Plays on in London

Ibsen’s 1888 play about a woman named Ellida at the heart of a love triangle between her safe husband Edward and a dangerous ex-lover referred to only as The Stranger gets staged relatively frequently: the last major London production was at the Donmar back in 2017. But it rarely gets the full West End celebrity Hedda Gabler/A Doll’s House/The Master Builder treatment – you’re probably lookig at a late-’70s production at the Roundhouse starring Vanessa Redgrave for its last and really only really big outing in this country. Until now. In a year otherwise dominated by musicals and Shakespeare plays, the Bridge’s big autumn show is a new version of Ibsen’s play but Aussie auteur Simon Stone, that will mark the professional stage debut of Swedish screen star Alicia Vikander as Ellida, joined by big name Brit Andrew Lincoln as Edward (his first show in front of an audience in 16 years, although he did the Old Vic’s A Christmas Carol to a webcam and an empty theatre in 2020). It’s hard to know exactly what to expect: Stone’s adaptations are modern, radical and often rather blunt – his Yerma for the Young Vic was explosively good; his Phaedra for the National Theatre was a bit silly; much of his prolific output simply hasn’t been seen in this country. Whatever the case, he’s a good get for the Bridge and if this production could probaby go either way, then that’s part of the Stone magic. 

Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac.  Specifically, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band’s mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members ‘Holly’ (aka Christine McVie) and ‘Diana’ (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band’s menfolk in favour of their own condominiums.  Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir).  Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile...

Packed your fascinator? Rehearsed your most attractive crying face? Well, good; over in Mansfield – by way of the Theatre Royal Haymarket – the wedding of the year is about to take place. Local girl Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is marrying Polish lad Marek (Julian Kostov), and the audience, some of whom are sat directly on the stage, are all invited.  The ceremony plays out in real time at Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down, now running in the West End after debuting at the National Theatre early last year. Director Bijan Sheibani sucks you right into this world through fast-paced dialogue and artfully constructed tableaus. It is heady, hilarious and emotional; the wedding itself might be a car crash, but this imaginative production is anything but. As the lights come up on Samal Blak’s set, little of the grandeur associated with getting hitched is visible. There’s a huge disco ball hanging overhead, whizzing fragmented stars across the theatre, but this romantic image dissipates when it comes face to face with  the realities of the working class family wedding: the electric fan, the TK Maxx shopper, the extension cord. Here, the sublime and the mundane exist in constant opposition; some characters dream aloud about the enormity of space and the universe, while others discuss their greying pubes. Matthews’s Sylvia, our scratchy voiced bride, is getting ready for her big day. Buzzing with nervous energy, she is something of a supporting figure to her conversation-dominating...

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...

This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris.  This play re-imagines the events surrounding his chaotic appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1958. He arrives at the NBC studio, whose boss is already jittery because of Levant’s erratic past behaviour, from a mental institution. His wife, June (Rosalie Craig), has secured a release under false pretences. Talk-show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport) wants to capitalise on his penchant for making controversial jokes live on air. His accompanying nurse, Alvin (Daniel Adeosun), is trying to stop him from popping pills. And Levant himself is hallucinating Gershwin.   Focused so tightly on the early days of American TV, this could potentially sound niche for a British audience. But in Wright’s assured hands, the collision of Levant’s private and public life down the barrel of a camera lens becomes a play about the beginning of so many things we now recognise as staples of celebrity culture. He’s famous for all the reasons he doesn’t want to be – as a performer of someone else’s music rather than a composer. He’s wheeled onto chat shows for controversy by people for whom his mental health is something to be exploited....

Even the most die-hard city dweller surely entertains fantasies of packing it all in for a self-sustained rural existence when a politician says something mad, or the weather does something weird, or grabbing a few essentials from the supermarket rings up over £50. Well, this new comedy drama from state-of-the-nation playwright Mike Bartlett is, on one level, here to warn anyone with such notions not to hand in their notice just yet. Farming requires dedication and an understanding of the land, Juniper Blood tells us. And most of us are slaves to capitalism and too reliant on technology to be able to go back to basics anyway.  It’s not one big, depressing lecture – though the decision to have the auditorium brightly lit throughout suggests it wants to be taken seriously. In fact, this production directed by Barlett’s regular collaborator James Macdonald is really very funny. But for a play that holds a mirror up to the gaping chasm between idealism and pragmatism, it has some disparities of its own. Though rivetingly performed all round, several characters become wildly different people between its three acts, while its form is slippery too.   Middle-aged couple Ruth (Hattie Morahan) and Lip (Sam Troughton) have left behind the Big Smoke to plough Ruth’s inheritance into setting up an organic, regenerative farm. But designer Ultz’s set of rotting decking perched on a mound of real, unkempt grass suggests they’ve got a long way to go, while a picnic propped up by bottles...

A war correspondent and an influencer-turned-actress walk into a New York apartment. What could possibly go wrong? In Interview, based on the 2003 Dutch film and 2007 Sienna Miller-Steve Buscemi remake of the same name, the answer is… a lot. She is Katya (Paten Hughes), the apparently air-headed ingénue with hidden depths and wicked wit. He is Pierre (House star Robert Sean Leonard), the jaded journalist, furious to have been dragged from his political patch – on the eve of the vice-president’s impeachment, no less! – to write a ‘fuckin’ puff piece’ about an influencer. Pierre spits out that last word, his voice dripping with contempt. He has no respect for Katya, and she has none for him. Let the cat-and-mouse games begin. Unfortunately, Interview fails to live up to its spicy sell. You can imagine the show that director and writer Teunkie Van Der Sluijs wanted to make: a fast-paced two-hander with an electric back-and-forth between Leonard and Hughes, where it’s never quite clear who has the upper hand and erotic tension simmers. Yet the script is clunky and the dialogue full of non-sequitors. Laugh lines that don’t land, and serious moments (like when Katya tells Pierre his mouth ‘tastes of Scotch and failure’) are unintentionally humorous. The performances, meanwhile, feel underrehearsed. Leonard and Hughes never truly get into each other’s rhythms, amounting to a dynamic that is intriguing in premise but in practice I couldn’t buy.  It’s a shame because, having...

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...

This is a bold opener for Indhu Rubasingham’s first season in charge at the National Theatre: first time playwright (though he’s got decent pedigree as an actor) Nima Taleghani offers up what sounds like a racously modern – and probably quite foul-mouthed – adaptation of Euripides’s shockingly violent Ancient Greek tragedy. Rubasingham herself will direct the show, which has a cast including James McArdle, Clare Perkins and Ukweli Roach. Following its NT run a version of the show – probably without the famous people in it – will tour to secondary schools.

Former Young Vic boss David Lan is arguably the most important British artistic director of the twenty-first century, with his embrace of avant-garde and European directors arguably responsible for the leftwards drift of the West End and beyond in recent years. He’s been involved in various projects since – notably producing the travelling refugee advocacy artwork-slash-festival The Walk – but The Land of the Living marks his first major British production since leaving the Vic. He returns in playwright guise with a story about Ruth a UN aid worker who adopts Thomas, an Eastern European child who was abducted by the Nazis during the Second World War. Years later, Thomas confronts Ruth about the decisions she made as a young woman that changed his life.  Juliet Stevenson will star as Ruth and German actor Tom Wlaschiha as Thomas. In a rather luxury production, Stephen Daldry will direct.