Plays on in London

Luke Norris’s first play in an age quite doesn’t have an M Night Shyamalan-level twist, but it does take a few pretty shocking turns from quite early on, and for that reason I’m going to talk about the plot in maddeningly general terms, so sorry for that.  As Guess How Much I Love You? begins, we meet Him (Robert Aramyo) and Her (Rosie Sheehy), a thirtysomething married couple who have come to hospital for what is presumably their 20-week scan. They are, for want of a better word, bantering: the sonographer has left the room and they’re idling away the time chatting shit about baby names and whether or not he’s into porn. She’s fiery and intense, he’s garrulous and philosophical. They’re a good couple. There is a nagging worry, however: the two are debating over why the sonographer has been away so long and whether or not she looked worried when she left. To say how this resolves itself would be to give too much away. But what I will say is that as a certified two-time parent, I found Guess How Much I Love You? – which does indeed take its name from the classic picturebook – to be a painfully acute portrait of the stress early parenthood can put on a relationship. Not in some sort of weird self-pitying way, but just that it’s very good and clear and unsentimental on how parenthood not only puts you through the emotional wringer, but how it totally recontexualises your relationship to your partner, as you have to almost start anew in a situation of maximum stress.  Of...

I wonder if the reason John le Carré never allowed his novels to be adapted for the stage was the fear they'd get turned into the sort of trashy touring potboilers that crisscross the country in numbers but never make it to the scrutiny of the West End. It was presumably his death in 2020 that allowed a stage version of his breakthrough The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to finally go ahead. But I’d say his estate was right to give the nod: the story is in safe hands with playwright David Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin, whose adaptation settles in at the West End after scoring good notices in Chichester. This is a slick and yes, maybe slightly MOR adaptation of Le Carre’s taut, brutal espionage yarn. But it’s a very good one, and Eldridge deftly crafts an intensely interior world, with us seeing the action unfold as much from within jaded spy protagonist Alec Leamas’s head as without. Herrin’s production goes heavy on the noir, and with good reason. Rory Keenan is magnificently grumpy and rumpled as Leamas, a hardbitten British spy in Cold War Berlin who ‘comes in from the cold’ – that is to say, is brought home – after his last informer is executed by Hans-Dieter Mundt, a ruthless counterintelligence agent who has systematically dismantled the British spy apparatus in East Germany. (It is slightly disconcerting that Keenan speaks in his natural Dublin accent, although you soon get used to it). But there is a long game at work: returning to The Circus (a fictionalised...

Kip Williams is not a massive name in British theatre (yet), but the Aussie writer-director is starting to make some serious waves over her. His dizzyingly high tech, Sarah Snook-starring one woman Dorian Gray was a big West End hit last year, this autumn he directs a version of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the Donmar. It seems questionable as to whether we’ll get part two of his one woman Victorian horror trilogy over here – a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde received mixed notices Down Under – but part three is coming our way in the new year as his take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula lands on our shores. In her first full London stage role since her career making turn turn in The Color Purple over a decade ago, Cynthia Erivo will return home to (hopefully) triumphantly take on 23 different roles in a tech enhanced solo romp through Dracula that plays clever visual homage to the early years of horror cinema.

Alan Ayckbourn is frequently referred to as ‘the English Chekhov’, a reflection of the melancholy that lies at the heart of his plays and their characters.  But that’s not the whole story. Chekhov did not go in for the sort of wacky high concepts that Ayckbourn has been wedded to throughout his bewilderingly prolific career. It’s unlikely, for instance, that there is another playwright on the planet who has written more shows about robots than him (he’s written something like seven plays about robots).  These days the 86-year-old Ayckbourn is a relatively fringe concern, his latest plays only really staged at his beloved Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. But in the 1980s he was at his commercial peak, firing out hit after hit. Some of these works have settled down as modest contemporary classics (notably 1984’s A Chorus of Disapproval and 1987’s A Small Family Business). On the outskirts of this group is 1985’s Woman in Mind, which has been a West End hit a couple of times before, in productions directed by Ayckbourn himself. Here, Michael Longhurst does the honour, in an alluring revival that thrills for a good while before miring in concept.    Sheridan Smith plays Susan, an embittered middle-aged mother who begins the play having taken a bump to the head that’s caused her perception of reality to become unmoored. She believes she’s a model parent with a dream life, living in a huge country house, quaffing Champagne all day and being told how wonderful she is by her...

Putting a film western on stage is an odd idea that doesn’t seem any less odd having seen High Noon, an adaptation of the classic allegorical 1952 movie starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. It’s an impressive show in a lot of ways. Thea Sharrock’s direction deftly conjures a dusty desert town using flexible sets, lovely period costumes (from Tim Hatley) and some sparse but effective gun slingin’. It’s theatrical, too, in the sense that the cast sing a lot more Bruce Springsteen songs than they did in the film, and an ever-present clock implacably ticks down to the title time.  And it’s got two sensational leads. I wasn’t really a massive fan of Billy Crudup’s recent one-man show Harry Clarke. But he’s the best thing about High Noon as the vulpine Sheriff Will Kane, who begins the story marrying and reluctantly hanging up his badge before he’s hauled out of retirement almost immediately upon the news that jailed outlaw Frank Miller has been released from prison and is on the noon train to town, hellbent on revenge.  Crudup is not a physically imposing man, and is older than Cooper was, but it’s his steely intensity combined with a sense of genuine vulnerability that binds the show together, as he tries and largely fails to form a posse to oppose Miller. The townsfolk are either seeking to avoid danger or have actively fallen out with the upright but abrasive lawman.  His new bride is tough, independent-minded Quaker Amy Fowler, played by the mighty Denise Gough, who imbues...

If somebody was as late to a party as I am to Jack Holden’s tour de force solo(ish) show KENREX then they would have got the year of the party wrong. The show debuted to great acclaim in Sheffield in late 2024, and had two hugely successful London runs last year, and finally I caught it two weeks before the end of the second. Sorry everyone! Anyway, it turns out it’s very good. Teetering on a guilty pleasure, but in an extremely classy way, and entirely intentionally. It caps a fairly remarkable few years for Holden, whose star has risen as a writer and a performer in more or less equal measures since his previous solo show Cruise was a West End hit post-pandemic hit. Co-written with director Ed Stambollouian, it’s a largely true account of the brutal life and unusual death of one Ken Rex McElroy. That is to say it’s true crime, and Holden and Stambollouian are entirely transparent about the fact that they’ve been heavily influenced by true-crime podcasts. While KENREX isn’t trying to emulate the format, there is the sense that it basically has the same priorities, guiding us through a remarkably juicy true story with the pacing and narrative strategy of a podcast series. And maybe this lets it off the hook a little for not trying to get beneath its characters’ surfaces very much – it’s a yarn first and foremost.  Not that it’s not theatrical: indeed, presentationally it doesn’t get much more theatrical than this. Holden plays every single role, taking on virtually the...

History has not been kind to Mary Todd Lincoln. Wife to one of America’s most mythologised presidents, she outlived Abraham Lincoln by nearly two decades, having already endured the deaths of three of her four children, public vilification, financial ruin and eventual institutionalisation, signed off by her own son, no less. She became, conveniently, the ‘mad widow’: a cautionary footnote to a Great Man’s story, recently introduced to a new generation after her absurdist depiction in Broadway smash Oh, Mary!. So, really, it’s no wonder that she’s keen to rewrite her story. And rewrite it she tries. John Ramson Phillips’s Mrs President, first staged in 2025 and revived after further dramaturgical development, returns to Charing Cross Theatre with a different cast, the same writer, and director (Bronagh Lagan) and, unfortunately, the same issues. In this version, Keala Settle (The Greatest Showman) takes on the role of Mary, entering swathed in a floral pink frock, a nod to the real Mary’s iconic outfits, standing out against a swampy green set (Anna Kelsey). She’s working with famed Civil War photographer, or ‘the father of photojournalism’ as he was known, Mathew Brady (Hal Fowler), who is determined to capture the ‘real’ her - or at least the version of her he imagines to be real. At first, she embraces the process, declaring that she needs ‘a new image that will change people’s perception of me’. But Brady’s pursuit of artistic immortality soon curdles, as he hovers...

Dante or Die’s resurrected 2013 show feels like a sweet throwback to the glory days of the site-specific theatre era: that is to say, plays that are written in response to the specific, non-theatre building they’re staged in.  In many ways the precursor to the boom in larger scale immersive theatre shows, site-specific work is no longer massively modish, but Dante or Die have kept the flame going for 20 years now. Much of their work is fringier and more radically intimate than I Do. But it’s kind of the company’s greatest hit, originally staged under the auspices of the Almeida. It’s a series of sweetly earnest interconnecting playlets about the build up to a wedding that is staged in a hotel, in this case the Malmaisson, and genuinely wouldn’t make sense in a non-hotel setting near the Barbican (which has programmed this revival).  It’s hard to know exactly where to begin when describing the show, which was created by the company’s Daphna Attias and Terry O’Donovan and written by Chloe Moss. That’s because where it begins varies. The audience is divided into six groups - each with their own usher - and will therefore see the six vignettes that make up I Do in a completely different order to any other group. The stories are self contained but with some crossover. Manish Gandhi’s nervy best man Joe, Geoff Atwell’s wheelchair-bound grandfather-of-the-bride Gordon, and Alice Brittain’s lairy sister-of-the-bride Lizzy never leave their own rooms and only appear in a single...

Are you looking for something fuzzy to warm your heart this Christmastime? Then boy does the National Theatre have the show for you.  Katy Rudd’s seamless production is adapted by playwright Kendall Feaver from the Noel Streatfeild children’s novel of the same name. It follows the story of the three Fossil sisters: Pauline (Nina Cassells), Petrova (Sienna Arif-Knights) and Posy (Scarlett Monahan) who are adopted by the eccentric explorer and palaeontologist Great Uncle Matthew, aka Gum (Justin Salinger). After Gum goes missing on one of his many, many expeditions, the girls are looked after by his steadfastly loyal niece Sylvia, aka Garnie (Anoushka Lucas) and the matronly Miss Guthridge, aka Nana, played by the charming Lesley Nicol with a drawling West Country accent.  Set in the 1930s, the five women live in a tumbledown house filled with fossils on the Cromwell Road in Chelsea, until they realise they are desperately running out of money and assemble a motley crew of lodgers to take up rooms. There’s the stern but kind-hearted English professor Doctor Jakes (Pandora Colin), glamorous dance teacher Theo Dane (Nadine Higgin), and the bumbling car repair man Jai Saran (Raj Bajaj). After being booted out of every state school in the area, the girls are enrolled in the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, where luckily Dane is the teacher. Here they discover their passions for acting, ballet and er… being a mechanic. The whole plot is basically implausible –...

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...