Plays on in London

Unless you’re fluent in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hiberno-English, John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World requires proper, eyes-wide-open concentration. And even more so in this NT revival, in which director Caitríona McLaughlin celebrates the lyrical language of the play in all its glory. At its best, hers is a production that rewards attentiveness, weaving in beautiful, affecting images of County Mayo folklore alongside some standout acting performances. But despite the play’s undeniable importance within the Irish canon, it feels like a strange choice for the National Theatre’s 2025 programme, and the production comes across as a hodgepodge of competing ideas.Not all of that is down to McLaughlin. There’s the rambling, stretched-out plot in which young Christy Mahon arrives at a small local pub, claims he has killed his father, and then, rather than being shunned, becomes something of a village celebrity. What follows are strings of repetitive scenes in which the truth about Christy’s story threatens to come out. Despite an assured, characterful performance, Éanna Hardwicke makes Christy a constantly wowed dufus. Which begs the question: could this really be a man who has hordes of women running after him?It is one of many confusing directorial decisions from McLaughlin, who attempts to lean into both the comedy and the pathos in Synge’s script. Crowds of mummers in traditional dress appear between the scenes, while mourners dressed all in black...

I wonder if the reason John le Carré never allowed his novels to be adapted for the stage was the fear they'd get turned into the sort of trashy touring potboilers that crisscross the country in numbers but never make it to the scrutiny of the West End. It was presumably his death in 2020 that allowed a stage version of his breakthrough The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to finally go ahead. But I’d say his estate was right to give the nod: the story is in safe hands with playwright David Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin, whose adaptation settles in at the West End after scoring good notices in Chichester. This is a slick and yes, maybe slightly MOR adaptation of Le Carre’s taut, brutal espionage yarn. But it’s a very good one, and Eldridge deftly crafts an intensely interior world, with us seeing the action unfold as much from within jaded spy protagonist Alec Leamas’s head as without. Herrin’s production goes heavy on the noir, and with good reason. Rory Keenan is magnificently grumpy and rumpled as Leamas, a hardbitten British spy in Cold War Berlin who ‘comes in from the cold’ – that is to say, is brought home – after his last informer is executed by Hans-Dieter Mundt, a ruthless counterintelligence agent who has systematically dismantled the British spy apparatus in East Germany. (It is slightly disconcerting that Keenan speaks in his natural Dublin accent, although you soon get used to it). But there is a long game at work: returning to The Circus (a fictionalised...

Are you looking for something fuzzy to warm your heart this Christmastime? Then boy does the National Theatre have the show for you.  Katy Rudd’s seamless production is adapted by playwright Kendall Feaver from the Noel Streatfeild children’s novel of the same name. It follows the story of the three Fossil sisters: Pauline (Nina Cassells), Petrova (Sienna Arif-Knights) and Posy (Scarlett Monahan) who are adopted by the eccentric explorer and palaeontologist Great Uncle Matthew, aka Gum (Justin Salinger). After Gum goes missing on one of his many, many expeditions, the girls are looked after by his steadfastly loyal niece Sylvia, aka Garnie (Anoushka Lucas) and the matronly Miss Guthridge, aka Nana, played by the charming Lesley Nicol with a drawling West Country accent.  Set in the 1930s, the five women live in a tumbledown house filled with fossils on the Cromwell Road in Chelsea, until they realise they are desperately running out of money and assemble a motley crew of lodgers to take up rooms. There’s the stern but kind-hearted English professor Doctor Jakes (Pandora Colin), glamorous dance teacher Theo Dane (Nadine Higgin), and the bumbling car repair man Jai Saran (Raj Bajaj). After being booted out of every state school in the area, the girls are enrolled in the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training, where luckily Dane is the teacher. Here they discover their passions for acting, ballet and er… being a mechanic. The whole plot is basically implausible –...

Alfie (Clive Owen) is dying of cancer. Julie (Saskia Reeves) is not. A couple since their twenties, their lives are about to diverge dramatically, though precisely how dramatically is up for grabs. David Eldridge’s new play begins with a physically ailing Alfie telling Julie he wants to stop treatment, before proceeding to splurge all manner of wild thoughts, theories and plans about his imminent death.  End follows Eldridge’s Beginning and Middle at the National Theatre. I’m not sure I’d call them his mid-life-crisis trilogy. But certainly in sum they are about as rigorous an interrogation of middle age as exists in the British theatrical canon. The fizzy, sexy smash Beginning was about the rush of first attraction between a 38-year-old and a divorced 42-year-old. Middle was about a slightly older couple stuck in the rut of a predictable long-term marriage.  With their handsome-looking north London house, Alfie and Julie are initially coded as the sort of monied older couple that has popped up in English theatre for centuries. The fact they’re actually just 59 comes as a slight surprise (Owen and Reeves are actually a few years older), but it’s their cultural references that feel the most startling. It soon transpires that Alfie was a big time acid house DJ, a subject he basically never stops talking about; there’s something disconcerting about thinking of that generation as ‘old’ now. End is not about Gen X dying out en masse: it’s kind of a point of the play that Julie...

Hampstead may be London’s most prominent theatre to not have an artistic director, but the team there certainly have programming patterns. One of the most notable is the recent tradition of lesser known Tom Stoppard play there at Christmas. In 2023 it was Rock ‘n’ Roll, last year it was The Invention of Love, and for 2025 it’s 1995’s Indian Ink. Not staged in the UK since its premiere – though there was a big off-Broadway revival in 2014 – it’s a typically complicated (ie Stoppardian) work from the playwright. Half of it is set in India, 1930, as progressive British poet Flora Crewe gets up to various escapades at the end of the Raj; the other half is set in the ’80s, as an American academic attempts to get to the bottom of the mysterious end of Flora’s life. As well as being a good old yarn, Indian Ink is an exploration of the difference between English and Indian art and poetry. There’s a lot going on, basically.  Directed by Hampstead regular Jonathan Kent, this revival stars Felicity Kendal as Flora’s younger sister Mrs Swan in the ’80s sections – a neat piece of casting as Kendal played Flora in the original production. She’ll be joined by Ruby Ashbourns Serkis as Flora and Gavi Singh Chera as dashing Indian painter Nirad Das.

See our ★★★★★ review of All My Sons here Belgian super director Ivo van Hove got his big English-language break with 2014’s astounding production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, and a couple of years later lucky New Yorkers got a deluxe production of The Crucible that scored warm reviews (maddeningly it never played here despite its largely British and Irish cast). Since then, Van Hove’s career has gone into overdrive and he’s famous dedicated a lot of time to making stage adaptations of classic films, to mercurial effect.  It would be entirely misunderstanding Van Hove to imagine that he’s returning to the safety of Miller as a result of last year’s colossal West End flop Opening Night. But there will certainly be those glad he’d doing so as he tackles the US playwright’s first big hit, All My Sons.  Set in 1943, the drama concerns Joe Keller, an upstanding pillar of the local community whose business partner has been found guilty of selling faulty parts to the US Airforce. Joe has escaped any blame. But should he have? Van Hove has assembled a proper A-grade cast here, with US star Bryan Cranston – who led the director’s 2017 hit Network –  as Joe, with the wondrous Marianne Jean-Baptiste as his wife Kate and Paapa Essiedu as their son Chris. 

Horror and the West End have a mixed recent history: The Woman in Black had a very good innings, and Inside Number 9’s Stage/Fright worked a treat. 2.22 – A Ghost Story was a nice idea that ended up being done to death. The Enfield Haunting was unspeakably awful. It’s with some trepadition, then, that we approach Paranormal Activity, a theatrical adaptation of the 2007 sleeper screen hit. Found footage horror isn’t the obvious genre to put on stage by a long shot. But this adaptation has a real USP: it’s directed by Felix Barrett, aka the brains behind immersive theatre legends Punchdrunk, his first non-Punchdrunk theatre show in over a decade. If anyone can inject some menace and atmophere into a show that is nominally about two people buying a house, it’s him. And he’s got a pretty good writer too: playwright Levi Holloway isn’t much known over here, but he sounds eminently qulified having scored a Broadway hit recently with the spooky drama Grey House. His adaptation of the film sounds pretty ‘free’: rather than a stage retelling of the misadventures of the original film’s demon-haunted San Diego couple Micah and Katie, this once concerns James and Lou, a couple who quit Chicago for London in the hope they can escape their past (spoiler alert: they can’t).

Show writer Kate Trefry explains all you need to know about ‘The First Shadow’. ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ is a sprawling maximalist monolith, a gargantuan entertainment that goes beyond being a mere ‘play’. It’s too unwieldy and too indulgent to be a theatrical classic. But nonetheless, this prequel to the Netflix retro horror smash is the very antithesis of a cynical screen-to-stage adaptation.  As overwhelming in scale as as the show’s monstrous Mindflayer, it’s a seethingly ambitious three-hour extravaganza of groundbreaking special effects, gratuitous easter eggs and a wild, irreverent theatricality that feels totally in love with the source material while being appreciably distinct from it.  It’s clearly made by a fan, that being big-name director Stephen Daldry, who used his Netflix connections (he’s the man responsible for ‘The Crown’) to leverage an official collab with the Duffer Brothers, creators of the retro horror smash.  It starts as it means to go on, with pretty much the most technically audacious opening ten minutes of a show I’ve ever seen, as we watch a US naval vessel deploy an experimental cloaking device in 1943, to catastrophic effect. Yes, the sets wobble a bit, and yes, writer Kate Trefry’s dialogue is basically just some sailors bellowing cliches. But we’re talking about watching a giant vessel getting pulled into a horrifying parallel dimension on stage. It is awesome; and when it cut into a thunderous playback of Kyle Dixon and Michael...

High Noon is rightly regarded as a high watermark for the Western film, a real time, allegorical drama (spoiler: it’s about Hollywood blacklisting) in which Will Kane, the sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is preparing for retirement with his new bride Amy, when word reaches them that a dangerous outlaw who Will sent down is out of jail and on the lookout for revenge. Will tries to rouse the townspeople to his side – but they’re too timid and self-intersted to do so. A stage version sounds both plausible – it’s a dialogue heavy, relatively cerebral work – but also kind of nuts: it ends with one of the most iconic gunfight scenes in cinema history, which would seem to be something very difficult to replicate convincingly on stage. Whatever the case, a superb team is going to give it their very best: cult US actor Billy Crudup will play Will, and the magnificent Denise Gough will follow in Grace Kelly’s footsteps and play Amy, with the excellent Thea Sharrock directing, and a screenplay from Academy Award winner Eric Roth, whose absurd list of credits runs from Forest Gump to Dune. It’s an improbable project, but if anyone can make it work it’s this team. 

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...