Plays on in London

If there is an afterlife, pioneering Black playwright and screenwriter Michael Abbensetts is presumably looking down from it in delighted surprise. His play Alterations originally ran at the now defunct 80-seat New End Theatre in Hampstead for a few weeks in 1978. There was a BBC radio adaptation too, but that looked to be it for his drama about Walker, a Windrush immigrant grappling with his dream of opening his own tailor shop in London. And yet here we are in 2025 – almost half a century on – and Alterations’s first ever revival is on the National Theatre’s huge Lyttelton stage, playing to virtually the capacity of the entire New End run on a nightly basis.  This has been made possible by the NT’s Black Plays Archive project, a catalogue documenting works by Black British writers that would simply have been lost to history otherwise. But it’s also the result of a Herculean effort from the creative team to bulk this bittersweet little drama out to Lyttelton scale. Director Lynette Linton adds some epic flourishes to underscore Alterations’s status as a part of a grander narrative about Black British life, while playwright Trish Cooke has been enlisted to expand the script and tweak its more dated moments.  Abbensetts’s greatest legacy is the pioneering Black-led TV soap opera Empire Road (which had two seasons on the BBC in the late ’70s) and the tone of Alterations is distinctly sudsy in places.  Walker (Arinzé Kene) is an ambitious tailor struggling to get his business...

While it would be pushing it to say Frederick the Great loomed large in my childhood, he probably loomed larger in mine than yours. Aside from the fact my family is Polish – Frederick is well up there on our national shitlist – my dad is a lecturer in eighteenth century European history with a habit of bitching about the Prussian monarch as if he were a hated work colleague. Oliver Cotton’s The Score essentially sets Brian Cox’s grouchy, loveable and deeply devout JS Bach against Stephen Hagan’s capricious atheist Frederick. It’s a fictionalised account of their real 1747 encounter, wherein the Prussian king asked the legendary composer to improvise a fiendishly tricky fugue for him.  While I’m sure Cotton has done his homework, he’s surely betting that the average British audience is unlikely to have any real opinion on Frederick. His play contents itself with an antagonist who is a sort of vague mish mash of biographical exposition, Blackadder-style toff-isms, and bits where Frederick’s warmongering is unsubtly paralleled with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m not saying there’s any need to be totally historically accurate in a work of fiction. But Cotton’s king feels like a half-hearted collection of tyrant tropes rather than a credible character. It’s hard not to see The Score as a distant relative of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but it’s simply not in the same league in terms of characterisation. Still, we’re here to see Brian Cox’s Bach, and the Succession star gives it...

Playwright Mike Bartlett’s impressively mercurial career has taken in everything from droll sci-fi epics to faux Shakespearean verse satires. Much of his work is dizzyingly grandiose, but within it there’s a definite sub genre of pared-back, small-cast ‘relationship dramas’, notably Cock (about bisexuality) and Bull (bullying). Unicorn is in this tradition, being a stripped back three hander on the topic of polyamory. Polly (Nicola Walker) and Nick (Steven Mangan) are a married couple in a middle aged rut. They both know this, but where he merely acknowledges it with wearily articulate horror, she has been out there flirting with Kate (Erin Doherty), a mature student of hers. Acknowledging the attraction but unwilling to cheat per se, she suggests Nick and Kate have a meeting with a view to bringing her into their marriage. Let’s not get into specifics about how this all pans out. But the first half of the play pretty much ploughs the furrow that you think a play about polygamy by an irony-addicted English playwright might: it’s really a comedy about Polly and Nick’s innate English awkwardness and inability to commit to inviting Kate in. No three-ways please, we’re British. It’s tartly amusing, but also cliche bound. While I’d say Bartlett’s eye for the foibles of middle-aged marriage is second to none, Kate feels mostly unbelievable, a hyper-confident 28-year-old with a total certainty about pretty much everything, who acts as a conveniently knowledgeable guide to Nick...

Kyoto, by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, is so indecently entertaining it almost feels like the result of a bet to choose the dullest, worthiest subject imaginable and make it as fun as humanly possible. The duo’s second play together – following 2017’s The Jungle – is about the Kyoto UN climate change conference of 1997, at which every country on the planet eventually agreed to curb its greenhouse emissions. It doesn’t make you a climate-change skeptic to think that sounds boring. But the secret is that Kyoto is actually a play about a total bastard. Don Pearlman was a real oil lobbyist whose finger prints were all over climate conferences in the ‘90s. Rather brilliantly, Murphy and Robertson have made him their protagonist: it’s not a worthy play about well-meaning people trying to stop climate change; it’s about one man and a shady oil cartel’s efforts to make sure nobody does anything about it. US actor Stephen Kunken is terrific as Pearlman, who we first meet in a scene set at George HW Bush’s inauguration. A junior official for the Reagan administration, lawyer Pearlman has vague plans to go on an extended break with his long-suffering wife Shirley (Jenna Augen), but is instead approached by a shady cabal of black-robed oil executives representing the so-called Seven Sisters, who warn him that an environmental pushback against Big Oil is brewing. Skeptical at first, Pearlman attends some sleepy late ’80s climate conferences and concludes the Sisters are right, and...

It’s a pretty damn starry start to 2025 over at the Barbican, as producers Wessex Grove lure legendary German theatremaker Thomas Ostermeier back over to London – following last year’s An Enemy of the People – to craft his first original British show. And what a cast: the legend that is Cate Blanchett will star as vain, insecure middle aged actress Arkadina in a new version of Chekhov’s early masterpiece by Ostermeier and Duncan Macmillan. Tom Burke will play her writer lover Trigorin, with Emma Corrin as the young actress Nina who becomes infaturated with him. They’ll be joined by Priyanga Burford (Polina), Zachary Hart (Medvedenko), Paul Higgins (Shamrayev), Tanya Reynolds (Masha), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Konstantin) and Jason Watkins (Sorin). It’s a stunning cast, but don’t go expecting a trad production from provocateur Ostermeier – his interpretation of the play is liable to be as much a talking point as anything Blanchett does, no matter how spectacular.

One thing’s for sure: tonight’s radically modernised Sophocles revival starring an Oscar-winning American actor was a lot better than last night’s radically modernised Sophocles revival starring an Oscar-winning American actor.  Where the Old Vic’s Rami Malek-fronted Oedipus was over-conceptualised into oblivion, Daniel Fish’s take on Elektra – which opened one night later – is a curious mixture of chaotic randomness and underlying respect for the 2,500-year-old play. Marvel star Brie Larson puts in a very solid turn as the eponymous princess. We meet Elektra living a twilight existence, locked in a permanent state of impotent rage at her mother Klytannestra (Stockard Channing, acid) and her lover Aegisthus (Greg Hicks, hapless). Famously, they killed her father Agamemnon. Now Elektra wants them dead. The trouble is she’s not actually willing to do it herself: she’s waiting for her brother Orestes to return home and get to murderin’. In the meantime, Larson’s Elektra stomps about in a Bikini Kill t-shirt with a shaven head, trading sardonic quips with her mother, her sister Chrysothemis (Marième Diouf), and an all-singing chorus of white-clad women. It’s a tricky role to play, combining murderous rage with total inertia, and I wouldn’t say Larson 100 percent nails it. But there’s a nihilistic charisma to her performance that works well, and there’s a bravery to her taking on this role that can’t be faulted.   Fish is an intriguing director, largely unknown in the UK beyond...

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be in the headlines every day, this densely philosophical techno-thriller by Beau Willimon – creator and showrunner of Netflix’s House of Cards – certainly feels timely. Computer coders Lena (Kaya Scodelario) and Sasha (Luke Treadaway) are locked in NSA waiting rooms, awaiting questioning by special agent Samira Darvish (Nathalie Armin) and their boss, Ari Abrams (Cliff Curtis). They’ve been developing a ‘kill code’ for the artificial general intelligence system, Logos, that they’ve been working on. But now it looks as though someone has tried to override the system and ‘release’ Logos into the outside world. Was it them? Or was it Logos itself? This production, directed by Ellen McDougall, jumps straight into big, ethical questions about humanity mimicking God. It’s a favoured trope of science fiction – to which Willimon brings a lot of contemporary theoretical thinking on AI and an Edward Snowdon-flavoured ‘hacktivist’ dimension. He gives Lena, a former Mennonite who is possibly, unknowingly, looking for something to replace her traditional faith, and Sasha, a Russian civil rights protestor, plenty of backstory acreage, as characters lengthily debate truth, falsehood and exactly what Logos is. This is a very talky play, to which McDougall adds movement and pacing by using Azusa Ono’s lighting design and Alex Eales’s split-level set – with the NSA agents watching Lena and Sasha from above – to weave in flashbacks and to...

There was a theatre-world kerfuffle last year when both the Old Vic and West End producer Sonia Friedman announced productions of Sophocles’s two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old classic Oedipus on the same evening. In actual fact it is hard to imagine two theatre shows with less in common, based on the same story or not. Where the West End Robert Icke-directed version was a meticulously modernised restoration of the tragedy in which the director had gone to great lengths to try transpose the old impact into new language, the Old Vic Oedipus – adapted by Ella Hickson – is just completely fucking nuts. A start would be to note that it’s co-directed by Old Vic boss Matthew Warchus and the great choreographer Hofesh Shechter. So there is dance in it: though the pounding, techno soundtracked movement sequences feel separated from the main action, they do effectively establish the sense that the city of Thebes has been overrun by ecstatic fanatics, a debilitating religious fervour consuming the city in its hour of need.  Having been subject to the enlightened rule of Oedipus for the past 20 years (ever since the last king died mysteriously), Thebes is now paralysed by drought and superstition. The people dance frenziedly to try to persuade the gods to bring them rain. But none is forthcoming. Climate change is never mentioned, but given Hickson’s main thrust seems to be interrogating the religious assumptions that underpin the story, it feels like there’s an underlying question...

In my notes to the Globe’s first ever production of a Chekhov play I’d scrawled and underlined the word ‘BECKETTIAN!!’, thinking I was making a piercing and original observation that, yes, this take on Three Sisters had a certain Samuel Beckett vibe to it. Afterwards I looked at adaptor/translator Rory Mullarkey’s accompanying essay, and noted that he begins it with a quote from Waiting for Godot, so maybe he wasn’t intending to be as subtle as all that, but it’s nice to know you’re on the right track. Mullarkey has spoken about his discontent with contemporary English-language adaptations of Chekhov, noting they impose too much stuff on him. And while I feel Mullarkey has probably imposed stuff here too, it’s weird how his take actually feels novel, recasting the titular trio of sisters as less fading, doomed aristocrats waiting to get crushed by the Russian Revolution, and more trapped in an absurdist pantomime. Caroline Steinbeis’s production starts effectively: Michelle Terry’s Olga seems jerky and unnatural as she delivers her opening monologue, speaking at a virtual babble. Shannon Tarbet’s black-clad Masha is snarling, sardonic and talks in discombobulated non sequiturs. The piping in their old country home clanks and groans ominously. It feels like they’re automata, part of some great machine, doomed to repeat their days over and over and over. What we see, slowly, is the machine break down, as fraying interpersonal relationships and the apparent descent into...

Show writer Kate Trefry explains all you need to know about ‘The First Shadow’. ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ is a sprawling maximalist monolith, a gargantuan entertainment that goes beyond being a mere ‘play’. It’s too unwieldy and too indulgent to be a theatrical classic. But nonetheless, this prequel to the Netflix retro horror smash is the very antithesis of a cynical screen-to-stage adaptation.  As overwhelming in scale as as the show’s monstrous Mindflayer, it’s a seethingly ambitious three-hour extravaganza of groundbreaking special effects, gratuitous easter eggs and a wild, irreverent theatricality that feels totally in love with the source material while being appreciably distinct from it.  It’s clearly made by a fan, that being big-name director Stephen Daldry, who used his Netflix connections (he’s the man responsible for ‘The Crown’) to leverage an official collab with the Duffer Brothers, creators of the retro horror smash.  It starts as it means to go on, with pretty much the most technically audacious opening ten minutes of a show I’ve ever seen, as we watch a US naval vessel deploy an experimental cloaking device in 1943, to catastrophic effect. Yes, the sets wobble a bit, and yes, writer Kate Trefry’s dialogue is basically just some sailors bellowing cliches. But we’re talking about watching a giant vessel getting pulled into a horrifying parallel dimension on stage. It is awesome; and when it cut into a thunderous playback of Kyle Dixon and Michael...