Tom Wicker

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. This production only skims the darker depths of the magical-drugging plot device that triggers the play’s love-swapping shenanigans, when four young lovers on the run in the forest outside Athens get caught up in fairy king Oberon’s season-disrupting feud with Titania. The play’s blurred lines between love and ownership and the intoxication of lust are mostly played for laughs. There’s great physical comedy from Ryan Hutton as a strutting Lysander, counterpointed by Nicholas Armfield’s stiffly wax-jacketed brown-nose, Demetrius. Boadicea Ricketts gives Helena real emotional heft. You wouldn’t want to pick a fight with Dawn Sievewright as Hermia. Sirine Saba’s Titania is perfectly pitched for the camp tone. Katherine Pearce’s Puck is less malevolent sprite, more ‘chuck a TV out of a hotel room on tour’ type. The aesthetic of Lucy Osborne’s costume design is a decades-jumbled Mods and (Punk) Rockers. It’s a neat visual flourish that distinguishes the stuffy Athenian court from the anarchy of the forest. Andrew Richardson’s Oberon has seemingly wandered straight out of Adam and The Ants’ Prince Charming, while his version of Duke Theseus owes a country-sized debt to King Charles. It's a c

Cinderella, King’s Head Theatre’s first family panto, is packed with talent and is a lot of fun… when its elements truly mesh together. But it doesn’t reach the perfect pinnacle of festive silliness you want it to. The show’s pedigree is impeccable. Writer and director Andrew Pollard spent 15 years as Greenwich Theatre’s dame-in-residence. RuPaul’s Drag Race UK's Ella Vaday (Nick Collier) is Ugly Stepsister Peckham. Real-life Dame of the realm, Judi Dench, is our pre-recorded narrator. We also get voiceover contributions from bona fide camp British icons Su Pollard and Miriam Margolyse.  The setting is vaguely historical, the tone distinctly disco and the plot heavily aquatic. The latter doesn’t make a lick of sense but certainly gives us the groan-worthy puns we expect from panto. Lucia Vinyard’s ‘Fairy Codmother’ pops out of ‘Sadler’s Well’ – given the King’s Head’s location, we get a steady stream of jokes about Islington – to help Cinderella (Maddy Erzan-Essien) go to the ball. Which is on a boat. Pollard’s production gets off to a slow start, with some oddly subdued singing as part of its mix of classic and modern chart songs. A wistful opening ballad and an underpopulated stage gives low-energy panto, not ‘wow, kids’! While this lessens, there’s still a tendency for big solo numbers to land quietly. The appearance of Vaday as Peckham and Harry Curley as her scrunched-faced sister Dalston is a shot of adrenalin. Their rabble-rousing audience schtick – all seaside humour

‘Fawlty Towers’ regularly tops polls of the best British TV comedies of all time. But in recent years, its co-creator and star John Cleese has become a lightning rod for criticism for his proclamations that so-called ‘wokeness’ is killing comedy. So, how does his stage version of hapless hotel owner Basil Fawlty – arriving ahead of his TV remake of the series with his daughter – fare in the ‘funny’ stakes? From Liz Ascroft’s detailed, 1970s-in-aspic set design – encompassing the titular Torquay hotel’s reception, dining room and an upstairs guest room – to the elaborate coiffure of Basil’s wife, Sybil (Anna-Jane Casey), Caroline Jay Ranger’s production leans so heavily on nostalgia, it’s amazing that it doesn’t crash through the stage. Ranger has form in turning iconic British TV shows that live partly in people’s rose-tinted memories into theatre: she directed ‘Only Fools and Horses The Musical’ a few years ago. As Basil (Adam Jackson-Smith) attempts to evade Sybil’s watchful gaze while dealing with barely concealed contempt with the hotel’s guests, we get a greatest hits parade of characters from the TV series’ two seasons. Theatre legend Paul Nicholas engagingly reanimates the absent-minded Major, Kate Russell-Smith and Nicola Sanderson wander in like extras from ‘Miss Marple’ as Miss Tibbs and Miss Gatsby and Hemi Yeroham gamely hams it up as the English-mangling Spanish waiter Manuel. As Basil, Jackson-Smith has the piano-string tautness of the younger Cleese’s voice dow

Along with The Forsyte Saga in its main space, the Park Theatre is having a bit of a moment for literary adaptations. Autumn is adapted by Harry McDonald from Scottish author Ali Smith’s 2016 novel of the same name – one of four seasonally titled state-of-the-nation works that Smith wrote in quick succession after the Brexit referendum. Charlotte Vickers’s production bounces back and forth between the post-referendum present day and art lecturer Elisabeth Demand’s memories of meeting with her enigmatic, elderly neighbour, Daniel Gluck, as a teenager. As the adult Elisabeth navigates a strained relationship with her mother and what feels like an increasingly unfriendly UK, she reads to a sleeping Daniel in his care home. Vickers stages the play with fluid simplicity, using fragments to create a heightened whole. Grace Venning’s deliberately sparse set is a versatile, almost surrealistic space in which Ali Hunter’s lighting and Jamie Lu’s soundscape blur the boundaries between memories and dreams. It also nicely captures Elisabeth’s growing sensation of living in a coldly unfamiliar country. Adaptor McDonald foregrounds the book’s focus on how, via Brexit, misogyny or simply the passage of time, people’s lives are stripped of their complexity, diminished or forgotten. Real-life 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty, who Daniel knew and whose works he introduces to Elisabeth, is a through-line. Her repeated ‘rediscovery’ by artistic gatekeepers is a cycle that the play challenges in an

With the terrible exception of 9/11, increased security and passenger checks have seen the number of plane hijackings per year diminish to virtually none. The intriguing premise of Oli Forsyth’s Brace Brace is how you would move forward with your life if you did experience – and survive – such an exceptional and harrowing experience. Honeymooners Ray and Sylvia find themselves in such a nightmare when their plane is hijacked by a passenger who overpowers the pilot. A struggle ensues and Ray is incapacitated, but Sylvia stops the hijacker and the plane is saved. She becomes a media hero, to the cost of Ray’s bruised ego.  But things fall apart when she learns that their attacker has been released on psychological grounds. Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster and Wicked Little Letters’ Anjana Vasan have charisma to burn as Ray and Sylvia, quickly conjuring their relationship in the affectionate banter of the play’s lighter early scenes, as they introduce themselves to us. They make the most of their characters' increasing schism as the play moves rapidly through the dramatically fertile territory of PTSD and Sylvia’s desperate need to find somewhere to put her anger and trauma. But the self-consciousness of Forsyth’s writing is a struggle. Perhaps due to the lean 70-minute run-time, the easy-flowing dialogue at the start – before Ray and Sylvia describe the hijacking and its aftermath to us – gives way to emotional developments that feel hasty and truncated, as if steps are missing. Conver

There are distinct shades of King Lear in Tanika Gupta’s new play at the National Theatre. Meera Syal plays Queenie, a powerful matriarch and owner of a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in London. When she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she divides her assets between her three children – who she also expects to let her live with them in turn. However, this reopens wounds that have never truly healed since the loss of her husband and their father. Syal brings Queenie vividly to life, aided by Gupta avoiding the trap of the ‘saintly sufferer’. She’s fiercely proud and quick to cut her children down with her words. As her condition worsens and her sense of time begins to dislocate, the glimpses of her early years in Calcutta and her memories of the racism she faced when arriving in the UK add a greater poignancy to the loss of the life she has fought to forge.  Queenie’s decline dominates the first two thirds of Pooja Ghai’s production. Music maestro Nitin Sawhney’s compositions fleetingly evoke both her heritage and the increasing jangle of her mind. Illusions director and designer John Bulleid employs some neat visual flourishes to capture the experience of her sudden time lapses, although these sometimes distract from the story. The blank backdrop of Rosa Maggiora’s set from the outset has the effect of isolating all the characters prematurely, in spite of some dynamic lighting design by Matt Haskins. Looking a little like a Cy Twombly painting, its appearance and purpose o

The Cabinet Minister finds the Menier Chocolate Factory rocking the 1890s like they’re the 2020s, in this frothy dig at the political class. This revival of one of nineteeth-century playwright Arthur Wing Pinero’s lesser-known farces sees a convivially amoral bunch of aristocratic one-percenters face financial ruin after the dodgy-dealings of the Right Hon Sir Julian Twombley – the titular minister and head of their family – come to light. Meanwhile, dressmaker Miss Fanny Lacklustre grabs the chance to exploit Lady Katherine Twombley’s own carelessness when it comes to spending money to blackmail her way up the slippery social ladder. Nancy Carroll – who is the play’s adapter as well as playing Lady Katherine – knows her Pinero, having acted opposite John Lithgow in the National Theatre’s production of The Magistrate in 2012. Here, she’s trimmed subplots and scenes, while still giving the sizable ensemble cast plenty of one-liners to work with. Under Paul Foster’s reliable direction, they’re all characters lifted straight out of a Punch cartoon. The gaudy excess and posturing of their lives is reflected in the many fake flowers (painted or under glass) and busily vogueish furnishings of set designer Janet Bird’s drawing-room. (Think Boris Johnson’s much-ridiculed redecoration of No 10). Carroll is also the star turn here. She brings an Edina Monsoon-like AbFab energy and physical comedy to the chaotic Lady Katherine as she watches her life slide away. She’s essentially an awf

This review is from 2019. ‘Only Fools and Horses the Musical’ will return to London for a limited season at the Hammersmith Apollo with Paul Whitehouse as Grandad and Vinnie Jones (!) as Danny Driscoll. If there’s a screen still flickering in the UK at the end of the world, it’ll probably be playing on loop that bit where Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter falls through the bar. John Sullivan’s ‘Only Fools and Horses’ has long since transformed from being just a TV show into a cultural phenomenon, annually topping those breathless audience polls as ‘Best British Comedy Ever, Ever, Ever’. It’s on that tidal wave of public adoration that this musical version of the misadventures of wheeler-dealer Del Boy, his hapless brother Rodney and their granddad, living together on a Peckham council estate at the tail end of the ’80s, sails into the West End’s Theatre Royal Haymarket. It’s co-written by Jim ‘son of John’ Sullivan and comic actor extraordinaire Paul Whitehouse (who’s also on stage as Granddad). Director Caroline Jay Ranger sets out her market stall early, as Del Boy (Tom Bennett) promises ‘plonker’ Rodney (Ryan Hutton), ‘This time next year, we’ll be millionaires.’ What follows is a blizzard of catchphrases, quotes and characters. Boycie and Marlene, Trigger, Mickey and Denzil are all crammed on stage and into the Nags Head. When Del tries hawking dodgy Eiffel Towers to the audience, he’s also selling us easy nostalgia. His battered Reliant car turns up like a guest star. It’s affec

The ‘lightest element’ in Stella Feehily’s new play is literally hydrogen, and metaphorically a real-life woman trying to forge a career in the heavily sexist world of academic astronomy in the first half of the twentieth century. The gas’s presence in the composition of stars is the groundbreaking theory of young PhD student Cecilia Payne at Harvard University in 1925. But she is dismissed by an older, male luminary of her field, who would later barely credit her when he announced the same discovery.  Flash forward. It’s 1956 and Cecilia (now Payne-Gaposchkin) is poised to become Harvard’s Chair of Astronomy and its first female department head. But the Red Scare is tearing through America and the double whammy of her being a woman who is also married to a Russian means powerful forces are out to discredit her. The historical events at the heart of Feehily’s play are fascinating. They are another dispiriting example of pioneering female achievement in the sciences either buried or downplayed by the men in charge. Maureen Beattie gives a strong performance as Payne-Gaposchkin, who emigrated to the U.S. from the UK to advance her career in ways she was unable to under the gender restrictions of the British university system of the 1920s and would still spend her life battling ingrained prejudice. Here, she’s no-nonsense, terse and fiercely intelligent. She’s formidably tidy-minded behind her chaotic desk. She wants what she deserves and likes strong Polish vodka. But the play

Amanda Abbington takes the lead to powerful effect in the European premiere of this play by New York Times-bestselling author Tawni O’Dell, directed by the Park Theatre’s artistic director, Jez Bond. Billed as a ‘theatrical memoir’, based on O’Dell’s own experiences, it unflinchingly charts the ripple effect for a whole family when author Tara (Abbington) is called at 3am by her distraught daughter, Esme (Rosie Day), saying that she has been raped by a stranger in her New York apartment. This call happens within minutes of the play opening, with Abbington and Day as two of four actors on a bare stage, alongside Miles Moran as Connor, the son and brother, and Tok  Stephen, who takes on multiple roles – from a detective, to a therapist, to, later on, Tara’s boyfriend – as the play progresses. They address us, as well as each other. Via Tara, O’Dell quickly calls the rape what it is and asks why we so often resort to euphemisms. This de-sensationalised approach doesn’t treat Esme’s sexual assault as some kind of crass, final act ‘event’, as is too often the case with women characters in theatre. Instead, it focuses on the emotional devastation left in its wake, as Esme’s life spirals away from everyone, Tara sells the family home and Connor retreats from his mum and sister. Abbington is painfully good as Tara, layering anger and vulnerability as her character struggles not only with how to help her daughter but how to confront the impact of the rape on herself. It’s an unsentime

In American director Gordon Greenberg’s charming production of Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz’s 1989 musical there’s a lot more to ‘The Baker’s Wife’ than ‘Meadowlark’, its best-known song. For one thing, there’s a whole village in 1930s Provence seemingly addicted to bread. They’re practically salivating by the time the new baker, Amiable (Clive Rowe), arrives. This is followed by gossip about how much younger his wife, Genevieve (Lucie Jones) is. She quickly catches the eye of local heartthrob Dominique (Joaquin Pedro Valdes) and scandal among the sleepy café tables ensues. Musical theatre veteran Rowe lives up to his character’s name, projecting an irresistible amount of naïve geniality, happily oblivious to the sniggering of the villagers. He also stirs in an enjoyably chaotic energy after the interval and delivers a speech about love with a beautifully judged quietness that cuts through the ‘Allo ‘Allo-ness of it all – piercing our hearts as much as those of the humbled townsfolk. Jones, meanwhile, conveys the dilemma of Genevieve’s situation: her affection for her husband but also her yearning for more in a tiny, self-absorbed village. Jones also gives full weight to Genevieve’s watershed moment, the aforementioned ‘Meadowlark’, building up the poignancy of this gorgeous ode to choosing between duty and desire. It’s a story embedded in a story, both anchoring the character for the audience and setting her free. However, it’s not all ballads. Some of the best songs ar

This review is from the Garrick Theatre in October 2022. ‘My Son’s A Queer’ has a run at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2024. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more joyous, life-affirming show in the West End right now than this one. Even its journey – via this year’s Edinburgh Fringe – into the bright lights of central London after debuting at the small Turbine Theatre in Battersea last year feels a little fairy-tale. Personally, as a gay man, there’s also something wonderful about seeing the word ‘Queer’ emblazoned so proudly above the venerable Garrick Theatre. This one-person show revolves around the amateur childhood stage productions of its charismatic and funny writer and performer Rob Madge. They talks to us from a set that functions as a heightened version of the Coventry front room we watch in grainy VHS footage on a screen above the stage. Through video snippets from the late 1990s and early 2000s, we see a very young Madge – a child star of West End mega-musicals ‘Les Misérables’ and ‘Mary Poppins’ – enlist their dad in homemade stagings of Disney films like ‘The Little Mermaid’. These clips – which Madge first released on the social media platforms where the non-binary actor and writer is a hugely popular presence – are, first off, extremely funny. They’ll resonate with anyone who’s dreamed of being a star in their living room. The little Madge is hilariously perfectionist, demanding that their dad endlessly repeat scenes, criticising line deliveries and dropping