Sadler’s Wells East, London
Visual spectacle overwhelms the human drama in the choreographer’s tech-heavy double bill

Technology can sometimes seem to take on its own life and sideline the people it is nominally assisting. That tension, even conflict, is the subject of Mirror, a new duet by Alexander Whitley, who has good form with choreographic deployments of digital, generative and VR technologies.

In black and white leotards studded with motion-capture markers, Gabriel Ciulli and Daisy Dancer wind themselves into spirals and symmetries that veer from closeness to counter-pull and back again. This unstable yet interdependent dynamic is interrupted by an impersonal beam of light that scans the space, and gives rise to rectangles flickering on the front cloth, like so many screen frames – a portal for the appearance of luminous digital doppelgangers that first echo then upstage the dancers, who now turn their attention away from each other and towards their ghostly avatars.

New work will be choreographed and directed by Benoit Swan Pouffer, artistic director of Rambert, with Davies and Pet Shop Boys serving as executive producers

It’s a Sin, the award-winning TV series about friendship during the 1980s Aids crisis, is to be adapted for the stage as a dance show. The new production is being developed by Rambert who had a hit in 2022 with its prequel to the TV series Peaky Blinders.

The creator of It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies, is executive producer on the new work which will be choreographed and directed by Benoit Swan Pouffer , Rambert’s artistic director. “Storytelling sits at the heart of Rambert’s mission,” said Pouffer on Thursday. “Collaborating with Russell – one of the most powerful storytellers of our time – is incredibly exciting. Together we’re exploring how dance and choreography can carry urgent, emotional narratives in a visceral way.”

Soho theatre, London
In Sarah Power’s impressive play, a new arrival makes a disturbing revelation to a team of oddballs working at a sleepy castle

Everyone is trying their best at the Pemfort Castle gift shop, where hundreds of years of history are smoothed down to plastic goblets and dragon slippers. Around designer Alys Whitehead’s carefully curated set of wooden swords and jars of jam, Sarah Power ’s shattering new play uses a living history event to grapple with the stories we tell about – and to – ourselves, and question what happens when the past cannot be shaken off.

“Medical leeching demonstration” is pinned optimistically to the ideas board for the sleepy castle’s forthcoming event, which accuracy-oriented Glenn (a serious, wonderfully pernickety Ali Hadji-Heshmati) desperately wants to be a success. He is outraged at the suggestion by scatty Uma (Debra Gillett, oozing warmth) that they lump together the dark stories of the castle’s past, out of time and context, while Ria (a buoyant Lydia Larson) is happy to go along with it, her mind half on the local deer she is in the process of befriending.

At Soho theatre, London , until 18 April.

Olivier theatre, London
Writers Nina and Moses Raine add comedy and raunch to Maxim Gorky’s satire of the holidaying elite

In 1898, Maxim Gorky wrote a fan letter to Anton Chekhov. Gorky was just starting out, and the leading light in Russian theatre convinced him to try his hand at plays. Summerfolk was written a few years later as a response to The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s elegiac last play about the downfall of the ruling class.

It features languid members of the elite gathering for the summer at a dacha belonging to Sergei Bassov (Paul Ready) and his wife, Varvara (Sophie Rundle). This setting is stunningly designed by Peter McKintosh as the exoskeleton of a house, rather like the construction of a draughtsman’s sketch in the middle of the woods.

A short play is the perfect snack to incorporate into your life. A long play is a feast – and a feat of endurance

Last week, I spent an hour in a makeshift theatre in the middle of a park, watching Garry Starr’s comedy clown show Classic Penguins . The next day, I spent eight and a half hours in one of Adelaide’s oldest theatres watching Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz – a play where The Great Gatsby is read aloud in full.

Both times, there was nowhere I’d rather be. They both adhere to my golden rule: all theatre should be less than two hours, or more than five hours.

The stars of Sex Education and The Morning Show will appear in a new West End production of Edward Albee’s classic, directed by Marianne Elliott

Gillian Anderson is to return to the West End in a role she has coveted “for decades”. The Sex Education star will appear opposite Billy Crudup in a revival of Edward Albee’s marital meltdown classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the autumn. Staged in-the-round, the production will be directed by Marianne Elliott at the intimate @sohoplace theatre.

Anderson will play Martha who spars with her professor husband George over drinks with a young married couple in the 1962 play. “Martha’s rage is inseparable from her longing, her disappointment and her need to be seen – all things still eminently relatable 60 years on,” said Anderson. The role was first played on Broadway by Uta Hagen, on screen a few years later by Elizabeth Taylor (opposite her husband Richard Burton) and in a 1996 London revival by Diana Rigg. “I’ve wanted to play Martha for decades,” said Anderson. “I’m thrilled Billy Crudup is joining me in the ring as George.”

Hampstead theatre, London
US businessman-turned-playwright Aaron Loeb combines medical tech concepts with knotty dilemmas and Mamet-esque dialogue

An earnest research scientist turns up at a sleek venture capitalist firm to pitch her idea with a set of old-school index cards. Willa (Letty Thomas) is initially dismissed by young gun May (Millicent Wong) until she realises Willa has found a way to predict cancer in the human body. It’s a sort of medicalised version of the “precrime” technology of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report – except this is not a futuristic landscape but modern-day San Francisco.

May, the ambitious protege of company boss Paul (Lloyd Owen), sees that she has a rare, high-value startup (known as a “unicorn”) in her hands. But the marriage between Willa’s cutting-edge medical technology and Paul’s profit-driven business brings big dilemmas.

At Hampstead theatre, London until 11 April.

The writer, actor and singer won an award for her role in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. Then everything went silent. As the rising star returns in her very own musical, she hits out at ‘massive’ celebrity casting

This time last year, Maimuna Memon was surfing an almighty career high. The Lancashire-born composer, writer and actor had just won an Olivier award for her performance in the musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 , based on a section of War and Peace. But then it all went silent. “I didn’t expect to skyrocket but I did think, ‘OK, what’s next?’” she says. “And it was a rather quiet year, which was tough.”

It turned out to be useful, in terms of “stripping the ego away”. She went to Galway to be with her mother, a nurse and fiddle-player. “I watched her play and saw these incredible musicians playing for the love of it – not for how they will be reviewed, or to win any awards, or any of that.”

The spectacular stage version of Studio Ghibli’s much-loved film has spent a year at the Gillian Lynne theatre in London. To celebrate, photographer Tristram Kenton was granted backstage access