Plays on in London

Belgian super director Ivo van Hove got his big English-language break with 2014’s astounding production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, and a couple of years later lucky New Yorkers got a deluxe production of The Crucible that scored warm reviews (maddeningly it never played here despite its largely British and Irish cast). Since then, Van Hove’s career has gone into overdrive and he’s famous dedicated a lot of time to making stage adaptations of classic films, to mercurial effect.  It would be entirely misunderstanding Van Hove to imagine that he’s returning to the safety of Miller as a result of last year’s colossal West End flop Opening Night. But there will certainly be those glad he’d doing so as he tackles the US playwright’s first big hit, All My Sons.  Set in 1943, the drama concerns Joe Keller, an upstanding pillar of the local community whose business partner has been found guilty of selling faulty parts to the US Airforce. Joe has escaped any blame. But should he have? Van Hove has assembled a proper A-grade cast here, with US star Bryan Cranston – who led the director’s 2017 hit Network –  as Joe, with the wondrous Marianne Jean-Baptiste as his wife Kate and Paapa Essiedu as their son Chris. 

Nicola Walker is a brilliant TV actor: her sullen, sarcastic charisma brings an edge to sundry MOR terrestrial Brit dramas – we’re talking Spooks, Last Tango in Halifax, River, The Split, Annika – in which her career has flourished. But even though she has done some great stuff on stage – notably her excellent turn in Ivo van Hove’s landmark production of A View from the Bridge – I’m not sure Nicola Walker has ever truly successfully brought her innate Nicola Walkerness to bear in a theatre role. Until now.  Nick Payne’s new Royal Court play The Unbelievers isn’t the instant classic his last one (2012’s Constellations) was. But its star gives a turn that is absolutely, magnificently, unfettered Nicola Walker. Her unique gift for proper nuanced acting filtered via an unshakeable deadpan grumpiness is harnessed to perfection as she plays a grieving mother whose sorrow and grief at the unexplained disappearance of her son has curdled into something darker and more disturbing. The play is set in three timelines, albeit heavily jumbled up and somewhat blurred. There’s the immediate aftermath of Oscar’s disappearance, when Walker’s Miriam is terse and snappy but fundamentally reasonable in both her grief and her burning desire to make progress on the case. There’s one year on, where things are beginning to slip with her. The play opens with a scene from this timeline in which a somewhat out of it Miriam is tending to a wounded hand which has arisen from a complicated series of...

After what feels like an infinity of iterations of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, finding something genuinely new or interesting in it is a difficult feat. But it’s something that writer-director Tanika Gupta’s pulls off in her new take for the Orange Tree. She reimagines Ibsen’s restless anti-heroine as a mixed-heritage actress in postwar London, still suffocating under societal expectations, but now also constrained by race, class, gender, and reputation in a new Britain. It is 1948. The Blitz scars are still visible, but a veneer of gentility has returned. Inside a pristine Chelsea mews house — Simon Kenny’s blinding white-on-white set is simple but effective — Hedda (Pearl Chanda) lives with her dependable new husband, George (Joe Bannister). Outwardly, she’s living the dream: a glamorous ‘retired’ film star, she’s still admired (and feared) for her beauty and clout. But beneath that polish, she’s suffocating — aching for the freedoms enjoyed by those around her. Gupta’s inspiration comes from real-life film legend Merle Oberon, who famously concealed her South Asian heritage to survive Hollywood’s racist studio system under the Hays Code (the strict moral censorship guidelines that ruled American cinema until the late 1960s). That parallel gives Gupta’s Hedda a modern edge while retaining Ibsen’s familiar structure — the domestic cage, the manipulations, the doomed flirtations. Around Hedda orbit familiar figures: Leonard (Jake Mann), the brooding playwright; John...

John Le Carré’s landmark Cold War novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has a huge reputation but is relatively under-adapted compared to the later, connected Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. There was a critically acclaimed but now largely forgotten Richard Burton film in 1965 (two years after the novel was published), and not a lot since, although a TV adaptation has been in the works for years, seemingly without much progress. Well, here’s a theatre version, transferring to London after an acclaimed run at Chichester last year. Written by David Eldridge and directed by Jeremy Herrin, it stars Rory Keenan as battle weary British intelligence officer Alec Leanas, ready to ‘come in from the cold’ but pressed into one more job by spymaster George Smiley (John Ramm). Posing as dishonourably discharged in an effort to be recruited by East German spy Hans-Dieter Mundt (Gunnar Cauthery), he sets off a dangerous chain of events after falling for well-meaning lefty librarian Liz Gold (Agnes O’Casey).

I’m going to be honest and say that I was worried I’d not be able to take a drama about a porn addict entirely seriously. It’s an unusual subject! And certainly the early sections of Josie Rourke’s production of Sophie Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play are happy to make relatively light of protagonist Ani’s habit. A successful English lecturer with a speciality in Milton, we first meet Ambika Mod’s Ani in the company of her soon to be ex, Liam (WIll Close). She has just won a big award for her work; he has chosen this moment to say he’s concerned about the amount of violent pornography she’s consuming. But her defence is pretty good: she doesn’t deny it at all, but instead compares wanking to having a glass of wine to unwind after a long day. She deftly flips the conversion on its head, and accuses him of exaggerating the problem out of jealousy over her award. He meekly agrees.  Rourke’s production is staged on a remarkable Yimei Zhao set: it transforms the Royal Court’s Upstairs theatre into a sort of gigantic flesh-coloured sofa with what I’m going to go ahead and say is a big hole that’s meant to be evocative of a vaginal opening as its focal point. And there’s a playful sensuality to the early stages, as the actors delve into the fleshy fabric of the set to pull out props, while there are scenes in which actor Lizzy Connolly flits around in a gauzy dress as a sort of spirit of desire (who also helps out with the scene transitions). But Ani is not okay, and over the course of...

Anna Ziegler’s play The Wanderers makes its UK debut at the Marylebone Theatre after becoming an off-Broadway hit in 2023, starring Katie Holmes. Tracking the lives and loves of two Jewish couples from different generations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, it is a crafty, gradually intensifying drama that examines the values we embrace and reject. Directed here by Igor Golyak, it’s staged on two sides of a translucent screen, with the tensions from the separate eras overlapping and reverberating across time. Abe (a wonderfully weary Alex Forsyth) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning prodigy who has known his wife, Sarah (Paksie Vernon) – a less successful writer – practically his whole life. At one of his book readings, he spots the movie star Julia Cheever (Anna Popplewell) in the audience and so begins a lustful email exchange, which sends Abe on a downward spiral; he questions the roots of his marriage, declares his love for Julia, and descends further into his own world. Elsewhere, in the novel Abe is trying to piece together about his family history, his parents Esther (Katerina Tannenbaum) and Schmuli (Eddie Toll) are Hasidic Jews. They’ve met only once before their arranged marriage and are about to embark on a life together. But, with Esther’s desire to push the boundaries of tradition, it’s not long before their union is in tatters. In the hands of Golyak, the play glows in its duality. Using white marker pen, the actors draw out objects, like radios, that are used separately in...

After a slow start, Hannah Doran’s drama about small-time tragedy among immigrant Americans in the age of Trump finds its feet in an explosive second half.  It’s set in Cafarelli & Sons, an NYC butcher’s shop that’s been in the family of owner Paula (Jackie Clune) for decades. She’s a badass with a heart of gold and has a benign tendency to hire staff with criminal records who other employers wouldn’t touch. Business is struggling, though, and only one of staff members JD (Marcello Cruz) and Billy (Ash Hunter) will be hired permanently at the end of the summer. There’s a lot of leisurely preamble before the story kicks in - I couldn’t shake off the sense that in this debut play, Anglo-Irish writer Hannah Doran felt like she had to compensate for her distance from this world by overly setting the scene, taking too much time to introduce her five characters. There is also a distracting initial similarity to Lynn Nottage superlative Clyde’s (about ex prisoners working in a sandwich shop). Finally, though, we get down to it. JD is enthusiastic about the job and a shoo in for the role, but is deeply nervous about getting it. Billy has been bumming around the shop for years without getting taken on permanently - but he needs the money to look after his desperately ill mother. Caught between them is T (Mithra Malek), Billy’s cousin, a young woman who has served time and is now working a temporary summer role at the shop. JD takes a shine to her; Billy leans on her to help him...

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...

There are no wild directorial flourishes or big awards-bait performances in director Michael Grandage and playwright Jack Holden’s stage adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s seminal novel of the ‘80s. The wheel is at no point reinvented. But, by Thatcher’s ghost, it does a tremendous job of cutting Hollinghurst’s period odyssey into a gripping, flab-free two-and-a-half hours of theatre. It is, above all, a great piece of storytelling.  If you’re not familiar, The Line of Beauty concerns Nick Guest (here played by Jasper Talbot), a young gay man who in 1983 moves into the ultra fancy home of his uni mate Toby Fedden’s parents as a lodger. ‘Welcome to Kensington Park Garden,’ intones Nick’s mother Rachel (Claudia Harrison), as she introduces Nick to the house she shares with her newly elected Tory MP husband Gerald (Charles Edward) and depressive daughter Catherine. The story charts his journey through the decade: adjacent to the ruling classes but not a member of them, he is further removed from the mainstream by his sexuality, which he is entirely open about, but also othered by. A relationship with Leo (Alistair Nwachukwu), a Black councillor (one assumes for Labour) is largely conducted on the down-low. Though nominally invited in, Nick is wary of bringing Leo into the circle of the Feddens for a multitude of reasons. Some are clearly self-interested: the pointedly ‘apolitical” Nick is aware Leo is unlikely to get on with his Tory benefactors. Others are more...

The gesture of Rufus Norris’s final piece of National Theatre programming being called End has been a bit muddied by the temporary closure of the Dorfman Theatre causing a delay that means it only runs as his replacement Indhu Rubasingham’s first season has already started.  The main thing, though, is that End marks the conclusion of David Eldridge’s trilogy of relationship dramas that began with the fizz of the delightful global smash Beginning and continued with the darker, more difficult Middle. What will End be about? Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves make for a heavyweight cast for Rachel O’Riordan’s production and are certainly the oldest couple in the trilogy. That said, they’re both shy of their retirement age, and End seems unlikely to explore the idea of growing old together. The blurb says that after a mostly happy life together it’s time for things to end for Alfie and Julie – you can speculate as to what this means but we’ll soon see for ourselves.