Plays on in London

Robert Icke: ‘if theatre isn’t astonishing, what’s the point?’ Why are there so many Sophocles plays on at the moment?  I’ll tell you: while about 95 percent of the press night audience to Robert Icke’s take on Oedipus clearly knew the plot already, you could hear every single ticket holder hitherto unaware of the two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old play’s ‘big twist’ gasp in horror when it came. If they ever stopped horrifying us we’d stop staging them, but the Ancient Greeks were basically sicker bastards than everyone else in all of history. And so we love them: Icke’s Oedipus opens a week after the National Theatre opened a version of Antigone called The Other Place and a couple of months ahead of the Old Vic’s, uh, Oedipus. In fact this is one that Stockton-on-Tees-born directorial genius Icke made earlier: Oedipus premiered in Amsterdam six years ago and it now makes its English language debut after a long, Covid-y road to the West End (it was originally going to open here in 2020 with Helen Mirren starring). Icke can do fiddly and complicated when the mood suits him, but as with his phenomenal 2015 adaptation of the Oresteia, his Oedipus benefits from a lethal but compassionate decluttering, a singularity of purpose that distils a famously lurid story into something empathetic, lucid and quite, quite devastating. Mark Strong is Oedipus, a passionate, self-serious politician whose upstart party is on the verge of securing a landslide victory in a sort-of-British version of

Not to be melodramatic about it, but everyone involved in Barcelona should be ashamed of themselves.  Well, maybe not star Lily Collins, who stays so close to her Emily in Paris comfort zone – she once again plays an adorably annoying American, blundering her way through a major European city – that you can hardly accuse her of letting the side down.  And okay, I’ll always give a pass to Lynette Linton, a brilliant and empathic director who frankly deserves a decent West End payday. She has also assembled a solid team of creatives here - when the play’s terrible story got too much for me I could at least take solace in the delicate shift of Jai Morjaria's lighting, as evening drifts from moonlight to dawn in a Barcelona apartment. Alright, ‘ashamed’ is a bit strong: broodingly handsome middle-aged Spanish co-star Álvaro Morte undeniably plays the role of Manuel – a broodingly handsome middle-aged Spaniard – to a tee. And look, American playwright Bess Wohl’s play isn’t ‘good’ but would probably make more sense on Broadway, in front of a US audience. Barcelona does have some reasonable points to make about American cultural insularity, as Collins’s ditsy, drunk Irene - on a hen do in the Catalan capital - hooks up with and comes back to the apartment of Morte’s Manuel, and proceeds to make an idiot out of herself via her total lack of awareness of Spanish current affairs. But to a European audience these truths are self evident, however, and Irene doesn’t feel like an audience

This review is from 2023, when Christopher Eccleston played Scrooge. In 2024 John Simm will take on the role. Sure, it’s nearly December, but it’s not really Christmas in London until there’s a few things happening. Regent Street lights. Uncopywrited Mariah Carey covers blaring in Superdrug. Bond Street station full of teenagers necking tinnies before Winter Wonderland.  And, of course, the return of ‘A Christmas Carol’ to the Old Vic. Jack Thorne’s adaptation premiered in 2017, and hasn’t showed signs of stopping since: it has played every single year since (including 2020) with a series of star-studded Scrooges, from Rhys Ifans to last year’s Owen Teale. This time, Scrooge is Christoper Eccleston off the telly. Your ma is swooning.  To put it simply, the Old Vic ‘Christmas Carol’ is a good laugh, which is lucky, because there are so many adaptations of Dickens’s story in theatres come Christmas that each needs a USP.  Not much changes year to year, and that’s why we love it; there’s overpriced mulled wine for sale, ol’ town folk handing out free mince pies to the crowd, potatoes and carrots thrown on a slide to the stage, and even a whole bit where it starts snowing.  Eccleston takes a little while to warm up but is a fantastic Scrooge once he gets there. His performance feels more sincere than the last version I saw (Paterson Joseph, who brought a bit more wackiness to the role), but he’s most dynamic (and most himself) during Scrooge’s more caricatured moments, and the jo

Just when you think Mark Rylance had Mark Rylance-d all he can, the man finds whole new ways to Mark Rylance. I’d be intrigued to know what Succession star J Smith-Cameron was expecting when she signed on to play the eponymous hard bitten wife and mother in Sean O’Casey’s classic 1924 drama set in the tenements of Civil War Dublin. Was she entirely clear about the extent to which human special effect Rylance would upstage her and, indeed, everyone else? While Matthew Warchus’s revival of Juno and the Paycock is grounded in realism, Rylance’s take on Juno’s drunken layabout husband ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle is coming from someplace entirely different. Presumably inspired by a throwaway line mentioning Charlie Chaplin – a startling reference to a glamourous world beyond the violence gripping Dublin at the time – Rylance has gone full vaudevillian. Looking for all the world like the shambolic Irish cousin of Chaplin’s Little Tramp, he rocks a toothbrush moustache, a penchant for dazzling extremes of physical business, and a tendency to directly address the audience or look bewildered out of the corners of his eyes as if he can’t work out why he’s trapped in a play. For the first half he’s so dazzlingly strange and doing so much more than anyone else – much of it inscrutable – that it’s hard to focus on the other actors. I found it brilliantly, bizarrely funny, the sort of auteur performance that no other actor alive would so much as think of giving. I suspect reviews will be divided

Adrien Brody hasn’t performed on stage since he hit the big time with his Oscar-winning turn in The Pianist back in 2003. So it’s unexpected but very cool that he’s popped up as the star attraction in the first play in Timothy Sheader’s first season in charge of the small but hard-hitting Donmar Warehouse. The Fear of 13 is US playwright Lindsay Ferrentino’s stage version of a 2015 documentary by British filmmaker David Singleton, which tells the story of Nick Yarris, a Pennsylvania man who spent 22 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.   What you’re hearing is a number of warning bells about excessively worthy celebrity projects: screen star who isn't really a stage actor; inspiring true story; adaptation of non-theatrical source material – shows like this sometimes pop up and feel stiff and clunky. Projects rather than plays. But Ferrentino is a proper playwright, Justin Martin – who did the honours for Jodie Comer smash Prima Facie – is a proper stage director and, yes, Brody proves himself to be a proper stage actor. Where the documentary was effectively a monologue performed by the real Yarris, the stage version eschews one-man-play cliches and puts Brody’s incorrigible protagonist at the heart of a mostly male ensemble who take on the role of various wardens, cops, prisoners and miscellaneous others. And they sing, too! If the play always feels slightly tied to the documentary format, there’s enough raw theatricality to Martin’s staging to overcome this, with

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 St

Richard Bean sails into familiar, yet new waters with his second play about the Hull distant water trawling fleet. But where his 2002 Royal Court hit Under the Whaleback was set at sea, the action in Reykjavík very much takes place on dry land. Set in 1975, it’s also less focussed on the sailors, with its protagonist the trawler fleet owner Donald Claxton (John Hollingworth), Cambridge educated son to the fleet’s retired founder. He’s hardly what you’d call posh but an odd mix of sensitive and hard nosed, he is nonetheless largely disliked by his employees and viewed as a member of the boss class, plain and simple.  The naturalistic first half is set in Donald’s offices in Hull, with the company reeling from a recent sinking off the coast of Iceland. Over the course of the evening, Donald chats with ship captains, his dad, his young secretary, an angry local mother and a hipster priest. Bean is a writer of comedies, and there are some funny lines, but the Hull-set portion of Reykjavík is measured and nocturnal, and sympathetic towards Donald, who is in no way the bastard people seem to think he is. It’s really just him going about his job, though in the background lurks the aftermath of the disaster. There’s the imminent need for him to do something called the widows’ walk, where he travels through town on foot to visit the family of each man that died. And there’s also the matter of the five survivors, who are holed up in Reykjavík awaiting passage home. Part two is a change

A drama about cryptocurrency couldn’t be more timely: with the market surging again, Beru Tessema’s Wolves on Road opens at the Bush scarcely 24 hours after the incoming US administration announced it’s putting Elon Musk in charge of a new government department whose name is basically a convoluted crypto in-joke. Wolves on Road centres on the rather more earthbound figure of Manny (Kieran Taylor Ford), a feckless wannabe hustler living with his mum in Bow in the spring of 2021 while frittering away his energy on a series of misguided get rich quick schemes.  Speaking of which: his best friend Abdul (Hassan Najib) has got into crypto, and after a bit of cajoling persuades Manny to do likewise. He spends his last £500 on bitcoin; the next morning he discovers it’s gone up in value tenfold. The boys are hooked, and ingratiate their way into the employment of local crypto entrepreneur Devlin, an agent for cryptocurrency exchange DGX. What Daniel Bailey’s production captures really well is the energy, enthusiasm and underlying societal disaffection of the two puppyish young leads – after directing West End transfer smash Red Pitch, Bailey feels like the absolute go to guy for depicting young Black male camaraderie on stage. Tessema’s dialogue fizzes and pops a treat, but he’s as good at portraying Manny’s flaws as his charm. However, it’s lacking in incisiveness on its subject – ultimately cryptocurrency and its 2021 crash feels more like the backdrop to a story about two pals tha

This review is from February 2023. In September 2024 ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ will return for its fourth London run, this time starring John Heffernan, Aaron Krohn and Howard W. Overshown. The National Theatre’s Sam Mendes-directed blockbuster ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ – now on its second West End run, after conquering Broadway last year – is performed on Es Devlin’s modern boardroom set, and bookended by short scenes from the 2008 demise of Lehman Brothers, the investment bank. But that is not the story that Italian playwright Stefano Massini – as adapted by Ben Power – wanted to tell. ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ isn’t about banking or the credit crunch. It’s about a family, and about the dizzying lifecycle of that family’s business during America’s chaotic years of ascent. Bavarian Jewish immigrant Henry Lehman (nee Hayum Lehmann) arrived in the US in 1844. In the years that followed, he was joined by his brothers, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman. They founded a cotton merchant together, that would eventually mutate into an investment bank. Eugene’s grandson, Bobby, was the last Lehman to run the company. And that’s effectively where this story ends, with Bobby’s death in 1969. So it’s the tale of a family business. And it’s utterly engrossing, built on hyperdetailed, surprisingly joke-packed old school narrated storytelling. It takes a lot of licenses, but it tells a story that has a compellingly unpredictable tang of truth to it. It’s startling how Henry dies after just a few years; how the tri

Writer-director Zinnie Harris’s tepid modern-dress update of famous tragedy The Duchess of Malfi isn’t helped by the fact that it opened on the West End precisely one night after writer-director Robert Icke’s sublime modern-dress update of famous tragedy Oedipus. But even The Duchess (of Malfi) had avoided being programmed on the worst night in the entire theatre calendar it could possibly have been programmed, it would still not be very good. This is a shame for star Jodie Whittaker, who was tremendous in her last stage role in another modern dress update of a famous tragedy, Antigone at the NT way back in 2012. Harris’s contemporary English rewrite of John Webster’s macabre 1613 play has some good lines, and she gets solid performances from Whittaker as the doomed Duchess, Paul Ready as her batshit brother The Cardinal, and Rory Fleck Byrne as her even more batshit other brother Ferdinand. But the problem with Harris’s approach is demonstrated straight away with an opening scene in which Whitaker’s widowed Duchess cackles at her brothers’ creepy attempts to exhort her to remain chaste. She’s right to do so. But unlike the meticulous Icke, Harris has made no real effort to update her characters’ psychology for the present day. In Webster, the Duchess might laugh at her brothers, but it’s understood how dangerous they are. She is forced to conceal her relationship with her steward Antonio (here played by the entertainingly geeky Joel Fry) and the existence of their two childr