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Noël Coward Theatre

  • Theatre
  • Covent Garden
Noel Coward Theatre.jpg
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Time Out says

Expect a broad programme of productions at this long-standing, popular Covent Garden landmark. Originally known as the New Theatre, the tribute to playwright Noël Coward was paid much later in the theatre's history – though a young Coward did manage to present one of his own plays, 'I'll Leave It to You', on the theatre's stage in 1920, while several of his hits have been presented there in more recent times.

More typically host to limited runs of plays in recent times, you have to go back to 2006-9 to find its last real long-runner, the raucous puppet musical ‘Avenue Q’. However the hit Broadway musical ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ – due at the end of 2019 – will be hoping to make a good go of it.

Details

Address:
85-88
St Martin's Lane
London
WC2N 4AU
Transport:
Tube: Leicester Square
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What’s on

The Motive and the Cue

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Drama

Johnny Flynn: ‘I fall asleep to Richard Burton reading me ”Under Milk Wood”’.   A play about rehearsals for a play, Jack Thorne’s ‘The Motive and The Cue’ was already deeply meta, but this transfer to the West End doubles down on such self-referential swagger. Transferring from the NT’s Lyttelton Theatre, this riotous peek behind the scenes of Richard Burton’s seminal ‘Hamlet’ – in which the Welsh hellraiser butted heads with stately director John Gielgud as they prepared for the groundbreaking 1964 Broadway production – now has the added layer of taking place in the very theatre in which Gielgud himself played the Dane in 1935.  Though it boasts a cast of 16, ‘The Motive and The Cue’ is a two-hander writ large, with multi-hyphenate folk singer and screen star Johnny Flynn taking on Burton’s charismatic, boozy bluster and Mark Gatiss launching himself into a condescending but sensitive Gielgud. Under the direction of Sam Mendes, both are sensational. Flynn wisely never overeggs the trademark Welsh accent, but still manages to remarkably channel the Port Talbot-raised Hollywood star, thrusting his jaw and wearing a white woollen roll neck as if it were armour. Gatiss is just as impressive, his uncanny Gielgud manifesting a man in flux, as a new era of performance threatens to subsume his traditional take on stagecraft. Gatiss’s Gielgud is lonely and lost, but still more than capable of getting one over on the wayward Burton.  With a backdrop of ‘Mad Men’-worthy costuming and a

Player Kings

  • Shakespeare

Unstoppable acting legend Ian McKellen and revered director Robert Icke join forces for this incredibly exciting new show, Icke’s own adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’ Parts 1 and 2 starring 84-year-old Sir Ian in the great role of dissolute knight John Falstaff.  It will be McKellen’s sixth play since turning 80, a remarkable workrate at any age, but his willingness to team up with auteur Icke to take on such a demanding role feels like some serious legacy-building. Human precedent suggests he’ll have to reign in the demanding lead roles at some point, but what a high point this would be to go out on if it were his final big stage part. We don’t know a huge amount about ‘The Player Kings’ beyond that: most mash-ups of the two plays tend to focus on the action-packed Part 1 more than the rambling Part 2. But Icke is renowned for mining new meaning out of classic texts, so who knows what route he’s going to take?  Whatever the case, this looks like a shoo-in for one of the theatrical events of 2024, regardless of whether McKellen retires after or not.

Slave Play

  • Experimental

Jeremy O Harris’s frenzied satire about a trio of interracial couples who seek to get their sex lives back on track by indulging in Antebellum-styled master-slave roleplays was both a massive smash and wildly controversial over its two Broadway seasons (for reasons that are presumably obvious from that description). Harris’s second play ‘“Daddy”’ was better received over its 2022 Almeida run than it was back home, but a UK transfer for ‘Slave Play’ has been a long time coming. Finally, though, here’s Robert O’Hara’s production, which boasts a cast to die for, with James Cusati-Moyer, Chalia La Tour, Annie McNamara and Irene Sofia Lucio returning from its the original Broadway production, plus an infusion of Brits headed by ‘Game of Thrones’ man Kit Harington and the reliably hilarious Fisayo Akinade. There will be numerous ways to get cheap tickets, including a release of tickets for the following week’s performances at 10am on a Wednesday, starting from as little as £1.  Harris pioneered Black Out performances – where it’s politely requested that only Black-identifying audience member attend – with the original 2019 run of ‘Slave Play’, and there will be two here, on July 17 and September 17.

Dr Strangelove

  • Comedy

On the face of it a stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s immortal Cold War satire 'Dr Strangelove’ is as hubristic a conceit as adapting ‘2001’ or ‘Full Metal Jacket’: not only was the 1964 masterpiece intentionally shot in black and white, but it also boasted a lead performance from Peter Sellars – more accurately, a trio of lead performances – so iconic and singular as to seem literally impossible to replicate. Nonetheless, here we are: the Kubrick estate has given the stage rights to master satirist Amando Iannucci (‘The Day Today’, ‘I’m Alan Partridge’, ‘The Think of It’, ‘Veep’. ‘The Death of Stalin’, etcetera etcetera) to adapt Kubrick’s classic about a rogue American general who decides to pre-emptively nuke Russia. Iannucci has in turn cast his old mucker Steve Coogan as the lead: it’s not entirely clear if the stage version will exactly mirror the film (Coogan is billed as playing ‘multiple roles’, not necessarily the same ones Sellars did), but certainly these are some very talented people doubtless giving it their best go. It’s co-written and directed by Sean Foley: a safe pair of comic hands who is unlikely to reinvent the wheel but should ensure the laughs are front and centre.

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