Plays on in London

Interview: Robert Icke ‘if theatre isn’t astonishing, what’s the point?’ Robert Icke made his name directing boldly reimagined takes on some of the greatest plays ever written: Hamlet, Professor Bernhardi, The Oresteia and last year’s Oedipus (which cleared up during this year’s theatre award season). Despite the sense that he has genuinely added something to millennia old works, it’s still a big deal to make his debut as a ‘proper’ playwright. Even his most outrageous rewrites have had somebody else’s ideas at their core. Manhunt, his play about Raoul Moat, is all him. And to be clear – and I’m going to shock you here – it’s not as good as Hamlet. Nonetheless, after a tentative start where it looks like it’s going to serve as a sort of well-intended apologia for Moat, Manhunt really settles down into something compellingly weird. It’s an examination of toxic masculinity, yes, but in the same kind of way that Moby Dick is an examination of toxic masculinity. The early stages see Samuel Edward-Cook’s triple-jacked double-stacked Moat in the dock for a variety of changes. If you have any familiarity with his short, brutal, bitterly absurd rampage across the north east, you’ll get that this trial can’t possibly have happened – it’s a vague existential framing device designed to get Icke’s Moat to defend his actions almost from the off.  There is undeniably something gauche about his pleading about the state of his mental health and hard childhood. And there’s a level of...

It’s a been a long time since we heard from Conor McPherson: aside from his 2020 adaptation of Uncle Vanya (which was prematurely closed by the pandemic), the great Irish playwright’s last original work was his Bob Dylan musical Girl from the North Country, which premiered at the Old Vic in 2017. McPherson returns to the venerable theatrre with what is, astonishingly, his first new straight-up play since 2013’s The Night Alive.  Directed by McPherson himself, The Brightening Air star Chris O’Dowd as Dermot, a man who returns to his family home in County Sligo during the ’80s to join up with his siblings – played by Brian Gleeson and Rosie Sheehy – who need his help in clinging on to the threatened house.  We don’t know a lot beyond that, although McPherson’s work typically includes haunting metaphysical flourishes that speak to a world beyond ours, even if this can often be relatively subtle.

There’s a lot of big spectacle in the West End at the moment. Big musicals, big stars, big budgets. Which makes Ryan Calais Cameron’s fifties-set three hander about a potentially commie actor seem pretty conventional. We’ve got sharp suits, big pours of scotch, a haze of cigarette smoke. We’ve got a no-bullshit lawyer who speaks in cliches (‘now we’re cooking with gas’ etc) and a nervy wannabe writer trying to break the big time. All a bit familiar, a bit old-fashioned.  But to assume that’s all that this play’s going to be – a pastiche of a fast-patter period piece – is to underestimate Calais Cameron who, after all, smashed the West End with his beautiful play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy. Because in walks Sidney Poitier, the guy who’d go on to become the first Black man to win an Oscar, and then the whole thing gets richer and tenser, with big speeches that borrow the cadences and blueprints of the golden age, becoming a play that feels both completely contemporary and like an instant classic.  The play is a transfer from the Kiln Theatre, directed by its artistic director Amit Sharma, and it works so well in the West End, maybe because it’s a really simple idea: Poitier is about to be cast in a big breakout role, but NBC’s lawyers want him to sign an oath that he’s not a communist, as well as denounce a friend. It’s three actors arguing in a nicely furnished office. That’s literally it.  First there’s the initial tension of...

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

This review is from the Young Vic, March 2025. Punch will transfer to the West End in autumn 2025 with the same cast. Absurdly prolific as he is, it sometimes feels like we could do with cloning playwright James Graham a few times. His reassuringly familiar but diverse body of work has done so much to bring obscure chapters of recent history to life – from the whipping operation of the hung 1970s Labour parliament to the 1968 television clashes between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr – that it feels faintly bleak pondering the great stories that one James Graham alone has to let slide.  Punch, which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse last year, is the perfect example of what he does. It tells the poignant story of Jacob (David Shields), a lad from Nottingham who got into a totally pointless fight – if you can even call it that – with James, a (never-seen) paramedic just a few years older than him. On a big night out, Jacob punched James precisely once. James went down, and a couple of weeks later he died, his life support switched off following a bleed to the brain. Graham’s script delves into this with typical deftness: arguably his plays all amount to really, really good explainers. We get the incident and also its profoundly complicated aftermath. But we also get a forensic dive into Jacob’s life, his journey from a sweet primary schooler who loves his single mum to his gradual falling in with the wrong crowd, as undiagnosed neurological conditions and the...

The Lost Boys meet Motherland in playwright John Donnelly’s giddily original stage return. It is a drama about postpartum depression and also vampirism that stars Sophie Melville as a stressed mum who turns to forces beyond mortal comprehension to sort out her mess of a life. Running at a fleet one hour 40 minutes - which includes an interval! - Blanche McIntye’s production is a punchy affair that cheerily rips off a load of atmospheric stuff from classic horror movies (and there’s a clear homage to the bridge jumping scene from Joel Schumacher’s aforementioned The Lost Boys). What it is mostly about, however, is motherhood. Mia (Melville) and Joe (Bryan Dick) have a primary school-aged son named Alfie who is probably neurodivergent or possibly just unusually sinister: he draws incredibly violent pictures, likes to wear a creepy mask, believs he has psychic powers, and has a habit of pointing at people in a truly terrifying manner. Moreover, Mia has just had a second child, Isla. Mia is struggling to run the home, to feed Isla, to deal with the thumping dance music emanating from the upstairs neighbours’ flat at all hours. Her affable partner Joe keeps them going financially but his weird hours and opaque police job don’t help Mia’s sense of stress, and when he is around he can’t help but put his foot in it by making his offers of help sound overly self-regarding. Then she encounters Alfie’s new teacher Ana (Laura Whitmore, yes, the one from Love Island). She’s young...

Over 17 years on from his last UK stage outing – with a Broadway Stoppard revival his only other theatre action in the interim – Ewan McGregor returns to the stage in 2025, reunited with Michael Grandage, the director of Guys & Dolls and Othello, the two Donmar Warehouse shows the Scots actor did at the height of his Star Wars fame. My Master Builder is a new play, or rather a new spin on an old play, being up and coming US playwright Lila Raicek’s reworking of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder. Like many of Ibsen’s works, the 1892 drama could reasonably be described as ‘proto-feminist’ without quite being ‘feminist’ – one suspects Raicek is liable to tease the #MeToo implications out of this story of an architect whose world is rocked by the appearance of a young women who says he propositioned her in the past. You might further guess that Raicek may have jettisoned some of the dreamlike symbolism that mark Ibsen’s original – all will be revealed in 2025.

  One of the biggest winners of Euro 2024 was undoubtedly the playwright James Graham. Having promised to update his smash Gareth Southgate drama Dear England following the final tournament of his subject’s tenure as England men’s team manager, Graham must have been thrilled when our boys neither crashed out nor triumphed, but rather did precisely as well as they had done in Euro 2020. Major changes were not therefore necessary; Dear England has been tweaked a bit for its third run in three years, but not a lot. A new cast hasn’t radically changed the vibe either: as Southgate, Gwilym Lee is broadly going going for exactly the same sort of respectful impersonation as his predecessor Joseph Fiennes; likewise Ryan Whittle’s scene-stealingly funny Harry Kane is pretty much the same as Will Close’s scene-stealingly funny Harry Kane. Clearly it’s back because it gets bums on seats rather than because Graham has astonishing new insights to share. But who cares? Graham has written deeper and more important plays than Dear England. But the secret of its success is that – unlike the actual England men’s team – it is consistently, relentlessly entertaining.  Of course there’s the worry that Rupert Goold’s pacy, widescreen production might overhype Southgate, or lionise him in luvvie-ish terms. Yes, by some metrics he’s the most successful England manager in history. But that’s not necessarily how the average England fan sees him.  As ever with England, it comes down to penalties....

While it would be pushing it to say Frederick the Great loomed large in my childhood, he probably loomed larger in mine than yours. Aside from the fact my family is Polish – Frederick is well up there on our national shitlist – my dad is a lecturer in eighteenth century European history with a habit of bitching about the Prussian monarch as if he were a hated work colleague. Oliver Cotton’s The Score essentially sets Brian Cox’s grouchy, loveable and deeply devout JS Bach against Stephen Hagan’s capricious atheist Frederick. It’s a fictionalised account of their real 1747 encounter, wherein the Prussian king asked the legendary composer to improvise a fiendishly tricky fugue for him.  While I’m sure Cotton has done his homework, he’s surely betting that the average British audience is unlikely to have any real opinion on Frederick. His play contents itself with an antagonist who is a sort of vague mish mash of biographical exposition, Blackadder-style toff-isms, and bits where Frederick’s warmongering is unsubtly paralleled with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m not saying there’s any need to be totally historically accurate in a work of fiction. But Cotton’s king feels like a half-hearted collection of tyrant tropes rather than a credible character. It’s hard not to see The Score as a distant relative of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but it’s simply not in the same league in terms of characterisation. Still, we’re here to see Brian Cox’s Bach, and the Succession star gives it...

Wintershall Players return with their huge open-air re-enactment of ‘The Passion Of Jesus’ on Good Friday, marking the day the big man is believed to have been crucified by the Romans. Two 90-minute performances will be delivered by a cast of more than 100 actors and volunteers – plus a true menagerie of horses, donkeys and doves. Huge crowds usually gather for this event, but big screens ensure you won’t miss any crucial moments. The crucifixion scene is described as a ‘realistic interpretation’ – aka bracingly gory – so parental guidance is advised.