London theatre reviews

Half a century’s worth of history squashed down into just 80 minutes is a mission so ambitious that it feels doomed to fail. Which is a particular misfortune in the case of Shanghai Dolls. Amy Ng’s play about the little-known relationship between Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong and Sun Weishi, the first female director in China, is ripe with dramatic potential.

Robert Icke made his name directing boldly reimagined takes on some of the greatest plays ever written. But despite the sense that he has genuinely added something to millennia old works, it’s still a big deal to make his debut as a ‘proper’ playwright. Even his most outrageous rewrites have had somebody else’s ideas at their core. Manhunt, his play about Raoul Moat, is all him. And to be clear – and I’m going to shock you here – it’s not as good as Hamlet.

Part of the reason that there’s not been a London production of Eugene Ionesco’s classic absurdist satire Rhinoceros in almost 20 years is that there’s not a huge amount you can *do* to it. But Omar Elerian – contemporary British theatre’s most consummate director of leftfield absurdism – very much has his cake and eats it with an enjoyable revival that pays fanboy-esque homage to Ionesco’s 1959 original, while also bolting on loads of fun extra stuff.

The Lost Boys meet Motherland in playwright John Donnelly’s giddily original stage return. It is a drama about postpartum depression and also vampirism that stars Sophie Melville as a stressed mum who turns to forces beyond mortal comprehension to sort out her mess of a life…

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. 

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.

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.