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...

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’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....

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.

Although his glory days were undoubedly in the middle of the twentieth century, Arthur Miller’s late works still pack a punch, and none more so than 1994’s Broken Glass, which was his final original play to transfer to Broadway. Revived here a couple of times since to acclaim, it follows a New York Jewish couple with a troubled marriage who are physically stricken down just as the events of Kristalnacht unfold. In his first non-musical production since hitting the big time, rising star Jordan Fein directs a cast headed by Pearl Chanda, Eli Gelb and Nancy Carroll.

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).

I wouldn’t really say Miriam Battye’s comedy The Virgins reminded me of my own teenage years, although to be fair this is probably because I was never a teenage girl. However, it did make me laugh a lot. Rosie Elnile’s set is divided into two rooms of the same unremarkable house, with a corridor in the middle. In the lounge, Joel (Ragevan Vasan) is silently playing on a console with his random mate Mel (Alec Boaden). In the kitchen, his teenage sister Chloe (Anushka Chakravarti) and her friends Jess (Alla Bruccoleri) and Phoebe (Molly Hewitt-Richards) are getting ready for a big night out.  The boys are not the focus here. The girls – clever, wordy, neurotic, virgins – are painstakingly crafting a plan to go out and get… snogged. They are smart and irrational, sweet and maddening as they try to naively micromanage their journey to adulthood. They’re treating kissing boys – and maybe more than kissing if it comes to it – as a sort of military operation to be planned, accomplished and ticked off. Deploy troops, storm the building, bring them home. But in part that’s their brains denying their actual horniness – for starters Jess is certainly incapable of vocalising the fact she obviously has a crush on Joel.  It’s hard not to see The Inbetweeners as casting a bit of a shadow here: I’m not saying Battye has even seen or been directly influenced by the C4 sitcom about a similarly aged, similarly neurotic group of boys, but at the least it’s a pretty good reference point for...

‘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...

I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever heard proper walk-on applause in this country before. But the Shadowlands audience erupted as soon as star Hugh Bonneville walked out on stage. Either our stiff upper lipped standards are slipping, there were a load of Americans in, or Bonneville fans are simply very, very thirsty people. Of course I choose to believe the latter, and it’s emblematic of Bonneville’s peculiarly English middle aged charm that the role that’s getting his base so hot under the collar is that of the extremely low thirst CS Lewis. A revival of Wiliam Nicholson’s 1989 play, Shadowlands stars Bonneville as the devoutly Christian Chronicles of Narnia author, and traces his real life romance with the younger American poet Joy Davidman. And it’s largely delightful, not an odd couple meet cute, but a story about a genuine, real connection between two somewhat lost souls. He is a man in his late fifties who lives a life of scholarly bachelorhood, in rooms he shares with his doddery older brother Major WH Lewis (Jeff Rawle). But Lewis – or ‘Jack’ to most people, though his real name was Clive – is also kind and amusing. He’s hardly a monk, and indeed we learn that his inability – or lack of desire – to form attachments with women can in part be traced to trauma at the early death of his mother. Maggie Siff’s Davodman is self-possessed and fiercely intelligent. She is brave but vulnerable, travelling the world with her sweet young son Douglas, her promising start as a...

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...