Hampstead Theatre

This hugely enjoyable tech satire-slash-thriller from US playwright Aaron Loeb is so good at bamboozling you as to what it’s going to be about that I almost hesitate to get into the plot. It’s good! Go see it! Isn’t that enough of a review for you? Okay, there isn’t a massive rug-pulling twist in ROI. But there is some fun misdirection in what initially looks set to be a satire on ethical investment funds. Sassy but idealistic May (Millicent Wong) is the protege – or in his words, ‘work daughter’ – of Paul (Lloyd Owen), the seen-it-all boss of ethical investors the Montrose Fund. One day, she stumbles across a unicorn: Willa (Letty Thomas) is a nervy, spectrum-y doctor with zero people skills who wants an insane $30bn investment in her ideas. But what she’s proposing intrigues May: advanced gene therapy that could change the world by eliminating most genetic conditions (eg cancer, Alzheimer’s). Willa contends that big pharma has suppressed such technology because it would tank their profits. May persuades Paul to take the plunge. The whole play is pointing towards ethical venture capitalist May discovering that she’s more capitalist than ethical. But in fact she proves to be a spirited, unbending heroine, winningly played by Wong. Really ROI is about two things: the inevitably of technological change, and how ill-equipped flawed human beings are to be its avatars.  Loeb is clearly interested in tech and what the near future might look like. It’s not po-facedly THIS WILL...

Two thoughts buzzed around my head while watching the first London revival of Michael Frayn’s 1998 megahit Copenhagen.  Number one, it’s astonishing that the first time around this hyper-dense show, substantially concerned with theoretical physics, ran in the West End for two years, following a year at the National.  And number two, it would probably land differently if the Americans nuked Tehran on press night which (at the time of writing) was a genuine possibility.  The play feels curiously more and less relevant than it must have done in the late ’90s, which should please venerable mischief maker Frayn (himself in his own nineties now). In Michael Longhurst’s first UK revival we are in an abstract, lightly sketched version of the afterlife. Joanna Scotcher’s set is a revolving black disc of a stage (I think meant to resemble an atom), surrounded by black water. Pulsing lights hanging from the ceiling reflect gorgeously on the mirrored back wall – their reflection evokes the lights of a city, perhaps the Danish capital. On the disc are three people: Danish theoretical physicist Nils Bohr (Richard Schiff), his wife Margrethe (Alex Kingston) and his German former protégé Werner Heisenberg (Damien Molony). Freely acknowledging they’re now dead, they dwell for almost three hours on a single meeting and its implications: what did Bohr and Heisenberg discuss, precisely, when the German came to visit his old mentor in occupied Copenhagen in 1941? In a dizzyingly clever...

A celebrated wildlife photographer and Marcus – the latest in a long line of apprentices – attempt to photograph the elusive firewing bird in David Pearson’s debut play, which is directed by Alice Hamilton and stars Charlie Beck and Gerard Horan.

A big coup for Hampstead Theatre here, as it bags the UK premiere of the wildly acclaimed US indie musical Kimberley Akimbo. Created by composer Jeanine Tesori and writer David Lindsay-Abaire, it’s an all-singing adaptation of Adams’s relatively obscure 2000 play of the same name, which follows the eponymous heroine, a 16-year-old girl afflicted by a rare/essentially magical disease that makes her age four times faster than usual. This means she has the appearance of an elderly woman while essentially being a teen. And apparently it’s wonderful! It bagged multiple wins at the 2023 Tony Awards – including the all important best new musical – and ran for a year-and-a-half on Broadway. Now it’s headed over here, albeit in a brand new production from Michael Longhurst, who did such a bang up job at the same address a few years back with Tesori’s Caroline, or Change.