Plays on in London

The last few years have seen some of the most celebrated theatrical blockbusters of the ’00s return to our stages with a whimper. That’s not to say that recent revivals of the likes of Art, God of Carnage or Copenhagen were bad – but they did not become raved-about, years-running theatrical phenomena a second time. Current productions of The Producers and Avenue Q are doing well enough in the West End, but neither embodies the zeitgeist the way they did 20 or so years ago. So here’s the National Theatre bringing back 2007’s blockbuster War Horse, a show that closed on the West End in 2016 but has lived on via endless tours and a Stephen Spielberg-directed screen adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s source text. Surely its moment in the spotlight was a combination of the novelty of its many, many puppets and Britain’s endless obsession with the First World War? Surely it’s dated? Actually it turns out War Horse is still incredible.  Number one, the puppets are astonishing. Made by the South African company Handspring, it’s not just that individual puppets are good, but that there are so damn many of them, from horses to birds to a tank. Their warm wooden frames look wonderful, and the standard of the puppetry and puppet direction (originally by Handspring’s Adrian Kohler, now by Matthew Forbes) is second to none. On this watch I was quietly blown away by a scene in which main horse Joey was just munching away on a nosebag in the background while the human characters were having...

  Ava Pickett has had the career start every writer dreams of. Your debut play about Anne Boleyn (but not really about Anne Boleyn) becomes the hottest ticket in town at the Almeida Theatre and earns you two Olivier nominations. In the process, you gain the attention of it-girl star of the moment Margot Robbie, who declares you a generational talent. Oh, and you’re also writing a film about Joan of Arc with Baz Luhrmann. Because why not. Pickett’s ascension has been so swift, that, I must admit, I approached 1536’s West End transfer with slight scepticism. Could it really live up to all that the hype? The answer, thankfully, is: yes, and then some. Co-produced with Robbie’s production company Lucky Chap, 1536 is an astonishing production. Director Lyndsey Turner has crafted a heady, sensory experience, one that is jolted forward by faultless performances from the female leads. The 110-minute one-act run time might raise eyebrows, yet the show never loses pace, and refuses to overcook things either. 1536 is a once-in-a-blue-moon theatrical experience. I laughed. I cried. I probably could have screamed too. The year, it’ll come as no surprise to hear, is 1536, where three women in their early twenties sit in a field in rural Essex. With so little going on in their lives, the girls are scandalised by the goss Jane (Liv Hill) has heard from London: that King Henry VIII has had his second wife Anne Boleyn arrested. The practical Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) wonders aloud if Henry...

Care – stylised as CARE – is acclaimed writer-director Alexander Zeldin getting back to his roots. Kind of. After the cartoonishly overwrought stab at Greek tragedy that was The Other Place, his newest is a naturalistic yarn about an English retirement home, that harks back to his breakthrough Inequalities trilogy of plays about the fraying social contract in austerity Britain. It’s not quite the same, though, because while contemporary stresses on the British care system are alluded to, they’re not really the point here. Despite an aesthetic that teeters on kitchen sink, Zeldin is one of the few Brit directors whose career has really taken off in Europe, and Care in fact began life in France. It’s been reworked, but it’s ultimately a play about a more universal care home experience. That experience centres on Linda Bassett’s Joan, a grandmother who has been placed in the show’s unnamed home for what – as she sees it – is a couple of weeks to recuperate from a nasty fall. She has a family: a daughter, Lynn (Rosie Cavaliero) and two grandsons, Laurie (William Lawlor) and Robbie (shared by Charlie Webb and Ethan Mahony), but they’re clearly having a tough time following the death of Lynn’s husband. So Joan is checking into a home for a bit. Or so she thinks.   It’s an extraordinary performance from Bassett. I don’t normally get too dewy-eyed about the emotional cost of acting, but it must surely be an unsettling thing to be an older actor when so much of the best work...

Last year, top Brit director Patrick Marber helmed a Broadway production of David Mamet’s classic ’80s parable of raging capitalism and toxic masculinity Glengarry Glen Ross. Nothing unusual about that, and Kieran Culkin as hotshot real estate salesman Ricky Roma and Bob Odenkirk as his yesterday’s man colleague Shelly Levene was pretty standard casting. Intriguingly, however, Marber stated that he’d like his production to have an all female second cast. This did not happen, whether because Marber simply couldn’t get it together in terms of casting and producers or because on reflection a gender switch would simply reconfigure the play too much to seamlessly take play during a single run. But clearly this Old Vic revival comes out of said idea. Marber aside, it’s a different creative team to the Broadway production: it more or less has to be as the 2026 Old Vic season is being staged in te round, so the New York sets and staging are no use here. But it is an entirely female cast, with Indira Varma (pictured) as Levene and Rosa Salazar as Roma (first names aren’t given and will presumably change), with the cast rounded out by Mercedes Bahleda, Nancy Crane, Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Florence Odumosu and Niky Wardley.  It goes without saying that women can have a different energy in the workplace to men and than indeed the point of the gender swap is surely to explore that. Clearly this isn’t quite what Mamet intended (he’s been surprisingly open minded about allowing it) but...

This review is from the original 2016 Menier Chocolate Factory run of The Truth. Lindsay Posner’s production is revived for a 2026 West End transfer starring Stephen Mangan, Ardal O’Hanlon, Sarah Hadland and Janie Dee. A new review will follow. This is the third play by the dazzling young French playwright Florian Zeller (‘The Father’, ‘The Mother’) to be staged in London in less than two years – and the third to be translated by British writer Christopher Hampton. It’s a zippy, witty farce about ever-shifting layers of infidelity as experienced by two middle-aged Parisian couples. The play’s laughs are as sharp as Lindsay Posner’s ruthlessly swift and snappy production (90 minutes, no interval). Its comedy is playful but also barbed: one of the characters even asks, ‘I want to know what kind of play we’re in. Is it a comedy? Or a tragedy?’We enter on a classic adultery set-up: Alice (Frances O’Connor, sleekly guarded) and Michel (Alexander Hanson, endearingly pompous), both well-turned-out professionals, are pulling up their pants mid-afternoon in a hotel room. It turns out that Michel is good friends with Alice’s husband, Paul (Robert Portal), and in turn Paul and Alice know Michel’s wife, Laurence (Tanya Franks). They’re urban sophisticates doing the dirty with a surface elan, and they're all intricately connected, just as in Harold Pinter’s landmark 1970s adultery drama ‘Betrayal’, a comparison that feels even more fitting when, as here, the play is performed in...

Obviously Peter Shaffer’s landmark 1973 play Equus has dated in some ways. It has gone from a story set ‘now’ to a ‘70s period drama. Its views on psychiatry are, at the very least, simplistic, speaking of an era where the concept was novel. But my god: it’s hard to see that mainstream British theatre ever getting more extreme – certainly psychologically – than Shaffer’s opus. It’s a seethingly sexual, deeply unsettling interrogation of the Apollonian versus the Dionysian that centres on Alan Strang, a young man who – as the play begins – has just brutally blinded six horses. But why? And what’s to be done? In some way Shaffer’s great achievement is simply in going there. Inspired by a real life incident (that involved the blinding of 26 horses), if the author was any less earnest in the way he ploughs into Alan’s unimaginably disturbing actions and psychology, it wouldn’t work. And indeed the naughty tittering elicited from the tabloid press when Daniel Radcliffe took on the role of Alan almost 20 years ago says it all - this is difficult stuff to talk about sincerely.   Interestingly, though, 2007’s D-Rad-starring revival has ushered in a modest renaissance for the play, which wasn’t touched for over 30 years after its original NT run ended in 1975 but has now been done a fair bit, with an ultra-modern 2019 version at Stratford East, and now this from the Menier. Historically Equus has been about scale and spectacle, with the six actor-dancers playing the horses...

The rumours are true: two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon has touched down in London to play icon of the silver screen – and the transatlantic gay community – Judy Garland. If you’re a fan, you’ve probably seen Monsoon impersonate Garland before – on Drag Race or, if you’re lucky, at one of her live cabaret shows. But this is a different thing entirely, because End of the Rainbow is a proper two-act play (by Peter Quilter). There’s zero audience interaction, but a handful of songs breaking up what is in fact the pretty depressing story of Garland’s demise.  Before we get onto the Jinkx Monsoon of it all, a bit of context on Garland herself. She is, of course, best known for playing Dorothy in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. But by the time of Quilter’s play, which is set months before Garland’s early death in 1969 from an accidental drug overdose, there was scarcely any trace of the girl with pig tails and ruby red shoes left. By her mid forties, Garland was broke, in debt, and not unlike the late Amy Winehouse, attracting huge audiences to a London residency she was sometimes too drunk or high to perform.  It’s this unglamorous final chapter of her life Quilter’s play – which scooped up Olivier Award nominations when it premiered on the West End in 2010, and was adapted into the Renée Zellweger-starring film Judy – focuses on. It’s set, for the most part, backstage. Here, Judy is in the company of husband number five Mickey (Jacob Dudman) – a first-rate dickhead who...

This review is from 2022. The P Word returns to the Bush Theatre in 2026 with the cast unchanged. Waleed Akhtar’s gorgeous, devastating new play is split between two Britains. One’s the twenty-first century, ‘love is love’ home of corporate Pride sponsorship and endless app-enabled sexual possibilities. And the other one’s tougher, older – medieval, almost – a place where gay asylum seekers are intrusively questioned about their sexual behaviour, and banished to their deaths. The resulting drama might sound grim, and sometimes it is, but ‘The P Word’ is also heart-meltingly lovely, full of faith in the transformative power of love and friendship.Akhtar himself plays Bilal, a Grindr-addicted gay man who deals with the lingering stigma of growing up a ‘fat Pakistani poof’ by throwing himself into self-punishing gym sessions. His story is spliced with that of gay Pakistani asylum seeker Zafar (Esh Alladi), who’s living an impoverished existence in Hounslow, advised by his lawyer to back up his case by taking photos of himself participating in a LGBTQ+ scene he couldn't feel more adrift from. Director Anthony Simpson-Pike creates subtle physical echoes between the two – Bilal does push-ups as Zafar offers desperate prayers – that emphasise their different shades of loneliness, both cut off from their families by their sexual identity. Max John’s ambitious set design makes them begin on separate halves of a circular stage that starts to revolve as their stories finally...

Inter Alia opens with Rosamund Pike wigged and gowned and rocking out, rasping ‘fuck the patriarchy’ into a mic. This is not a power ballad: the Saltburn and Gone Girl star plays Jess Parks, a pioneering feminist judge, and she is performing the emotional cut-and-thrust of a recent rape trial with relish, deploying her icy froideur to slay macho barristers who are attempting to slut shame vulnerable complainants. The dimly lit blokes in the backing band are, it transpires, Parks' husband and son: a fitting setup for Suzie Miller's three-hand play that feels more like a 100-minute monologue. Like its companion legal drama Prima Facie, which was a massive hit starring Jodie Comer, Inter Alia is a spectacularly demanding showcase for a female star, and Pike delivers the goods with stadium-level charisma, intelligence and flair. Miller’s play is based on interviews with female judges who juggle demanding careers with caring responsibilities and social lives: ‘inter alia’ means ‘among other things’. It's fun to see Pike in an earthier, more physical theatrical role, very different from the icy Hitchcock blondes she's known for on film. Initially, we see her dashing from court to robing room, fielding a dozen missed calls from her sweet bumbling lout of a teenage son, Harry (Cormac McAlinden) who can't find a Hawaian shirt for a party he's going to later, then dashing home to prepare a supper for guests while getting dolled up, taking phone calls and questions, and ironing...

In a grimly timely stage adaptation of a major Iranian work, Nadia Latif directs Carmen Nasr’s adaoptation of Babak Anvari’s Bafta-winning horror film. Under the Shadow is set in ’80s Tehran, at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, and follows a mother and her daughter who are haunted by a mysterious entity after they refuse to evacuate the city. Leila Farzad stars in the lead role of mother Shideh.