London theatre reviews

Writer Stephen Beresford’s musical adaptation of his own 2014 film is a triumph. Under the assured direction of Matthew Warchus – who directed the film – with a by-turns playful and powerful score by Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde, Pride succeeds in packing a wallop of an emotional punch while never neglecting to find the very human humour in even its most sombre moments…

A Frank Sinatra musical is a great opportunity: a titan of the 20th century, he was a complex figure who was both emblematic of America and in many ways an outsider to it. He also had a pretty stonking songbook. But this sauceless bio-musical manages to do the impressive job of acknowledging Sinatra’s many, uh, foibles while making him seem incredibly bland as a human being…

The Truth opens with a classic farce set-up: a rumpled bed from which the rumpled head of Stephen Mangan's Michel emerges, looking roguishly pleased with itself, next to the equally rumpled but less satisfied head of Alice (Sarah Hadland) who is, we soon discover, Michel's best friend's wife. Over the course of 90 tightly-plotted minutes, it becomes enjoyably clear that neither Michel, Alice nor their cuckolded spouses Paul and Laurence, would know what the truth was if it came and bit them on the bottom…

At first glance, Ben Ockrent’s family drama Relics has it all. There’s the starry cast (Sally Phillips! Charly Clive!), and big name director Michael Longhurst. Even Joanna Scotcher’s richly layered set, slowly revealed as a screen lifts to show off the deep wood panels and sentimental knick knacks of a beloved home where secrets lie, offers a sense of intricately selected prestige…

Sandra Oh makes a very decent UK stage debut as Alice, the misanthrope in question in Martin Crimp’s new adaptation of the classic Molière comedy…

A drawback to our national addiction to Shakespeare is that occasionally a production comes along that’s so good it sort of queers the pitch for a while. I’m not saying Jamie Lloyd’s superlative 2025 Much Ado About Nothing was the last word on the play, or that Chelsea Walker’s new Globe production is intentionally derivative of it. Nonetheless, as a largely upbeat, good vibes, modern dress production in which the cast cavort around in amusing animal masks, it does kind of invite comparisons.

Sophie Swithinbank creates a masterful, destabilising examination of domestic abuse that plays out like if A24 got their hands on an episode of Line of Duty…

Patrick Marber clearly knows that to actually do something new with Glengarry, you have to fuck around with it a bit. He went on record saying he planned to have an all-female second cast to his production, and while that didn’t happen in New York, here he is a year later with an all-new Old Vic take, with a Y chromosome-free ensemble.

I feel like I have fairly normie bleeding heart European liberal views on Israel and its treatment of Palestine and as such I found leftwing Israeli performer Itai Erdal’s storytelling piece about his time in the IDF relatively uncontroversial. Perhaps relatively unremarkable, too, theatrically speaking: Anita Rochon’s production has a few nice flourishes but it feels like the text could have gone a round or two with a dramaturg to sharpen it up.

They say we all have one great story in us. Well, actor Martina Laird arguably has three. But it may not have been a great idea for her debut play Driftwood to try and tell all of them at once.

The setting is an intriguing, little-dramatised one: the Trinidadian capital Port of Spain on the eve of the 1956 general election which would set the island and its sibling Tobago on the route to independence from Britain.

The action revolves around Alma, a drinking den that’s owned by posh, childish white Brit Mansion (Roger Ringnose), but run by the hardnosed, weary Pearl (Ellen Thomas) and her beautiful, fiery daughter Ruby (Cat White). Justin Audibert’s production brings this small corner of a lost world to life very nicely indeed. Calypso blares on the radio; different brands of rum are sampled and argued over; the superficially charming but under the surface obnoxious Mansion loudly refuses to believe that the – to his mind – hapless Black population would ever vote for independence.

It’s an intriguing snapshot of both the times and Trinidad’s diversity, with its significant Indian population represented by Seldom (Shane David-Joseph), an affable policeman, whose comings and goings are dictated by the febrile politics of the island. Though you soon adjust, the accents are far from the generic Caribbean lilt – it’s very authentic and impressive work from dialect coach Aundrea Fudge.

Still, Laird never really drills down into this as she might, with the plot rather focussing on the more timeless human drama – shading into melodrama – that’s triggered by the arrival of Diamond (Martins Imhangbe), a rum delivery guy whose seemingly random appearance turns out to be anything but. I won’t spoil, but you can perhaps surmise from the name that he has a connection to Pearl and Ruby. Once revelations start revealing themselves, Driftwood becomes an intense (very intense) meditation on the meaning of family, in a way that pretty much overshadows the historical/political/postcolonial side of the story.

But it’s also wrapped into a thriller that concerns comically nasty American sailor Tom (Ziggy Heath) and his attempts to use Alma for some sort of shady smuggling operation. This seemingly tertiary plot – which doesn’t emerge until deep in – seems largely worked in as a means to bring Driftwood to an overwrought ending that does not feel earned.

There is much that is promising in Driftwood, but the smouldering passions of Pearl, Ruby and Diamond are surely enough to have combusted by themselves – they don’t need petrol pouring on. And indeed, we could have done with a little more exploration of them as characters. Artificially bringing things to an explosive head via the smuggling story ultimately feels a bit cheap: either Laird has tried to pack in too much, or she didn”t have enough faith in her own core characters.