Plays on in London

Unless you’re fluent in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hiberno-English, John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World requires proper, eyes-wide-open concentration. And even more so in this NT revival, in which director Caitríona McLaughlin celebrates the lyrical language of the play in all its glory. At its best, hers is a production that rewards attentiveness, weaving in beautiful, affecting images of County Mayo folklore alongside some standout acting performances. But despite the play’s undeniable importance within the Irish canon, it feels like a strange choice for the National Theatre’s 2025 programme, and the production comes across as a hodgepodge of competing ideas.Not all of that is down to McLaughlin. There’s the rambling, stretched-out plot in which young Christy Mahon arrives at a small local pub, claims he has killed his father, and then, rather than being shunned, becomes something of a village celebrity. What follows are strings of repetitive scenes in which the truth about Christy’s story threatens to come out. Despite an assured, characterful performance, Éanna Hardwicke makes Christy a constantly wowed dufus. Which begs the question: could this really be a man who has hordes of women running after him?It is one of many confusing directorial decisions from McLaughlin, who attempts to lean into both the comedy and the pathos in Synge’s script. Crowds of mummers in traditional dress appear between the scenes, while mourners dressed all in black...

The much-feted Sam Grabiner’s second play – following last year’s Olivier-winning Boys on the Verge of Tears – is a dark, dark comedy about a jaw-droppingly dysfunctional British Jewish family.  It is an anarchic meditation on the British Jewish psyche, that is really very fearless about ‘going there’ with certain political issues. It is about the British tradition of having a massive ding dong on Christmas Day. And it’s a comedy about living in London.  As the play begins, a bewildered Elliot (Nigel Lindsay) has arrived at the chaotic office conversion inhabited by his children Noah (Samuel Blenkin) and Tamara (Bel Powley), plus 10 other housemates who’ve mostly vacated the place because today is Christmas Day.  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Elliot exclaims in horror at the room’s most noticable feature: some sort of industrial heater, suspended from the ceiling in spectacularly unwise fashion, that periodically roars into life very loudly.  It’s a dinner-party play, kind of: food is the nominal main event (a Chinese takeaway, in imitation of New York Jewish tradition), and as is the way with the genre, secrets are unveiled, revelations are revealed, etcetera.  James Macdonald’s production feels genre-cliche free, though, in part because the ‘family’ is so shambolic that food simply feels like another thing for them to argue about. Joining dithering Noah and pathologically intense Tamara is Noah’s sweet non-Jewish girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke) and Tamara’s slick ex Aaron...

There may be a big Old Vic revival of Arcadia just around the corner, but it does feel a bit odd that this is the first production of a Tom Stoppard play since his death at the end of November. For the last three years Hampstead Theatre has been staging lesser-revived Stoppards over Christmas, and for Stoppard fans it’s been fun to see them come to life. But Indian Ink is a deep cut. A vehicle for his former partner Felicity Kendal, Stoppard wrote it first as a radio drama called In the Native State and then expanded and enriched it into this version, which premiered in 1995. Reviews didn’t rave about it back then, and never really have since, and Jonathan Kent’s production doesn’t get around the problems that, despite moving moments, remain in the bones of the play.Split across two(ish) timelines, it tells the story of poet Flora Crewe: first we meet her in India in 1930 where she encounters local painter Nirad Das, who does a portrait of her while she is slowly dying from TB; second, sixty years later, Flora’s ageing sister Mrs Swan reflecting on her letters with an academic trying to write a biography, as well as Das’s son Amish.Ruby Ashbourne Serkis plays Flora with an accent that could cut diamond – think Kiera Knightley but posher – Bette Davis eyes and the kind of easy grace that throws back to golden age Hollywood stars. She’s breezy, sexually free, with a huge smile. It’s a very strong lead performance. While she romanticises India – blithe about the brewing...

I wonder if the reason John le Carré never allowed his novels to be adapted for the stage was the fear they'd get turned into the sort of trashy touring potboilers that crisscross the country in numbers but never make it to the scrutiny of the West End. It was presumably his death in 2020 that allowed a stage version of his breakthrough The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to finally go ahead. But I’d say his estate was right to give the nod: the story is in safe hands with playwright David Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin, whose adaptation settles in at the West End after scoring good notices in Chichester. This is a slick and yes, maybe slightly MOR adaptation of Le Carre’s taut, brutal espionage yarn. But it’s a very good one, and Eldridge deftly crafts an intensely interior world, with us seeing the action unfold as much from within jaded spy protagonist Alec Leamas’s head as without. Herrin’s production goes heavy on the noir, and with good reason. Rory Keenan is magnificently grumpy and rumpled as Leamas, a hardbitten British spy in Cold War Berlin who ‘comes in from the cold’ – that is to say, is brought home – after his last informer is executed by Hans-Dieter Mundt, a ruthless counterintelligence agent who has systematically dismantled the British spy apparatus in East Germany. (It is slightly disconcerting that Keenan speaks in his natural Dublin accent, although you soon get used to it). But there is a long game at work: returning to The Circus (a fictionalised...

Are you looking for something fuzzy to warm your heart this Christmastime? Then boy does the National Theatre have the show for you.  Katy Rudd’s seamless production is adapted by playwright Kendall Feaver from the Noel Streatfeild children’s novel of the same name. It follows the story of the three Fossil sisters: Pauline (Nina Cassells), Petrova (Sienna Arif-Knights) and Posy (Scarlett Monahan) who are adopted by the eccentric explorer and palaeontologist Great Uncle Matthew, aka Gum (Justin Salinger). After Gum goes missing on one of his many, many expeditions, the girls are looked after by his steadfastly loyal niece Sylvia, aka Garnie (Anoushka Lucas) and the matronly Miss Guthridge, aka Nana, played by the charming Lesley Nicol with a drawling West Country accent.  Set in the 1930s, the five women live in a tumbledown house filled with fossils on the Cromwell Road in Chelsea, until they realise they are desperately running out of money and assemble a motley crew of lodgers to take up rooms. There’s the stern but kind-hearted English professor Doctor Jakes (Pandora Colin), glamorous dance teacher Theo Dane (Nadine Higgin), and the bumbling car repair man Jai Saran (Raj Bajaj). After being booted out of every state school in the area, the girls are enrolled in the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, where luckily Dane is the teacher. Here they discover their passions for acting, ballet and er… being a mechanic. The whole plot is basically implausible –...

Alfie (Clive Owen) is dying of cancer. Julie (Saskia Reeves) is not. A couple since their twenties, their lives are about to diverge dramatically, though precisely how dramatically is up for grabs. David Eldridge’s new play begins with a physically ailing Alfie telling Julie he wants to stop treatment, before proceeding to splurge all manner of wild thoughts, theories and plans about his imminent death.  End follows Eldridge’s Beginning and Middle at the National Theatre. I’m not sure I’d call them his mid-life-crisis trilogy. But certainly in sum they are about as rigorous an interrogation of middle age as exists in the British theatrical canon. The fizzy, sexy smash Beginning was about the rush of first attraction between a 38-year-old and a divorced 42-year-old. Middle was about a slightly older couple stuck in the rut of a predictable long-term marriage.  With their handsome-looking north London house, Alfie and Julie are initially coded as the sort of monied older couple that has popped up in English theatre for centuries. The fact they’re actually just 59 comes as a slight surprise (Owen and Reeves are actually a few years older), but it’s their cultural references that feel the most startling. It soon transpires that Alfie was a big time acid house DJ, a subject he basically never stops talking about; there’s something disconcerting about thinking of that generation as ‘old’ now. End is not about Gen X dying out en masse: it’s kind of a point of the play that Julie...

Read our review of Paranormal Activity here. Horror and the West End have a mixed recent history: The Woman in Black had a very good innings, and Inside Number 9’s Stage/Fright worked a treat. 2.22 – A Ghost Story was a nice idea that ended up being done to death. The Enfield Haunting was unspeakably awful. It’s with some trepadition, then, that we approach Paranormal Activity, a theatrical adaptation of the 2007 sleeper screen hit. Found footage horror isn’t the obvious genre to put on stage by a long shot. But this adaptation has a real USP: it’s directed by Felix Barrett, aka the brains behind immersive theatre legends Punchdrunk, his first non-Punchdrunk theatre show in over a decade. If anyone can inject some menace and atmophere into a show that is nominally about two people buying a house, it’s him. And he’s got a pretty good writer too: playwright Levi Holloway isn’t much known over here, but he sounds eminently qulified having scored a Broadway hit recently with the spooky drama Grey House. His adaptation of the film sounds pretty ‘free’: rather than a stage retelling of the misadventures of the original film’s demon-haunted San Diego couple Micah and Katie, this once concerns James and Lou, a couple who quit Chicago for London in the hope they can escape their past (spoiler alert: they can’t).

The one-night stand is comedy’s gift that keeps on giving: a pressure cooker of intimacy, regret, hope and awkward logistics. David Ireland’s Most Favoured takes that familiar morning-after scenario and, then twists it into something weirder. The short show premiered in Scotland in 2013 and was memorably billed a ‘theatrical snack’. Now Most Favoured get its London premiere at Soho Theatre, in a new production, but still clocking in at a brisk 45 minutes. Director Max Elton confines the production to set designer Ceci Calf’s nondescript, three-star-looking hotel room: a timber bed frame and rumpled sheets wrapped in a striped polyester bed-runner. In this anonymous space, Mike (Alexander Arnold) drifts nonchalantly around the hotel room, while Mary (Lauren Lyle) is exhilarated. She reveals that she has, for the first time in her life, felt loved, and she is determined to make Mike understand the significance of that fact. He, however, has also experienced a first: he’s tried KFC, and is understandably fixated on the finger lickin’ goodness. That bucket of chicken becomes the play’s central running joke and, eventually, its structural crutch. The awkwardness escalates when Mary reveals why she has been picking up men for at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (I mean, where else do people find ‘glamourous’ specimens — I mean, men — with good genes?) The pair function as effective foils. Lyle gives Mary unfiltered, Glaswegian charm, shot through with moments of genuine,...

Sheridan Smith’s last West End outing was in Ivo van Hove’s flop ‘musical’ Opening Night – a charming, quirky show that didn’t deserve its meaner notices at all, but was proably also a bit ambitious for Theatreland. It's clearly not been too traumatic, as she reunites with its producers Wessex Grove for a Michael Longhurst-directed revival of Alan Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind. First seen in 1985, it follow Susan, a woman who takes a knock to the head and starts to experience two version of reality – one actual reality, featuring her actual family, and the other fantastical and featuring an entirely imagined family. The play came out when the hyperprolific Ayckbourn was at the zenith of his commercial popularity; he has been a relative stranger to the London stage in recent years, with his lumbering dystopia The Divide his only new effort to gain traction in the last decade and Woman in Mind bein his first major West End revival since 2012. Could Longhurst’s Sheridan Smith-powered revival be the show that powers a full on comeback? Time will tell.

High Noon is rightly regarded as a high watermark for the Western film, a real time, allegorical drama (spoiler: it’s about Hollywood blacklisting) in which Will Kane, the sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is preparing for retirement with his new bride Amy, when word reaches them that a dangerous outlaw who Will sent down is out of jail and on the lookout for revenge. Will tries to rouse the townspeople to his side – but they’re too timid and self-intersted to do so. A stage version sounds both plausible – it’s a dialogue heavy, relatively cerebral work – but also kind of nuts: it ends with one of the most iconic gunfight scenes in cinema history, which would seem to be something very difficult to replicate convincingly on stage. Whatever the case, a superb team is going to give it their very best: cult US actor Billy Crudup will play Will, and the magnificent Denise Gough will follow in Grace Kelly’s footsteps and play Amy, with the excellent Thea Sharrock directing, and a screenplay from Academy Award winner Eric Roth, whose absurd list of credits runs from Forest Gump to Dune. It’s an improbable project, but if anyone can make it work it’s this team.