Plays on in London

David Byrne’s Royal Court seasons have proven almost aggressively eclectic so far, with surefire commercial smashes rubbing up against stuff that comes across as genuinely quite mad. Coming a year after West End transfer Giant made its debut, Nick Payne’s The Unbelievers certainly looks like another big hit: the great Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Curious Incident) will make her debut at the venerable new writing theatre, in Payne’s first Court play since his huge hit Constellations, with design by the legendary Bunnie Christie. The cherry on the cake is the marvellous Nicola Walker, who will star as a woman whose son disappeared seven years ago and for whom time has now fractured, causing her to experience every minute of every year gone by simultaneously. Okay, that’s a pretty mad concept, but if anyone can pull it off it’s this A-Team of theatrical talent.

Head here to read our review of Mary Page Marlowe.

Arguably the entire point of the first play to be programmed at the National Theatre by its new boss Indhu Rubasingham comes around five minutes from the end – after the actual plt has wrapped up – when Ukweli Roach’s Dionysus adds the mantle of ‘god of theatre’ to his celestial portfolio and dedicates the NT’s Olivier theatre to us. And if the hour and 40 minutes that precede this moment are messy, I’d say they are entertainingly messy.  Bacchae is of course based on Euripides’s classic Greek tragedy nasty of the same name, and is the debut play from Nima Taleghani. He’s hitherto been better known as an actor, and while his biggest gig is Heartstopper, I knew him from Jamie Lloyd’s gorgeously rhythmic-but-serious Cyrano de Bergerac of a few years back. I’d wondered if his hip-hoppy take on Euripides might be similarly solemn. In fact it’s nothing of the sort: colourful, irreverent and frequently goofy, its sillier moments reminded me of those hip hop Shakespeare plays that sometimes pop up at the Edinburgh Fringe (The Bomb-itty of Errors and such). It begins with the redoubtable Clare Perkins introducing us to her all-female posse of dysfunctional Dionysus worshippers, aka the Bacchae. ‘Not even Zeus can steal my thunder, fam’ she declares. It’s fun to spend time with them, as they swear and argue and rage, but there’s the nagging sense that it’s not clear where their story is going. Frankly it also seems a bit unexpected that a male writer would be out to reclaim Bacchae...

Although Aussie director Simon Stone has staged only a handful of shows in the UK, it has to be said that you can see a pattern developing. Take a classic play – previously Lorca’s Yerma and Seneca's Phaedra – rewrite the whole thing into aggressively modern English that revolves around long, light hearted stretches of posh people swearing amusingly, season with a bit of Berlin-indebted stage trickery, and finally change tack and wallop us with the tragedy, right in the guts.  The Lady from the Sea is based on Ibsen’s 1888 drama of the same name, and shares its basic plot beats while tinkering with much of the underlying characterisation and motives.  In a starry production. Edward (Andrew Lincoln) is a wealthy neurosurgeon married to his second wife Ellida (Alicia Vikander), a successful writer. They live with Edward’s two pathologically precocious daughters from his first marriage: Asa (Grace Oddie-Jones), who is at university, and Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike), who is at school. Tossed into the mix are Heath (Joe Alwyn), a hot but nerdy distant cousin who has come to Edward to get a diagnosis for a worrying neurological symptoms, and Lyle (John Macmillan), Edward and Ellida’s droll family friend, who is also hot but nerdy. On Lizzie Clachlan’s bougie white thrust set – suggestive of a fancy modern home, without spelling it out – The Lady from the Sea proceeds exactly as you’d expect a Simon Stone play to proceed. There is a lot of very posh banter, that’s very entertaining...

Irish writer Conor McPherson also directs this West End revival of the play that sent his career into the stratosphere when it opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997. It’s lost none of its gently haunting, melancholic pull in the intervening years. The Weir is a classic example of a play where nothing really seems to happen, but then you realise you’ve seen pretty much all of life pass by. Here, Brendon Gleeson steps into the shoes of garage owner Jack, who we meet chewing over his day with publican Brendan (Owen McDonnell) in an Irish boozer in County Leitrim. They’re joined by Jim (Sean McGinley). Their conversation is as familiar as the ritual of their drink orders in designer Rae Smith’s well realised pub set, with its fading knick-knacks. But this fireside beer routine is interrupted when the man they’ve been making snide remarks about, Finbar (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), appears with a newcomer to the village, Valerie (Kate Phillips), who stuns pub owner Brendan by ordering a glass of white wine. Soon, though, she is drawn into their world of storytelling. The cast quickly establishes a believable, lived-in chemistry. An effortlessly charismatic Gleeson sinks as deeply into Jack as if he’s grown gruffly out of his bar stool – crotchety and drily funny. McGinley imbues ponderous Jim with an amusing lack of self-awareness tempered, at times, by an almost noble sincerity. Meanwhile, restlessly springy, with an ever-ready grin and eager to impress people, Vaughan-Lawlor is...

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...

After a weird false start a decade ago wherein it was announced that a musical adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s bestselling YA novels would come to a revolving theatre in Wembley (this did not happen) The Hunger Games are finally heading to the stage – indeed, it says that in the name. This is not a musical, but rather a straight up adaptation from the great Irish playwright Conor McPherson, that will in fact run in a brand new, 1,200-set, in-the-round theatre in Canada Water. Directed by West End stalwart Matthew Dunster – who has good form with big, techy productions via his smash 2.22: A Ghost Story – it’s specifically an adaption of the titular first Hunger Games novel from 2008.  Set in a post-apocalyptic North America, it follows teenager Katniss Everdeen as she is enterted into the dystopian gladatorial survival games that the goverment requires all its ‘sectors’ to enter. Youngster Mia Carragher (pictured) will play Katniss, in a large ensemble cast that includes Euan Garrett (Peeta Mellark), Joshua Lacey (Haymitch Abernathy), Tristan Waterson (Gale Hawthorne),  Tamsin Carroll (Effie Trinket),  Stavros Demetraki (Caesar Flickerman), Nathan Ives-Moiba (Cinna & Mayor), Sophia Ally (Prim Everdeen & Ensemble), and Ruth Everett (Mrs. Everdeen & Ensemble).

It’s one of those Fringe successes people dream of mimicking. Since debuting in Edinburgh in 2014, Duncan Macmillan Every Brilliant Thing – co-written with its original star Jonny Donahoe – has earned rave reviews, been translated into numerous languages, including Spanish, Greek, and Mandarin, and performed all across the globe. Last year, it returned to the Fringe  for a triumphant victory lap marking its tenth anniversary. But until now, this strangely uplifting show about depression had never received a West End run — perhaps because it was always deemed too intimate to upscale. If there’s any larger venue fit to house Macmillan’s mini masterpiece, it is @sohoplace. In a co-production between Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, the play is once again performed in-the-round, with the audience on all sides encouraged to join in and play their part. Over the course of its three-month stint, Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver will all take the lead role, but tonight’s performer is Lenny Henry. Dressed in a colourful patterned shirt, he sends smiles soaring across the crowd from the outset. Still, in the larger space, it’s harder to build the same rapport. With a much greater capacity and the audience spread across three tiers, creating the world of the play feels less like a communal endeavour and more the responsibility of a select few. Henry is a gentle guide: first as the seven-year-old boy desperate to show his mum – who has depression – all the goodness in...

Since leaving the Young Vic in 2018, David Lan’s canvas may have changed but his principles certainly haven’t. Over 18 years in charge of the inflential Waterloo theatre he programmed bold work founded on unswerving morals, often foregrounding the lives of less fortunate people around the world. In 2021, in his first big project as a free agent, he oversaw the global tour of a huge puppet called Little Amal to highlight the plight of displaced children. And it’s a deep well of empathy that continues here with his first new play in almost 30 years.Set in the immediate fallout of the Second World War, with Germany ‘an open wound’, a worker for an agency called United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration stumbles across a mystery when she and her colleagues are trying to rehome displaced children. There are too many adopted kids in one small town.The reason is the unconscionable Lebensborn programme, Himmler’s invention, which sought to boost the Aryan race by kidnapping ‘perfect’ children from countries including Poland and Ukraine and giving them to Nazi families. Hundreds of thousands of them.Lan constructs a deeply researched, morally complex play based on interviews with journalist Gitta Serreny, who was part of the effort to reunite those children. It focuses on Juliet Stevenson’s idealistic UNRRA worker Ruth and a boy called Thomas who seeks her out many years later to demand answers about his past. Now a worn journalist, Ruth comes clean, summoning the...

This review is from the Young Vic, March 2025. Punch will transfer to the West End in autumn 2025 with the same cast. Absurdly prolific as he is, it sometimes feels like we could do with cloning playwright James Graham a few times. His reassuringly familiar but diverse body of work has done so much to bring obscure chapters of recent history to life – from the whipping operation of the hung 1970s Labour parliament to the 1968 television clashes between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr – that it feels faintly bleak pondering the great stories that one James Graham alone has to let slide.  Punch, which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse last year, is the perfect example of what he does. It tells the poignant story of Jacob (David Shields), a lad from Nottingham who got into a totally pointless fight – if you can even call it that – with James, a (never-seen) paramedic just a few years older than him. On a big night out, Jacob punched James precisely once. James went down, and a couple of weeks later he died, his life support switched off following a bleed to the brain. Graham’s script delves into this with typical deftness: arguably his plays all amount to really, really good explainers. We get the incident and also its profoundly complicated aftermath. But we also get a forensic dive into Jacob’s life, his journey from a sweet primary schooler who loves his single mum to his gradual falling in with the wrong crowd, as undiagnosed neurological conditions and the...