I loved Enron, with Sam West, and Jerusalem with Mark Rylance.

Mark Rylance’s performance was one of the best I’ve ever seen on stage, so it would have been a travesty if he didn’t win the Best Actor.

The only performance I’ve seen that tops it in the last five years was Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello at the Donmar Warehouse. That performance was elemental, he was like a huge storm cloud moving across the stage rather than an actor. He really reclaimed the play from Iago (a far weaker performance by Ewan McGregor), and rightly was awarded the Olivier Award for Othello in 2008.

Another recent excellent performance by Dominic West in Life is a Dream, also at the Donmar. Although he didn’t reach the same levels as Rylance and Ejiofor, his incarcerated prince was powerful and nuanced.

Having managed to miss every single show that Rylance has been in over the last 10 years, I was kicking myself when I saw him in Jerusalem. I now want to go and see shows like Endgame and I generally can’t stand Becket.

I think Rylance will sweep the boards at other Awards with his performance as Rooster, and my money is on him to pick up the Oliviers. Jerusalem won Best Play but it is only a good play and not a classic; it’s Rylance that lifts it above being just good.

Enron is overall a better production, so it’s fair that it picks up Best Director for Rupert Goold.

I love Ian Rickson, the director of Jerusalem and the ex-artistic director of the Royal Court.

He directed a fantastic production of The Seagull as his final show there – also starring Ejiofor, as well as MacKenzie Crook (surprisingly disappointing in the main role), Pearce Quigley, who for me stole the show as the awkward school teacher, Katherine Parkinson from the IT Crowd, Kristen Scott Thomas, Carey Mulligan now flying to fame in An Education. All incredibly impressive in a hilariously funny, yes funny, verision of Chekhov.

But Jerusalem was ponderous in places and could have done with a slightly firmer hand, so I don’t feel too bad for Rickson losing out to Goold.

Enron, although not quite as good as everyone is making out, is a beautifully composed production. It weaves together storytelling about financial products (surely the best way to learn about boring accountancy issues) with choreographed musical numbers of a type hard to categorise, and startling original and disconcerting imagery.

I did think that the scenes in court and the final monologue with Sam West is slightly anti-climatic, a bit of a damp squib after the perfectly orchestrated rest of the play.

Both Jerusalem and Enron are transferring to the West End in January 2010.

Would highly recommend both of them.

You can get tickets for both plays through the Royal Court Box Office on 020 7656 5000 or online at www.royalcourttheatre.com

But you can’t beat the £10 nights on a Monday at the Royal Court — which is what I paid for great stalls seats for both Enron and Jerusalem. Just sign up to the mailing list and get in there quick for future productions.

The new Alan Bennett play The Habit of Art is about the poet W.H. Auden and composer Benjamin Britten.

But it’s also an examination of acting, theatre, writing, music, artists: the fabric that makes up “art”.

In The Habit of Art, rehearsals are taking place for a play about Auden. He has returned from America to Oxford. This is no romanticised version of the poet’s life, as demonstrated by his personal hygiene, which includes urinating in the sink, and encounters with a rent boy.

The focus is the relationship between Auden (Richard Griffiths as the actor Fitz) and Benjamin Britten (wonderfully upright and uptight Alex Jennings, playing the actor Henry). They haven’t seen each other for 20 years, and Britten visits him to seek support on his new opera, Death in Venice.

There are many different layers in the play, like a set of Russian dolls. Inside The Habit of Art itself is the play Caliban’s Day, about Auden and Britten. The actors go in and out of role, offering constructive and not so constructive criticism about the quality of the play. Griffiths can’t remember his lines as Auden (and you wonder if this has been written in deliberately, as Griffiths took over from Michael Gambon at the last minute).

The play is at its best when it’s slipping effortlessly between the preoccupations of Auden and Britten as artists, to the insecurities, aspirations and disappointments of the cast. For example, Adrian Scarborough (playing the neurotic actor who plays the autobiographer) winces that he may be a “device”, a word that strikes horror among the rest of the retinue.

The first half is generally very funny. Auden is told that Professor Tolkien was at dinner in the college and that he’s just written another book. “More fucking elves I suppose,” replies Auden.

However, the play could do with some editing, as it is a bit rambling and discursive in places. This review is based on seeing a preview of the production, so I suspect that it will get sharpened up significantly.

This is most apparent in the second half when the focus falls firmly on the discussion between Britten and Auden, and it gets bogged down in being a straight-forward (and not majorly engaging) play.

There is less of the chopping and changing out of character, and you lose the funny and revealing commentaries from the actors. And I just wasn’t convinced by the relationship between Auden and Britten, which lacked chemistry; the exchanges between them were a bit ponderous and, dare I say it, boring.

It is a stunning cast, with Griffiths, Jennings, and Adrian Scarborough. Frances de la Tour was woefully underused as a bit parter and a stand-in director who spends most of the time sitting on the side-lines – something, indeed, that emerges as a frustration for her character at the end.

I felt that the whole cast was operating on 75% because the material wasn’t quite there. Again, perhaps this is something that will tighten up.

Overall, I loved the first half with it’s light touch and the examination of the creative process by an accumulation of well-observed detail.

But I didn’t enjoy the second half as much: the play lost its main attraction by focusing on Auden and Britten and a fairly clunky plot with the rent boy.

Then again, I couldn’t see what the fuss was about The History Boys whereas everybody else raved about it, so it’s possible I am missing something again.

Dates up to 24 January are sold out. More seats will be released for February and March 2010, with booking open on Wednesday 2 December on the National Theatre website.

If you’re clothes shopping on your lunchbreak, Arturo Brachetti is a man you want with you.

In Change, he whips through 100 costume changes in this hour and a half show: the changes themsleves are so quick you can’t quite believe your eyes.

The biggest strength of the show is Brachetti – his quick changes are spectacular. He changes from punk rocker to the queen in the blink of an eye. It’s worth seeing the show just for this.

But the biggest weakness of the show is also Brachetti. He just can’t act, and large segments of the show revolve around him doing so. Sean Foley’s script is latently entertaining and could work with another performer, but it falls flat with Brachetti.

You can see exactly what motivated the producers (including Brachetti himself) to bring this to the West End on this scale. To make the show spectacular, you need the elaborate costumes and set, and a script to cohere it into a full length show.

But it’s a catch 22 as Brachetti can’t support this. And the high stage with the proscenium arch also doesn’t do him any favours, with a big divide between performer and audience. I really feel that this is suited to a smaller, more initimate venue. And Brachetti should definitely stick to just performing his set pieces and drop the bits inbetween.

Overall, it’s definitely worth a watch. It’s great family entertainment and you can’t deny his talent. But get ready to sit through some clunky and faintly embarrassing interludes intbetween the changes.

Cheap tickets – you can get second price stalls seats for a tenner on lastminute.com

I’d also heard that it was meant to be scary. So I was preparing for a halloween experience at the Soho Theatre, and drafted in a male friend that I could dig my nails into his arm. I placed myself on the back row on the aisle seat, ready to scamper out of the door in terrified horror.

This was certainly no fright night. It was, though, a different kind of disturbing. A young man called Liam (played by Liam Joe Armstrong) bursts in on a couple having some dinner. He is the wife’s younger brother, always getting in trouble with the police. He is covered in blood.

The play shifts cleverly through the different versions that Liam offers, each one revealing that the last version was a lie. It starts off with him finding a boy lying down outside with cut wounds, a “lad” that clearly was getting up to no good himself. It morphs into a version where he is followed down an alleyway and he fights back his attacker. And then reaching out into more and more disturbing places.

It explores the boundaries of what people will do to protect family, what they’ll do to other people, and anbecause they’re scared of getting found out. Playwright Dennis Kelly pushes these boundaries incrementally as the play goes on, like a parent teaching a kid to swim, and moving back everytime it gets closer.

But there are some fundamental problems with this play. There is an unrealness to the conversations between the three characters, which is fine. But for some unknown reason, nearly every sentence is repeated twice or three times. So the conversations go a little bit like this:

WIFE: “Are you going to call the police?”
HUSBAND: “Are you saying you want me to call the police?”
WIFE: “You can call the police if you want”
HUSBAND: You want me to call the police?

(This is an approximation.)

The play runs for 1 hour 45 without interval. Seriously, we could have happily lost half of this if the actors had said the script once. Although I could see that these repetitions sometimes worked (such as “the lad is covered in blood” resonates further in the play when this is repeated), these exchanges were really quite annoying.

Then the characters are pretty flimsy. Helen, played well by Claire-Louise Cordwell, conveys the idea of love and loyalty for her brother and uncertainty about her marriage and pregnancy. Danny (Jonathan McGuinness), her husband is pretty two dimensional, although I am sure he is meant to be quite weak and bland. And it’s interesting to see the change in the husband from a bit of a wet blanket to a torturer. Joe Armstrong is undeniably excellent in the role of Liam, wide-eyed and sweet but capable of dark acts. But the characters weren’t convincing, and I didn’t really care what happened to them.

Overall, its cons outweigh its pros.

Alan Cumming does a decent job with his one man show.

It’s a mixture of him talking and singing, (very) loosely based on his last ten years in America.

His conversation between the songs was charismatic and entertaining, and a story about Cabaret was particularly engaging. Cumming was performing as Emcee in the musical (presumably dressed in leather or not very much at all) and asked a grandfatherly man up on stage to dance with him. The crowd went wild. When Cumming asked the man’s name, the reply was “Walter Cronkite”, the broadcast journalist named as “the most trusted man in America”.

However, Cumming seemed a bit lost on the stage of the Vaudeville when singing, stripped of any set and any real choreography or ensemble, and his voice doesn’t have enough wow-factor to fully compensate. The selection of songs for the most part is a bit schmaltzy. And when he starts singing he loses some of his natural charisma and falls back on the conventions of musical theatre: making of fists, wide sparkly eyes, wry smiles.

When he goes into a song from Cabaret, Mein Herr, it’s an entirely different matter. This is dark, mischievous and erotic and you can see quite easily how he racked up a string of awards in the UK and US with his performance in the Donmar’s production. He really excels here: his natural charisma re-emerges and he has the chance to do a bit of proper acting.

And the comic songs were a real treat. Taylor, the Latte Boy was sweet and funny, and the encore song that had been written for a 96 year old grandmother was hilarious: “You’re fucking beautiful”, with more “fucks” than a randy band of rabbits.

There was something else undermining the performance though. The band members were undeniably talented and their placement on stage created a nice sense of intimacy. However, I suspect that Cumming was unaware that one of the band members was pissing about for large parts of the performance.

Mate, you’re lit up on stage with a whole audience looking at you! He sat there looking beyond bored, slumping over his instrument, and trying to catch the attention of another musician sat next to him. He was mouthing words and a couple of times, and he even looked like he was playing scissors, paper, stone or some other sort of hand gestures.

Cumming made a big deal about creating bonhomie with his band, introducing them all at the start, and making jokes about their relative youth. Either this musician didn’t care or there was some politics going on, but it really jarred with Cumming’s attempts to create intimacy and distracted from the performance.

It was an enjoyable show. It would have been better with improved choreography, changing some of the musical numbers for funnier ones, a bit more of the Cabaret raunch, and some stern words to the band.

I don’t know where to start with Jerusalem.

The first place has to be Mark Rylance. This is his play and he blows your socks off. He is Rooster Byron, a bloke who live in a trailer in the woods of Flintoff, drinking and smoking, where all the local kids and assorted people with nothing better to do go and hang around and drink, smoke, shag and take drugs. He’s charismatic, a storyteller, an indomitable spirit.

His performance is really something special, and I will be stunned if he doesn’t win, or at least get nominations for, best actor awards.

The play is an epic three hours and split into three parts. It takes place on the day of the village fair and the council are coming to evict Rooster.

The first part is basically a lot of these people sitting round talking outside the trailer.

The ensemble cast does a very competent job: Mackenzie Crook as Ginger, who’s a bit wet and applies basic logic that deflates the most inflated of Rooster’s tales; Tom Brooke as the sweet and skinny Lee Piper, who is going off to Australia and is scared to be leaving Flintoff; the overweight kid who is proud not to leave Flintoff and works at an abattoir killing 200 cows a day; Lee points out that he’ll kill 2 million cows by the end of it.

It’s nothing special and veers slightly on being dull; the banter is funny enough but not gripping and the characters are engaging but a little two dimensional.

But the dullness of the first part proves necessary; it sets the scene, the ordinariness of it, the safeness where these people congregate despite the lack of health and safety, the badger shit, the coke on the table. And it provides a huge contrast to what happens next.

The second part starts to build the tension. A teenage girl of 15 called Phedre has gone missing; her stepfather comes to Rooster calling him a gypo and a maggot and says he has something to do with it.

Rooster says that her stepfather has been interfering with her. By now, Rooster’s character is emerging more strongly. This is a man who rode daredevil over 13 buses, broke his bones, technically died, and then got up for a pint.

As well as a fighter, he is a great story teller. One story is a particularly tall tale. He met a giant outside a pub who told him that he built Stonehenge. The giant’s earring drops to the ground, and is a full-size drum. Rooster says that if he hits the drum, it will summon the giants.

Everybody greets the story with disbelief and the ever-logical Ginger says that BBC Points West woud have covered the story were it true. Even so, the power of Rooster’s story-telling makes them terririfed to bang on the drum.

But it’s in the third part – after the relaxed realism of the first part and the building tension of the second part – where Rylance comes into his own.

You feel the impending tragedy. Eveything that is unique, different, wild, un PC, sex at 12, coke on the table, is OK: it’s the rich variety of life, the dark undercurrents that throb and keep the world alive, and it’s in danger of being whitewashed out by the council and the new estate and the pub brewaries who enforce codes of conduct.

One piece of acting is astonishing. When Phedre tries to get him to his feet to dance, there is a silent struggle between his unspoken commitment to providing a haven and his attraction and compulsion to get close to the girl. He sits there with his mind willing his body back and sadness as his body is pulled forward; and all wihtout barely moving a muscle.

As the play builds to its climax, Rooster is attacked. All the way through he is barrel chested ready to fight and yet perfectly still. Now, he is broken and ostensibly beaten, and you think there is no chance he will survive. And this is when it really kicks in. He is elemental, and reminded me of Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood or Gangs of New York.

Everything that you thought was real changes. The ending is unbelievable and yet completely and utterly convincing, with its paganism and power. I have never left a show on such an adreneline high.

There was an ovation, and stange yelps from the audience. Several curtain calls and Rylance jumping up and down with some sort of raw energy. I left the building in a trance. Then went back realising I was in need of beer. We completely forgot about the cast talk at the end until a second wave of people emerged half an hour later.

It is a powerful lesson for a play such as Phedre with Helen Mirren at the National, which was high intensity from the very start. Take your time and build it up, it’s way more effective.

The play is good, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s also a weakness of the play that Rooster is so charismatic and powerful. It means that the other characters don’t get a look in; they suffer the fate of being ordinary. But Jerusalem is all about Rooster Byron, and more specifically Rylance.

See it, you really should.

Jerusalem transfers to the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue from 28 January 2010

Set on the eve of Martin Luther King’s death, The Mountaintop is a surprising play.

The great civil rights activist sits alone in his hotel room while it is pouring with rain outside. The set is remarkably atmospheric and evocative; it is shabby and littered with cigarette ends and empty coffee cups, and Luther King (played by David Harewood) is visibly nervous, jumping in shock each time the thunder cracks: to him, it’s a gunshot, a materialisation of the death threats he is receiving.

The play takes a little while to warm up. Harewood’s voice is initially strange; it wavers with what sounds like heightened emotion even when asking for cigarettes. But he conveys King’s emotional state very well. He’s exhausted from preaching and shouting, frustrated by the lack of progress of the peaceful black rights movement; torn up with guilt about the violence that it has inspired, resulting in the death of a 16 year old killed by police.

But the real treat of The Mountaintop is Lorraine Burroughs as Camae. She gives a brilliant performance as the maid who brings him his roomservice coffee and who doesn’t leave. It’s a two-hander, so it’s just her and him for the whole play, and the interplay between the two characters is authentic and charged with chemistry.

Camae is beautiful and irresistible – “even my uncle couldn’t resist”. But she’s not just a pretty face: she is sharp, witty and has no sense that King is any better than she is, just because he is a Dr, or Martin Luther King or a man. She challenges. This is a voice for black rights but also women’s. She runs circles around him. When King is faltering about what to do next, after realising the marches aren’t powerful enough, Camae puts on his suit jacket and his shoes and delivers her own sermon, one that has King gripped.

The Mountaintop a lovely complex portrayal of a man desperate to do what’s right and have an impact on the world, and change it for the better, while struggling with the thing that he says unites us all and makes us human: fear. And smoking, drinking and ready to cheat on his beloved wife with the beautiful Camae.

But I have to say that the twist in the tale didn’t completely convince me. Camae is no maid: she is an angel, sent to tell King that his days are numbered. In fact, tonight is his last night before meeting his maker. Magical realism and all that, but it is a bit of a stretch to believe that she is an angel and he is on the phone to God.

The actors pull it off as their performances are so strong and the writing is agile. And the final scene where King is transported by Camae, like the Ghost of Christmas Future, into everything that happens since, is mesmerising. The whole set is engulfed in a light show that speeds past riots and murders and hip hop music. It’s overwhelming for us and for King. It ends in a note of hope with Obama’s voice and his famous slogan: “Yes we can”.

The set is a wide bare space with craggy rock and clean sunlight hitting the stage; the lighting creates an incredibly convincing impression of actually being in Greece. Dominic Cooper as Hippolytus is the first on stage and my mum says, “Ooh it’s just like Mamma Mia”. And she’s right – we’re in Greece and Cooper is dressed in a black vest showing off his rippling muscles. But that’s where the similarities end, unless I fell asleep during Mamma Mia and it descended into a bloodbath.

Phèdre (Helen Mirren) is married to Theseus, Hippolytus’ dad. Phèdre fancies the pants off Hippolytus (Dominic Cooper) and has persecuted him in order to prevent her true feelings coming out. But when Theseus is missing, presumed dead, she ends up admitting her love. Unfortunately for Phèdre, Hippolytus is too upstanding for his own good and inconveniently in love with the younger and beautiful Aricia. And, guess what, Theseus ain’t dead after all. The shame of dishonour and the fear of the repercussions lead Phèdre and her maid into some dastardly decisions.

What starts as something quite inconsequential, especially from the perspective of a modern audience – OK she is in love with her husband’s son but nothing has happened and no-one knows – descends rapidly with each scene into a more and more twisted situation, each step digging their graves deeper.

The cast is strong, with Ruth Negga as Aricia and John Shrapnel as Théramène particularly standing out. His gift of story telling brings an epic monologue of reported action vividly to life. Dominic Cooper, as much as I like him, is mainly eye candy. He holds his own but mainly conveys emotion by raising his voice and talking more emphatically rather than really expressing much depth. Helen Mirren is sometimes very impressive, but the main problem is that she pitches in too high too quickly. Her very first entrance is steeped in melodrama, hysterical. When you start off like that, and there’s two more hours of it, there’s no way to build the tension. You get to saturation point quite quickly. It is quite early on in the run, though, and this may improve with time.

Theseus (Stanley Townsend) is a nice surprise. I was expecting a dashing ladies man, an older version of Hippolytus, but instead we get the entrance of a broad set man, with a Yorkshire accent (I think) and the moodiness of a thunder cloud. It felt like the presence of Ted Hughes, who translated it from Racine’s French. Suddenly you realise the danger and the consequences of Phèdre’s actions. When Theseus later confronts Hippolytus he moves like a sumo wrestler, delivering an irreversible curse.

The play is dramatic, stretched taut over two hours without an interval. I am a great fan of the interval (stretch legs, drink, make a swift exit if necessary), but I can see why they didn’t put one in here. It’s almost if you take a break the tension goes. And I was riveted. I am also usually plagued by a disparate urge to go to the loo within about 20 minutes of the start of a show, by my bladder was paying too much attention. Watching Phèdre is like watching a car spiral out of control in slow motion.

But this is also the downside. It’s too dramatic, too stretched, and – mainly due to Mirren (sorry Helen!) – too hysterical and when the play ends, there is a sense of fatigue and anti-climax. Not the feeling that you get after going through emotional highs and lows, but the one where you’ve spent quite a lot of time concentrating and investing in something and then, when it’s done, you wonder if it was quite worth it. You’re just not connected enough to the characters to care deeply about their downfall.

I think it was very impressive, but it left me a little cold at the end.

I think Phèdre could have learnt a bit from Mamma Mia actually and taken itself a little less seriously. The dramatic tension needs some relief, and a bit of dodgy singing from Pierce Brosnan.

Eileen Atkins and Anna Maxwell Martin, two fantastic actors, appear under utilised in the two-dimensional characters of Margot and Molly.

Margot, obviously inspired by academic Germaine Greer, is a self obsessed feminist writer, who thinks that the world revolves around her. Molly is an archetypal geeky student, rucksack on both shoulders, with a West Country drawl. She blames the death of her mother on Margot and holds her at gun point.

Atkins and Maxwell Martin are restrained by the sterotypes, and the jokes are a bit obvious and clunky. For example, Greer’s The Female Eunuch is substituted with The Cerebral Vagina.

But then Sophie Thompson appears on stage, as Margot’s daughter Tess. Initially, she seems only to be a cypher for the anti-feminist viewpoint: a harrassed wife and mother, everything her mother despises.

But very quickly, Thompson shifts the comedy up a gear. After encouraging Molly to pull the trigger on her mother, she launches into an exhausted and hysterical rant about dealing with the children. Who is God? Where do Pokemen go on holiday? The audience spontaneously applaud her at the end of it.

From this point on, the play is massively entertaining. The arrival of each new character adds to the farce, and the writing and delivery is exceptional. The next entrant is Tess’ husband Bryan – he’s a businessman but also a “new man”, sensitive and apron-wearing. He’s followed by a butch taxi driver who has been attempting to be communicative and caring, but is desperate to show his manly side again.

Yes, credibility is strained. Would Molly’s mother really be driven to suicide because of following Margot’s feminist teachings? (She apparently dies clutching a copy of The Cerebral Vagina). The talented actors aren’t going to be stretched to the limit of their capabilities. And the play’s not going to win any awards for offering the revelation that sometimes women prefer a bit of rough.

But who cares when it’s this much fun?

The grief suffered by The Women of Troy is huge: city destroyed, husbands and children murdered, friends raped by the triumphant Greeks. Yet Katie Mitchell’s production fails to deliver the horror and pathos that this should inspire.

Her women are locked in a prison which looks like an underground carpark with cafeteria tables, dressed in cocktail dresses and fumbling futilely with make-up bags and lipsticks, evidently plucked out of a much more salubrious setting. The gap between the high life and rock bottom is a perfect place from which to mine the power of despair.

But Mitchell’s decision to stylise the misery and despair of the women means this opportunity is lost. The chorus of women are reduced to representations of hysteria. They twitch and moan in regular patterns, twirl fabric around fingers, eyes wide with horror, twittering between themselves: a collection of sterotypes of psychological trauma.

It is an annoying way to present collective hysteria and shock; but, more importantly, it means that when their tragedies pile up, it’s more of a body count rather than a examination of human suffering.

There are moments of beauty. The women drift into ballroom dancing, a ghostly evocation of their previous existence. There is a particularly impressive scene where one of the women performs a grotesque parody of the dance, her limbs jerking around in death throes, like a broken string puppet.

And there are a couple of scenes when convincing feeling seeps through the surface. When Andromache reveals the news to Hecuba that her daughter is dead, it is a quieter and more powerful examination of unbearable grief.

However, it is outnumbered by shouty scenes: the crazed and shrieky Cassandra being carted off to be married to Agamemnon, setting fire to dustbins and stripping off. The debate between between Clytemnestra and Helen is not a clever desperate fight as the words suggest but a brawl, points scored by decibel.

And to top it all off, there is an almighty explosion at the end of the play as the prison is blown up. I almost leapt into the lap of the person next to me and it must have left audience members shaken. Although spectacular, it left me feeling it was a shock tactic.

But even this explosion could not cut through a relentless tragedy which inspires little sympathy.