Plays on in London

Like you, I enjoyed the TV show Normal People without having any sense that I desperately wanted to see its co-stars perform in Tennessee Williams plays at the Almeida Theatre, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. But it turns out we were wrong not to desperately want that.   Two years ago Paul Mescal brought a deliciously mephistophelian edge to A Streetcar Named Desire’s antagonist Stanley Kowalski. And now Daisy Edgar-Jones is truly phenomenal as Maggie, the complicated female lead of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The first act of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 classic is more or less a monologue for Maggie, interspersed by grunts from her booze-addled husband Brick.   It’s basically an opportunity for the actress playing Maggie to show off for an hour and then have relatively little to do for the rest of the play. It has a tendency to attract screen stars wanting to prove their stage chops in one intense burst and then chill out for a bit – Scarlett Johansson was the last Big American Maggie, Sienna Miller the last Brit one.    I guess Edgar-Jones is doing the same, but she is so, so good, inhabiting Maggie with a burning, vivacious swagger, alternatively self-mocking, self-pitying, compassionate and vicious in her diatribe to Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Brick about the wretched state of their marriage. Sometimes she feels like a stand-up comedian, at others a fey spirit. ‘I’m Maggie the cat!’ she repeatedly declares, leaping on the piano or crawling on all fours, and at moments it seems like...

Hot on the heels of last year’s Robert Icke production of Oedipus, the Old Vic kicks off its 2025 with… Oedipus, this time adapted by Ella Hickson and directed by Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter. There was a considerable – if niche – controversy last year when both productions were announced on the same evening, in what was clearly a weird gesture of competitiveness. However, the two are liable to be very different – Icke’s writing and directorial style are totally different to Hickson and Warchus’s, while the presence of the great choreographer Shechter suggests a much more physical approach to the Old Vic version. It’s also got the considerable USP of some very tasty names lined up for doomed hero Oedipus and his wife-slash-mother Jocasta: Oscar winner Rami Malek is an eye-catching star making his UK stage debut, while Indira Varma is a reliably tremendous stalwart of stage and screen.

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...

In The Lonely Londoners, Roy Williams lifts the words from the pages of Sam Selvon’s seminal 1956 novel about the Windrush generation in London and sears them onto the stage. Ebenezer Bamgboye’s hugely evocative production has secured a richly deserved upgrade to the Kiln Theatre after opening last year at Jermyn Street Theatre.  Moses (Solomon Israel) is our eyes and ears into the city as he greets – and quickly shows the ropes to – other immigrants from the Caribbean seeking a new life. This includes a swaggering newbie that Moses nicknames ‘Galahad’ (Romario Simpson), ‘Big City’ (Gilbert Kyem Jnr), dreaming of hosting a steel-band club night, and Lewis (Tobi Bakare), who’s awaiting the arrival of his wife, Agnes (Shannon Hayes), and his mother, Tanty (Carol Moses). Williams burnishes his reputation as an unflinching chronicler of the complicated and often ugly side of our national psyche. From the novel’s picaresque shape, he has crafted a story that touches on Black immigrant experiences without patronising his characters. We feel their rage in a postwar UK that has exploited their citizenship for gain but treats them like dirt.  Bamgboye’s superb staging forgoes the trappings of conventional period drama, loosening the 1950s setting to speak as much to the here and now as to the past. The blue luggage boxes that the characters carry or sit on in Laura Ann Price’s sparse set are a constant reminder of their enforced sense of impermanence in this chilly metropolis, with...

Following the Royal Court’s huge 2024 success Giant, here’s another play that suggests that under new artistic director David Byrne, the theatre is becoming a good place to see really smart, really sharp political work.This one is by South African writer Amy Jephta, and whirls brilliantly around a super simple idea: a smart new build cul-de-sac in a nice part of town in South Africa, where suddenly a shack pops up. Three couples who live on the road plot to get rid of the entity that’s dragging the value of their houses down, and Jephta whips up a lot of issues, mainly gentrification, race and class. But as directed by Nancy Medina it’s all done with such a huge sense of humour and a frenzied energy – not to mention the toe-curling awkwardness of some of the conversations – that it’s a constant joy to watch.We start in the very tasteful home of the only Black couple in the neighbourhood. Mimi M Khayisa plays snob Bonolo, who has a vintage cheese knife and a wine aerator, while at the same time insisting she is the defender of poor Black communities. Her husband Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) has managed to escape a poor childhood to end up in a high-paying financial job.They invite their next door neighbours, white couple Chris and Lynette, for drinks, and the conversation ripples with assumptions. ‘I’m in securities,’ Sihle says to Chris. ‘Which security company is that?’ says Chris. There’s a younger couple, too, Jess and Andrew, who have overstretched themselves to buy their...

Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan have already played one troubled couple in the TV show The Split, and now they take on another in Mike Bartlett’s latest. One of his intimate ‘relationship plays’ in the vein of Cock and Bull rather than his more grandiose conceptual work, Unicorn sees Walker and Mangan star as Polly and Nick, a couple who decide to open up their marriage, with Erin Doherty’s Kate the third drafted in to bring some sparkle back to their relationship. James Macdonald directs this straight-into-the-West End premiere, having done the honours for the smash revival of Cock a couple of years back.

Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes is a bleak study in moral ambivalence and lethally suppressed ambition. Not performed in this country in almost a quarter century, I’d wondered if the passage of time might have made its scheming Southerner protagonist Regina more sympathetic. After careful consideration: maybe. A bit. Spoiler alert, but by the end Regina has torn apart pretty much everyone in her life in an effort to secure the property and power denied to her as a woman by living in the Deep South in the year 1900. Hellman was clearly not unsympathetic on this point, but at the same time Regina was most famously embodied by Bette Davis in the 1941 film as a femme fatale-slash-psychopath-slash-walking allegory for the pernicious effects of capitalism (the author being an actual commie). In Lyndsey Turner’s elegant revival, Anne-Marie Duff is certainly not in any way camp or hammy. Rather, she is icy-cold and laser focused, an apex predator battling her way through a harsh, dangerous capitalist jungle. Her prey is her two brothers – Mark Bonnar’s cruel schemer Ben and Steffan Rhodri’s hapless bully Oscar – and her embittered, wheelchair-bound husband Horace (John Light). Like a lion attacking a herd of buffalo, her success is far from guaranteed and dumb luck aids her machinations to take control of a family cotton mill as much as her killer instinct. But succeed she does, with a cold eyed grimness that’s both satisfying and horrifying.  In a tremendous...

The Ancient Greeks are definitely having one of their periodic ‘moments’ in London theatres: shortly after the NT’s ‘Antigone’ rewrite ‘The Other Place’  and Robert Icke’s ‘Oedipus’ wrap up and running concurrently with the Old Vic’s, uh, ‘Oedipus’, here’s a fresh take on Sophocles’s ‘Elektra’ from Canadian poet Anne Carson, directed by Daniel Fish, who made his name with his bold recent take on ‘Oklahoma!’. Toss in legendary choreographer Annie-B Parson and that’s quite a conglomerate of New World talent for this most Ancient World of plays, but the real story is Brie Larson, who’ll be playing the title role of Elektra, the daughter of Agamemnon who vows revenge upon her mother Clytamnestra for his death.  Larson is of course best known for playing Captain Marvel in the MCU films, to slightly mixed success (‘Captain Marvel’ was a box office beast; ‘The Marvels’ tanked so hard people started writing think piece about how superhero movies were over). It’s always been clear there’s a lot more to her than that, not least because she’s is a literal Oscar winner thanks to 2015’s psychological kidnap thriller ‘Room’, but she also writes, directs, produces and has an indie-leaning CV if you take out the 'lady with magic space powers' stuff. Getting involved with all this leftfield theatre royalty feels like a smart move and an interesting challenge – she’s done little in the way of stage work before and this will surely be something of a baptism of fire. She'll be supported by a...

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...

This review is from the Almeida Theatre in January 2023. A Streetcar Named Desire returns in 2025 for a short run at the Noël Coward Theatre before heading for a slightly longer NYC run. Obviously we need to talk about Paul Mescal: the post-fame stage return of the star of ‘Normal People’ and ‘Aftersun’ is the reason the Almeida’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s landmark 1947 play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ sold its run out instantly (apparently if you queue for day-seats you have pretty good odds of success, FYI). But before that we really, really need to talk about Patsy Ferran. She’s undoubtedly a national treasure in the making – not yet a household name, but if you’ve seen her on stage, you’ll never forget her. However, the odds felt stacked against her in taking on Williams’s doomed protagonist Blanche DuBois, one of the all time great stage roles. Firstly, she is clearly cast against type. Ferran is technically just about the right age for Blanche, who we gather to be in her thirties despite her intense denial of this fact. But the role is typically played by middle-aged actresses, while Ferran still basically looks like a gawky teenager. By any conventional wisdom she should be playing delicate recluse Laura in Williams’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’, and saving Blanche for another decade or two. More practically, Ferran was a last-minute replacement as the lead in Rebecca Frecknall’s revival, after Lydia Wilson dropped out during rehearsals due to injury. While the...