London theatre reviews

To assume that’s this play is just going to be a pastiche of a fast-patter period piece is to underestimate Ryan Calais Cameron who, after all, smashed the West End with his beautiful play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy. 

One of the biggest winners of Euro 2024 was undoubtedly the playwright James Graham. Having promised to update his smash Gareth Southgate drama Dear England following the final tournament of his subject’s tenure as England men’s team manager, Graham must have been thrilled when our boys neither crashed out nor triumphed, but rather did precisely as well as they had done in Euro 2020.

Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s off-Broadway hit Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors isn’t that bad: it’s a goofy, gag-filled but fundamentally quite tame parody of Bram Stoker’s immortal 1897 novel that basically adds up to an old-fashioned BBC radio comedy. 

The only way I can think to describe Jean-Phillipe Daguerre’s massive Parisian stage hit Farewell Mister Haffmann is as an unnatural collision of Schindler’s List and Indecent Proposal. Proof that the French really are a bewilderingly freaky people.

Amy Heckerling’s cult 1995 comedy Clueless feels a bit overshadowed by the funnier (but less nuanced) Mean Girls, which came a few years later and more aggressively staked its claim to the same post-John Hughes, high-school-as-a-jokey-microcosm-of-life turf. So it’s not surprising that Mean Girls was first in there with a musical adaption, currently fetching away over at the Savoy Theatre. But finally, here’s Clueless, which like Mean Girls is adapted by its original screenwriter, a sign of a labour of love if ever there was one.

The first show I remember seeing at the Yard Theatre was called Manga Sister and was a 40-minute micro opera about a samurai going nuts at an old people’s home. I liked it a lot. But it’s fair to say that Hackney Wick’s only theatre has come a long way in the 14 years since then, as it closes the doors of its original building not with a fringe curio but a revival of Tennessee Williams’s greatest play The Glass Menagerie.

English Touring Theatre boss Richard Twyman is a hugely experienced director of Shakespeare, so it’s beyond me how he came to create this atrocious Macbeth. My current theory is that he may have directed too much Shakespeare and emerged in some strange hinterland where every perverse decision in this production is made not for the audience but purely so he can feel alive again.

Absurdly prolific as he is, it sometimes feels like we could do with cloning playwright James Graham a few times. His reassuringly familiar but diverse body of work has done so much to bring obscure chapters of recent history to life that it feels faintly bleak pondering the great stories that one James Graham alone has to let slide. Punch, which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse last year, is the perfect example of what he does.

If there is an afterlife, pioneering Black playwright and screenwriter Michael Abbensetts is presumably looking down from it in delighted surprise. His play Alterations originally ran at the now defunct 80-seat New End Theatre in Hampstead for a few weeks in 1978. There was a BBC radio adaptation too, but that looked to be it for his drama about Walker, a Windrush immigrant grappling with his dream of opening his own tailor shop in London…

Oliver Cotton’s The Score essentially sets Brian Cox’s grouchy, loveable and deeply devout JS Bach against Stephen Hagan’s capricious atheist Frederick the Great. 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.