Plays on in London

Man and Boy is never going to displace The Deep Blue Sea or The Browning Version or even French without Tears as the quintessential Terence Rattigan work. But this is a truly extraordinary revival, that in its way has a significance that transcends the actual choice of play. Anthony Lau’s production is the first Rattigan I’ve seen that throws off the shackles of naturalism. Even amazing productions of his plays have basically been set in some variant of a period drawing room. But with Lau’s Man and Boy, Rattigan finally joins Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen et al in being deemed a playwright whose work can be given a batshit staging and still stand tall.  Staged in the round, designer Georgia Lowe‘s distinctly Brechtian, wilfully anachronistic set is a billiard table-like spread of green with a smattering of period decor (a wireless, a dial phone). The centre is dominated by a series of metal legged, Formica-looking tables of the sort that I don’t think existed in 1934, the year in which the play is set. And the very long dot-matrix printed financial report deployed at one point is definitely not right. Oh, and on the back wall in an alluring retro font is an actual cast list that illuminates the names and roles of whoever is on stage at the time (aesthetics aside, this is just a bloody good idea.). I don’t think every part of the design is loaded with meaning. But collectively it sets Rattigan free from chintzy tradition, and when combined with Angus MacRae’s wild, jazzy...

Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass is a really weird play. A lot weirder than official summaries tend to divulge. Which is impressive given that official summaries will tell you that it concerns a Jewish Brooklyn housewife who is inexplicably paralysed in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, Germany’s 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom.  But that doesn’t touch the fact that Miller’s last big hit is a seething Freudian stew, spiced with Jewish guilt, a heady, occasionally surreal blend of desire and regret. Its protagonists are the paralysed Sylvia (Pearl Chanda) and her husband Philip (Eli Gelb), and while they’re middle aged - and director Jordan Fein seems to have intentionally cast actors too young for the roles as written - it’s hard not to view it through the lens of Miller having been in his late seventies and looking back with his own regrets when Broken Glass premiered in 1994.  The man had lived an extraordinary lifetime, and written extraordinary dramas. But he’d rarely explicitly written about either sex or Jewishness. Here he does both in a strange period piece that doesn’t conform to the thunderous classical tragedy of his most famous works. But certainly there is much about it that proves tragic, not least in Philip, whose fear of his own passions and heritage have led to a superficially successful but ultimately unfulfilled life.  The couple’s regrets are substantially tied to sex, although they struggle to articulate that until it’s slowly prised out of them by Harry Hyman (Alex...

Top playwright Nina Raine and her younger brother writer Moses are descended from Doctor Zhivago author Boris Pasternak – Russian blood has touched on both of their writing careers, notably their Moscow-set collaborative play Donkey Heart.  Now they join forces again for an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s classic drama Summerfolk, directed by National Theatre deputy Robert Hastie. The play is set in the beautiful summer of 1905, as Russia’s bourgeoisie retreat to the countryside for frivolity and relaxation. But in true Chekhovian style, there are stomclouds on the horizon – if only the characters can recognise them. The very large ensemble cast includes Rebecca Banatvala, Thomas Barrett, Tamika Bennett,  Pip Carter, Peter Forbes, Brandon Grace, Arthur Hughes, Sam Jenkins-Shaw, Gwyneth Keyworth, Daniel Lapaine, Alex Lawther, Adelle Leonce, Doon Mackichan, Justine Mitchell, Paul Ready, Sophie Rundle,  Sid Sagar and Richard Trinder.

Anna Ziegler is one of those American playwrights who has had a million hits back home and remains virtually unproduced over here, (the sole exception being Photograph 51, which was a stonking West End hit about 10 years ago – less because it was an all time classic and more because it had Nicole Kidman in it.) Evening all Afternoon isn’t necessarily one for the ages either. However, it’s pretty good, and more to the point the 90-minute two-hander is a tremendous vehicle for two actors. It enables an absolutely storming stage debut for Erin Kellyman, the 27-year-old Brit who has been making a name for herself as a screen actor since her teenage years and now ticks ‘being great on stage’ off with an effortlessness that recalls Jodie Comer’s belated theatre debut a couple of years back. She plays Delilah, the surly university-age American daughter to an unseen British father. He’s taken her back home to England where she studies, sulks and slowly disintegrates, marinating in a dangerous psychological stew of grief at her mother’s death and the isolation of the Covid lockdown. And also resentment, of her dad’s new wife Jennifer (Anastasia Hille). An absolutely storming stage debut for Erin Kellyman The play is built on a fascinating variation on the old Brit/Yank culture clash. With her fabulous frizz of hair and perpetual scowl, Kellyman’s Delilah is a brassy, DGAF, New York-raised hipster who absolutely does not care about speaking her mind or causing offence. This puts her...

Read our review of Our Town HERE. Michael Sheen recently put his screen career on hold in order to lead and launch the new Welsh National Theatre. But fear not! The immuntable law of theatre physics that states everything good will end up in London at some point anyway continues to hold true as the Welsh National Theatre’s inaugural production heads to the Rose Kingston after three engagement in the motherland. Our Town is, of course, the revered metatheatrical drama by Thorton Wilder, which arrestingly details life and death in the small American town of Grover’s Corners, a strange and sometimes cosmic journey that goes from wilfully banal to chillingly otherworldly. Heading an all-Welsh cast, Sheen will play the show’s Stage Manager, our guide and occasional particpant in the strangeness that follows. The play is directed by Francesca Goodridge, with the great Russell T Davies as creative associate (what if anything this means we’re unsure but he’ll probably do something fun).

‘So… we think this is based on a true story.’ Opening Jack Nicholls’ debut play The Shitheads, these words instantly instil a sense of nervousness in the audience, a scepticism in what they’re about to watch. I mean, the cragged stone wall that spans the length of the stage seems pretty realistic. This is a show about cavepeople; caves are to be expected.  Don’t be fooled. It might be set tens of thousands of years in the past, but The Shitheads couldn’t be further from some historical re-enactment where characters dress in animal hides and communicate only in grunts. Instead, Nicholls, along with directors Aneesha Srinivasan and David Byrne, have created a strange, macabre, properly funny piece of theatre about the human condition that ponders on the future as much as the past. The concepts of ‘reality’ and ‘history’ are disrupted almost as soon as The Shitheads starts, when a majestic, ghostly puppet elk canters onto stage. Designed by Finn Caldwell and Dulcie Best and controlled by the cast, it is a breathtaking sight: huge in scale, eerie in look, with fabric trailing from its antlers and suggesting decay. The elk is being chased by strong-headed Clare (Jacoba Williams), and frenetic, jumpy Greg (Jonny Khan). The pair have only just met but bicker like old friends, Greg gleefully goading Clare while also warning her that she should be moving south. ‘The country’s going to die,’ he says. ‘The weather’s going to kill it.’ Clare is uninterested in his premonition of ‘ice...

It’s been years since a David Hare play went to the West End – so in 2026, naturally, there are two of them. Over at the Theatre Royal Haymarket his latest Grace Pervades will star his regular collaborator Ralph Fiennes. And at the Duke of York’s one of his oldest plays – dating back to 1975 – will star an unexpected newcomer. Rebecca Lucy Taylor - aka sardonic pop star Self Esteem – did do a stint in the West End’s Cabaret a couple of years back, but she's never been in a straight up play (or, for what it's worth, had to face theatre critics before).  You probably wouldn't have put money on her drama debut being in a Hare play. But actually Teeth 'n' Smiles makes perfect sense for her, being a late ’60s-set drama that concerns Maggie Frisbee, an embittered, alcoholic rock star left raging and washed up at the end of the decade. The role was originated by a young Helen Mirren – who based her performance on Janis Joplin – and in that context it’s not hard to see why Taylor might have been intrigued. Plus! There are songs for Maggie to perform, originally written by Nick and Tony Bicât, but with new contributions from Taylor herself.  It’ll be directed by Daniel Raggett, who did such an excellent job with West End hit Accidental Death of an Anarchist a couple of years back. Taylor is joined by a large cast that includes the great Phil Daniels as Sarrafian.

There’s a nagging irony at the centre of Bird Grove. This play about the young Mary Ann Evans – aka future literary titan George Eliot – features copious scenes of her expressing frustration that only men have a voice in society. But the play itself is very much written by a man, Alexi Kaye Campbell. It more or less styles this out, but there are lines where you wonder how Campell wrote them with a straight face.  Maybe I’m being unfair as really Bird Grove is about two people: Mary Ann and her father, Owen Teale’s Robert Evans. A slightly cringe epilogue aside, Campbell’s play barely alludes to Eliot, but is firmly concerned with Mary Ann, a brilliant and unconventional young woman who nonetheless desperately needs her dad. Teale’s Robert is a gruff middle class widower who is paying a small fortune for the titular abode in fashionable 1840s Coventry, essentially in an effort to engage with society and bag his beloved daughter a suitable husband. He’s doing this out of care: independent women weren’t really a thing at the time and in the opening scene he’s shown to be both indulgent of Mary Ann and her unconventional friends – including a flamboyant French hypnotist! - and intolerant of douchebag suitors, giving Jonnie Broadbent’s amusingly pathetic suitor Horace short shrift. He wants to make sure she’s looked after. Matters between them become tested when Mary Ann works up the courage to tell her dad that she no longer wants to go to church as she no longer believes....

Everyone knew there was more to the late Chadwick Boseman than Black Panther, but even so it was somewhat startling when Deep Azure – a play he wrote in 2005 – popped up on the winter programming schedule of Shakespeare’s Globe.  Boseman’s playwriting career fell by the wayside as his acting one took off, and from recent interviews with his widow Taylor Simone Ledward – who had tragically little time with him before his death from cancer – it’s apparent that she wasn’t especially familiar with this work until the Globe asked to stage it. And why would she be? Deep Azure was, relatively speaking, his most successful play, but it only received one staging in Chicago. There is undeniably something random about how by far its biggest production to date is at a candlelit Jacobean playhouse in London, 21 years on. Actually, though, the fit with the Globe makes sense beyond being a show that director Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu was keen to stage. Boseman’s play is not only written in street poetry-esque rhyming verse, but it features a ghost (kind of), a revenge plot and even actually quoted passages from Hamlet. Like Hamlet, it’s set in the aftermath of a death, that of Deep (Jayden Elijah), the free-spirited lover to Selina Jones’ intense Azure. He was killed by a cop, and she’s now stuck in a spiral of despair, compounded by her own underlying body image issues. She lives with Deep’s friends Tone (Elijah Cook) and Roshad (Justice Ritchie) because she doesn’t trust herself to go home...

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...