Plays on in London

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...

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.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is as American as apple pie and the electric chair. So on paper it seems like a strange first choice of play for Michael Sheen’s new Welsh National Theatre.   But never fear: the whole thing manages to be so exuberantly Welsh that you’ll soon forget the town of Grover’s Corners is supposed to be somewhere in New Hampshire. Francesca Goodridge’s production does Welshify a few details: a couple of incidental place name changes, a couple of hymns. But for the most part the difference is that every cast member not only has a chunky Welsh accent – as the omniscient Stage Manager, Sheen finds a whole new layer of fruitiness in his Rs – but there’s also a warmth and heartiness to their deliveries that softens (and maybe sentimentalises) a strange play that’s often intentionally served up cold and dry.  For its more conventional first two acts, Sheen’s stomach padded Stage Manager is a twinkle-eyed, avuncular guide to life in Grover’s Corners at the turn of the twentieth century as we meet the townsfolk and eventually watch the courtship and then wedding of Emily Webb (Yasemin Özdemir) and George Gibbs (Peter Devlin). Traditionally the play is performed on a bare stage, without props but Goodridge’s production uses staging based around Jess Williams’ dynamic, upbeat movement and the lifting, placing, twirling etc of various wooden boards and props.  Amping up the boisterous charm does feel like it changes Our Town: it conceals the cerebral...

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...

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,...

This review is from Inter Alia’s National Theatre premiere in July 2025. In March 2026 it will transfer to the West End, with Pike again leading the cast. Playwrights usually want to flex their range after their first big hit. But it’s to the credit of Suzie Miller that she cares so much about the issues explored in her smash Prima Facie that she’s come up with a follow up that you have to at least describe as ‘a companion piece’.  Both Prima Facie and Inter Alia are named after legal terms, both are about high-achieving female members of the legal profession, and while Prima Facie was a monologue and Inter Alia is a three-hander, both have a huge-scale female role at their centre that makes them the perfect vehicle for a screen star looking to scratch the stage itch. And so both have had Justin Martin-directed UK premieres starring major celebrities: Jodie Comer made her stage debut in Prima Facie, while Rosamund Pike treads the boards for the first time in years in Inter Alia. The most crucial similarity, however, is not entirely apparent from the first half hour or so of Inter Alia, which is basically an extended sequence of Pike’s high court judge Jessica frenziedly girlbossing as she juggles her extremely high-powered job with a busy social life and being a mum to vulnerable teen Harry (Jasper Talbot). It’s a breathless performance from Pike, who crests and surges from neuroticism to icy confidence. It’s draining: there’s barely room for us or her to breathe, and a...

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...

This hugely enjoyable tech satire-slash-thriller from US playwright Aaron Loeb is so good at bamboozling you as to what it’s going to be about that I almost hesitate to get into the plot. It’s good! Go see it! Isn’t that enough of a review for you? Okay, there isn’t a massive rug-pulling twist in ROI. But there is some fun misdirection in what initially looks set to be a satire on ethical investment funds. Sassy but idealistic May (Millicent Wong) is the protege – or in his words, ‘work daughter’ – of Paul (Lloyd Owen), the seen-it-all boss of ethical investors the Montrose Fund. One day, she stumbles across a unicorn: Willa (Letty Thomas) is a nervy, spectrum-y doctor with zero people skills who wants an insane $30bn investment in her ideas. But what she’s proposing intrigues May: advanced gene therapy that could change the world by eliminating most genetic conditions (eg cancer, Alzheimer’s). Willa contends that big pharma has suppressed such technology because it would tank their profits. May persuades Paul to take the plunge. The whole play is pointing towards ethical venture capitalist May discovering that she’s more capitalist than ethical. But in fact she proves to be a spirited, unbending heroine, winningly played by Wong. Really ROI is about two things: the inevitably of technological change, and how ill-equipped flawed human beings are to be its avatars.  Loeb is clearly interested in tech and what the near future might look like. It’s not po-facedly THIS WILL...

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...

The mighty Marianne Elliott returns to her old haunt the National Theatre to direct this deluxe revival of Christopher Hampton’s classic stage adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos sexy epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Starring big names Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner as scheming artistocrats turned bitter rivals Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, it's undeniably the jewel in the crown of the NT’s spring season, with a much longer run than anything else is getting.