Plays on in London

The Cherry Orchard is, of course, one of Chekhov’s great plays, and follows an aiing aristocratic family as they contemplate the end of their beloved country estate and the sale of its beloved orchard. It was last seen in London a couple of years back in an absolutely bonkers production at the Donmar. Expect something less eccentric but powerfully poignant from the great director Ian Rickson, who turned in a fine Uncle Vanya on the cusp of the pandemic. This production will reunite him with Kristin Scott Thomas, who almost 20 years ago starred in his Royal Court production of The Seagull. She’ll play big hearted but finanically irresponsible aristocract Lyubov Ranevskaya, with Stephen Mangan co-starring as awkward nouveau riche interloper Lopakhin.

The thrill of slogging up three flights of steps to the Royal Court’s tiny experimental Upstairs studio is that you never know what you’ll find at the top. Happily, debut playwright Joy Nesbitt’s excellent ancestry drama has a scenario that bites from the get-go, and never relaxes its grip. It unfolds in a slave cabin on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, which is now a trendy Airbnb complete with Live Laugh Love poster and a pregnant White superhost Nora, (‘I’m a sympathetic vomiter!’) who is painfully anxious to welcome Talulah, a young Black Londoner into this devastatingly awkward space. Tallulah claims she has come to the slave cabin to ‘really disconnect and, you know, find purpose I guess’. But actually she's here to commune with her ancestress, Ginnie Good, a slave who birthed eight children in this very cabin. In a stirring invocation, Tallullah hangs bottles on the blossoming tree in the dirt patch outside and summons her, chanting ‘I have a right to the tree of life’. Back in 1862, the US Civil War is raging audibly and Ginnie is trying to soothe her baby girl. The women face powerful dilemmas in different eras while briefly sharing the same space.  Nesbitt conjures up all the drama you can find in a slave cabin-turned Airbnb, which is a lot: cringe comedy; morally bankrupt personal drama; cultural satire; pathos and female heroism; hair-raising spiritual connections. Tonally that’s also a lot and, when I saw it early in the run, Tatenda Shamiso’s lively...

The first major West End revival of Edward Albee’s classic play in a decade has a cast to die for, as Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson play the iconically awful George and Martha, an acidic middle aged couple who invite George’s young colleague Nick and his wife Honey over for a bizarre evening of weird and problematic game playing. And @sohoplace is a wonderfully intimate venue to watch the horrors unfold. The catch is that the show is heavily sold out, though at time of writing there were a decent number of more expensive tickets available across the run. The great Marianne Elliott will direct a cast that’s rounded out by Josh Dylan as Nick, and Phoebe Horn as Honey.

We all love a plot twist but New York theatremaker Andy Sandberg’s play Affluenza feels like a cautionary story about what happens when you twist too hard. Well actually maybe ‘plot twist’ isn’t right: it’s more that writer-director Sandberg is obsessed with the idea of bamboozling us, with each new scene in his play determinedly defying expectations and eliciting a bigger WTF than the last. This isn’t inherently a good thing. Especially if your expectation was that you were going to see Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp in the lead role of Dylan, an American teenager who kills two people in a drink driving incident and whose parents agree to the outlandish defence that he was simply too cocooned by privileged to understand the gravity of his actions. And to be fair Schnapp does play Dylan, who is based on real-life Texan teen Ethan Couch. But it’s a supporting role – in the first scene he wanders briefly through his parents’ posh living room while they talk to the very expensive New York lawyer they’ve flown out. Then there’s one set in his bedroom. And that’s kind of it for this version of Dylan. It’s odd: you have to think that having a not-too–big role may have been what tempted Schnapp into making his stage debut. But he’s perfectly good here and could clearly have handled more. Affluenza then abruptly leaps ahead to after the trial, where Dylan successfully escaped with a slap on the wrist. It certainly subverts our expectation of a courtroom drama with a juicy role...

It’s shaping up to be a good year for Brit auteur Rob Icke: his superb take on Oedipus wrapped up an acclaimed Broadway run in February and was rewarded with seven Tony nominations; his idiosyncratic version of Romeo & Juliet is a hit and further shows his pull with big names by bagging the UK stage debut of Sadie Sink; and now he’s got a second original West End show lined up for 2026 in The Lives of Others.  If you’re reasonably au fait with global cinema you’ll recognise that this is an adaptation of the Oscar-winning 2006 German film about a playwright and his mistress being surveilled by Stasi agents in ’80s East Germany. It’s the first time Icke – who has adapted many a classic play – has done the same for a film, but the clautrophobic source material built around a small number of characters feels perfect for adaptation, and Icke is an expert with human emotions, often deepeningthe classics. He’s also got some bloody good names here: Bridgerton man Luke Thompson will play playwright Georg Dreyman, with Stephen Dillane as Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, the agent somewhat reluctantly spying on him. But the big coup is Keira Knightley, returning to the stage for the first time in 15 years to star as Christa-Maria Sieland, Dreyman’s actress lover. It’s the big class celebrity drama of the autumn.

The key to what makes Daniel Bailey’s touring revival of August Wilson’s 1985 play – now at the Lyric Hammersmith – so good is how intimately devastating it is. The sweep of the generational and national tragedy so deftly portrayed by Wilson is always anchored by its impact on one family. At this production’s heart is Ray Fearon as Troy, a fiercely proud Black man whose struggle to support his family and anger at the racism of 1950s America, on the cusp of painful postwar change, becomes destructively entangled with his inability to let go of the past. As he relentlessly builds a fence around his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is he keeping the world out or trapping his family inside? Lily Arnold’s gorgeous set – a two-story house façade, with peeling paint and fading features – is a richly realised domestic space in which the drama feels real and rooted. As characters laugh, argue or fight in the yard, we see others at bedroom windows, on the stairs or answering the phone. At some points, the house pivots 360 degrees – briefly revealing, almost in tableaux, the interior. These small, telling moments, coupled with Khalil Madovi’s soulful sound design and the moments when the cast interrupt the naturalism to sing alone to us, add to the production’s richly textured emotional authenticity. Fearon gives a tour-de-force performance as Troy, his face quickly switching from easy charm to ugly menace when his character feels his authority challenged. He conveys the deep...

Is getting a drink with an ex always a bad idea? If the aim to create the chaos and drama befitting a side-splitting one-act play, well: you might be onto something. Debuting in London after runs in New York and Los Angeles, Douglas Lyons’ Table 17 is dependent on people making bad, often unjustifiable, choices. Decisions are made and details revealed that elicit audible boos from the audience, some of whom sit on cabaret tables and have been actively encouraged in the pre-show to talk backand let rip. It’s all part of the fun.  Directed by Tony-winner Zhailon Levingston (he of Broadway’s acclaimed CATS The Jellicle Ball), Table 17 is unafraid to conjure these big emotions – and big sounds – from its crowd. Constantly wrongfooting the audience, the show flips from laugh-out-loud hilarity to genuine tragedy in minutes, changing costumes and switching timelines at equal pace. It’s a stylish and exhilarating theatrical experience, jolted forward by three powerful, emotive performances. The characters might be car crashes, but you won’t want to look away from a production this slick. The former couple in question are the confident Jada (Marisha Wallace) and kinda corny mechanic-cum-music-producer Dallas (the West End’s original Alexander Hamilton, Jamael Westman). We meet both individually, delivering respective monologues as they get ready for their date (or not-date?). The pair primp and preen, as Jada switches one bandage dress for another and Dallas opts for the corduroy...

Almost a century on and I think we can be adult about the fact that 20th century American playwright Clifford Odets was never in the same league as the older Eugene O’Neill, or the younger Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller (who both clearly owed him a debt). Golden Boy, from 1937, is a fine play but clunkier than any of those writers at their best, with rougher-drawn characters and a somewhat on-the-nose consideration of art versus violence as embodied by protagonist Joe Bonaparte, a sensitive Italian-American violinist who throws himself into the world of boxing, with ultimately tragic results.  But it’s boring to quibble about the flaws of a worthwhile revival: not every US play from the middle of the last century can be A View from the Bridge. Though elements of Sam Yates’ stylish take will doubtless prove to be divisive, I thought it was great, a crack cast meeting a bold vision that seeks to do more than just squeeze Golden Boy into standard naturalist tragedy shapes. The story opens with Tom, a down-on-his-luck boxer manager in ‘30s New York. He’s played by Daniel Mays with a not entirely dissimilar note to his Nathan Detroit in the Bridge Theatre's recent Guys & Dolls: all comic bluster and goggling eyes. Like Nathan, he even has a girlfriend he won’t marry, although Hayley Squires' Lorna is a more intense character, and the chief impediment to their wedded bliss is that Tom already has a wife.  Business is bad, but then step into the ring – first metaphorically,...

An overlooked middle-aged woman decides to take a stand one day after an encounter on a station platform goes wrong, in Helen Edmundson’s new play. We really don’t know a lot more about in than that, but Julie Robson – the woman in question – is played by Anne-Marie Duff, which is always good news. Blanche McIntyre directs. 

Describing the plays of James Graham as ‘history podcast theatre’ would be mean and inaccurate but also a bit true. To be clear, Graham has produced many wonderful works of drama. But even when he’s not at his absolute best dramatically you’ll still come out of one of his historical dramas having learned a lot. The Standard of Living isn’t quite Graham at his best dramatically, because where his finest works have tended to be hyper-fixated on small, manageable periods of history. Here he almost has too much to say about his subject: the great economist John Maynard Keynes. Photo: Manuel HarlanNatalia Osipova and the ensemble Did he want to write a drama about Keynes’ membership of the Bloomsbury Group and the tensions that crept in between the gay economist and his bohemian artist pals when he went to work for the government, and when he later dumbfounded them by bringing home a woman, the blunt Russian ballet star Lydia Lopokova (Natalia Osipova)?  Did he want to write a play about Keynes’ rivalry with the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston)? Here the two are depicted as genuinely fond of each other, but so aghast at the other’s economic visions that they can’t help but becomes enemies. Or is The Standard of Living about… the standard of living, and Keynes’ belief in not only spending out of a recession, but that an infusion of art – be that the Degas paintings he snaps up for a song at the beginning, or Arts Council England which he founds at the end –...