Plays on in London

  Having premiered at the Old Vic in 2017 – and gone on to conquer the West End and Broadway – Girl From the North Country has lost none of its potency as it returns to the theatre where it all began — a dreamy, sepia-soaked production of character-driven vignettes and reimagined Bob Dylan songs. It’s 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s actual birthplace – and the Great Depression is chewing through the soul of the town. At the centre of this dustbowl drama is the Laine family, struggling to keep their guesthouse (and each other) from crumbling under debt, loss, and the weight of time. Nick Laine (Colin Connor) is a man burdened by a bubbling anger — the same kind that seems to course through the town — while his wife Elizabeth (Katie Brayben) floats between madness and sudden, unnerving clarity. Their adopted Black daughter Marianne (Justina Kehinde) is pregnant, unmarried, and navigating her place within the world. Their house is a revolving door of boarders: hustlers, dreamers, a smooth-talking preacher, and a boxer down on his luck (think 1930s sitcom). The 23-strong company moves fluidly between character, chorus, and live band. Simon Hale’s arrangements of 20 Dylan songs float in the spaces between joy and hardship. Stripped-back renditions of ‘Forever Young’ and ‘I Want You’ drift through wood-panelled walls and empty whisky bottles. Some numbers are so radically reimagined you’ll barely recognise them — like Brayben’s raw, ragged and impossibly controlled version...

Packed your fascinator? Rehearsed your most attractive crying face? Well, good; over in Mansfield – by way of the Theatre Royal Haymarket – the wedding of the year is about to take place. Local girl Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is marrying Polish lad Marek (Julian Kostov), and the audience, some of whom are sat directly on the stage, are all invited.  The ceremony plays out in real time at Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down, now running in the West End after debuting at the National Theatre early last year. Director Bijan Sheibani sucks you right into this world through fast-paced dialogue and artfully constructed tableaus. It is heady, hilarious and emotional; the wedding itself might be a car crash, but this imaginative production is anything but. As the lights come up on Samal Blak’s set, little of the grandeur associated with getting hitched is visible. There’s a huge disco ball hanging overhead, whizzing fragmented stars across the theatre, but this romantic image dissipates when it comes face to face with  the realities of the working class family wedding: the electric fan, the TK Maxx shopper, the extension cord. Here, the sublime and the mundane exist in constant opposition; some characters dream aloud about the enormity of space and the universe, while others discuss their greying pubes. Matthews’s Sylvia, our scratchy voiced bride, is getting ready for her big day. Buzzing with nervous energy, she is something of a supporting figure to her conversation-dominating...

  General advice is to stay away from hornets’ nests, especially if you are the West End and you want people to have a nice time and pay lots of money for a ticket. Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play goes against general advice. In fact he finds the biggest hornets’ nests he can and prods at all of them, and sees what comes flying out. What does come out is pretty spectacular. Despite recently winning what seemed like every single award that had ever been invented, and turning round the faltering fortunes of the Royal Court Theatre, there was never a guarantee that his play about (‘about’ seems like a fairly inadequate word) Roald Dahl’s antisemitism – and the deep trenches of dispute about Israel – would work in the West End. At the Royal Court you expect that kind of politics. The West End is for musicals and celebrities.But it does work, just as brilliantly. First off there’s John Lithgow (also all the awards) stooping and scowling his way into Dahl, charming in his grandpa-ish grumping at the beginning. He’s a walking metaphor: a giant – of literature, of stature – and big. But friendly? If you knew nothing about him except the good stuff – Charlie, Matilda, Mr Fox – you’d be charmed by his strong will, his passion and compassion. It’s 1983, he’s got a bad back, his house is being noisily renovated, he’s recently got engaged, and has a new book coming out so no wonder he’s grumpy. When his publisher suggests he moves temporarily to a nearby cottage, his crabby reply is, ‘I...

The last Lyttelton theatre show to be programmed by Rufus Norris prior to his departure looks like a good one: following the Jodie Comer-fuelled West End smash Prima Facie, writer Susie Miller and director Justin Martin join forces with a new star for for follow-up Inter Alia. Rosamund Pike has had a good few years with screen hits Saltburn and The Wheel of Time, and now she makes her National Theatre debut to star as Jessica Parks, a maverick high court judge who precariously balances her work and her home life. We don’t know a lot more about the Miriam Buether-designed show just yet, but the fact Pike will be joined by actors Jamie Glover and Jasper Talbot points to the fact that this won’t be a monologue in the vein of Miller’s last.

Michael Shannon interview: ‘I think TV is garbage – I certainly don’t watch it’. It’s a trap, almost, to think of Eugene O’Neill’s final play A Moon for the Misbegotten as a sequel to his miserable masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Sure, they share the character of Jim Tyrone, a dissolute young actor in Long Day’s Journey and a dissolute older actor here. But you go in expecting despair and instead find something that’s more like an episode of Steptoe and Son.Maybe that’s down to director Rebecca Frecknall – now a master of whipping the lesser-revived plays of the American canon into shape – putting space between this and the old workhorse of Long Day’s Journey (which we’ve seen three times in London in the last 13 years): not the faded grandeur of a seaside home here, but a wooden yard full of splintered timbers pointing into the sky, messy and dusty.The production itself, though, is anything but dusty. From the first moment, every line is a punch or a jab or a dagger. Peter Corboy and Ruth Wilson as siblings Mike and Josie burst onto the stage and whack each other with dialogue, and their fists. Fed up with his dad Phil’s drunkenness and slave-driving on their rock-infested farm, Mike is leaving. All that’s left to Phil is daughter Josie, whose sleeping around has made her ‘the scandal of the neighbourhood’, and their landlord Jim Tyrone who may or may not sell the farm to them and who may or may not be in love with Josie.David Threlfall is a hoot as Phil,...

Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac.  Specifically, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band’s mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members ‘Holly’ (aka Christine McVie) and ‘Diana’ (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band’s menfolk in favour of their own condominiums.  Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir).  Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile...

Change at the top can completely alter a theatre’s character. But there is something quite lovely about the fact that the great US playwright Lynn Nottage and our own fast-rising directing superstar Lynette Linton have done a play together for each of the last three Donmar artistic directors.  Josie Rourke’s reign ended with the monumental working class tragedy Sweat, which did much to establish both Nottage and Linton’s UK reputations. For Michael Longhurst there was Clyde’s, Sweat’s beautifully redemptive, almost magical realist sort-of-sequel. Now Linton moves on to Intimate Apparel. Where Sweat and Clyde’s were both UK premieres, Intimate Apparel is an older Nottage work that was her first US hit back in 2003 and had a very decent UK premiere a decade ago. But more Lynn Nottage is always a good thing. It’s a period drama, following a selection of characters in New York City, 1905. The story centres on Esther (Samira Wiley), a hard working but shy and emotionally repressed Black seamstress who specialises in ‘intimate apparel’ – that is to say underwear, which in 1905 includes a lot of fancy corsets.  Neither Nottage’s play nor Linton’s production really gives a sense of what the wider city – or indeed country – was like at the time, and that’s the point. Each of Nottage’s characters exists on some sort of margin, or we only see the marginal side of their existence. So there’s Esther: shy, self-doubting but determined in her passion for her work. There’s her friend...

There are no Shakespeare plays in Drew McOnie’s first season running the Open Air Theatre. But Tinuke Craig – the theatre’s new associate artistic director – tackles this old RSC adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s dystopian YA novel as if it were Shakespeare, bringing vigour and gravitas to the story of a Britain where Black ‘Crosses’ rule and white ‘Noughts’ serve as the underclass. It’s not an unreasonable approach. The story of how lifelong friends Sephy (a privileged Cross) and Callum (a poor Nought) fall for each other with disastrous consequences has more than a hint of Romeo & Juliet to it. But I’m not sure how well it all stands up. Ultimately the source material is a 24-year-old kids’ novel, as seen through Dominic Cooke’s faithful 18-year-old adaptation. At worst it feels both clunky and dated. Clunky, because while yes, having Black people oppress white people is clearly an ironic way to comment on the fact that historically it’s been the other way around, the society of the story is so hysterically racist – apartheid South Africa level, at least – that it feels like it lets actual institutional British racism off the hook somewhat. Dated, because racial discourse has changed over the last quarter century and there are bits of Noughts & Crosses that now play out uncomfortably close to a modern-day white grievance fantasy. I don’t think it’s going to attract a white-power audience, but I do think its story of how Callum and his family are radicalised into violence...

The time is once again Nye, as Michael Sheen returns to the National Theatre to reprise firebrand politician and NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan, in Tim Price’s play, after Rufus Norris’s production originally debuted last year. The state of the country’s health and that of Nye himself are intwined from the start, as we open on a huge chest x-ray projected onto hospital-green curtains behind the bed-ridden deputy leader of the Labour Party. It’s July 1960. His anxious wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) and childhood friend Archie Lush (Jason Hughes) are by his side and his doctor is concerned. We’re here, it’s increasingly clear, for the end of his life. Plunging us into Nye’s unconscious, Price gives us a dream-like portrait of his life, as Nye recalls its events in neuron-like bursts. There are parallels between the coal miner-turned-politician challenging schoolroom bullying in Tredegar, his working-class Welsh hometown, in the early 1900s, to upsetting the members’ club snobbery of Parliament as a new MP. Paule Constable’s ever-shifting lighting design melds beautifully with Steven Hoggett and Jess Williams playful choreography, snatching feather-light moments of humour from the darkness. The playful and somnambulant tone of Norris’s production perfectly suits the portrait of a man whose sometimes bulldozing lack of subtlety was one of his defining traits. Sheen is predictably great at combining Nye’s burning sense of belief in welfare for all and his irascibility within a...

If you’re a big fan of burlesque and can take or leave acting and narrative then you will love Diamonds & Dust, an impressive-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing series of cabaret setpieces, strung together with a creaky yarn about a lady gambler as embodied by Faye from Steps. I’m going to be honest and say that burlesque is not really my thing. On the one hand I fully get that the performers here – foremost among them kittenish ’90s legend Dita von Teese, who barely appears to have aged – are incredibly talented, and that their bodies and costumes are all part of an exquisitely honed athletic, artistic and to a degree comedic act. It’s not just posh stripping! I know that!! On the other hand it is a bit like watching a series of skits that uniformly end the same way – she’s taking her top off but… she’s wearing nipple tassels!! Of course if you’re into burlesque this is fine, and me complaining about this would be akin to somebody moaning to me that they always talk funny in Shakespeare plays. What complicates matters is that Diamonds & Dust – which is the brainchild of performer and director Tosca Rivola – isn’t just an evening of burlesque. Staged in the agreeably dramatic confines of the Emerald Theatre (as far as I can tell is just a reskinned version of the Proud Embankment cabaret club), the show is billed as ‘London’s newest theatrical production’ and certainly there is an arch but considerable dramatic dimension to it.  There is a plot, and it revolves around Faye...