Plays on in London

  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...

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...

Director Clint Dyer has put a very bold spin on Ken Kelsey’s countercultural classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The former National Theatre deputy has reimagined Dale Wasserman’s 1963 stage adaptation as an intersectional work about racial hierarchies, in which the outnumbered white staff of a psychiatric hospital keep a largely Black patient population in check via icy self-belief and exploitation of their charges’ vulnerabilities. On paper it’s a solid metaphor for systematic oppression, that chimes with the civil rights era in which the play was written.  But Kesey’s essentially libertarian allegory for how the system crushes bright, interesting and rebellious individuals does not really translate that well into a parable of collective solidarity. And it’s not just a question of intent, but quality. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not exactly Shakespeare-level stuff, ie a text so fundamentally robust that it can take aggressive reinterpretation. Rather, it’s a paranoid individualist hippie’s view of the mid-century US mental healthcare system. It’s not without merit in 2026, but as a cultural artefact it clearly peaked in significance over half a century ago with the Jack Nicholson film (something its Christian Slater-starring last London revival unabashedly channelled). Pre-show, information is projected onto the walls about the historic African-American gathering space of Congo Square in New Orleans, and the origin of the city’s Black Mardi Gras Indians. Ben...

Les Liaisons Dangereuses – I think it’s French for ‘the sexy meetings’ – is a classic play, though I’m not convinced that’s the same as being a good one. Starting life in 1782 as an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Christopher Hampton’s 1985 stage adaptation was a sensation, adapted into a hit 1988 film and clearly responsible for the ‘90s teen remake Cruel Intentions. It was always trashy, mind, and in a post-#MeToo world I’d say there are some hard questions to be asked about its titillating realpolitik.  Accepting all that, this is a pretty good production of it, as you’d expect from the great Marianne Elliott’s first show at the NT in over a decade, with a to die for cast headed by Lesley Manville and Aiden Turner.  The duo play callous, capricious, above all very sexy French toffs Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil and Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont, ex-lovers whose relationship has degenerated into callous game playing.  Manville is of course an absurdly good actor, one of the all time greats, and Turner is not bloody bad either. In the sexy, sinister, mirror-filled world conjured by Rosanna Vize’s set and Tom Jackson Greaves’ whirling choreography – filled with silent, glowering courtiers who dance with menacing elegance – the two leads are the main attraction and rightly so. The play has issues but by god do they work it, and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect. Manville’s Merteuil is sexy but not overtly sensuous. Rather, she is cerebral, an expert...

David Hare may not be the radical political firebrand he once was - a revival of his 1975 play Teeth ‘n’ Smiles is playing a few streets away and shows some of that terrible infancy - but his recent works show an undimmed curiosity in how we’ve created the world around us, channelled through carefully researched history, as in his 2022 play Straight Line Crazy about the architect Robert Moses and his 2019 film The White Crow about the dancer Rudolf Nureyev.Both of those were collaborations with Ralph Fiennes – actor in the former, director of the latter – and that partnership has been fascinating to watch, the two almost like each other’s muses. In a way it feels like the relationship has been building to this: a big portrait of two of the most important actors who ever lived, a history of and an endearing paean to theatre.Dame Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving are in no small way the reason audiences get to sit in the Theatre Royal Haymarket and watch Fiennes of an evening. At the end of the 19th century they restored theatre to respectability pretty much for the first time since Shakespeare’s day. Grace Pervades is the story of their time on stage, a winking exploration of traditionalism and populism in theatre that itself is a traditional, populist piece of theatre.The opening moment sets the tone perfectly: director Jeremy Herrin has a grand tableau of a dozen actors appear backlit and framed by a proscenium arch, who then take their places on stage to tell the story of...

This looks like a fun way to start the new Open Air Theatre season, with a new stage adventure for Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal detective. Holmes is a complicated figure to stage, so easy to bog down in Victorian kitsch that he lends himself more to comedy adaptations than easnest ones. This play from Joel Horwood sounds like it is going for the latter, and certainly the OAT is the perfect venue for a big, bracing romp. The story follows Sherlock and Watson as they hit a slump following their first big case, only to have things turned around by the arrival of a woman with a mysterious jewel. There are quite a lot of Holmes stories involving women and mysterious jewels, so whether this is straight uo adaptation or more of a composite is TBC, but it sounds like Horwood has deliberately aimed for a younger Holmes, origin story type set up to ease audiences into the detective’s world. Joshua James plays the title role, in a production directed by Sean Holmes (on a sabbatical from London’s other big open air theatre, the Globe). 

Virginia Woolf’s towering 1931 novel The Waves doesn’t offer Joycean levels of formal complexity. Nonetheless, its haunting modernist blend of poetry and novel that sketches out the lives of six – or perhaps seven – friends is not a simple read. But it goes down surprisingly smoothly in this stage adaptation by Flora Wilson Brown. And that’s all to the good: The Waves is so purely literary that I don’t think an entirely equivalent stage version is possible. But Brown’s text and Julia Levai’s deft, efficient production conventionalise it with love and brisk purpose. Part of that is simply down to having a superb cast, who inject warmth and feeling into Woolf’s lengthy poetic soliloquies, whose mannered language holds the characters at an intentional remove on the page. We do get plenty of Woolf’s original poetry. But Brown is fearless about chopping and changing: she has added lashings of dialogue (the novel is essentially one character talking after another), and has rearranged things to make the autobiographical character of Rhoda the effective main narrator. This is a clever move for a number of reasons, the most pragmatic of which is that it means the production gets the most value out of its Rhoda, the excellent Ria Zmitrowicz, in her first stage performance in years. She’s wonderful as an introspective, panic-attack prone outsider, happy to hover quietly around the margins of her group of friends, some of whom – gorgeous good-time socialite Jinny (Syakira Moeladi) and...

‘Can Rebecca Lucy Taylor act?’ is I guess the big question here.  Well, I don’t think there’s any evidence from the pop star’s straight-up play debut (she previously co-starred in Cabaret) that the artist also known as Self Esteem is a hugely versatile character actor. But: the answer is ‘yes’. The theatrical, theatre-literate singer potently channels what feels like a lot of personal stuff into the role of Maggie Frisby – a minor rock singer, angry, amused and very drunk as her band disintegrates at a 1969 Oxford student ball. And I think if you’re a proper hardcore Self Esteem fan you’ll probably see David Hare’s 1975 play Teeth ’n’ Smiles as a means to an end, a vehicle to fire Taylor up as she pours her heart and soul and cynicism at the music industry into the role of Maggie, combusting spectacularly – and at one point, almost literally – at the tail-end of the ’60s.  The trouble is the play has not aged brilliantly, a fact that, to his credit, Hare has acknowledged in the past (though he’s been supportive of this revival).  He was right! Teeth ‘n’ Smiles was inspired by Hare’s observations of a washed up Manfred Mann at the playwright’s own university ball. Which is interesting. But in 2026 it’s astonishing how unclear it is what point Hare is really trying to make.  I think it’s a passage of time thing. In 1975, this slightly absurdist drama about an addled rock band limping on through a catastrophic final show was in and of itself powerful commentary on the end of...

Artistic director Michelle Terry’s new thing for Globe summer seasons seem to be giving one slot over to a classic twentieth century play and let them have fun in the Elizabethan playhouse’s big, uncoventional space. Last year it was Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and this year it’ll be young Bertold Brecht’s turn to make his debut as Elle While directs his 1939 anti-war classic Mother Courage and Her Children. Terry herself will takre on the eponymous role of war profiteer Mother Courage, whose children are gradually killed off by the conflicts she herself profits from. All other casting is TBC.

I was both moved by and a little annoyed at Mass. This story of two sets of bereaved parents attempting rapprochement in the aftermath of a high school shooting is the debut play by US actor and filmmaker Fran Kranz. He scored a low-key indie cinema success with the screen version of Mass, a 2021 film you’d be excused for not having heard of as it’s one of those flicks that got released to literally four cinemas. Transposed to the stage, it retains an awkward filmic structure, bookended by extraneous scenes in which two staff members at the church hall in which it’s set fret over getting the space ready for the meeting. Rochelle Rose’s Kendra – the facilitator of the meet – swoops in with a very icy American efficiency that teeters on the pass agg. But it’s all irrelevant to the plot, and it feels like either more should have been made of these characters or much less.  The meat is the meeting. Four great Brit actors play the parents, and I suppose it’s a very small spoiler to say that at first we’re not entirely sure who is mum and dad to the victim, and who the shooter. Is it Adeel Akhtar’s forcedly cheerful Jay and brittler wife Gail (Lyndsey Marshal)? Or is it the more visibly broken down and subdued Linda (Monica Dolan) and Richard (Paul Hilton), whose marriage is implied to have broken down?  It’s not a mystery that Carre Cracknell’s naturalistic production attempts to drag out for a great length of time, but the five or 10 minutes of ambiguity underscore the...