A young English couple backpacking across Australia run into a spot of bother when they catch a lift with a sinister American.

Hardly an advisable enterprise in this day and age, but laddish Brit Alex (Shaun Evans) and his well-bred girlfriend Sophie (Amelia Warner) set out to backpack across Australia. Having a lovely time, they think their good fortune is boundless when offered a lift by Taylor (Scott Mechlowicz), a handsome American with a car. Tension builds among the three as Sophie quickly finds herself drawn to the alpha-dog charms of the winsome yank. It's Taylor's custom to take Polaroid snaps of everyone he meets on his travels and, when Alex finds a compromising snap of Sophie among them, the outback air turns positively red with malice.

The jaw-dropping wide shot scenery and tight, claustrophobic shots inside the car add to the brooding malevolent mood in this chest-gripping drama.

See? All we need is... a map and... some kind of plan. This overcoat is neutral darling, neither Bolshevik nor Menshevik. Just essence of Prole. In Kiev during the Russian Civil War, the Turbin household is sanctuary to a ragtag, close-knit crowd presided over by the beautiful Lena. As her brothers prepare to fight for the White Guard, friends charge in from the riotous streets amidst an atmosphere of heady chaos, quaffing vodka, keeling over, declaiming, taking baths, playing guitar and falling in love. But the new regime is poised and in its brutal triumph lies destruction for the Turbins and their world. And those are the real enemies we face, deep in the shadows. This modern man with no name, no past, no love. This desperate hate-filled man born of loneliness and frustration. This man with nothing to be proud of, nothing he is part of... Andrew Upton's version of Mikhail Bulgakov's The White Guard premiered at the National Theatre, London, in March 2010.

The Maids (Les Bonnes, here translated by Bernard Frechtman) is Jean Genet's most oft-revived work for the stage. First performed in Paris in 1947, its action was inspired by a real-life scandal, the murder by two maids, sisters Christine and Lea Papin, of their mistress and her daughter. Genet's maids - Solange and Claire - occupy themselves, whenever their Madame is out of doors, by acting out ritualised fantasies of revenging their downtrodden status. But when the game goes beyond their control the maids are compelled to try to make their fantasy a reality. 'The most extraordinary example of the whirligigs of being and appearance, of the imaginary and the real, is to be found in [Genet's] The Maids. It is the element of fake, of sham, of artificiality, that attracts Genet in the theatre.' Jean-Paul Sartre

Sung at a funeral and a wedding today. The full gamut of the human experience from the ridiculous to the utterly pointless. A restless bunch of young radicals hang out, have sex, dance, drink, moan and philosophise at the home of a prosperous decorator. While Pyotr, a sometime student of law, falls for the lovely, loose-living lodger, his sister carps on about the tedium of life, lusts after Nil - who's blind to her charms but in pursuit of the servant - and botches her own suicide. Life. People shout, fight, eat and go to bed. When they wake up? They start shouting again. In this house everything fades quickly. Tears, laughter. Everything. Dissipates. The last sounds ringing out over the lake. Then nothing. A banal hum. A household falls to pieces as the personal and political turmoil of pre-revolutionary Russia gathers pace. Gorky's darkly comic first play of 1902, banned from public performance under the Czarist regime, is seen here in an exuberant new version by Andrew Upton. Philistines premiered at the National Theatre, London, in May 2007.

Hear what I have to say about the cherry orchard, because it is mine. I say bring it down, tear it down. Smash it down and tear it down. Watch, watch. Just you watch. I will build holiday villas, as far as the eye can see. I will build a place for everyone to come and enjoy. For the future. And this will be the future. A new life. A new way of life. Here! Come now and play. Play. Play! Get the band to play. Ranyevskaya returns more or less bankrupt after ten years abroad. Luxuriating in her fading moneyed world and regardless of the increasingly hostile forces outside, she and her brother snub the lucrative scheme of Lopakhin, a peasant turned entrepreneur, to save the family estate. In so doing, they put up their lives to auction and seal the fate of the beloved orchard. Set at the very start of the twentieth century, The Cherry Orchard captures a poignant moment in Russia's history as the country rolls inexorably towards 1917. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov in a version by Andrew Upton, premiered at the National Theatre, London, in May 2011.