Plays on in London

Director Clint Dyer has put a very bold spin on Ken Kelsey’s countercultural classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The former National Theatre deputy has reimagined Dale Wasserman’s 1963 stage adaptation as an intersectional work about racial hierarchies, in which the outnumbered white staff of a psychiatric hospital keep a largely Black patient population in check via icy self-belief and exploitation of their charges’ vulnerabilities. On paper it’s a solid metaphor for systematic oppression, that chimes with the civil rights era in which the play was written.  But Kesey’s essentially libertarian allegory for how the system crushes bright, interesting and rebellious individuals does not really translate that well into a parable of collective solidarity. And it’s not just a question of intent, but quality. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not exactly Shakespeare-level stuff, ie a text so fundamentally robust that it can take aggressive reinterpretation. Rather, it’s a paranoid individualist hippie’s view of the mid-century US mental healthcare system. It’s not without merit in 2026, but as a cultural artefact it clearly peaked in significance over half a century ago with the Jack Nicholson film (something its Christian Slater-starring last London revival unabashedly channelled). Pre-show, information is projected onto the walls about the historic African-American gathering space of Congo Square in New Orleans, and the origin of the city’s Black Mardi Gras Indians. Ben...

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...

Who would the Fab Four be without their fifth member? Would Beatlemania have existed at all? Would their US success have even been possible? And those albums – would they have given it all up before they’d had the chance to create the likes of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Revolver? In Tom Wright’s play, the band steps back from their microphones, allowing the spotlight to fall instead on Brian Epstein – their manager, and the man who first discovered their raw genius and propelled it into global superstardom. Tracking his discovery of the band at the Cavern Club, Wright’s bio-drama shows us the belief Epstein had in the band from the very beginning, as well as the role he played in shaping them into the group the world came to know. But as the Beatles rise – playing bigger shows to ever more frenzied fans – Epstein falls, descending into a life fuelled by sex and addiction. Most of all, Please, Please Me is a kind of love story between Epstein and John Lennon. In fact, Lennon is the only member of the Beatles we actually see on stage in this production, directed by Kiln boss Amit Sharma. When Epstein first sets eyes on the band, it is Lennon’s shadowy figure that emerges, lit by the stage lights and dressed in leather. While the other ‘boys’ are mentioned in passing, this is an all-blinkers on exploration of Epstein’s infatuation with Lennon. Of course, creative licence shapes the central relationship. But Epstein was a gay man at a time when homosexuality was...

A fascinating feminist hybrid of EastEnders, Samuel Beckett and Wolf Hall, Ava Pickett’s 1536 is set in some marshland on the outskirts of an Essex village in – you guessed it – 1536, the year Anne Boleyn was executed.  Not that this is a by-the-numbers Tudor drama: the story focuses on three young women – Jane (Liv Hill), Anna (Sienna Kelly) and Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) – who never come within a sniff of the royal family. They see the monarchy as an important but distant constellation: in the opening scene Hill’s innocent Jane struggles for Henry VIII’s name beyond ‘the king’. The engine of the play is Pickett’s superb dialogue and the sweary, lairy modern-language chats had by the women in the trampled bulrushes of Max Jones’s set.. Hill’s Jane is an adorable naif, Reynolds’s midwife Mariella is gawkily sarcastic. Each has their own complicated relationship with men in the village. But it’s Kelly’s Anna who is effectively the lead: beautiful and poor, she is deserted and scorned by the townsfolk, especially her wealthy lover Richard (Adam Hugill), who at the start of the play we discover is set to be married off to Jane. It begins as a funny, even goofy, drama. Three Tudor women, effing and blinding away in an Essex field, using language that would make Danny Dyer blush is inherently funny, as is the fact that each of the early scenes begins with Anna and Richard going at it hammer and tongs in the reeds. But things start to curdle: aside from various village tensions...

This 1968 play by the great dramatist of the fractured American Dream isn’t one of Arthur Miller’s best. But The Price is compelling in its uncompromising cynicism, originally written as a rebuke to how Miller perceived the abstract, consequence-free tone of 1960s theatre. New York cop Victor (Elliot Cowan) has returned with his wife, Esther (Faye Castelow), to his long-dead father’s home to sell off the furniture before the house is demolished. This re-opens old wounds about what he feels he sacrificed to care for his bankrupted parent while his brother, Walter (John Hopkins), became a doctor. A heavyweight creative team led by director Jonathan Munby makes the weight of this past almost tangible. With Anna Watson’s lighting picking out chairs and lamps and mementos as if they were bones, Jon Bausor’s forced-perspective set is mausoleum-like. There’s a dusty, stifling density to the piles of things that crowd out the stage.  Into this tale of family strife drops wily furniture dealer Gregory (Henry Goodman), knocking on 90 years old and a man of many lives. He’s someone who – in contrast to everyone else on stage – relentlessly adapts to the present rather than hopelessly seeking meaning, blame or absolution in the past. Nostalgia isn’t his game. He’s a show-stopping character, played to twinkly inscrutable perfection by Goodman, whose shambolic bluster hovers beguilingly between sincerity and lived-in pragmatism as he informs Victor that these things from his past don’t...

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...

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...

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...

David Hare may not be the radical political firebrand he once was - a revival of his 1975 play Teeth ‘n’ Smiles is playing a few streets away and shows some of that terrible infancy - but his recent works show an undimmed curiosity in how we’ve created the world around us, channelled through carefully researched history, as in his 2022 play Straight Line Crazy about the architect Robert Moses and his 2019 film The White Crow about the dancer Rudolf Nureyev.Both of those were collaborations with Ralph Fiennes – actor in the former, director of the latter – and that partnership has been fascinating to watch, the two almost like each other’s muses. In a way it feels like the relationship has been building to this: a big portrait of two of the most important actors who ever lived, a history of and an endearing paean to theatre.Dame Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving are in no small way the reason audiences get to sit in the Theatre Royal Haymarket and watch Fiennes of an evening. At the end of the 19th century they restored theatre to respectability pretty much for the first time since Shakespeare’s day. Grace Pervades is the story of their time on stage, a winking exploration of traditionalism and populism in theatre that itself is a traditional, populist piece of theatre.The opening moment sets the tone perfectly: director Jeremy Herrin has a grand tableau of a dozen actors appear backlit and framed by a proscenium arch, who then take their places on stage to tell the story of...

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...