National Theatre

Nine years ago, rising star director Lyndsey Turner tried her hand at blockbuster Shakespeare when she helmed the Barbican’s Benedict Cumberbatch-starring production of Hamlet. And it was aggressively okay: visually ravishing, and a big hit, but a fairly shallow take on arguably the deepest work in the entirety of English literature. Coriolanus is the first Shakespeare play Turner has directed since, and she’s clearly learned a few tricks over the last decade, because this is tremendous. And indeed, while Hamlet designer Es Devlin is back to conjure a slickly anachronistic mishmash of ancient and modern worlds – men battle with swords in rooms that look like a cross between the British Museum and a Grand Designs property – this is not a show that coasts on spectacle.  Psychology is the thing, and jacked Hollywood star David Oyelowo is wonderful as Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus, the stacked Roman general who turns on Rome after its people reject him. It’s not a play that’s done a huge amount, and in the highly entertaining last major London production, Tom Hiddleston took the popular path and portrayed Coriolanus as an inveterate snob, whose downfall comes from a genuine contempt for the common people of Rome.  Oyelowo’s general is more complicated than that. As a minimum it’s clear that part of reason Coriolanus is so difficult a character is that he is deeply traumatised from the many wars he’s fought for the Roman republic. Now striving for the senior political rank of consul,

Writer-director Alexander Zeldin made his name with the plays Beyond Caring, LOVE and Faith, Hope and Charity, a trilogy of agonisingly empathetic shows about Britain in the age of austerity. I wonder if those same instincts ultimately shaped this overegged, psychosexual take on Sophocles’s Antigone, which might be coming from a place of compassion for the vulnerable, but ends up feeling perilously close to one of those in-yer-face ‘90s shock plays. For the first half of The Other Place’s brisk 80-minutes it cleaves closely to Antigone thematically, albeit smartly transposed into the present. In the original two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old rendering of the story, Antigone is a Theban princess who is sentenced to death after she buries her brother Polynices in defiance of Creon, her uncle and the king of Thebes. In The Other Place, Annie (Emma D’Arcy) has returned to the family home to defy her uncle Chris (Tobias Menzies) over his plan to scatter the ashes of her late father, stating that they have to remain in the home no matter what (NB: though D’Arcy identifies as non-binary, Annie uses she/her pronouns). If Annie’s behaviour isn’t especially logical, well that’s the point. Antigone’s bloody minded, suicidal defiance has often been interpreted as a form of mental illness. D’Arcy’s Annie is explicitly unwell, a fragile drifter driven beyond sanity by her inability to get over her father’s death (plus, some… other things). There’s no brother here, but both source material a

There are distinct shades of King Lear in Tanika Gupta’s new play at the National Theatre. Meera Syal plays Queenie, a powerful matriarch and owner of a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in London. When she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she divides her assets between her three children – who she also expects to let her live with them in turn. However, this reopens wounds that have never truly healed since the loss of her husband and their father. Syal brings Queenie vividly to life, aided by Gupta avoiding the trap of the ‘saintly sufferer’. She’s fiercely proud and quick to cut her children down with her words. As her condition worsens and her sense of time begins to dislocate, the glimpses of her early years in Calcutta and her memories of the racism she faced when arriving in the UK add a greater poignancy to the loss of the life she has fought to forge.  Queenie’s decline dominates the first two thirds of Pooja Ghai’s production. Music maestro Nitin Sawhney’s compositions fleetingly evoke both her heritage and the increasing jangle of her mind. Illusions director and designer John Bulleid employs some neat visual flourishes to capture the experience of her sudden time lapses, although these sometimes distract from the story. The blank backdrop of Rosa Maggiora’s set from the outset has the effect of isolating all the characters prematurely, in spite of some dynamic lighting design by Matt Haskins. Looking a little like a Cy Twombly painting, its appearance and purpose o

Oscar Wilde’s drawing room comedy pretty much invented twentieth century British comedy, and as such it’s become something of a cliché. It’s not that ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is never staged – it was last seen in the West End in 2018 – so much as the major theatres tend not to touch it. The NT hasn’t tackled it since the early ’80s, but here, intriguingly it is, finally getting a splashy Christmas revival that’ll star newly-minted Timelord Ncuti Gatwa as lusty young idler Algenon, who alongside his BFF Jack (Hugh Skinner) must infiltrate the stately home of the formidable Lady Bracknell in order to go a-wooing.  It’s a great cast and Gatwa alone will ensure it sells out its relatively brief festive run. But is there anything new to be found in Wilde’s play? If there is, director Max Webster is the man to find it – with his extravagent visual style and innovative recent takes on Shakespeare (notably his binaural ‘Macbeth’ with fellow Doctor David Tennant) you can expect something more than period dress and wobbly country house sets. 

The National Theatre’s big family Christmas show is the first ever major stage adaptation of Noel Streatfeild’s classic 1936 children’s novel. ‘Ballet Shoes’ follows a trio of very different adopted sisters raised in the home of an absent-minded palentologist who turn to ballet to make a living when their adopted father Gum fails to return from a lengthy expedition. Adapted by rising star Australian playwright Kendall Feaver and directed by Katy Rudd – who did the honours with the NT’s smash ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’ – the cast will be led by Melanie-Joyce Bermudez, Grace Saif and Daisy Sequerra as Petrova, Pauline and Posy Fossil, the three sisters.

‘Dear England’ returns to the National Theatre in March 2025. This review is from June 2023. Now onto its fifty-seventh year of hurt, the capacity of the English men’s football team to be the focal point of ruinous national self-mythologization is well documented. As such, a play about the squad’s resurrection under Gareth Southgate feels like a potentially hubristic idea – dangerously overhyping a gifted man who still hasn’t taken home any actual silverware.  However: ‘Dear England’ is written by James Graham, a playwright who has made genuinely classic work out of such esoteric subjects as the quiz show ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, and the Labour whips office during the 1970s. Unlike the England team, his form is so impeccable that you kind of have to trust that whatever he has planned is probably going to work. And with ‘Dear England’, he’s hit the back of the net once again. Reuniting Graham with Almeida boss Rupert Goold (following last year’s musical ‘Tammy Faye’ and 2017’s Rupert Murdoch drama ‘Ink’), ‘Dear England’ essentially works because Graham and Southgate are interested in the same thing: why is the England men’s team burdened with such high expectations? And what do those expectations do to the psychology of both the team and the nation? Helpfully, Southgate’s penalty miss against Germany in Euro ‘96 is the perfect embodiment of England’s problems. Goold’s widescreen production starts off with a flashback to it, and when we first meet him, it’s come to def

He may have been the greatest composer of musicals in history, but Stephen Sondheim’s final musical was, appopriately enough, too arty for Broadway: the posthumously produced Here We Are debuted at major NYC arts centre The Shed in 2023, where its mash up of two disturbing arthouse classics by Luis Buñuel received warm if not uncritical notices, with the general consensus being that in terms of songs, the first half – based upon The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – felt a lot more finished than the second – based upon The Exterminating Angel. Nonetheless, the imminent arrival of new Sondheim is a furiously exciting and sadly never to be repeated experience and what a coup for Rufus Norris to score it as the centrepiece of his final season running the NT.  Directed by Joe Mantello in what has been billed as a new production likely to be different fron his original NYC one, it has a formiddable cast headed by Tracie Bennett, Rory Kinnear and Denis O’Hare. The plot follows Leo and Marianne Brink, who think they”ve dicovered the perfecrt new brunch spot – but things start to get very weird.

This review is from London Road’s original 2011 run at the National Theatre. It will return in 2025 as part of the final season of work from outgoing NT boss Rufus Norris, who directed the show originally. Casting is TBA. With garlands of critical praise now wreathing Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s flower-drenched documentary musical, it’s a measure of how genuinely ground-breaking it is that ‘London Road’ remains a hard sell on paper. A journey through four years in the life of the street in Ipswich where Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright lived, the book and lyrics are derived from interviews conducted with the residents of London Road. (Verbatim is Blythe’s modus operandi – she wrote a residents’-eye view of a Hackney gunman in 2003.) Beginning with a Neighbourhood Watch meeting, ending with the second annual London Road in Bloom competition and directed with low-key sparseness by Rufus Norris, this is as far away from chorus lines and jazz hands as it gets. Three things make ‘London Road’ extraordinary. First are Cork’s verbatim songs. If you can make something with the chorus ‘Everyone is very, very nervous and unsure of everything, basically’ sound both beautiful but also true to the original sentiment – and Cork does – then that is raw humanity captured in music. Second is the outstanding ensemble: unlike previous Blythe productions, where actors parrot the recorded voices which they hear via headphones, here Cork’s manipulation of words means the cast have had to learn eve

‘Nye’ will stream in cinemas as part of NT Live from April 23. The British, in case you hadn’t noticed, tend to get a little sentimental about the NHS.  So it’s understandable that playwright Tim Price and director Rufus Norris are wary of dewy-eyed hagiography when approaching ‘Nye’, a new biographical drama about Aneurin Bevan, the firebrand Labour health minister who founded the service. With the title role played by the great Michael Sheen, there is a danger of going OTT in having the nation’s favourite current Welshman star as the nation’s favourite historical Welshman. And so Norris’s production has a determinedly trippy quality intended to counter the cliches. Billed as an ‘epic Welsh fantasia’, ‘Nye’ is largely presented as the stream-of-consciousness of an older Bevan, who is a patient in one of his own hospitals. There for an ulcer operation, he drifts in and out of the present and into recollections of his past, unaware he is dying of stomach cancer – something his MP wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) has determinedly kept from him. Crowned by a truly uncanny wig, Sheen is a delight as the fiery but unassuming Bevan. He never at any point changes out of his red striped pyjamas, a pleasingly absurdist touch at the heart of Norris’s stylish production, in which the green hospital ward repeatedly dissolves into the past to the sound of wheezing lungs.  It’s otherworldly in places, especially the scene where Tony Jayawardena’s overbearing Churchill collars Bevan in the Co