Plays on in London

Read our review of The Lady from the Sea here. Ibsen’s 1888 play about a woman named Ellida at the heart of a love triangle between her safe husband Edward and a dangerous ex-lover referred to only as The Stranger gets staged relatively frequently: the last major London production was at the Donmar back in 2017. But it rarely gets the full West End celebrity Hedda Gabler/A Doll’s House/The Master Builder treatment – you’re probably lookig at a late-’70s production at the Roundhouse starring Vanessa Redgrave for its last and really only really big outing in this country. Until now. In a year otherwise dominated by musicals and Shakespeare plays, the Bridge’s big autumn show is a new version of Ibsen’s play but Aussie auteur Simon Stone, that will mark the professional stage debut of Swedish screen star Alicia Vikander as Ellida, joined by big name Brit Andrew Lincoln as Edward (his first show in front of an audience in 16 years, although he did the Old Vic’s A Christmas Carol to a webcam and an empty theatre in 2020). It’s hard to know exactly what to expect: Stone’s adaptations are modern, radical and often rather blunt – his Yerma for the Young Vic was explosively good; his Phaedra for the National Theatre was a bit silly; much of his prolific output simply hasn’t been seen in this country. Whatever the case, he’s a good get for the Bridge and if this production could probaby go either way, then that’s part of the Stone magic. 

Since leaving the Young Vic in 2018, David Lan’s canvas may have changed but his principles certainly haven’t. Over 18 years in charge of the inflential Waterloo theatre he programmed bold work founded on unswerving morals, often foregrounding the lives of less fortunate people around the world. In 2021, in his first big project as a free agent, he oversaw the global tour of a huge puppet called Little Amal to highlight the plight of displaced children. And it’s a deep well of empathy that continues here with his first new play in almost 30 years.Set in the immediate fallout of the Second World War, with Germany ‘an open wound’, a worker for an agency called United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration stumbles across a mystery when she and her colleagues are trying to rehome displaced children. There are too many adopted kids in one small town.The reason is the unconscionable Lebensborn programme, Himmler’s invention, which sought to boost the Aryan race by kidnapping ‘perfect’ children from countries including Poland and Ukraine and giving them to Nazi families. Hundreds of thousands of them.Lan constructs a deeply researched, morally complex play based on interviews with journalist Gitta Serreny, who was part of the effort to reunite those children. It focuses on Juliet Stevenson’s idealistic UNRRA worker Ruth and a boy called Thomas who seeks her out many years later to demand answers about his past. Now a worn journalist, Ruth comes clean, summoning the...

It’s one of those Fringe successes people dream of mimicking. Since debuting in Edinburgh in 2014, Duncan Macmillan Every Brilliant Thing – co-written with its original star Jonny Donahoe – has earned rave reviews, been translated into numerous languages, including Spanish, Greek, and Mandarin, and performed all across the globe. Last year, it returned to the Fringe  for a triumphant victory lap marking its tenth anniversary. But until now, this strangely uplifting show about depression had never received a West End run — perhaps because it was always deemed too intimate to upscale. If there’s any larger venue fit to house Macmillan’s mini masterpiece, it is @sohoplace. In a co-production between Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, the play is once again performed in-the-round, with the audience on all sides encouraged to join in and play their part. Over the course of its three-month stint, Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver will all take the lead role, but tonight’s performer is Lenny Henry. Dressed in a colourful patterned shirt, he sends smiles soaring across the crowd from the outset. Still, in the larger space, it’s harder to build the same rapport. With a much greater capacity and the audience spread across three tiers, creating the world of the play feels less like a communal endeavour and more the responsibility of a select few. Henry is a gentle guide: first as the seven-year-old boy desperate to show his mum – who has depression – all the goodness in...

If you’ve ever felt Lucy Westenra got a terrible deal (#justiceforlucy and all that), the Lyric Hammersmith’s new spin on Dracula is here to set the record straight. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation takes Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic classic and shifts the focus to the women sidelined in the original. It also joins a lineage of feminist retellings: in Liz Lochhead’s 1985 Dracula, Lucy and Mina embraced their vampiric transformation, while Morna Pearson’s 2023 Mina’s Reckoning was staged with an all-women and non-binary cast — productions that, for all their boldness, received a mixed reception. Here, Mina (Umi Myers) delivers a moving performance, puppeteering a play within a play, in which the survivors of Dracula’s incursion to London serve up a cautionary tale — and lament Lucy’s fate in long stretches of exposition, a real tension killer. For those familiar with the novel or its many adaptations, the constant need to catch us up on plot points can feel especially tedious. With Mina and Lucy (Mei Mac) at the centre, the ensemble — Jack Myers as Jonathan Harker included — circles in and out as stand-ins for multiple roles, but their presence, and their purpose, feels thin. But definitely not as thin as the role of the men in this production. In Stoker’s original, Harker, Van Helsing, and Lucy’s various suitors are men of action — rational champions of science and medicine rallying to protect ‘their’ women — while Mina and Lucy, though scandalous for their time, were still...

Packed your fascinator? Rehearsed your most attractive crying face? Well, good; over in Mansfield – by way of the Theatre Royal Haymarket – the wedding of the year is about to take place. Local girl Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is marrying Polish lad Marek (Julian Kostov), and the audience, some of whom are sat directly on the stage, are all invited.  The ceremony plays out in real time at Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down, now running in the West End after debuting at the National Theatre early last year. Director Bijan Sheibani sucks you right into this world through fast-paced dialogue and artfully constructed tableaus. It is heady, hilarious and emotional; the wedding itself might be a car crash, but this imaginative production is anything but. As the lights come up on Samal Blak’s set, little of the grandeur associated with getting hitched is visible. There’s a huge disco ball hanging overhead, whizzing fragmented stars across the theatre, but this romantic image dissipates when it comes face to face with  the realities of the working class family wedding: the electric fan, the TK Maxx shopper, the extension cord. Here, the sublime and the mundane exist in constant opposition; some characters dream aloud about the enormity of space and the universe, while others discuss their greying pubes. Matthews’s Sylvia, our scratchy voiced bride, is getting ready for her big day. Buzzing with nervous energy, she is something of a supporting figure to her conversation-dominating...

This is a bold opener for Indhu Rubasingham’s first season in charge at the National Theatre: first time playwright (though he’s got decent pedigree as an actor) Nima Taleghani offers up what sounds like a racously modern – and probably quite foul-mouthed – adaptation of Euripides’s shockingly violent Ancient Greek tragedy. Rubasingham herself will direct the show, which has a cast including James McArdle, Clare Perkins and Ukweli Roach. Following its NT run a version of the show – probably without the famous people in it – will tour to secondary schools.

This review is from the Young Vic, March 2025. Punch will transfer to the West End in autumn 2025 with the same cast. Absurdly prolific as he is, it sometimes feels like we could do with cloning playwright James Graham a few times. His reassuringly familiar but diverse body of work has done so much to bring obscure chapters of recent history to life – from the whipping operation of the hung 1970s Labour parliament to the 1968 television clashes between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr – that it feels faintly bleak pondering the great stories that one James Graham alone has to let slide.  Punch, which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse last year, is the perfect example of what he does. It tells the poignant story of Jacob (David Shields), a lad from Nottingham who got into a totally pointless fight – if you can even call it that – with James, a (never-seen) paramedic just a few years older than him. On a big night out, Jacob punched James precisely once. James went down, and a couple of weeks later he died, his life support switched off following a bleed to the brain. Graham’s script delves into this with typical deftness: arguably his plays all amount to really, really good explainers. We get the incident and also its profoundly complicated aftermath. But we also get a forensic dive into Jacob’s life, his journey from a sweet primary schooler who loves his single mum to his gradual falling in with the wrong crowd, as undiagnosed neurological conditions and the...

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

Even the most die-hard city dweller surely entertains fantasies of packing it all in for a self-sustained rural existence when a politician says something mad, or the weather does something weird, or grabbing a few essentials from the supermarket rings up over £50. Well, this new comedy drama from state-of-the-nation playwright Mike Bartlett is, on one level, here to warn anyone with such notions not to hand in their notice just yet. Farming requires dedication and an understanding of the land, Juniper Blood tells us. And most of us are slaves to capitalism and too reliant on technology to be able to go back to basics anyway.  It’s not one big, depressing lecture – though the decision to have the auditorium brightly lit throughout suggests it wants to be taken seriously. In fact, this production directed by Barlett’s regular collaborator James Macdonald is really very funny. But for a play that holds a mirror up to the gaping chasm between idealism and pragmatism, it has some disparities of its own. Though rivetingly performed all round, several characters become wildly different people between its three acts, while its form is slippery too.   Middle-aged couple Ruth (Hattie Morahan) and Lip (Sam Troughton) have left behind the Big Smoke to plough Ruth’s inheritance into setting up an organic, regenerative farm. But designer Ultz’s set of rotting decking perched on a mound of real, unkempt grass suggests they’ve got a long way to go, while a picnic propped up by bottles...

Despite an A-list cast of Bridgerton’s Golda Rosheuval and Letitia Wright of Black Panther fame, Not Your Superwoman feels like a wilfully scrappy note for Lynette Linton to end her exemplary reign at the Bush Theatre on – a fringey drama by a relatively obscure playwright (Emma Dennis-Edwards) that doesn’t at all feel like it’s being groomed for a West End transfer.  Linton has directed a lot of glossy slebby dramas at other theatres – she’s become a commercial director of some clout – but she’s kept the Bush’s rough-and-ready character intact throughout her reign. There’s definitely a charm to seeing the Bush not gussy up for its celebrity guests, but rather the superstar Wright tackle a no ego, down-to-earth role of a regular London girl. In it, she and Rosheuval play mother and daughter Joyce and Erica, with both of them sharing the flashback role of Elaine, Erica’s late grandmother. It charts an eventful trip to Guyana, where Joyce was born and Elaine lived until murky circumstances drove her to move to England as a single mother. Now the pair have come to the South American-Caribbean country to scatter Elaine’s ashes.  But it’s also something of a personal reckoning for the two of them: Joyce has clearly been an incredibly difficult mother to have over the years: flakey, and with a tendency to throw money at Erica when love is what she would have preferred. Erica wants to talk about this. Joyce does not. Both actors are superb. Rosheuval’s Joyce is a cool boho mum...