Hampstead Theatre

The stage or screen kiss has always made audiences speculate (often correctly; my mother is still not over Brad and Angie) as actors negotiate something that’s both intimate and sterility professional. It's the tension Sarah Ruhl toys with in Stage Kiss, finally receiving its UK premiere at Hampstead Theatre 12 years after it debuted in New York. We open in a classic audition room: mismatched chairs, institutional lighting, a flamboyant director (Rolf Saxon) who wants his actors to ‘follow their instinct’. The trouble is that nobody's instincts are particularly good. He reaches for the word ‘slippery’ to describe his first play - apt for everything that follows. MyAnna Buring's She arrives in a ball of anxiety, fumbles her lines, drops her bag, and gets the part anyway. The play she's cast in, a forgotten 1930s melodrama called The Last Kiss, is packed with longing and terminal illness, and also coincidently features He (Patrick Kennedy), her old flame. His expression upon recognising her suggests that the flame was never quite extinguished. Because of this, the first act is comedically theatrical – Stoppardian, even – a loving homage to the absurdity of the rehearsal room, the set blooming gradually into the full gilt aspirations of the play. After the interval, Robert Innes Hopkins’s design makes a decisive lurch from red velvet to the grubby reality of He’s flat, and then to a director’s nostalgia project set in ’70s New York, featuring a Bronx sex worker and an Irish...

This autobiograophical drama from US playwright Joshua Harmon – best known for Bad Jews – looks back upon his New York childhood and the time he spent with his formiddable, ecccentric grandmother. It’s directed by Josh Seymour and stars Suzanne Bertish, Anna Francolini and Ryan Kopel.

When it was first announced, Richard Nelson’s Springwood had a very impressive director indeed attached in the form of the mighty Stanley Tucci. He dropped out shortly thereafter – presumably on account of having famous actor stuff to do – to be replaced by Nelson himself, who is hardly a duff choice, being a seasoned director of his own work. With a long and distinguished career that has included a long stint with the RSC, the US playwright is probably best known for writing the book to the musical Chess and for his Bill Murray-starring 2012 film Hyde Park-on-Hudson, which Springwood is adapted from. Like the film, it’s a dramatisation of the 1939 visit by King Edward VI to the US to meet with Franklin D and Eleanor Roosevelt at their country estate in Hyde Park, New York, in an effort to drum up American support for a predicted conflict with Germany. But scandal in the shape of the President’s numerous mistresses threatens to derail the trip.  Robert Lindsay will star as Franklin, and Jemma Redgrave as Eleanor, with Andrew Havill as King George VI and Rebecca Night as his wife Elizabeth.

A big coup for Hampstead Theatre here, as it bags the UK premiere of the wildly acclaimed US indie musical Kimberley Akimbo. Created by composer Jeanine Tesori and writer David Lindsay-Abaire, it’s an all-singing adaptation of Adams’s relatively obscure 2000 play of the same name, which follows the eponymous heroine, a 16-year-old girl afflicted by a rare/essentially magical disease that makes her age four times faster than usual. This means she has the appearance of an elderly woman while essentially being a teen. And apparently it’s wonderful! It bagged multiple wins at the 2023 Tony Awards – including the all important best new musical – and ran for a year-and-a-half on Broadway. Now it’s headed over here, albeit in a brand new production from Michael Longhurst, who did such a bang up job at the same address a few years back with Tesori’s Caroline, or Change.