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© Susie Rea

Haymarket Theatre Royal

This storied (and potentially haunted) venue is one of London's oldest theatres
  • Theatre | West End
  • Leicester Square
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Time Out says

Dating back to the eighteenth century, Theatre Royal Haymarket is London's third oldest theatre that's still in use. On the outside, its gleaming white Neoclassical facade, designed by John Nash, features six stately Corinthian columns. On the inside, things have often been rather less dignified. The theatre's riotous history includes the 'Dreadful Accident' of 1794, where 20 people were killed in a crush of audience members trying to glimpse the king. It was also the home of legendarily scurrilous 18th century actor, theatre manager and satirist Samuel Foote, whose digs at other performers regularly threatened the theatre's existence. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its long and eventful history, it's also one of London's most haunted theatres. Actor Patrick Stewart is the latest person to have claimed to see the ghost of the theatre's Victorian actor-manager, John Baldwin Buckstone, who apparently hangs out in the wings, wearing tweeds, when a comedy is playing. 

Unlike its West End neighbours, Theatre Royal Haymarket offers a clutch of fresh openings each year. One of the finest proscenium arches in theatreland frames a line-up that focuses on 'proper theatre': you'll regularly get celeb-led takes on classic 20th century plays, as well as the odd production of Shakespeare or a new musical. 

Details

Address
18 Suffolk St
London
SW1Y 4HT
Transport:
Piccadilly Circus tube
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What’s on

The Score

3 out of 5 stars
While it would be pushing it to say Frederick the Great loomed large in my childhood, he probably loomed larger in mine than yours. Aside from the fact my family is Polish – Frederick is well up there on our national shitlist – my dad is a lecturer in eighteenth century European history with a habit of bitching about the Prussian monarch as if he were a hated work colleague. Oliver Cotton’s The Score essentially sets Brian Cox’s grouchy, loveable and deeply devout JS Bach against Stephen Hagan’s capricious atheist Frederick. It’s a fictionalised account of their real 1747 encounter, wherein the Prussian king asked the legendary composer to improvise a fiendishly tricky fugue for him.  While I’m sure Cotton has done his homework, he’s surely betting that the average British audience is unlikely to have any real opinion on Frederick. His play contents itself with an antagonist who is a sort of vague mish mash of biographical exposition, Blackadder-style toff-isms, and bits where Frederick’s warmongering is unsubtly paralleled with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m not saying there’s any need to be totally historically accurate in a work of fiction. But Cotton’s king feels like a half-hearted collection of tyrant tropes rather than a credible character. It’s hard not to see The Score as a distant relative of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but it’s simply not in the same league in terms of characterisation. Still, we’re here to see Brian Cox’s Bach, and the Succession star gives it...
  • Drama

The Deep Blue Sea

Lindsay Posner’s Tamsin Greig-starring revival of Terence Rattigan’s melancholy 1952 classic got good notices when it ran at Theatre Royal Bath earlier in 2024, and now it books a transfer to the West End. Greig returns as the suicidal Hester, whose life has disintegrated following her abandonment of her husband William in favour of a younger lover, alcoholic former RAF pilot Freddie. Finbar Lynch also reprises his role as William, with other casting TBC.
  • Drama
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