@sohoplace

Playwright David Ireland has made a career out of saying the unsayable, which has in the past meant gags about rape, race and other such wearyingly ‘provocative’ transgressions. With The Fifth Step he’s taken it further yet: he’s written a play about how awesome God is. That’s a slightly glib summary. But in the programme Ireland explains how he found Jesus in 2020, and it does a lot to explain where the play’s coming from. The Fifth Step is about two men in Alcoholics Anonymous – which Ireland was a member of in the past – but the play is not really about the instition as a whole. Rather, it’s AA’s ambiguous spiritual dimension that holds the most interest to the playwright.  With a big scruffy beard and his natural Scottish accent front and centre, Jack Lowden looks and sounds a world away from his breakthrough role in Slow Horses. He plays young Glaswegian Luka, an inarticulate, twitchy mess of a man; an alcoholic who suffered a terribly abusive upbringing and is desperately lonely to boot. His very first words in the play are ‘I think I might be an incel’. He’s addressing Martin Freeman’s James, an AA old-timer who exudes a sort of seen-it-all serenity and is clearly angling for Luka to appoint him as his sponsor – something Luka duly does.  The men get on well enough so long as James remains in the driving seat. But then something odd happens: the programme really starts working for Luka. Or it starts working in unexpected ways. James – who is staunchly atheist –...

Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing has been slowly inching towards the West End for over a decade now. Although it won instant Fringe acclaim, the show – about an unnamed narrator whose life’s work is a list of all the good things in the world – has always seemed too intimate to scale up, so has instead spread around, adapted for a vast array of countries, cultures and languages, from Arabic to Mandarin and all points in between.  @sohoplace is where it finally makes its West End debut, and the relatively intimate, in-the-round venue feels like the perfect spot for maintaining the all-important closeness between performer and an audience often called upon to help out. The show has experienced various UK permutations over the years – Macmillan himself directed last year’s tenth anniversary revival, and this will be a co-direct between Macmillan and the more seasoned director Jeremy Herrin. But the big selling point is the casting. The show’s co-creator and regular British star Jonny Donahoe will again perform; but so will three other actors: Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins, and the one and only Lenny Henry will split the run. The actors will perform in rep, with Henry and Donahoe performing throughout August (Henry will understandably tackle the lion’s share) and a more even split between Mod and Perkins in September. All information on who is performing can be found when you book. 

John Le Carré’s landmark Cold War novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has a huge reputation but is relatively under-adapted compared to the later, connected Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. There was a critically acclaimed but now largely forgotten Richard Burton film in 1965 (two years after the novel was published), and not a lot since, although a TV adaptation has been in the works for years, seemingly without much progress. Well, here’s a theatre version, transferring to London after an acclaimed run at Chichester last year. Written by David Eldridge and directed by Jeremy Herrin, it stars Rory Keenan as battle weary British intelligence officer Alec Leanas, ready to ‘come in from the cold’ but pressed into one more job by spymaster George Smiley (John Ramm). Posing as dishonourably discharged in an effort to be recruited by East German spy Hans-Dieter Mundt (Gunnar Cauthery), he sets off a dangerous chain of events after falling for well-meaning lefty librarian Liz Gold (Agnes O’Casey).