Royal Court Theatre

This review is from March 2026. John Proctor is the Villian transfers to Wyndham’s Theatre in Febrary 2027, with casting TBC. John Proctor is the Villain is a period drama about 2018. By that I don’t specifically mean that the Broadway smash nails the exact experience of going to a US high school in the late ’10s: frankly, the American education system is so alien that there are points where Kimberly Belflower’s play might as well have been set on a Mars colony space academy for all the resemblance it bears to the average Brit comp. But what Belflower does do brilliantly is nail the intersection between the relatively brief apex of the #MeToo movement and a generation of smart, naive school girls who would have been the right age to absorb its rhetoric at the precise moment they’re discovering what it was a reaction to. Plus, it has a banging soundtrack, with Lorde’s 2017 hit ‘Green Light’ embedded deep in its bones, and discussed in reverent tones by its young characters in a way that feels poignant and illuminating: school girls don’t geek out over ‘Green Light’ anymore, and they probably don’t discuss #MeToo either. If this sounds like it has the potential to come across as a bit like a po-faced lecture then that couldn’t be further from the case. Danya Taymor’s production – which transfers recast from a smash Broadway run – is an absolute blast, the many serious issues raised all of a piece with its breathless ebullience and Belflower’s endlessly witty text. As much as...

As actor Yousef Sweid freely admits near the start of his solo show, the name Between the River and the Sea promises controversy – controversy that never really comes, because you see, he’s a bit of a centrist dad.  That’s a very flippant way of cross pollinating a silly meme about ’10s Labour moderates with the very complicated reality of life as a secular Arab Israeli (who is also a dad). And let’s be honest, Israel (and its associated controversies) is such an emotive subject that I’m sure the affable Sweid and his autobiographical monologue (co-written with its director Isabella Sedlak) might offend some people – especially if they’re looking for fiery condemnation of the country of his birth. But Sweid knows all that: he knows that even the act of not describing himself as Palestinian is problematic in some circles. And in this amusing, poignant and somewhat-slippery hour he details a half century on the planet trying to avoid trouble. Now living in Berlin and dealing with a divorce from his second wife (who wants to take their daughter to live in Israel), he confesses to seeking out the company of the city’s glossy international class, rather than its Arab and Palestinian diaspora. He’s fond of these communities. But he’s also a middle-aged Euro hipster. Really it’s a story about trying to live an unremarkable life in an area of the world cursed to experience constant remarkable events. Growing up in Haitha and attending a Jewish school, he describes how a...

You have to assume that this Gary Oldman designed, directed and (of course) starring production of Samuel Beckett’s high concept elegy for youthful ambition Krapp’s Last Tape would have run at Theatre Royal York earlier in 2025 regeardless of the Royal Court’s 2026 seventieth anniversary season.  But here it is, gaining a new London life at the Court. And it’s a doubly appropriate piece of programming for the seventieth birthday season. Beckett’s play about an old man listening back with mounting horror to the megalomaniacal tapes he recorded on his birthday in his younger years had its debut at the Court in 1958, and was revived again for its fiftieth birthday with no less than Harold Pinter in the title role.  And it’s a homecoming of sorts for Oldman, who was a prolific theatre actor and Royal Court regular in the ’80s before he drifted off into film (his last stage role was in Caryl Churchill’s 1987 masterpiece Serious Money). Curiously for such a landmark play, Krapp’s Last Tape started life as a ‘curtain raiser’, the secondary event before a production of Beckett’s longer Aftermath. In that spirit, Oldman’s performance will have a curtain raiser of its own in the form of Godot’s To Do List, a short Beckett-inspired play from young writer Leo Simpe-Asante.

There are lots of highlights to the Royal Court’s seventieth anniversary season. But where the Gary Oldman-starring production of Krapp’s Last Tape and the hit Broadway play John Proctor is the Villain would have been expected to come to London eventually, Man to Man is altogether more of a surprise. Manfred Karge’s hallucinatory solo play about a widow who assumes her late husband’s job and identity in inter-war Germany had its UK premiere at Edinburgh Traverse Theatre in 1987 before transferring to the Court the following year. Stephen Unwin’s production provided a breakthrough for an androgynous young actor named Tilda Swinton, starting her down the path to global cult fame.  Now, in a similar way to the Court’s 2025 revival of 4.48 Psychosis, the whole band is back together for a revival of Man to Man once again starring Swinton and directed by Unwin. Although Swinton has starred in the odd stage role in Europe since, she’s not performed in the UK for over three decades, and who knows if she’ll do so again.