Plays on in London

Les Liaisons Dangereuses – I think it’s French for ‘the sexy meetings’ – is a classic play, though I’m not convinced that’s the same as being a good one. Starting life in 1782 as an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Christopher Hampton’s 1985 stage adaptation was a sensation, adapted into a hit 1988 film and clearly responsible for the ‘90s teen remake Cruel Intentions. It was always trashy, mind, and in a post-#MeToo world I’d say there are some hard questions to be asked about its titillating realpolitik.  Accepting all that, this is a pretty good production of it, as you’d expect from the great Marianne Elliott’s first show at the NT in over a decade, with a to die for cast headed by Lesley Manville and Aiden Turner.  The duo play callous, capricious, above all very sexy French toffs Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil and Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont, ex-lovers whose relationship has degenerated into callous game playing.  Manville is of course an absurdly good actor, one of the all time greats, and Turner is not bloody bad either. In the sexy, sinister, mirror-filled world conjured by Rosanna Vize’s set and Tom Jackson Greaves’ whirling choreography – filled with silent, glowering courtiers who dance with menacing elegance – the two leads are the main attraction and rightly so. The play has issues but by god do they work it, and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect. Manville’s Merteuil is sexy but not overtly sensuous. Rather, she is cerebral, an expert...

Anya Reiss’s new adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a panic attack in textual form, that smartly amplifies the debt-related anxieties that underpin the 1879 original into something extremely modern and extremely nerve-wracking. Nora (Romola Garai) is an anxious, impulsive woman, who we first meet in her bougie rental house surrounded by obscene amounts of Christmas shopping. Her workaholic husband Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) is taken aback by the sprawl of purchases, but Garai’s Nora remains brittly giddy, reminding him of how different this is to their last Christmas: they are on the cusp of being rich, with the last stages of the multimillion-pound sale of his company going through.  It is, however, all built on a lie, albeit a lie Nora has very nearly gotten away with. Desperate after Torvald’s drug addiction almost ruined them, she laid her hands on a vast sum of money to pay for him to go to a fancy rehab centre. He believes – or chooses to believe – that it was paid for by an improbable inheritance from Nora’s late father. In fact, she acquired it by illicit means that finally come out when Torvald lets go of his longterm employee Nils (James Corrigan), who tells Nora that her secret is dependent on his being reinstated.  Reiss’s updates are an impressively incisive, white-knuckle engagement with contemporary anxieties Reiss is a former Royal Court prodigy who made a big splash in her late teens and early twenties before mostly drifting off into TV. Although...

Inter Alia opens with Rosamund Pike wigged and gowned and rocking out, rasping ‘fuck the patriarchy’ into a mic. This is not a power ballad: the Saltburn and Gone Girl star plays Jess Parks, a pioneering feminist judge, and she is performing the emotional cut-and-thrust of a recent rape trial with relish, deploying her icy froideur to slay macho barristers who are attempting to slut shame vulnerable complainants. The dimly lit blokes in the backing band are, it transpires, Parks' husband and son: a fitting setup for Suzie Miller's three-hand play that feels more like a 100-minute monologue. Like its companion legal drama Prima Facie, which was a massive hit starring Jodie Comer, Inter Alia is a spectacularly demanding showcase for a female star, and Pike delivers the goods with stadium-level charisma, intelligence and flair. Miller’s play is based on interviews with female judges who juggle demanding careers with caring responsibilities and social lives: ‘inter alia’ means ‘among other things’. It's fun to see Pike in an earthier, more physical theatrical role, very different from the icy Hitchcock blondes she's known for on film. Initially, we see her dashing from court to robing room, fielding a dozen missed calls from her sweet bumbling lout of a teenage son, Harry (Cormac McAlinden) who can't find a Hawaian shirt for a party he's going to later, then dashing home to prepare a supper for guests while getting dolled up, taking phone calls and questions, and ironing...

The first major London revival for the stage version of Ken Kesey’s countercultural classic in over 20 years comes this spring, as Clint Dyer directs Aaron Pierre and Giles Terera as two inmates of a hellish psychiatric ward. Published in 1962, Kesey’s darkly comic satire on psychiatry and institutionalisation was quickly adapted into a 1963 play that starred Kirk Douglas as Randall P McMurphy, a rebellious prisoner who makes the mistake of faking insanity, believing he’ll have an easier time of it in a mental hospital (Jack Nicholson famously starred in the 1975 film as Douglas was too old for the role by the time it finally got made). Pierre – best known for his role in Netflix hit Rebel Ridge – will star as McMurphy, with Olivier winner Giles Terera as his fellow inmade Dale Harding. In what is clearly a pointed gesture, Dyer has cast two Black actors as inmates and that he’s said he wants to pick up on the novel’s ‘conversation on colonialism and identity’. In the most prominent non inmate role, Rachael Stirling will play the vile Nurse Ratched.

Two thoughts buzzed around my head while watching the first London revival of Michael Frayn’s 1998 megahit Copenhagen.  Number one, it’s astonishing that the first time around this hyper-dense show, substantially concerned with theoretical physics, ran in the West End for two years, following a year at the National.  And number two, it would probably land differently if the Americans nuked Tehran on press night which (at the time of writing) was a genuine possibility.  The play feels curiously more and less relevant than it must have done in the late ’90s, which should please venerable mischief maker Frayn (himself in his own nineties now). In Michael Longhurst’s first UK revival we are in an abstract, lightly sketched version of the afterlife. Joanna Scotcher’s set is a revolving black disc of a stage (I think meant to resemble an atom), surrounded by black water. Pulsing lights hanging from the ceiling reflect gorgeously on the mirrored back wall – their reflection evokes the lights of a city, perhaps the Danish capital. On the disc are three people: Danish theoretical physicist Nils Bohr (Richard Schiff), his wife Margrethe (Alex Kingston) and his German former protégé Werner Heisenberg (Damien Molony). Freely acknowledging they’re now dead, they dwell for almost three hours on a single meeting and its implications: what did Bohr and Heisenberg discuss, precisely, when the German came to visit his old mentor in occupied Copenhagen in 1941? In a dizzyingly clever...

Winsome Pinnock’s eccentric and occasionally confounding new play follows Abi (Rakie Ayola) and Marva (Cherrelle Skeete), two Black female historians who have secured access to the recently unearthed daily records of an eighteenth century Jamaican plantation. It belonged to Henry Harford, an ancestor of Fenella (Sylvestra le Touzel), an eccentric older lady who now lives in a splendid country pile built by the gargantuan sums Henry was paid as compensation for Britain’s abolition of slavery. One might well expect the exuberantly free spirited Marva and her more reserved, more prickly mentor Abi to come into conflict with Fenella (aka Fen) over the latter’s handwringing over the connection between her family wealth and the trade. Actually it all gets a lot more complicated than that. Pinnock is deeply interested in the extent to which one’s ancestry constitutes one’s identity. This is of course most obviously made manifest in Fen – she cannot escape the spectre of Henry without physically abandoning the wealth she inherited from him. But then again, Pinnock makes the point that as individuals, Black Britons are not monolithic in their historical relationship to slavery. Abi has written about how she’s from slave-owning Nigerian nobility (who admittedly treated their slaves better than the British did); Marva, meanwhile, is descended from enslaved Ghanaians who were shipped out to the West Indies.  But how ‘real’ is the past? What if the facts about your past abruptly...

For the first 15 minutes or so, I thought I had Welcome to Pemfort’s number. Sarah Power’s play presents as a cosily familiar comedy about a clutch of small-town eccentrics pulling together in an effort to stage a fundraising fun day for the titular medieval fort (not a castle!) that forms the chief point of interest in their sleepy town. And Power has crafted a classic trio of oddballs: dotty older lady boss Uma (Debra Gillett), autistic nerd Glenn (Ali Hadji-Heshmati) and hippyish Ria (Lydia Larson), who believes she’s made friends with a deer. The three of them run Pemfort in relative harmony. But it’s the hire of Sean Delaney’s ex-con Kurtis that starts the real story, the quirky villager tropes used as cover to ask some very hard questions about community and forgiveness. Curtis is a good-hearted, sensitive person who has done the work, wants to be better and wholeheartedly regrets the terrible crime he committed as a young man (exactly what it was we only discover around the halfway point). But his arrival is, nonetheless, a seismic event for the small community. Really, Power’s play is a meditation on human nature and the ability to forgive, magnified through the lens of smalltown life, where every addition to the community is scrutinised and dwelt upon. Clearly Kurtis deserves to be given a second chance. But is it realistic to think he’ll get one? Should he have simply lied about his past? These are hard, painful questions that Power asks unsparingly while also,...

Read our review of Teeth ‘n’ Smiles. 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.

Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk is the sort of esoteric classic that only gets staged very occasionally: I think this NT revival is the third UK production ever, and the first this century. It’s not hard to see either the reason for its reputation or its infrequent staging. Concerning a group of dissolute nouveau-riche Russians spending a frivolous summer arguing among themselves as societal storm clouds gather, it is pretty damn Chekhovian. On the other hand its enormous cast and prodigious uncut running time mean it’s well beyond the means of most theatres to put on: it has only ever been staged here by the NT and RSC.  This new adaptation by Nina and Moses Raine is a full hour shorter than its previous National Theatre outing in 1999. It’s still overwhelming at first: it feels like you’ve been plunged into a sprawling existential soap opera, teeming with characters and plot lines that have been running for years that you’re having to familiarise yourself with on the fly. Gradually, though, Robert Hastie’s revival does take shape thanks to some delicious luxury casting. Foremost is Sophie Rundle as the gorgeous, disaffected Varvara, who rails with mounting fury against… everything basically. The rootless insubstantiality of her peers; the annoying men who insist on adoring her; her awful husband Sergei, very entertainingly played as a gravelly voiced boor by Paul Ready. The pleasures are pretty soapy throughout: essentially three hours of compulsive people watching. The 22...

Read our review of John Proctor is the Villain HERE. There are three obvious ‘wow’ moments in the Royal Court Theatre’s seventieth birthday programme. Two are starry revivals of classic plays from the theatre’s past: Man to Man starring Tilda Swinton and Krapp’s Last Tape with Gary Oldman.  The third is a very modern coup: the modestly-sized new writing theatre has bagged the UK debut of Kimberley Belflower’s US smash John Proctor is the Villain, a wholesale transfer of Danya Taymor’s hit Broadway production. The play does in fact have a link to the Royal Court, being a very playful post-#MeToo riff on Arthur Miller’s landmark The Crucible, which premiered at the Court during its very first season, 70 years ago in 2026. Here the action is set in a high school and a class studying The Crucible, with a debate over the morality of the actions of the play’s nominal hero Proctor finding head-spinning parallels in the student-teacher relationships in the ‘real world’. Plus: there are pop songs from the likes of Lorde and Taylor Swift. The play’s Broadway success owes a lot to the star casting of Sadie Sink of Stranger Things fame – the Royal Court run is a little lower key, with the biggest name probably The Wheel of Time star Dónal Finn as teacher Carter Smith. Curiously, though, the lead-ish role of Shelby Holcomb will be played by another Sadie S – in this case Sadie Soverall, who starring in the off-Broadway transfer of the Donmar’s excellent The Cherry Orchard. Are you...