Plays on in London

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.

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...

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.

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).

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...

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 under 35? We've got exclusive access to £25 tickets for...

In a parallel universe in which a harmonious two-state solution was achieved in Israel/Palestine, you might question why a theatre would revive Ryan Craig’s solid (but not classic) Jewish family drama barely a decade after it debuted at the National Theatre,  We do not live in that parallel universe. And so it’s obvious why director Lindsay Posner might choose to revive The Holy Rosenbergs. A brand new play in which a north London Jewish family is rent asunder by IDF-serving son Danny’s death in Gaza and daughter Ruth’s work as a human rights lawyer looking into IDF war crimes would seem at best on the nose in the post-October 7 landscape. But as a period drama set in 2009 – which is stressed by the blaring ‘00s bangers during the transitions – it gains something, a timelessness, that reminds us of the bleakly circular nature of the situation. The fact you could make this play today and it would be equally relevant is why it feels more relevant than if it was actually made today. If that makes sense.  It is the night before Danny’s London memorial - he’s already had a funeral in Israel - and things are not going well for the Rosenbergs. Hot mess third sibling Jonny (Nitai Levi) is angry and sloppy. Rabbi Simon (Alex Zur) has popped over to advise Ruth that there are protests planned over her presence at her beloved brother’s funeral and could she maybe skip it? And then there’s dad David (Nicholas Woodeson) and mum Lesley (Tracy-Ann Oberman), both locked in rictus-like...

I could definitely cobble together a wanky theory for you about why there’s so much great horror theatre around at the moment.  But all you need to know is that there just is, and that following Paranormal Activity and A Ghost in Your Ear – and with the Almeida’s fine looking Under the Shadow on the horizon – there’s reason to get your hopes up that when a nominally scary new play comes along it won’t make you die screaming of cringe. Tim Foley is a playwright who has also written several Doctor Who audio adventures, two strands to his career that come together very nicely in It Walks Around the House at Night, a rip-roaring horror adventure that packs in laughs and chills in equal measure without actively crossing the line into full on comedy. Superficially the set up is remarkably similar to Hampstead Theatre’s A Ghost in Your Ear: both are about misfit out of work actors who get caught up in ominous supernatural goings on in spooky mansions. But where Jamie Armitage’s play was heavily indebted to MR James, Foley’s is more of a spicy mix, with early Lovecraft the prominent flavour. Joe (George Naylor) is a cynical gay ‘actor’ – inverted commas because in reality he works in a shitty pub while not getting any acting work. He’s on the cusp of trying to get a real job when one of the regulars – a handsome, aloof man named David who Joe dubs ‘the mysterious stranger’ – asks if Joe could do a gig at his country estate. The idea is that Joe will get bed and board and dress as...

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the godmother of rock and roll. Raised by her mother, a travelling Arkansas evangelist, she played guitar and sang on the road from the age of six and grew up to be a huge recording star, touring from church halls to Carnegie Hall via Harlem’s Cotton Club. Her electric guitar-powered classic, ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’, broke gospel music into the R&B charts for the first time in 1945, while sultrier nightclub hits such as ‘I Want a Tall Skinny Papa’ ruffled pentecostal feathers back in Dixieland. Her story and her music are extraordinary. So it’s a privilege and a treat to see British soul goddess Beverly Knight play Rosetta in this intimate two-hander, a play with songs that’s all about the music.  Knight is a singer who raises the hackles on the back of your neck: from the tips of her outstretched fingers to her swiveling hips, her body is an instrument. But she does more here, channeling Rosetta Tharpe in a stomping dramatic performance that conveys the passion, resilience, and sheer physical hard work of her life on the road. Most jukebox shows tell a life story through songs, but this one is more like a staged scene dramatising the relationship between Rosetta and the young Marie Knight, who recorded and toured together for three years. We meet them the night before their first show together: they’re bunking up in a funeral home (the South being too racist for them to rent a room or sleep safely in their van). The setup is a good...

Maimuna Memon’s Manic Street Creature did the rounds at the Edinburgh Fringe a few years back, where – I’m ashamed to say – I studiously avoided it because I thought it had a silly name. I still think it has a silly name, but Memon has since shown herself to be a truly formidable talent. Her most obvious achievement is an extremely well deserved Best Supporting Actress in a Musical win at last year’s Oliviers (for her turn in the Donmar’s Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812). But she’s a gifted musician too, having done the score for the National Theatre’s luxuriant stage version of The Grapes of Wrath, and due to do the honours for the Open Air Theatre’s imminent A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  And now Manic Street Creature is back in a slightly expanded form. A gig-theatre show that mixes Memon’s original songs with her spoken-word storytelling, she’s joined on stage by a three-strong backing band (cello, drums, guitar), the members of whom speak the odd line but largely leave the acting to her. The story concerns a young musician named Ria, who moves to London and falls for Daniel, a sensitive soul who struggles with his mental health – he is the titular Manic Street Creature (by which I mean there’s a song called that, he’s not a monster or anything). At heart the show is a relatively straightforward affair: Daniel is depressed; he takes antidepressants but they totally change his character; Ria struggles, caught between her love for him as a person, her concern...