Photo by Trafalgar Theatre
Photo by Trafalgar Theatre

Trafalgar Theatre

This modern theatre is a no-frills home for the edgier end of proper drama
  • Theatre
  • Whitehall
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Time Out says

As of April 2021, Trafalgar Studios is due to reopen as the revamped Trafalgar Theatre, a larger and more conventional venue with no second studio

A kitsch-free rebel on the outskirts of theatreland, Trafalgar Studios is a modern, minimalist, not-especially comfortable space in the shell of the former Whitehall Theatre. Its two studios tend to present emerging, established and international talent with varied success. Director Jamie Lloyd successfully scuffed it up for a trio of big name, youth-focussed seasons under the banner of Trafalgar Transformed, but this seems to have ended, and the venue potters on much as it did before. The 380 seater Studio One tends to play host to celebrity-led productions that run for a few months, as well as transfers from big producing houses like the NT's 'Nine Night'. With just 100 seats, Studio Two is essentially a glorified fringe theatre, and often hosts shows from the likes of the Finborough and Theatre 503.

Trafalgar Studios assumed its current form in 2004, when an ambitious conversion turned the austere art deco 1930s theatre into two spaces: the dress circle was turned into Studio One, with a new elevated stage, while the former stalls area was turned into Studio Two. The great divide marked a change of pace, too. The old Whitehall Theatre was best known for Brian Rix's so-called Whitehall farces, a series of five long-running comedies in the '50s and '60s which featured crowd-pleasingly silly plotlines full of misunderstandings and trouser-dropping mishaps. And in grey wartime Britain, the Whitehall follies featured naked turns from Phyllis Dixey, who tickled audiences with dances with feathered fans in the West End's first stripshow.

Details

Address
14
Whitehall
London
SW1A 2DY
Transport:
Rail/Tube: Charing Cross
Opening hours:
Temporarily Closed
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What’s on

The Duchess (of Malfi)

Writer-director Zinnie Harris’s tepid modern-dress update of famous tragedy The Duchess of Malfi isn’t helped by the fact that it opened on the West End precisely one night after writer-director Robert Icke’s sublime modern-dress update of famous tragedy Oedipus. But even The Duchess (of Malfi) had avoided being programmed on the worst night in the entire theatre calendar it could possibly have been programmed, it would still not be very good. This is a shame for star Jodie Whittaker, who was tremendous in her last stage role in another modern dress update of a famous tragedy, Antigone at the NT way back in 2012. Harris’s contemporary English rewrite of John Webster’s macabre 1613 play has some good lines, and she gets solid performances from Whittaker as the doomed Duchess, Paul Ready as her batshit brother The Cardinal, and Rory Fleck Byrne as her even more batshit other brother Ferdinand. But the problem with Harris’s approach is demonstrated straight away with an opening scene in which Whitaker’s widowed Duchess cackles at her brothers’ creepy attempts to exhort her to remain chaste. She’s right to do so. But unlike the meticulous Icke, Harris has made no real effort to update her characters’ psychology for the present day. In Webster, the Duchess might laugh at her brothers, but it’s understood how dangerous they are. She is forced to conceal her relationship with her steward Antonio (here played by the entertainingly geeky Joel Fry) and the existence of their two childr
  • Drama

Charlie Cook's Favourite Book

The team behind the Little Angel’s recent West End transfer hit ‘The Smartest Giant in Town’ – that’s Barb Jungr and Samantha Lane – join forces again for another major adaptation of a picturebook by colossally beloved writer-illustrator duo Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. ‘Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book’ is from 2005, and is a celebration of the power of reading consisting of lots of mini-stories that live inside the eponymous hero’s titular tome. For ages three-to-eight.
  • Children's

The Merchant of Venice 1936

3 out of 5 stars
This review is from February 2024; The Merchant of Venice 1936 returns for a Christmas run. Nothing points to how obstinately alive Shakespeare is within our culture than the fact we can’t – or won’t! – simply ditch a play like ‘The Merchant of Venice’. While far less antisemitic than contemporary works like Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’ – by Elizabethan standards it was perhaps even mildly progressive – there is no other playwright whose patently problematic play about a devious Jewish moneylender would remain front and centre of the theatrical canon in 2024. Which brings us to ‘The Merchant of Venice 1936’. A passion project of its star and co-adaptor, the Jewish actor Tracy-Ann Oberman, it doesn’t so much reclaim Shakespeare’s play for the Jewish community as aggressively repurpose it. Directed by Brigid Larmour, it relocates the action to the East End of London in 1936, where Oberman’s moneylender Shylock is a proud Jewish matriarch and emigree from Eastern Europe. Around her corner of London, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists are stirring, gearing up for the infamous/ignominious march that culminated in the Battle of Cable Street. Here, many of the gentile characters are explicitly black-shirted Mosley supporters, and the ones who aren’t are happily pals with the racists. Let‘s be real here: this doesn’t entirely make sense. Oberman’s shtetl-accented Shylock is far more sympathetic than her tormentors, but Shylocks generally are these days. Her insistence on havin
  • Shakespeare

Clueless

A quintessential ’90s high school comedy that launched the brief Hollywood career of Alicia Silverstone, Amy Heckerling’s 1995 ‘Clueless’ is a smart rewrite of Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ that centres on Cher Lloyd, a priviliged but kind-hearted student at a Californian high school whose efforts to help her peers in life and love leave her somewhat neglected. In its way a forerunner of ‘Mean Girls’, it makes the leap to West End musical a year after Tina Fey’s adaptation of her own film opened here, with Heckerling writing the book and big-in-the-’00s Scottish songwriter KT Tunstall doing the music, with direction from Rachel Kavanaugh. Opening at the relatively intimate Trafalgar Theatre, it’s clearly positioning itself on the more indie side of the West End spectrum, but if it can match the culty charm of Heckerling’s original film then it could have some real legs. Casting is currently TBC, though the fact most of the characters are schoolkids means big names are unlikely.  
  • Musicals
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