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Picking out clear trends running through the hundreds of theatre shows staged in London in any given year is an act of madness – there are too many productions, too many theatres, with too many different priorities to really be able to look at the sum total of everything and say ‘ah ha - behold the zeitgeist!’.
That said, 2024 was a good year for Serious Drama in London, and despite the domination of Wicked at the cinema, it felt like a less good year for musicals on stage after last year’s landmark revivals of Sunset Boulevard and Guys & Dolls.
There were certainly big commercial hits for musical theatre: MJ, The Devil Wears Prada and the Starlight Express revival had varying reviews but good box office. It was a joy to have Hadestown back in London, and there were cool off-West End revivals for The Producers and Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.
But there was no single, zeitgeisty song-and-dance show and instead this felt like a good year for big name directors – Benedict Andrews, Katie Mitchell, Sam Mendes, two from Robert Icke, two from Jamie Lloyd – and serious stage actors: Lesley Manville, John Lithgow, Laura Donnelly. The Europeanisation of the London stage continued slowly but surely, with major shows from Thomas Ostermeier, Ivo van Hove and Eline Arbo’s incandescent The Years was a deliciously out of the blue smash for the Almeida.
Shakespeare always has a good year in London, but 2024 was a particularly one for him. Certainly if there was a symbolic moment on the London stage in 2024 then it was Frozen closing at Theatre Royal Drury Lane and being replaced by a Shakespeare play – the first time a non-musical has run at the enormous venue in decades. It won’t last – Disney’s Hercules rolls in next summer – but it does feel like it’s been That Type of Year. And these are my highlights of it.
1. Machinal
Technically a show from late 2023 – that’s when it debuted at Theatre Royal Bath – Richard Jones’s pulverising wonder of a production turned Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist classic into something huge and unsettlingly other, pulsing from the Old Vic’s stage like an ominous Lovecraftian sun. Rosie Sheehy gave a superb performance as a nameless, non-conformist woman being gradually obliterated by a society that rejoices in her destruction. But it’s the near apocalyptic visuals I’ll remember the most – the final image of the company wordlessly linking hands to obliterate Sheehy was about as powerful a moment as I’ve ever seen in the theatre.
2. The Cherry Orchard
If new Donmar Warehouse artistic director Tim Sheader came in on a high with hits The Fear of 13 and Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, his predecessor Michael Longhurst went on one too. Well, in my opinion: Benedict Andrews’s wild but intimate take on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard was one of the more divisive shows of the year, but I thought it was extraordinary. In a hallucinatory, Wes Anderson-toned setting, an incredible cast infused these century-old characters with so much love and care it was heartbreaking.
3. Oedipus
Revered director Robert Icke returned to the London stage in a big way this year, with his Ian McKellen-powered Shakespeare mash-up Player Kings. But it’s the hugely delayed arrival of his Oedipus – originally due in 2020 – that blew my mind: an elegant, devastating and brilliantly modernised take on the thousands-of-years-old Greek tragedy, home to tremendous performances from Lesley Manville and Mark Strong.
Wyndham’s Theatre, until Jan 4 2025.
4. Mnemonic
Was it a revival? An update? A reimagining? I missed Complicité’s 1999 classic the first time around, and I guess I’ll never really know how it was then because Simon McBurney’s production has been given a root-and-branch update for our modem world, adding everything from Brexit to mobile phones to the war in Ukraine. But it remained extraordinary, a wide-eyed, visionary work about the interconnectedness of everything and the narrowness of human perception. Visionary stuff.
5. The Years
Testimony to the kaleidoscopic diversity of programming at the Almeida under outgoing artistic director Rupert Goold: alongside the homegrown goodies, he was the first to snap up a show from Eline Arbo, the new AD of the revered Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. A searing adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s Booker-nominated memoir, this show about a woman’s journey through the twentieth century was visceral, disturbing and phenomenally acted by a cast of five who will all be transferring with the show to the West End in 2025.
Harold Pinter Theatre, Jan 24-Apr 19 2025.
6. Viola’s Room
Immersive gods Punchdrunk pared it right back this year for a stripped down and unsettling fairytale that was entirely linear and yet made you feel more like a character in the story than any of their more wide-ranging adventures. Intense and foreboding, the banging ‘90s alt-rock soundtrack was a nice bonus.
The Carriageworks, until Dec 23.
7. The Hills of California
Jez Butterworth’s epic drama about a quartet of Blackpool sisters scattered by a terrible secret didn’t end up getting quite the rapturous reception as his recent-ish smashes Jerusalem and The Ferryman. And in part that’s fair enough – the ending was a muddle. Credit to Butterworth, he actually totally rewrote the final act for Broadway, and has by all accounts now nailed it. But regardless of flaws, it’s a fine play and an incredible showcase for star Laura Donnelly - her arrival as an unexpected second character, to the sound of the Stones’ Gimme Shelter, has to stand as one of the all-time great entrances in the history of theatre.
8. Or What’s Left of Us
Holy performance-art fools Sh!t Theatre – aka Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersdale – took their shtick of acting like idiots while saying the most profound thing you’ve ever heard to devastating new heights this year. Or What’s Left Of Us is a funny show about the pair getting into folk music, but is also a harrowingly intense work about living on through grief. It returns to London for a second run early next year.
Soho Theatre, Feb 18-Mar 1 2025.
9. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Although the nuclear levels of camp brought to bear on this virtuosic Australian stage adaptation of the Oscar Wilde classic occasionally threatened to drown everything else out, The Picture of Dorian Gray was as technically dazzling a show as the London stage has seen. Taking on every single role herself – both live and pre-recorded – Succession star Sarah Snook gave a fine acting performance and a phenomenal technical one as she negotiated the innumerable pitfalls of Kip Williams’s insanely high-concept production with apparently effortless dexterity.
10. Giant
David ‘not the Talking Heads guy’ Byrne’s tenure at the Royal Court got off to the best possible start this year with a stonking great hit in the form of Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play Giant. Formally, it was maybe a little old fashioned by the standards of ‘new writing Mecca’, the Court. But Rosenblatt’s drama about Roald Dahl’s antisemitism was written with enormous wit, care and even empathy, while veteran US actor John Lithgow delivered a staggering central performance. It transfers to the West End next year.
Harold Pinter Theatre, Apr 26-Aug 2 2025.
11. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Though more divisive than Rebecca Frecknall’s productions of Summer & Smoke and A Streetcar Named Desire, as far as I was concerned the Almeida’s in-house director made it three Tennessee Williams revivals for three with this creeping gothic take on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In a superlative cast, Normal People star Daisy Edgar-Jones was revelatory, burning the stage up as an almost hyperreal take on the play’s morally ambiguous female protagonist Maggie. She’ll go far!
Almeida Theatre, until Feb 1 2025.
12. Bear Snores On
Popping up at the Open Air Theatre unexpectedly out of season, this deliriously loopy immersive kids’ show about a mouse taking shelter from a snowstorm with a group of maddeningly eccentric animals was – children’s theatre or no – about the funniest show I saw in 2024 and it would be wonderful if it got another run. That it was co-adapted by big name actor Cush Jumbo was random, but delightful.