Pegeen. Christy acts as a mirror for the people of the town, building his boastful stories upon their own desires, only to have them turn on him when he finally tries to live up to their ideal.

The siblings meet a few of the locals at their housewarming party. After Martin encounters a young boy, who he assumes to be trespassing through his garden, the pair decide to set up a Neighbourhood Watch group. When the group decide to go ahead without the involvement of any police officers, the previously quiet inhabitants of Bluebell Hill become vigilant and the play takes a darker turn.

Opposition to the cuts is so widespread that it was bound to find its way into the Edinburgh Fringe.

On 26 March around half a million marched in London against the cuts. What happened that day to a classical bassoon player and hundreds of protesters in a store in Oxford Street is the subject of the extremely funny show, Ben Brailsford: My Fortnum & Mason Hell.

What makes the play a classic - and what this production makes clear - is the meaning of these events for the family, their servants and hangers-on and for Lopakhin himself, in the context of the Russian society of the time.

Clifford Odets is rightly celebrated for his earlier overtly political plays Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! Rocket to the Moon, which premiered in 1938, is a more innocuous creation, centring as it does on a somewhat hapless married New York dentist, his wife, her father, and the young dental assistant and aspiring dancer who excites his desire and causes him to muse on his thwarted ambitions.

How do you swallow a war? You dilute it with long, dull slugs of peace. In fact, war is frequently so boring that soldiers long for the fighting to start. Their time is filled with the mundane. Call it a kind of humanitarian intervention.