Thirty years after their final performance, the Follies girls gather to have a few drinks, sing a few songs and lie about themselves. SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE 56 PARK STREET SE1 9AR 020 7261 9565 Romantics Anonymous To 6 January Angélique makes beautiful chocolates, carefully infused with all the emotion that seems to overwhelm her in daily life. Jean-René runs a chocolate factory that is running out of steam, rather like his own existence. Both seek help from the usual sources: Jean-René favours self-help tapes and Angélique joins a support group, Les Émotifs Anonymes. Romantics Anonymous is an unusual and tender love story in which the obstacles to happiness are not the usual external barriers, but those sneaky little ones we know all too intimately: the ones within. THE OLD VIC 103 THE CUT SE1 8NB 020 7928 2651 A Christmas Carol 18 November to 20 January 2018 By Jack Thorne Matthew Warchus directs Charles Dickens’timeless classic A Christmas Carol in a joyous new adaptation. On a bitter ENTERTAINMENTS Listings Network, the dystopian TV news drama comes to the stage with Bryan Cranston P H O T O B Y J A N V E R S W E Y V E L D P H O T O B Y H E L E N M A Y B A N K S Theatre NATIONAL THEATRE SOUTHBANK SE1 9PX 020 7452 3000 Network To 24 March by Paddy Chayefsky I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore. Howard Beale, news anchorman, isn’t pulling in the viewers. In his final broadcast he unravels live on screen. But when the ratings soar, the network seize on their newfound populist prophet, and Howard becomes the biggest thing on TV. Network depicts a dystopian media landscape where opinion trumps fact. Hilarious and horrifying by turns, the iconic film by Paddy Chayefsky won four Academy Awards in 1976. Now, Lee Hall (Billy Elliot, Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour) and director Ivo Van Hove (Hedda Gabler) bring his masterwork to the stage for the first time, with Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) in the role of Howard Beale. Follies To 3 January Book by James Goldman, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim New York, 1971. There’s a party on the stage of the Weismann Theatre. Tomorrow the iconic building will be demolished. Rhys Ifans is Scrooge at the Old Vic | C U L T U R E | 22 THE RIVER MAGAZINE | Winter 2017 | C U L T U R E |