Raising the curtain

Danny Boyle's Frankenstein, a flurry of West End musicals and Keira Knightley treading the boards again...  Al Senter sets the stage for a dazzling theatrical year

The theatre has survived the recession in robust health if judged by audience figures in London and the regions. But the arts world is braced for spending cuts, and it remains to be seen how badly affected the theatre will be. For the foreseeable future, though, there's a good deal to interest enthusiasts.

In London, the National Theatre has lured film director Danny Boyle back to the stage. Boyle, who won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, began his career at venues such as the Royal Court and the RSC, and he will mark his return to live performance with Frankenstein, a new version of the Mary Shelley classic by Nick Dear. Unusually the lead actors, Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, will be alternating the roles of the Monster and his creator. The show opens next month.

There are two strong Shakespeare productions leaving London to go on the road this spring. Once it has ended a run at the Donmar Warehouse, Sir Derek Jacobi's King Lear will visit eight venues between February and April, including Glasgow, Llandudno and Salford. Shortly afterwards, the National's much-praised staging of Hamlet, with Rory Kinnear an acclaimed Prince, also goes on tour with dates including Plymouth and Milton Keynes.

Throughout next month and March, the Sheffield Crucible, under its youthful artistic director Daniel Evans, will celebrate the work of Sir David Hare. Evans directs a revival of Racing Demon, Hare's dissection of the Church of England, while veteran director Peter Gill tackles The Breath of Life. Thea Sharrock will stage Plenty with Hattie Morahan as the doomed anti-heroine of one of Hare's most powerful pieces.

Plenty is an apt description for the busy Sharrock. Her production of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit will open at the Apollo in London's West End in March. Alison Steadman plays eccentric medium Madame Arcati with Robert Bathurst and Hermione Norris, a married couple in ITV's Cold Feet, once again cast as husband and wife. Sharrock is also working on a revival of Terence Rattigan's Cause Célèbre at the Old Vic in March. This year marks the centenary of the birth of Rattigan, once dismissed as the epitome of the boulevard playwright but now fully recognised as a major figure. The play is a thinly disguised account of a sensational 1930s murder case, with Anne-Marie Duff playing the femme fatale who urges her young lover to dispose of her husband.

There is a flurry of new musicals opening in the West End. First up is The Wizard of Oz, (starting at the London Palladium next month) with several new Andrew Lloyd Webber songs added to the score of the 1939 Judy Garland film. Also in February, rock 'n' rollers of a certain vintage will flock to the Noël Coward Theatre to catch Million Dollar Quartet, a jukebox musical that relives the day in 1956 when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were assembled to work together for the only time.

A Private Function, Alan Bennett's hilarious screenplay depicting social machinations in a northern town as the country prepares to celebrate the royal wedding of 1947, has been turned into a musical. Betty Blue Eyes, opening in March at the Novello Theatre, refers to the unfortunate pig acquired by a meek dentist and his ambitious wife as part of a plan to gain entry to the town's highest echelons. Two more adaptations from successful films complete the line-up. Shrek—The Musical (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane from June) and Ghost—The Musical (Piccadilly Theatre in July) continue the pattern of selling a show on the back of a recognised commodity.

Elsewhere in the West End, there is yet more evidence of London theatre's apparently insatiable hunger for American drama, both period and contemporary. Keira Knightley is back on the boards at the Comedy Theatre from 22 January for a revival of Lillian Hellman's 1934 drama The Children's Hour. Knightley is joined by Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss and Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn for this story of a malicious pupil and the aftermath of rumours she spreads about the nature of a relationship between the two women who run her boarding school.

Neil LaBute's In A Forest, Dark and Deep (Vaudeville from March) is a two-hander starring Matthew Fox, from Channel 4's Lost, and Olivia Williams, a Brit who also has a considerable Hollywood presence, in an unsettling story about a sibling relationship. Finally, Clybourne Park, a social satire by Bruce Norris, much praised when opening at the Royal Court last autumn, transfers to Wyndhams on 28 January.

Look out for Ecstasy, a revival by Mike Leigh of the play he premiered at the old Hampstead Theatre more than 30 years ago and which he brings to the new Hampstead in March. The many fans of Downton Abbey can see the graceful Penelope Wilton in person when she leads a revival of Edward Albee's stately but absorbing A Delicate Balance at the Almeida in May.

After an extensive facelift, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford is back in business with a traditional line-up of Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the lee of the main house the Swan, the venue which recalls an Elizabethan playhouse, is also in action again and one of its highlights should be a production of Cardenio (in May), often described as Shakespeare's "lost" play.

There is a rich assortment of productions on the road for the first half of 2011. There's a revival by David Grindley of his outstanding production of The Life of Riley, by Alan Ayckbourn; Robert Powell in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell; Yes, Prime Minister, direct from the West End; and a revival of Christopher Luscombe's production of Alan Bennett's The History Boys.

In August, Bennett and Luscombe are reunited for a new staging of Bennett's The Madness of George III, which will be seen at the Theatre Royal Bath as part of that venue's continuing relationship with veteran director Sir Peter Hall. Hall himself will undertake a new production of the two parts of Henry IV, in repertoire with a revival of Coward's This Happy Breed.