Tim Bano

Following its acclaimed summer 2024 run at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Fiddler on the Roof transfers to the Barbican as park of a tour of the UK. There’s an irony that ‘Fiddler On the Roof’ is being revived in the only theatre in London that doesn’t have one. But Jordan Fein’s joyous, then suddenly very sad production is all about uprooting traditions. So for the opening image – one of the most famous in musical theatre – where the fiddler would normally fiddle on a shtetl rooftop, here instead in Tom Scutt’s superb design he stands among wheat sheafs on a strip of land uprooted and peeled back like skin to hang threateningly above the stage.It’s a remarkable image in a production full of them; a production about reinventing a classic musical through small gestures and symbols, rather than radical high concepts. Famously, ‘Fiddler’ was criticised when it premiered in 1964 as ‘shtetl kitsch’. We’ve got Tevye, the old wisecracker, and the increasingly untraditional marriages of his daughters; we’ve got the small Jewish community with the matchmaker and the slightly hapless Rabbi.But Fein, who co-directed ‘sexy Oklahoma!’ when it came to London last year and helped strip it of any hokey old associations, eradicates the kitsch here, too. Yes it’s funny – Adam Dannheisser’s Tevye still cracks jokes and talks to the audience, though he’s more dad-funny than the kind of showman-comedian that Tevye often becomes – and yes it’s faithful, but this is a serious production.Part o

When the IDF are going to attack, they drop a warning bomb: five minutes to get out and get away, as far as you can, before the big rockets come.  So says Gazan resident Mariam, in Khawla Ibraheem’s monologue. For such a terrifying concept, Ibraheem – who performs the monologue, too – starts things off breezily. She asks the stage manager if we’re good to start. Chats to us like we’re catching up on the phone, occasionally asks us questions (‘how many pairs of underwear would you pack?’) and gets frustrated when politely reticent audience members don’t answer.  Then she starts practising her escape: setting timers on her phone to mark five minutes, packing bags the same weight as her small son, worrying what she’d do with her mother, thundering down the seven floors of her apartment block. This becomes an obsession, as normal life around her is slowly obliterated and her mind, in a constant state of alertness, winds itself tighter and tighter. By the end Ibraheem’s voice – always loud and clarion-like – becomes high-pitched and breathless like a long scream.  The script was developed with Oliver Butler, who also directs, and in its chattiness there are some beautifully crafted lines: ‘our freedom is anything but ours’ Mariam says, resenting the many who claim stakes in her home. But the great strength of the writing is the way Ibraheem lets the boring things of everyday life mingle with the horror of being in a war zone. As she runs down the seven flights of stairs, Mariam n

How do you take two national treasures and make them really quite awful and annoying? Well, like this. Celia Imrie is Beth, the strong-willed, callous, possessive mother of Tamsin Greig’s meeker, milder Bo. After Beth has a stroke, slices of their lives together unfold repetitively in Anna Mackmin’s exploration of motherhood, which seems desperate to be unconventional but plays out with a plodding realism from the opening medical crisis to the inevitable end.  After an accomplished career as a director, Mackmin has added writing to the mix more recently, and she does both here. Maybe that explains the feeling of a production that’s always trying to do too much – from its washed out projections to an undercooked adoption subplot – often to too little effect. A hospital bed raised centre stage at the back (blue, clinical) bleeds into a cosy kitchen set at the front (earthenware, Aga), while Imrie and Greig shunt between the two spaces. Imrie gets to enjoyably scene-steal as Beth (always Beth, never ‘mum’, you see), with long dyed hair and a frankness about sex that revolts Bo. She’s the kind of person that you’d call bohemian if you actually believed in the Eddie-from-Ab-Fab broad brushstrokes of her character. Still, floating round in billowing robes she provides some nice comic moments. ‘I had a one night stand’, 22-year-old Bo reveals. ‘Finally!,’ Beth replies. ‘Did he have a nice cock?’ Much of the play she spends mutely in bed while completely unconvincing medical business

Following the Royal Court’s huge 2024 success Giant, here’s another play that suggests that under new artistic director David Byrne, the theatre is becoming a good place to see really smart, really sharp political work.This one is by South African writer Amy Jephta, and whirls brilliantly around a super simple idea: a smart new build cul-de-sac in a nice part of town in South Africa, where suddenly a shack pops up. Three couples who live on the road plot to get rid of the entity that’s dragging the value of their houses down, and Jephta whips up a lot of issues, mainly gentrification, race and class. But as directed by Nancy Medina it’s all done with such a huge sense of humour and a frenzied energy – not to mention the toe-curling awkwardness of some of the conversations – that it’s a constant joy to watch.We start in the very tasteful home of the only Black couple in the neighbourhood. Mimi M Khayisa plays snob Bonolo, who has a vintage cheese knife and a wine aerator, while at the same time insisting she is the defender of poor Black communities. Her husband Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) has managed to escape a poor childhood to end up in a high-paying financial job.They invite their next door neighbours, white couple Chris and Lynette, for drinks, and the conversation ripples with assumptions. ‘I’m in securities,’ Sihle says to Chris. ‘Which security company is that?’ says Chris. There’s a younger couple, too, Jess and Andrew, who have overstretched themselves to buy their hous

What happens if you give kids in conflict zones guns? That’s the thrust of this new play by Josh Azouz, whose work has often blended horror and humour, using strange and sometimes surreal settings to tune into the politics of race, religion and human relationships.His last play, Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia, explored Jewish-Arab relations via a knitting Nazi. This latest – a self-aware comedy first about keeping secrets as a teenager, then about keeping secrets as a soldier – has the same impulse, essentially an anti-war message through off-kilter comedy, but it’s less specific in its target.Gigi (Tanvi Virmani) and Dar (Lola Shalam) are two young soldiers guarding a roadblock, somewhere. The lighting suggests it’s hot and sandy. Current events make comparisons to the Middle East inevitable, though the lack of place names means you can map any conflict zone onto the bare stage. In this strange, non-specific landscape they talk – often directly to the audience, seemingly aware they’re in a play – about how they’re a few days from the end of compulsory service. They eat Nutella and chat about boyfriends, secrets (who’s sleeping with who), their different backgrounds (Gigi is rich, Dar is left-wing). They fiddle with their massive machine guns. Virmani and Shalam bring the goofy dialogue to life brilliantly, Shalam’s Dar the more garrulous and mercurial, while Virmani is quiet and intense.Despite the occasional mention of ‘enemies’, ‘extremists’, ‘your people’, thes

Waleed Akhtar’s last play ‘The P Word’ was a love story: two gay men from different worlds, exploring attitudes to sexuality, racism, asylum seekers. It was a huge hit and won an Olivier Award. His new play is a love story, too, but of a very different kind. Starting as a period piece in 2006, we hurtle through almost two decades of friendship between Zaid and Neelam. Zaid is gay, Neelam has ‘a reputation’ after sleeping with a classmate. Both come from fairly strict Pakistani Muslim families. They start off in sync: uni, clubbing, first loves. Then they start to weave in and out of each other’s paths. And then they diverge.  Akhtar writes their (initially) uncomplicated platonic love as brilliantly as he does their crackling arguments. it’s hard not to fall for Zaid, a sweet and optimistic Nathaniel Curtis, who adds a bitter note of self-interest as the play goes on, and Mariam Haque’s Neelam - a superb performance - who starts cynical and sarcastic, with flashes of beautiful sincerity, before modulating her accent and muting her brashness as she gets older and settles into a good job, starts a family.  Director Anthony Simpson-Pike has the duo flitter through the staccato scenes in a sunken circle, the many locations summoned with Christopher Nairne’s brilliantly busy lighting. With Zaid and Neelam wannabe playwrights, Akhtar chucks in plenty of in-jokes about the theatre world, its approach to programming Asian writers, and its demands on the content of their plays. But he

Of that persistent strand of plays about putting on plays, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s ‘Our Country’s Good’ is among the best known, and among the best. Adapted in 1988 from Thomas Keneally’s novel ‘The Playmaker’, it follows the first British colonists landing in 1780s Australia. Some are convicts who’ve been transported, some are marines sent to supervise and civilise. One soldier has the bright idea of putting on a play; so they debate, they rehearse, they put on Farquhar’s Restoration satire ‘The Recruiting Officer’.  That sets up loads of opportunities for jokes about theatre, and smart lines about plays, and it’s that self-awareness that director Rachel O’Riordan leans into in her chunky, slightly exaggerated production. All the acting is overacting, the cast pushing towards a shouty, almost absurd register, with some scenes turning into broad comedy as they all entertainingly take on multiple roles. They seem to want to constantly remind us they are actors putting on a production of ‘Our Country’s Good’.  Gary McCann’s set brings it out too: an undulating dune with stripped trees – ‘a brittle burnt out country’, as one character says – natural looking until you hear the plastic thump of the actors’ feet on it, and see the spotlights come slowly down from the sky.  That smart concept and boisterous comedy too often come at the expense of the play’s seriousness of purpose. The more harrowing scenes have to work harder to earn their power. There’s an important strand in her

A new play by Rob Drummond is pretty much a guarantee of a good evening. In his best shows, which often feature himself, big concepts are presented in fun formats. There was The Majority at the National Theatre that asked the audience to vote on everything from whether latecomers should be admitted to whether a person’s deeply private love letter should be read out on stage. There was Bullet Catch, in which an audience member pointed a gun at his head. And In Fidelity which tried to make two audience members fall in love.Pins and Needles is about vaccines. Yikes. And how do you do a play about something that has pushed many people to extreme views? Make it verbatim of course. Using the real words of real people is a surefire way to add authority and solemnity. But this is a Drummond play, and the tricksiness starts right from the beginning. The guy on stage says he’s Rob Drummond. Says he’s doing a verbatim play about vaccines. Except that’s not Rob Drummond. That’s actor Gavi Singh Chera.Writing his own play as he performs it, not-Rob shifts between an interview he did in 2012 with a woman who decided not to give her baby son the MMR vaccine, an interview he did last year with a guy whose mum died from the Covid vaccine, and an interview with Edward Jenner himself, the (apparent) inventor of vaccines.While the characters talk about the impossibility of knowing what to believe – lies from big pharma, lies by Andrew Wakefield, lies from the government – we too grapple with whe

Ah the Seventies. Already bored of perfectly polished Golden Age musicals, the mad geniuses of the decade decided that they’d invent the ‘concept musical’, based around a particular theme rather than a nice story.Cue ‘A Chorus Line’. Based on interviews with a bunch of Broadway chorines, their fretful experiences of being ensemble members – the vexed question of wanting to be an individual but having to be identical to the next chorus member along – as well as their stories of growing up (abuse, rejection, escape through dance etc) were turned into this: a strange, bitty piece set on a bare Broadway stage, showing a group of 24 dancers audition for a part in the chorus of a new show.There’s not really any story, and songs flit in and out, interwoven with dialogue and dance. Each of the dancers tells us a bit about themselves. Essentially, a strange product of its age, the original anti-musical.Nikolai Foster’s production, which started life at Leicester’s Curve Theatre in 2021, is a long way from all that. The original production was surprising for its lack of set, costumes and its frankness around sex and sexuality. But the show’s been made glitzy and glossy over the years, and especially so here. There’s a colossal amount of set and lighting gone in to make it look like there’s none at all. Seriously, the lighting by Howard Hudson is phenomenal. It flashes between harsh house lights and beautiful sculpted stage lighting, with huge rigs that rise and fall above the stage.Fos

Stefan’s got a problem. He doesn’t remember the woman he slept with ten years earlier and now she’s basically his stalker. That’s the thrust of this strange, slight play by Christopher Hampton, adapted from the novella by Stefan Zweig. But despite its themes of obsession and mental illness, this is not ‘Baby Reindeer’. It’s far too arch, too stiff for that.  The original novella takes the form of a letter written by a woman to a Viennese writer. She explains her obsession with him, how it’s played out for many years, and some of the dire consequences. Hampton, who first adapted this for the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna where it was very successful, has had to fiddle with the structure and the timeline. Yes he has form with epistolary works turned into plays – ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ is his biggest hit – and he knows that someone reading out a letter on stage probably isn’t that interesting. But nor, especially, is this. First Stefan and the woman have a one night stand. She seems to know a lot about him. Then she comes back in some distress, and talks at him for ages.  The unpeeling of the mystery keeps things interesting for a while, but the dialogue stays too stilted, like it’s translated from another language (which it sort of is) and Chelsea Walker’s production feels all cold and alienating, with a permeating bleakness that stops us from finding any heart, or any way of feeling for the characters.  Rosanna Vize’s set looks cold and ghostly. The flat is grey, ful

Remember that incredibly cool band from Scotland in the ’80s that changed music forever despite only playing a few gigs? No? Well that’s because they didn’t exist. This sort-of one-man play (a hit in Edinburgh in 2022) is adapted from David Keenan’s 2017 hallucinatory novel about an imagined Scottish post-punk band called Memorial Device. There’s a lead singer who can’t form memories and a bassist who likes to cover himself in blood, that kind of thing.Paul Higgins plays Ross Raymond, a fanzine editor-cum-journalist who was there for all of it, enthusiastically bringing the band to life with mannequins, a fancy dress box and a laptop. Higgins is great, one of those middle-aged music obsessives who's never quite let go of their youth, telling the story with a passionate intensity, like he can’t quite believe we don’t know more about Memorial Device. Mimicking the form of the novel, which consists of interviews with other people who were there, a projector screen plays talking heads who flesh out some of the story.The text, adapted and directed by Graham Eatough, brings that place and that era to life in a beautifully joyful, haunted way. There’s the attention to detail first and foremost: the carefully created memorabilia, genealogy maps of the various bands that coalesced and broke up to eventually get to Memorial Device (Occult Theocracy, Slave Demographics), and the snippets of music from Gavin Thomson and Stephen Pastel which suggest a kind of woozy psychedelic vibe.And Ea

In 1884 a group of countries (Britain included) came together to divvy up Africa between them. The Berlin Conference is the inspiration for this very sharp, very clever game-theatre show from the masters of the form, Coney.  Warning: you will have to talk to strangers, and you will have to do stuff. This isn’t a sitting in the dark kind of evening at the theatre. We all go into a big room and split ourselves into groups of seven, our little gangs sitting around a plywood table on which is a blank plywood floor plan. The table is strewn with little plywood props and pens and other things, a beautiful custom made board game designed by Chloe Mashiter and Jacob Wu.  A story starts to unfold with the help of some deliberately over the top acting. Our tables are our new communities. We’re asked to design a house logo, create a house knock, draw items that we’d like to include in our house. We’re encouraged to discuss and chat – and it’s really kind of awkward, coming to collective decisions with complete strangers about a space we’re meant to call our home. One of my group wants to put a shrine in our home, another wants his PlayStation.  As the games continue, we start to settle into it: bonds form, everyone relaxes a bit. And then it all starts to go wrong.  The fun of it, really, is not knowing what’s coming – so that’s about as much as I’ll give away but writer Rhianna Ilube, who was behind the brilliantly, bitingly satirical play ‘Samuel Takes A Break’ recently, has created w