Plays on in London

  Having premiered at the Old Vic in 2017 – and gone on to conquer the West End and Broadway – Girl From the North Country has lost none of its potency as it returns to the theatre where it all began — a dreamy, sepia-soaked production of character-driven vignettes and reimagined Bob Dylan songs. It’s 1934 in Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s actual birthplace – and the Great Depression is chewing through the soul of the town. At the centre of this dustbowl drama is the Laine family, struggling to keep their guesthouse (and each other) from crumbling under debt, loss, and the weight of time. Nick Laine (Colin Connor) is a man burdened by a bubbling anger — the same kind that seems to course through the town — while his wife Elizabeth (Katie Brayben) floats between madness and sudden, unnerving clarity. Their adopted Black daughter Marianne (Justina Kehinde) is pregnant, unmarried, and navigating her place within the world. Their house is a revolving door of boarders: hustlers, dreamers, a smooth-talking preacher, and a boxer down on his luck (think 1930s sitcom). The 23-strong company moves fluidly between character, chorus, and live band. Simon Hale’s arrangements of 20 Dylan songs float in the spaces between joy and hardship. Stripped-back renditions of ‘Forever Young’ and ‘I Want You’ drift through wood-panelled walls and empty whisky bottles. Some numbers are so radically reimagined you’ll barely recognise them — like Brayben’s raw, ragged and impossibly controlled version...

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 new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris.  This play re-imagines the events surrounding his chaotic appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1958. He arrives at the NBC studio, whose boss is already jittery because of Levant’s erratic past behaviour, from a mental institution. His wife, June (Rosalie Craig), has secured a release under false pretences. Talk-show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport) wants to capitalise on his penchant for making controversial jokes live on air. His accompanying nurse, Alvin (Daniel Adeosun), is trying to stop him from popping pills. And Levant himself is hallucinating Gershwin.   Focused so tightly on the early days of American TV, this could potentially sound niche for a British audience. But in Wright’s assured hands, the collision of Levant’s private and public life down the barrel of a camera lens becomes a play about the beginning of so many things we now recognise as staples of celebrity culture. He’s famous for all the reasons he doesn’t want to be – as a performer of someone else’s music rather than a composer. He’s wheeled onto chat shows for controversy by people for whom his mental health is something to be exploited....

Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac.  Specifically, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band’s mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members ‘Holly’ (aka Christine McVie) and ‘Diana’ (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band’s menfolk in favour of their own condominiums.  Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir).  Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile...

The time is once again Nye, as Michael Sheen returns to the National Theatre to reprise firebrand politician and NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan, in Tim Price’s play, after Rufus Norris’s production originally debuted last year. The state of the country’s health and that of Nye himself are intwined from the start, as we open on a huge chest x-ray projected onto hospital-green curtains behind the bed-ridden deputy leader of the Labour Party. It’s July 1960. His anxious wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) and childhood friend Archie Lush (Jason Hughes) are by his side and his doctor is concerned. We’re here, it’s increasingly clear, for the end of his life. Plunging us into Nye’s unconscious, Price gives us a dream-like portrait of his life, as Nye recalls its events in neuron-like bursts. There are parallels between the coal miner-turned-politician challenging schoolroom bullying in Tredegar, his working-class Welsh hometown, in the early 1900s, to upsetting the members’ club snobbery of Parliament as a new MP. Paule Constable’s ever-shifting lighting design melds beautifully with Steven Hoggett and Jess Williams playful choreography, snatching feather-light moments of humour from the darkness. The playful and somnambulant tone of Norris’s production perfectly suits the portrait of a man whose sometimes bulldozing lack of subtlety was one of his defining traits. Sheen is predictably great at combining Nye’s burning sense of belief in welfare for all and his irascibility within a...

See our Inter Alia review here.  The last Lyttelton theatre show to be programmed by Rufus Norris prior to his departure looks like a good one: following the Jodie Comer-fuelled West End smash Prima Facie, writer Susie Miller and director Justin Martin join forces with a new star for for follow-up Inter Alia. Rosamund Pike has had a good few years with screen hits Saltburn and The Wheel of Time, and now she makes her National Theatre debut to star as Jessica Parks, a maverick high court judge who precariously balances her work and her home life. We don’t know a lot more about the Miriam Buether-designed show just yet, but the fact Pike will be joined by actors Jamie Glover and Jasper Talbot points to the fact that this won’t be a monologue in the vein of Miller’s last.

Michael Shannon interview: ‘I think TV is garbage – I certainly don’t watch it’. It’s a trap, almost, to think of Eugene O’Neill’s final play A Moon for the Misbegotten as a sequel to his miserable masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Sure, they share the character of Jim Tyrone, a dissolute young actor in Long Day’s Journey and a dissolute older actor here. But you go in expecting despair and instead find something that’s more like an episode of Steptoe and Son.Maybe that’s down to director Rebecca Frecknall – now a master of whipping the lesser-revived plays of the American canon into shape – putting space between this and the old workhorse of Long Day’s Journey (which we’ve seen three times in London in the last 13 years): not the faded grandeur of a seaside home here, but a wooden yard full of splintered timbers pointing into the sky, messy and dusty.The production itself, though, is anything but dusty. From the first moment, every line is a punch or a jab or a dagger. Peter Corboy and Ruth Wilson as siblings Mike and Josie burst onto the stage and whack each other with dialogue, and their fists. Fed up with his dad Phil’s drunkenness and slave-driving on their rock-infested farm, Mike is leaving. All that’s left to Phil is daughter Josie, whose sleeping around has made her ‘the scandal of the neighbourhood’, and their landlord Jim Tyrone who may or may not sell the farm to them and who may or may not be in love with Josie.David Threlfall is a hoot as Phil,...

This nihilistic comedy about a British Asian politician who seizes his chance to become leader of the opposition is funny and frustrating in equal measures. In the opening scenes, first time playwright Shaan Sahota (she also works as a doctor!) does a decent job of spinning an In The Thick of It-style yarn about Angad (Adeel Akhtar), a very junior British Sikh shadow minister who suddenly finds himself in play for the leadership of what is implicitly the Tory Party. The opening scenes thrum with an energy similar to a previous National Theatre triumph, James Graham’s This House, as it plunges us into an amusingly compromised world of sweary spads, cocky whips and malleable MPs. Helena Wilson is scene stealingly entertaining as the apparently humble Angad’s shark-like head of comms Petra. It’s fun. But then Sahota introduces what is essentially an entire second main storyline, this time revolving around Angad’s late father’s will and his family’s lasting trauma at their patriarch's unfeeling treatment of them. We see Angad playing the role of the understanding if somewhat distant brother to his GP eldest sister Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and hilariously highly strung middle sister Malika (Shelley Conn, superb). And then we see him calmly accept the will’s shocking contents, much to the horror and fury of his siblings.  These two threads – cynical political comedy and sensitive look at the traumatising legacy of a patriarchal upbringing – are by no means impossible to...

Less than a year after making his Doctor Who-era stage return in the NT’s sublime The Importance of Being Earnest, Ncuti Gatwa is back at it again. And if Earnest was a big ensemble piece in which he was a very enjoyable cog, US playwright Liz Duffy Adams’s Born with Teeth is a two-hander that is presumably pretty much wall-to-wall Gatwa. He’ll star as the legendary playwright Christopher Marlowe opposite Edward Bluemel as William Shakespeare; the year is 1591 and in a paranoid Elizabethan England the two are collaborating on Henry VI together with a mix of flirtation and suspcion. Okay, it does sound a bit like slash fiction, penned by an American playwright barely known in this country. But it’s also an RSC production, directed by the company’s co-leader Daniel Evans – if that’s not a mark of quality assurance, then what is?

Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing has been slowly inching towards the West End for over a decade now. Although it won instant Fringe acclaim, the show – about an unnamed narrator whose life’s work is a list of all the good things in the world – has always seemed too intimate to scale up, so has instead spread around, adapted for a vast array of countries, cultures and languages, from Arabic to Mandarin and all points in between.  @sohoplace is where it finally makes its West End debut, and the relatively intimate, in-the-round venue feels like the perfect spot for maintaining the all-important closeness between performer and an audience often called upon to help out. The show has experienced various UK permutations over the years – Macmillan himself directed last year’s tenth anniversary revival, and this will be a co-direct between Macmillan and the more seasoned director Jeremy Herrin. But the big selling point is the casting. The show’s co-creator and regular British star Jonny Donahoe will again perform; but so will three other actors: Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins, and the one and only Lenny Henry will split the run. The actors will perform in rep, with Henry and Donahoe performing throughout August (Henry will understandably tackle the lion’s share) and a more even split between Mod and Perkins in September. All information on who is performing can be found when you book.