Plays on in London

Proving you’re never too old to make your London stage debut, the great Susan Sarandon will do so aged 78 as she shares the title role of this acclaimed drama by Tracy Letts with our own Andrea Riseborough. Both brilliant screen actors who have drifted away from the stage, it’s coup for Matthew Warchus to have bagged them for his UK premiere production of Letts’s intriguing sounding play that tells the life story of its title character in willfully jumbled, mosaic-like order. It’s the first production in Warchus’s final season in charge at the Old Vic and will see the theatre reconfigured into an in the round staging that wil remain in place for the whole season.

Arguably the entire point of the first play to be programmed at the National Theatre by its new boss Indhu Rubasingham comes around five minutes from the end – after the actual plt has wrapped up – when Ukweli Roach’s Dionysus adds the mantle of ‘god of theatre’ to his celestial portfolio and dedicates the NT’s Olivier theatre to us. And if the hour and 40 minutes that precede this moment are messy, I’d say they are entertainingly messy.  Bacchae is of course based on Euripides’s classic Greek tragedy nasty of the same name, and is the debut play from Nima Taleghani. He’s hitherto been better known as an actor, and while his biggest gig is Heartstopper, I knew him from Jamie Lloyd’s gorgeously rhythmic-but-serious Cyrano de Bergerac of a few years back. I’d wondered if his hip-hoppy take on Euripides might be similarly solemn. In fact it’s nothing of the sort: colourful, irreverent and frequently goofy, its sillier moments reminded me of those hip hop Shakespeare plays that sometimes pop up at the Edinburgh Fringe (The Bomb-itty of Errors and such). It begins with the redoubtable Clare Perkins introducing us to her all-female posse of dysfunctional Dionysus worshippers, aka the Bacchae. ‘Not even Zeus can steal my thunder, fam’ she declares. It’s fun to spend time with them, as they swear and argue and rage, but there’s the nagging sense that it’s not clear where their story is going. Frankly it also seems a bit unexpected that a male writer would be out to reclaim Bacchae...

David Byrne’s Royal Court seasons have proven almost aggressively eclectic so far, with surefire commercial smashes rubbing up against stuff that comes across as genuinely quite mad. Coming a year after West End transfer Giant made its debut, Nick Payne’s The Unbelievers certainly looks like another big hit: the great Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Curious Incident) will make her debut at the venerable new writing theatre, in Payne’s first Court play since his huge hit Constellations, with design by the legendary Bunnie Christie. The cherry on the cake is the marvellous Nicola Walker, who will star as a woman whose son disappeared seven years ago and for whom time has now fractured, causing her to experience every minute of every year gone by simultaneously. Okay, that’s a pretty mad concept, but if anyone can pull it off it’s this A-Team of theatrical talent.

Read our review of The Lady from the Sea here. Ibsen’s 1888 play about a woman named Ellida at the heart of a love triangle between her safe husband Edward and a dangerous ex-lover referred to only as The Stranger gets staged relatively frequently: the last major London production was at the Donmar back in 2017. But it rarely gets the full West End celebrity Hedda Gabler/A Doll’s House/The Master Builder treatment – you’re probably looking at a late-’70s production at the Roundhouse starring Vanessa Redgrave for its last and really only really big outing in this country. Until now. In a year otherwise dominated by musicals and Shakespeare plays, the Bridge’s big autumn show is a new version of Ibsen’s play but Aussie auteur Simon Stone, that will mark the professional stage debut of Swedish screen star Alicia Vikander as Ellida, joined by big name Brit Andrew Lincoln as Edward (his first show in front of an audience in 16 years, although he did the Old Vic’s A Christmas Carol to a webcam and an empty theatre in 2020). It’s hard to know exactly what to expect: Stone’s adaptations are modern, radical and often rather blunt – his Yerma for the Young Vic was explosively good; his Phaedra for the National Theatre was a bit silly; much of his prolific output simply hasn’t been seen in this country. Whatever the case, he’s a good get for the Bridge and if this production could probaby go either way, then that’s part of the Stone magic. 

Since leaving the Young Vic in 2018, David Lan’s canvas may have changed but his principles certainly haven’t. Over 18 years in charge of the inflential Waterloo theatre he programmed bold work founded on unswerving morals, often foregrounding the lives of less fortunate people around the world. In 2021, in his first big project as a free agent, he oversaw the global tour of a huge puppet called Little Amal to highlight the plight of displaced children. And it’s a deep well of empathy that continues here with his first new play in almost 30 years.Set in the immediate fallout of the Second World War, with Germany ‘an open wound’, a worker for an agency called United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration stumbles across a mystery when she and her colleagues are trying to rehome displaced children. There are too many adopted kids in one small town.The reason is the unconscionable Lebensborn programme, Himmler’s invention, which sought to boost the Aryan race by kidnapping ‘perfect’ children from countries including Poland and Ukraine and giving them to Nazi families. Hundreds of thousands of them.Lan constructs a deeply researched, morally complex play based on interviews with journalist Gitta Serreny, who was part of the effort to reunite those children. It focuses on Juliet Stevenson’s idealistic UNRRA worker Ruth and a boy called Thomas who seeks her out many years later to demand answers about his past. Now a worn journalist, Ruth comes clean, summoning the...

Irish writer Conor McPherson also directs this West End revival of the play that sent his career into the stratosphere when it opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997. It’s lost none of its gently haunting, melancholic pull in the intervening years. The Weir is a classic example of a play where nothing really seems to happen, but then you realise you’ve seen pretty much all of life pass by. Here, Brendon Gleeson steps into the shoes of garage owner Jack, who we meet chewing over his day with publican Brendan (Owen McDonnell) in an Irish boozer in County Leitrim. They’re joined by Jim (Sean McGinley). Their conversation is as familiar as the ritual of their drink orders in designer Rae Smith’s well realised pub set, with its fading knick-knacks. But this fireside beer routine is interrupted when the man they’ve been making snide remarks about, Finbar (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), appears with a newcomer to the village, Valerie (Kate Phillips), who stuns pub owner Brendan by ordering a glass of white wine. Soon, though, she is drawn into their world of storytelling. The cast quickly establishes a believable, lived-in chemistry. An effortlessly charismatic Gleeson sinks as deeply into Jack as if he’s grown gruffly out of his bar stool – crotchety and drily funny. McGinley imbues ponderous Jim with an amusing lack of self-awareness tempered, at times, by an almost noble sincerity. Meanwhile, restlessly springy, with an ever-ready grin and eager to impress people, Vaughan-Lawlor is...

It’s one of those Fringe successes people dream of mimicking. Since debuting in Edinburgh in 2014, Duncan Macmillan Every Brilliant Thing – co-written with its original star Jonny Donahoe – has earned rave reviews, been translated into numerous languages, including Spanish, Greek, and Mandarin, and performed all across the globe. Last year, it returned to the Fringe  for a triumphant victory lap marking its tenth anniversary. But until now, this strangely uplifting show about depression had never received a West End run — perhaps because it was always deemed too intimate to upscale. If there’s any larger venue fit to house Macmillan’s mini masterpiece, it is @sohoplace. In a co-production between Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, the play is once again performed in-the-round, with the audience on all sides encouraged to join in and play their part. Over the course of its three-month stint, Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver will all take the lead role, but tonight’s performer is Lenny Henry. Dressed in a colourful patterned shirt, he sends smiles soaring across the crowd from the outset. Still, in the larger space, it’s harder to build the same rapport. With a much greater capacity and the audience spread across three tiers, creating the world of the play feels less like a communal endeavour and more the responsibility of a select few. Henry is a gentle guide: first as the seven-year-old boy desperate to show his mum – who has depression – all the goodness in...

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...

This review is from the Young Vic, March 2025. Punch will transfer to the West End in autumn 2025 with the same cast. Absurdly prolific as he is, it sometimes feels like we could do with cloning playwright James Graham a few times. His reassuringly familiar but diverse body of work has done so much to bring obscure chapters of recent history to life – from the whipping operation of the hung 1970s Labour parliament to the 1968 television clashes between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr – that it feels faintly bleak pondering the great stories that one James Graham alone has to let slide.  Punch, which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse last year, is the perfect example of what he does. It tells the poignant story of Jacob (David Shields), a lad from Nottingham who got into a totally pointless fight – if you can even call it that – with James, a (never-seen) paramedic just a few years older than him. On a big night out, Jacob punched James precisely once. James went down, and a couple of weeks later he died, his life support switched off following a bleed to the brain. Graham’s script delves into this with typical deftness: arguably his plays all amount to really, really good explainers. We get the incident and also its profoundly complicated aftermath. But we also get a forensic dive into Jacob’s life, his journey from a sweet primary schooler who loves his single mum to his gradual falling in with the wrong crowd, as undiagnosed neurological conditions and the...

If you’ve ever felt Lucy Westenra got a terrible deal (#justiceforlucy and all that), the Lyric Hammersmith’s new spin on Dracula is here to set the record straight. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation takes Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic classic and shifts the focus to the women sidelined in the original. It also joins a lineage of feminist retellings: in Liz Lochhead’s 1985 Dracula, Lucy and Mina embraced their vampiric transformation, while Morna Pearson’s 2023 Mina’s Reckoning was staged with an all-women and non-binary cast — productions that, for all their boldness, received a mixed reception. Here, Mina (Umi Myers) delivers a moving performance, puppeteering a play within a play, in which the survivors of Dracula’s incursion to London serve up a cautionary tale — and lament Lucy’s fate in long stretches of exposition, a real tension killer. For those familiar with the novel or its many adaptations, the constant need to catch us up on plot points can feel especially tedious. With Mina and Lucy (Mei Mac) at the centre, the ensemble — Jack Myers as Jonathan Harker included — circles in and out as stand-ins for multiple roles, but their presence, and their purpose, feels thin. But definitely not as thin as the role of the men in this production. In Stoker’s original, Harker, Van Helsing, and Lucy’s various suitors are men of action — rational champions of science and medicine rallying to protect ‘their’ women — while Mina and Lucy, though scandalous for their time, were still...