London theatre reviews

Last year, the Menier Chocolate Factory felt like the perfect place to revive The Producers. Mel Brooks’s gleefully bad-taste musical was a ’00s phenomenon, which sold out the massive Theatre Royal Drury Lane for the best part of two years, and did even better on Broadway. But the sheer scale of its success was never going to be repeated: the zeitgeist had long moved on. 

Let’s first acknowledge that there is not a person alive who is currently torn between spending their birthday theatre vouchers on a choice between either Mamma Mia! or Cow | Deer. Even if you have never heard of the great avant-garde director Katie Mitchell, it seems inconceivable that you would book into her Cow | Deer and go expecting a night of high-octane commercial theatre lulz…

A Catholic upbringing has left me both terrible at lying and capable of looking guilty about more or less anything. As such I was morbidly convinced that I would get the tap on the shoulder designating me a traitor in this live recreation of the smash BBC game show. This proved to be entirely correct and long story short I lasted four rounds until I was rumbled. And speaking as somebody who has barely watched the show: I had a blast.

If you think a two-hander drama about Elizabethan legends Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare having a sexy, dangerous time while trying to write a play together sounds a bit slash fiction-y then you would have the number of Born with Teeth, a new drama by US playwright Liz Duffy Evans.

A war correspondent and an influencer-turned-actress walk into a New York apartment. What could possibly go wrong? In Interview, based on the 2003 Dutch film and 2007 Sienna Miller-Steve Buscemi remake of the same name, the answer is… a lot.

Even the most die-hard city dweller surely entertains fantasies of packing it all in for a self-sustained rural existence when a politician says something mad, or the weather does something weird, or grabbing a few essentials from the supermarket rings up over £50. This new comedy drama from state-of-the-nation playwright Mike Bartlett is, on one level, here to warn anyone with such notions not to hand in their notice just yet…

Like Hamlet, Twelfth Night is one of those god-tier Shakespeare plays that pops up so much at 'regular’ theatres that it feels relatively underproduced at the Globe. It’s a stretch to say it’s actually not suited to the Bankside playhouse (which is probably something you could say about Hamlet). But this new production feels like an object lesson in what can go wrong with a Globe Twelfth Night.

There is some very stiff competition, but Lerner & Loewe’s Brigadoon – a romance about a time-travelling Sottish village – might well stand as the maddest musical of all time…

If there’s any larger venue fit to house Duncan Macmillan’s mini masterpiece, it is @sohoplace. In a co-production between Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, the play is once again performed in-the-round, with the audience on all sides encouraged to join in and play their part. Over the course of its three-month stint, Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver will all take the lead role, but tonight’s performer is Lenny Henry.

This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris.