Lyn's Picks: 18 Jan

Crips Without Constraints Part 2 (Free Online 19 Jan - 16 Feb)
There’s a great line up of talent in the latest batch of short new works from the disabled-led company, Graeae. Released on YouTube every Tuesday over the next five weeks, the season takes the form of duologues featuring some very fine actors including Harriet Walter, Sharon D Clarke, Mandy Colleran, Naomi Wirthner and more. Kellan Frankland’s How Do You Make a Cup of Tea kicks off the season and asks questions about who has the right to play a disabled person.

Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Hung Parliament (Online 27 Jan - 10 Mar, tickets from £15)

Here’s one to book ahead from the rather wonderful Les Enfants Terribles. Part of a growing number of shows that combine theatre and game playing, the show casts the audience as Scotland Yard’s newest recruits to solve the mystery, set in Victorian England, in which leading members of the government have been found dead. With Sherlock missing you have to solve the clues and discover whodunnit. The show starts public performances on January 27 and while there’s been a number of shows in similar vein I reckon that Les Enfants Terribles' past record makes this well worth donning your deerstalker.

Faith Healer (Online 20 - 22 Jan, tickets from £10)/Lungs (Online 27 - 29 Jan, tickets from £10)
If you missed the livestreamed versions last year then there’s a chance to catch up on Brian Friel’s mighty Faith Healer and Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs as part of the Old Vic’s Playback season. Despite the excellent cast—Michael Sheen, David Threfall and Indira Varma—I reckon I have seen more devastating revivals of Friel’s play whose unreliable narrators delve into issues surrounding performance, truth and illusion, the capriciousness of talent, and the very nature of theatre itself and its indefinable magic. But it’s a quality piece of work and worth seeing. The same applies to Macmillan’s skittering play about a young couple deciding whether or not to have a baby because of the effects of climate change. Claire Foy and Matt Smith star as the pair anxious about the future.

You can find lots of streaming theatre shows - many of them available for free - in our Streamdoor guide

Cover Image: Claire Foy & Matt Smith in Lungs. Photo by Helen Maybanks.