Theatre in Covent Garden

At the end of this elegant Agatha Christie thriller, the newly uncovered homicidal maniac steps into a sinister spotlight and warns everyone never to reveal his or her identity. The production recently celebrated its 60th birthday and although Wikipedia and Stephen Fry have both blown the murderer's cover, there is a remarkable conspiracy of silence over 'The Moustrap'. The real mystery of the world's longest-running theatre show is not whodunit but, in its currently mediocre state, whydoit at all? 'The Mousetrap's ticket prices are the only element of this show that isn't stuck fast in the 1950s – although the actors' strained RP does make the odd break for the twenty-first century. Otherwise, this is a walking, talking piece of theatre history and – at £39 for a full-price stalls seat – the most expensive museum exhibit in London. Christie's neat puzzler of a plot is easier to defend. It has defied the inevitably mummifying process of more than 25,000 performances and still possesses an uncanny precision worthy of the mistress of murder's chilling geriatric creation, Miss Marple. In the 60 years since it premiered, its premise, in which six Cluedo-like middle-class stereotypes are imprisoned by snow in a country house while they try to fathom which of them is a raving murderer, has become a cliché, just as the authorities' response to adverse weather conditions (skiing coppers? In Berkshire?) have become a nostalgic memory. It's fascinating to glimpse the ghost of Peter...

Show writer Kate Trefry explains all you need to know about ‘The First Shadow’. ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ is a sprawling maximalist monolith, a gargantuan entertainment that goes beyond being a mere ‘play’. It’s too unwieldy and too indulgent to be a theatrical classic. But nonetheless, this prequel to the Netflix retro horror smash is the very antithesis of a cynical screen-to-stage adaptation.  As overwhelming in scale as as the show’s monstrous Mindflayer, it’s a seethingly ambitious three-hour extravaganza of groundbreaking special effects, gratuitous easter eggs and a wild, irreverent theatricality that feels totally in love with the source material while being appreciably distinct from it.  It’s clearly made by a fan, that being big-name director Stephen Daldry, who used his Netflix connections (he’s the man responsible for ‘The Crown’) to leverage an official collab with the Duffer Brothers, creators of the retro horror smash.  It starts as it means to go on, with pretty much the most technically audacious opening ten minutes of a show I’ve ever seen, as we watch a US naval vessel deploy an experimental cloaking device in 1943, to catastrophic effect. Yes, the sets wobble a bit, and yes, writer Kate Trefry’s dialogue is basically just some sailors bellowing cliches. But we’re talking about watching a giant vessel getting pulled into a horrifying parallel dimension on stage. It is awesome; and when it cut into a thunderous playback of Kyle Dixon and Michael...

This review is from February 2023. In September 2024 ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ will return for its fourth London run, this time starring John Heffernan, Aaron Krohn and Howard W. Overshown. The National Theatre’s Sam Mendes-directed blockbuster ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ – now on its second West End run, after conquering Broadway last year – is performed on Es Devlin’s modern boardroom set, and bookended by short scenes from the 2008 demise of Lehman Brothers, the investment bank. But that is not the story that Italian playwright Stefano Massini – as adapted by Ben Power – wanted to tell. ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ isn’t about banking or the credit crunch. It’s about a family, and about the dizzying lifecycle of that family’s business during America’s chaotic years of ascent. Bavarian Jewish immigrant Henry Lehman (nee Hayum Lehmann) arrived in the US in 1844. In the years that followed, he was joined by his brothers, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman. They founded a cotton merchant together, that would eventually mutate into an investment bank. Eugene’s grandson, Bobby, was the last Lehman to run the company. And that’s effectively where this story ends, with Bobby’s death in 1969. So it’s the tale of a family business. And it’s utterly engrossing, built on hyperdetailed, surprisingly joke-packed old school narrated storytelling. It takes a lot of licenses, but it tells a story that has a compellingly unpredictable tang of truth to it. It’s startling how Henry dies after just a few years; how the...

This review is from 2021. The current cast is headed by Ben Joyce (Marty) and Cory English (Doc).  This long-gestating musical version of ‘Back to the Future’ – it has literally taken longer to bring to the stage than all three films took to make – is so desperate to please that the producers would doubtless offer a free trip back in time with every ticket purchase if the laws of physics allowed. It is extra as hell, every scene drenched in song, dance, wild fantasy asides, fourth-wall-breaking irony and other assorted shtick. You might say that, yes, that’s indeed what musicals are like. But John Rando’s production of a script by the film’s co-creator Bob Gale is so constantly, clangingly OTT that it begins to feel a bit like ‘Back to the Future’ karaoke: it hits every note, but it does so at a preposterous velocity that often drowns out the actual storytelling.  As with the film, it opens with irrepressible teen hero Marty McFly visiting his friend ‘Doc’ Brown’s empty lab, where he rocks out on an inadvisably over-amped ukulele. Then he goes and auditions for a talent contest, hangs out with his girlfriend Jennifer, talks to a crazy lady from the clock tower preservation society, hangs out with his loser family… and takes a trip 30 years into the past in the Doc’s time-travelling DeLorean car, where he becomes embroiled in a complicated love triangle with his mum and dad. It is, in other words, the same as the film, with only a few minor plot changes (the whole thing...

Not to be melodramatic about it, but everyone involved in Barcelona should be ashamed of themselves.  Well, maybe not star Lily Collins, who stays so close to her Emily in Paris comfort zone – she once again plays an adorably annoying American, blundering her way through a major European city – that you can hardly accuse her of letting the side down.  And okay, I’ll always give a pass to Lynette Linton, a brilliant and empathic director who frankly deserves a decent West End payday. She has also assembled a solid team of creatives here - when the play’s terrible story got too much for me I could at least take solace in the delicate shift of Jai Morjaria's lighting, as evening drifts from moonlight to dawn in a Barcelona apartment. Alright, ‘ashamed’ is a bit strong: broodingly handsome middle-aged Spanish co-star Álvaro Morte undeniably plays the role of Manuel – a broodingly handsome middle-aged Spaniard – to a tee. And look, American playwright Bess Wohl’s play isn’t ‘good’ but would probably make more sense on Broadway, in front of a US audience. Barcelona does have some reasonable points to make about American cultural insularity, as Collins’s ditsy, drunk Irene - on a hen do in the Catalan capital - hooks up with and comes back to the apartment of Morte’s Manuel, and proceeds to make an idiot out of herself via her total lack of awareness of Spanish current affairs. But to a European audience these truths are self evident, however, and Irene doesn’t feel like an...

Dr Strangelove will be screened in cinemas via NT Live from March 27 2025. With its legend tied up in that of its director Stanley Kubrick, its star Peter Sellers, its magnificent monochrome cinematography and moreover its release against the backdrop of the actual Cold War, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a film comedy that gets treated with arthouse reverence. And for that reason, there are nagging doubts about the idea of a stage version. Is director Sean Foley in the same league as Kubrick? Is Coogan in the same league as Sellers? Can it possibly be anything like as timely as the original? What do you do about the whole black and white thing? Broadly speaking the answers are no, no, no and well what do you think? But here’s the thing: at its heart Armando Iannucci and Foley‘s stage adaptation is just very aware that Dr Strangelove is fun, funny and possessed of a play-like structure, with the action almost all taking place in two locations. Foley’s production has some bite, but it’s also light and zingy, confident that with a couple of tweaks and a few new gags, the absurdist satire of the source material will amuse. Taking on the same roles Sellers did - plus one extra - Coogan is particularly strong as the most Alan Partridge-esque of the characters, Captain Lional Mandrake, a hapless RAF man who has been seconded to bonkers American General Ripper (John Hopkins). As the story begins, it‘s slowly dawning on the affable, servile...

  ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ is the latest in a seemingly endless post-pandemic string of musical takes on retro movies. ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Dirty Dancing’, ‘Groundhog Day’... if you were born in the ’80s, the West End has decided that by now you're obviously loaded and ready to be milked of your money like a pantomime cow. Only this genuinely funny comedy musical doesn't feel like a cash grab, thanks to its twenty-first-century jokes, perfectly paced book, and silly voices galore.Writer John O’Farrell has worked on ‘Have I Got News For You’ and ‘Spitting Image’, and some of that topical flair can be seen here. Freshly divorced dad Daniel is a comic actor whose voiceover recording seshes ingeniously break out of the American world of the story: he begins with a witty theatre pre-show announcement, then breaks into non-naff impressions of Prince Harry and Boris Johnson. Refreshingly, this production has resisted the temptation to cast a famous funny person in the role, and musical theatre actor Gabriel Vick pulls off both the gags and the songs with impressive aplomb.This story’s serious bits aren't quite as well-handled. O’Farrell struggles a little to make Daniel’s ex-wife Miranda (Laura Tebbutt) more than a boring disciplinarian foil to Daniel's relentless zaniness (here, she gets an improbable fashion career and a 2D hunky love interest). Karey and Wayne Kirkpatricks’ lyrics don't zing with the kind of psychological insights or witty couplets musical theatre fans dream of. But...

Robert Icke: ‘if theatre isn’t astonishing, what’s the point?’ Why are there so many Sophocles plays on at the moment?  I’ll tell you: while about 95 percent of the press night audience to Robert Icke’s take on Oedipus clearly knew the plot already, you could hear every single ticket holder hitherto unaware of the two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old play’s ‘big twist’ gasp in horror when it came. If they ever stopped horrifying us we’d stop staging them, but the Ancient Greeks were basically sicker bastards than everyone else in all of history. And so we love them: Icke’s Oedipus opens a week after the National Theatre opened a version of Antigone called The Other Place and a couple of months ahead of the Old Vic’s, uh, Oedipus. In fact this is one that Stockton-on-Tees-born directorial genius Icke made earlier: Oedipus premiered in Amsterdam six years ago and it now makes its English language debut after a long, Covid-y road to the West End (it was originally going to open here in 2020 with Helen Mirren starring). Icke can do fiddly and complicated when the mood suits him, but as with his phenomenal 2015 adaptation of the Oresteia, his Oedipus benefits from a lethal but compassionate decluttering, a singularity of purpose that distils a famously lurid story into something empathetic, lucid and quite, quite devastating. Mark Strong is Oedipus, a passionate, self-serious politician whose upstart party is on the verge of securing a landslide victory in a sort-of-British version...

A labour of love that has worked its way slowly to the West End over the five years since it debuted at Southwark Playhouse, at its best Jethro Compton’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an extraordinary thing, a soaring folk opera that overwhelms you with a cascade of song and feeling. It is based on F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, and shares a premise: Benjamin Button (John Dagliesh) is a man inexplicably born at the age of 70, who then begins to age backwards, leading to a strange, exhilarating, sometimes extremely sad sort of life. Writer/director/designer Compton’s interpretation is very different to both Fitzgerald’s and the 2008 David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt. For starters it’s not set in nineteenth century America, but is virtually a love letter to Compton’s native Cornwall, its story spanning much of the twentieth century.  Fitzgerald’s plot is loosely followed, but heavily tinkered with – one of the more significant changes is having Dagliesh’s Benjamin born with a full adult’s mind and vocabulary rather than beginning life as a baby in an old man’s body. More to the point, it has a joy, romance and big-hearted elan that stands in stark contrast to Fitzgerald’s cynicism and the dolefulness of Fincher’s sloggy film. Indeed, despite tragic notes from the off – Benjamin’s mum takes her own life early on – the tone is largely whimsical and upbeat, focussing on the eccentric minutiae of Cornish village life, from oddball shopkeepers to dozy sheep....

The posters have been plastered around the London Underground for years – long enough for this show to become the most successful musical of all time – but nothing prepares you for the sheer impact of 'The Lion King's opening sequence. With the surge of 'Circle Of Life' reverberating through your chest, Julie Taymor's animal creations march on, species by species. Gazelles spring, birds swoop and an elephant and her child lumber through the stalls. It's a cacophonous cavalcade that genuinely stops you breathing. You'd think Noah's Ark had emptied onto the stage. For a global blockbuster, 'The Lion King's absolute theatricality is astonishing. Techniques from all over the world – African masks, Japanese Kabuki costumes, Malaysian shadow puppetry – are smashed together in an explosion of spectacle. It's perfect for a musical, allowing both distinct flavours and an eclectic carnival spirit. Admittedly, things deflate when it sacrifices this defiant originality for subservient approximation of the film. Timon and Pumba (Damian Baldet and Keith Bookman), though impressively like their screen counterparts, step into the savannah from a different dimension. The hyena-infested elephant's graveyard swaps menace for goofiness and the famous stampede scene, so delicately handled and moving in the film, is merely ticked off with a sigh of relief. The familiarity of the film is a root cause of the show's commercial success. But, ironically, 'The Lion King' can't afford such...