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...

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...

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...

Although it’s the second most influential Christmas story of all time, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a tale that’s disseminated by adaptations rather than because everyone still religiously reads the 1843 novella. And for eight Christmases in a row – including 2020! – the main form of dissemination for Londoners has been the Old Vic’s stage version, which packs ‘em into the huge theatre for two months every year. I haven’t been since it debuted in 2017, when Rhys Ifans played supernaturally reformed miser Ebeneezer Scrooge. Back then, Matthew Warchus’s production of Jack Thorne’s adaptation was simply a stage version, of a story endlessly retold each year. Now it is essentially the version, not because nobody else does it (in 2022 I counted 11 adaptations), but because of the unparalleled scale of its success: it’s certainly the most successful stage adaptation of this century, and quite possibly ever. Eight Christmases on and it’s charming, but groans under the weight of its own success. What really struck me on second viewing was the conflict between Thorne’s smartly empathetic text and Warchus’s ecstatically OTT Christmasgasm of a production. Making a few judicious departures from Dickens, Thorne seeks to humanise Scrooge, get to the heart of his wasted life, make his second chance at being a decent man count for something. His relationships with women are smartly scrutinised – the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future are all pointedly female. But it...

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...

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...

The National Theatre’s big family Christmas show is a sumptuous adaptation of Noel Streatfeild’s classic 1936 children’s novel Ballet Shoes. It’s slick, classy and meticulously directed by Katy Rudd. But ultimately it lacks dramatic punch. The story follows the eccentric household initially headed by Justin Salinger’s Great Uncle Matthew (aka GUM), a paleontologist in the old-school explorer vein. A confirmed bachelor, he is initially aghast when he is abruptly made legal guardian of his 11-year-old niece Sylvia (Pearl Mackie). But he soon changes his tune when freak circumstances lead to him taking in three baby girls: Petrova (Yanexi Enriquez), Pauline (Grace Self) and Posy (Daisy Sequerra), each of whom he found orphaned while out on an expedition. But then he disappears on one of his trips; the meat of the story is about his three daughters growing up in the unconventional, almost entirely female household headed by Sylvia and their redoubtable housekeeper Miss Guthridge (Jenny Galloway). Each girl’s life is defined by seemingly having a calling that they are simply born with: Pauline to be an actor, Petrova to be a mechanic, and Posy to be a dancer, spurred on by the titular ballet shoes left to her by her mother.   To be honest… that’s sort of the whole plot. On a beautiful, fossil-filled set from Frankie Bradshaw, Rudd directs gracefully, pepping things up with various plays within the play, most notably an amusingly weird retro sci-fi version of A Midsummer Night’s...

This review is from the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe. Cyrano transfers to the Park Theatre for Christmas 2024. This mischievous and somewhat maddening meta adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s classic verse play has gone down a storm in creator and star Virginia Gay‘s native Australia, and now it’s come o’erseas for a stint at the Fringe followed by one at London’s Park Theatre. The best and most frustrating thing about ‘Cyrano’ is how luckily funny it is when Gay turns her mind to it. Away from the named characters, Tessa Wong, David Tarkenter and Tanvi Virmani are highly amusing as a trio of unnamed minor actors vocally confused about what they’re doing in this play. Bemused by the whole situation they bicker furiously and offer shambolic, often amusingly counterproductive advice to the leads.  In it, ‘Cyrano’ is repurposed as a queer love triangle, with both Gay’s female title character and Brandon Grace’s pretty but dumb-as-rocks Yan vying for the hand of Jessica Whitehurst’s feisty Roxanne. Gay doesn’t wear any prosthesis, but Cyrano’s nose is clearly meant to be big: the other characters discuss it in amusingly mortified tones. Whether it’s more meant to be an allegory for the barrier her sexuality presents to Roxanne I wasn’t entirely clear, but let’s say that’s the case but also an excuse for a few good nose gags. Directed by Clare Watson, Gay’s show is at its best when it’s being spikily subversive, but too often it opts for mawkish sentimentality. Ultimately much of Gay’s...

This review of ‘A Sherlock Carol’ is from November 2022. ‘A Sherlock Carol’ returns for 2024. Why the hell are there so many productions of ‘A Christmas Carol’ in London? There’s a moment in this misbegotten attempt to cut and shut Sherlock Holmes and ‘A Christmas Carol’ that has stayed with me, through the journey home and the long marches of the night. ‘What’s the matter?’ asks the sister – played by a white actor – of her brother, – played by a Black actor – ‘you look pale.’ Titters from (some of) the audience. I don’t know what I’m not getting here, but this doesn’t feel like some super-sophisticated piece of meta-woke prejudice-baiting. It just feels like old-fashioned 1970s-TV ‘comedy’. This is an extreme example of the tone-deafness of off-Broadway import ‘A Sherlock Carol’, but there’s no shortage of others. Briefly, Holmes – troubled by the spectre of his nemesis Moriarty – is called upon to investigate the death of the wealthy Londoner Ebenezer Scrooge. In exorcising his own demons, he solves the case. It’s not that bad an idea. You could – squinting – see Conan Doyle as a popular-fiction heir to Dickens, with characters and phrases that have entered our collective culture. But you get the feeling that writer/director Mark Shanahan really likes Sherlock Holmes and maybe isn’t that into Dickens. Most of ‘A Sherlock Carol’ is just a Holmes story made from parts of other ones. The Dickens-y bits are generic festiveness and some ghosts, and there aren’t really...

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...