London theatre reviews

While the RMS Titanic proved to be all too sinkable, this titanically camp musical spoof of the James Cameron film should sail on for quite some time.

There is much to admire about the three-hour The Invention of Love, and I’m glad I got a chance to see it in Blanche McIntrye’s sturdy Hampstead Theatre revival. I don’t think the word ‘boring’ is fair. But it’s certainly dense…

Superstar director Jamie Lloyd has had an incredible run of somewhat improbable celebrity-led West End smashes, from Martin Freeman in Richard III to Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard.

This gargantuan production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest – the first non musical to play at Theatre Royal Drury Lane for decades – does feel like the point where his luck runs out. By which I mean: bagging the UK stage debut of movie icon Sigourney Weaver feels like a coup on paper, but maybe not so much in practice. She’s not embarrassingly bad or anything, but the role of exiled magician Prospero simply feels beyond her – this is a giant theatre, a tricky role, and she’s not done any Shakespeare since the ’80s. She’s not a good verse speaker, delivering everything in a concerned-mom monotone that fails to hold this big, weird play together. Having her on stage constantly – usually seated in a chair, observing the action – feels like a sop to her celebrity that isn’t borne out by her ability.

Setting its star aside, Lloyd’s Tempest is an awesome spectacle, in which the island to which Prospero has been exiled is represented by a hulking black hill, part industrial slag heap, part Denis Villeneuve's Dune. The entire production would seem to be set over a single night, and Jon Clark’s astonishing lighting makes the best of that: when magic occurs it looks incredible, glowing weird and bright, like the aliens arriving in Close Encounters. MVP of the whole thing is Mason Alexander Park’s bound spirit Aerial – a growlingly androgynous figure.Aerial is pledged to Prospero’s service, but beyond that his powers are clearly almost infinite – this is the rare Aerial where you feel how dangerous he is. Park often descends from the ceiling on visible safety ropes, in what perhaps feels like a nod to an older age of theatre in which Shakespeare was last seen at this theatre. But it still looks cool – Park has the air of somebody who could style out pretty much anything. 

Elsewhere, newcomer Mara Huf is terrific as a growling voiced, sarcastic Miranda, turning many of Prospero’s daughter’s ditsiest lines on their heads – ‘oh brave new world, that has such people in’t’ definitely sounds like a pisstake.

In a play that has had a fair bit pruned to get it to a spare two hours 15 minute runtime, it feels like Lloyd has lavished a lot of time on the comedy subplot. The hijinks relating to the monstrous Caliban (depicted as a sort of grotesque overgrown baby by Forbes Masson) and the shipwrecked piss artists Stefano (Jasoin Barnett) and Trinculo (Matthew Horne) feel both overly prominent and generic. A lot has been written and argued about Caliban as a sort of post-colonial figure, but here he’s just a kinky doofus.

By contrast, the scenes following the other shipwreckees – notably bad guys Antonio, Alonso and Sebastian – feel lacking in flesh on their bones. They’re skimmed over and largely feel like a minor distraction – certainly there’s no sense of danger from them. 

All-in-all it’s a stylish mix of good ideas and bad ideas. It looks awesome, and cues up Park and Huf as stars of the future. But it’s not very coherent and Weaver is not up to the role she’s been saddled with. There’s magic here, but it all gets pretty rough at times.

Like you, I enjoyed the TV show Normal People without having any sense that I desperately wanted to see its co-stars perform in Tennessee Williams plays at the Almeida Theatre, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. But it turns out we were wrong not to desperately want that.

Two years ago Paul Mescal brought a deliciously mephistophelian edge to A Streetcar Named Desire’s antagonist Stanley Kowalski. And now Daisy Edgar-Jones is truly phenomenal as Maggie, the complicated female lead of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The first act of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 classic is more or less a monologue for Maggie, interspersed by grunts from her booze-addled husband Brick.

It’s basically an opportunity for the actress playing Maggie to show off for an hour and then have relatively little to do for the rest of the play. It has a tendency to attract screen stars wanting to prove their stage chops in one intense burst and then chill out for a bit – Scarlett Johansson was the last Big American Maggie, Sienna Miller the last Brit one. 

I guess Edgar-Jones is doing the same, but she is so, so good, inhabiting Maggie with a burning, vivacious swagger, alternatively self-mocking, self-pitying, compassionate and vicious in her diatribe to Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Brick about the wretched state of their marriage. Sometimes she feels like a stand-up comedian, at others a fey spirit. ‘I’m Maggie the cat!’ she repeatedly declares, leaping on the piano or crawling on all fours, and at moments it seems like more than a nickname, like she’s some trickster god. 

Chloe Lamford’s claustrophobic, silver-panelled set is dominated by that piano, which is topped by Brick’s prodigious booze collection, and an ever ticking metronome. There is also an unspeaking, unacknowledged pianist (Seb Carrington) playing it, teasing out jazzy tinkles or discordant shrieks. At first he just seems to be A Musician, the same idea as the drummer in Frecknall’s Streetcar. But around the start of the second act it becomes apparent that he on some level represents Skipper, Brick’s dead best friend, whose passing has all but destroyed Brick.

In a performance the tonal opposite of Edgar-Smith’s, Ben-Adir spends much of the play horizontal and virtually catatonic. Brick was always taciturn, but Ben-Adir takes it to a new level; terrific acting, but sacrificing showing off to the greater good of the play. His Brick is simply too drunk and too miserable to give us anything flashy. I thought it worked tremendously, adding to the production’s creeping horror-show atmosphere while also somewhat redeeming Brick. When he threatens to smack Maggie it’s the impotent mumblings of a sad drunk; he is not going to do it, he can’t do it, and there is little evidence he wants to do it.

If Frecknall directs Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as a sort of Southern Gothic, then the horror here is the hell of other people. Everyone is trapped with everyone else. At first it’s Brick’s hysterically annoying nephews and nieces, who Maggie starts her monologue by ripping into. But by the end of the first act it’s apparent that the free-spirited Maggie is trapped by her love of Brick, which she utterly resents; Brick is trapped by his guilt over Skipper’s death and the claims about the nature of their friendship; Skipper’s unspeaking shade seems literally bound to the room; and the extended family is trapped by the gravity-like pull of patriarch Big Daddy’s money. 

Gathered to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday, everyone apart from the man himself (Lenny James) and his hapless wife Big Mama (Clare Burt) knows he’s dying of cancer (he has been told he is all clear bar a ‘spastic colon’ - the repeated use of the phrase ‘spastic colon’ is very funny). The vultures are gathering to carve up the estate, most especially Brick’s grasping, cowardly older brother Gooper (Ukwell Roach) and his bitchy, rapacious wife Mae (Pearl Chanda). They don’t want to leave without a settlement that favours them. But they’re also too craven to say it to Big Daddy’s face.

Using what I believe is Williams’s own potty-mouthed 1974 revision of the play, James drops copious f-bombs as the take-no-shit, Trumpian Big Daddy. Humourless and unfeeling, he instinctively treats everyone around him like crap – everyone apart from Brick. Ben-Adir plays the character so crushed and pathetic that it’s hard not to see Big Daddy’s obvious love of him as somewhat redemptive – there is an honesty to Brick’s total collapse that you sense the older man on some level admires. Meanwhile his contempt for the much more competent Gooper is simply very funny. The production reaches its doomy apex as Brick finally unburdens himself of his guilt to his father, and his father rages back, under Lee Curran’s remarkable lighting – apocalyptic washes of primary colours that represent birthday fireworks but look like a war.

Not everyone is going to love Frecknall’s doomy reimagining of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Big Daddy’s mansion is a house of trapped spirits. But amidst the gloom, there’s a glimmer – what makes Frecknall’s Tennessee Williams productions so powerful is that she always manages to find the goodness in his cracked characters, always makes us care about them. Maggie, Brick, even Big Daddy - there is still light in this infernal darkness, in these anything but normal people.

Ever wished you could be someone else? How about trying out multiple personalities? That’s exactly what the ‘passengers’ of You Me Bum Bum Train get to do. The labour of love of its creators Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, who founded it in 2004, this immersive cult show has popped up in secret spots across London, taking participants one by one through a series of weird, wonderful, intense and exhilarating experiences.

Each participant signs a non-disclosure agreement so that the mystery of what actually happens gets preserved and so everything is a total surprise. You are the star of each of the incredibly realistic scenes, with hundreds of volunteer actors (and the occasional celebrity) guiding you through – but how you react is entirely up to you. This is a safe space to unleash that main character energy and lean into different parts of your personality you had no idea were there, which can be a life changing experience. A shocked first timer I chatted to afterwards said that he would ‘never be the same again’; a 70-something veteran YMBBT rider exclaimed that these shows were the most memorable moments of his entire life. 

In the early 2010s I went to more immersive theatrical events than I care to remember, including four YMBBTs. My immersive days are now long behind me but when it was announced that YMBBT was back after eight years, I knew I had to have another dose. Wearing my comfiest of clothes and ready for anything, I turned up at the secret West End location feeling a mix of excitement and fear. Of course, I can’t tell you anything that happened to me in that joyful 45 minute whirlwind, but I can say that the hiatus has only made it better. The sets are bigger and bolder, the storylines are topical and often challenging and the pay-off is even greater. My advice to anyone who has managed to get a golden ticket (it sold out faster than you can say NDA) is to be open, be playful and to fully go for it because, you never know, it might just change your life.

You Me Bum Bum Train is sold out. If you’re interested in volunteering for the show there’s more information here.

Not to boast, but I saw the original US production of Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 in a big circus tent in Manhattan and can confirm it was sick. Why it didn’t make it out here I don’t know, but its long-awaited UK premiere has given incoming Donmar boss Tim Sheader one hell of an opportunity for his directorial debut here.

Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes is a bleak study in moral ambivalence and lethally suppressed ambition. Not performed in this country in almost a quarter century, I’d wondered if the passage of time might have made its scheming Southerner protagonist Regina more sympathetic. After careful consideration: maybe. A bit.

It might seem strange to put on a play set at the height of summer in the middle of December. But the colourful excess of the RSC’s latest take on Shakespeare’s comedy – transferring to the Barbican under the direction of Eleanor Rhode after premiering in Stratford in January – fits the season.

Last seen in London almost 18 years ago, it’s easy to forget what a phenomenon The Producers was at the time - easily the most hyped musical of the century until the emergence of Hamilton. 

The National Theatre’s big family Christmas show is a sumptuous adaptation of Noel Streatfeild’s classic 1936 children’s novel Ballet Shoes. It’s slick, classy and meticulously directed by Katy Rudd. But ultimately it lacks dramatic punch.