Plays on in London

‘But how did Marilyn Monroe really die?’ is not necessarily a question you’re expecting to have answered down the theatre in 2026, especially not via the medium of a play starring late ‘00s pop star Pixie Lott.  But here we are. Sharleen Cooper Cohen’s drama – conspiracy thriller, even – opens with Lott’s extremely breathy, extremely blonde Marilyn hovering near the bed where her body was found. She tells us we don’t really know the real her, and to prove it she drops an F-bomb (Marilyn Monroe did swears???) and takes us on a whirlwind tour of her life.  Not a very illuminating one. In part because Lott’s limitations as an actor leave her stranded doing what amounts to a Monroe impression and in part because Cohen clearly thinks subtext is for cowards there’s simply no depth of character here. A ‘real’ Marilyn is constantly alluded to, but her whole life still seems like a performance. Everyone talks in exposition. Lott’s Marilyn never does anything casual or insignificant. The stilted dialogue is simply a cavalcade of modestly interesting facts about her career, marriages and death. And then there’s the conspiracy. Although the fact of Monroe’s death is dropped at the start, Cohen essentially precedes in a purely linear fashion, only revealing how she believes her subject died at the end. Rather than present it in a literary way, Cohen simply trundles through and says ‘this is how it happened’… and then has Marilyn confirm it herself. Lott’s Marilyn never does anything...

What a treat for London to get two major Cate Blanchett stage performances two years on the trot. A major stage force long before her screen career took off, Blanchett famously co-ran the Sydney Theatre Company with her husband Andrew Upton for five years, and has taken plenty of work to New York, but her London appearances tend to have been confined to avant-garde projects that were difficult to get tickets to: see her previous National Theatre turn in 2019’s weirdy When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other. But with last year’s The Seagull at the Barbican the double Academy Award winner – and now Sussex resident – signalled that she was ready for still artsy but relatively more mainstream work on bigger stages, and that continues with Electra/Persona. Running on the Lyttelton stage over late summer, it’s directed and adapted by fellow Aussie Benedict Andrews and is indeed a mash-up of Ancient Greek classic Electra and Ingmar Bergman’s more recent 1966 masterpiece Persona. Exactly how all this will work is TBC, although it would seem from the synopis that a performance of Electra replaces the film images that traditionally rupture the world of the two female leads in Persona. Blanchett will be joined by her Tár co-star Nina Hoss and young Black Doves star Ella Lily Hyland. It’s not yet clear who is playing who although doomed princess Electra and Persona’s leads Elisabet and Alma offers three obviously leads (though it may not be as simple as all that).

The Truth opens with a classic farce set-up: a rumpled bed from which the rumpled head of Stephen Mangan's Michel emerges, looking roguishly pleased with itself, next to the equally rumpled but less satisfied head of Alice (Sarah Hadland) who is, we soon discover, Michel's best friend's wife. Over the course of 90 tightly-plotted minutes, it becomes enjoyably clear that neither Michel, Alice nor their cuckolded spouses Paul and Laurence, would know what the truth was if it came and bit them on the bottom.  There is plenty to laugh at and to like about Lindsay Posner's production, which was a hit in 2016 at the Menier Chocolate Factory and is now revived, with extra star power, for the West End. It's a concise evening of polished, satisfyingly light entertainment, with a strong cast, an early finish time, and fairly reasonable ticket prices. Mangan fans won't be disappointed, his performance is more than worth the entry fee. He is fantastically enjoyable as Michel, bringing irresistible hangdog charm and ageing himbo vibes to the character who believes he is successfully deceiving everyone around him. His epic tantrum on discovering that he is the more deceived is hilarious: utterly hypocritical, and heartfelt. Michel's arc is the driving force of the story and when Mangan commits to his outrage, it lifts the comedy to the next level and really makes it grip. A comic ensemble often finds a deeper groove during a show's run. On opening night, it stopped just short of being...

This review is from 2022 and the original, Ralph Spall-starring London run for Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation. The production returns in 2026 with a new cast headed by Richard Coyle as Atticus Finch. Meet Atticus Finch: centrist dad. Aaron Sorkin’s smash Broadway stage version of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ makes a fair few tweaks to Harper Lee’s 1960 literary masterpiece.  Most predictably, there’s the ‘West Wing’ mastermind’s trademark sparkling dialogue. Yes, he remains faithful to the idea that we’re in ’30s Alabama, but his polished wit is very much present and correct, most especially in the goofily pinging three-way narration provided by his child characters: plucky Scout (Gwyneth Keyworth), chippy Jem (Harry Redding) and dorky Dill (David Moorst). The narrative structure has been tinkered with: the climactic trial scene is now parcelled up into chunks throughout the play rather than included as a single sweeping sequence.  The plot, however, is essentially unchanged. By far Sorkin’s most significant intervention via Bartlett Sher’s production is to pointedly reimagine the play’s white lawyer hero Atticus Finch. Rafe Spall’s interpretation of the role steers well clear of Gregory Peck’s immortal screen version and, to a large extent, the book. Peck’s Finch was famously sonorous-voiced and saintly. In both book and film, Finch was explicitly seen through the adoring eyes of his daughter Scout. Here, with his chipmunk Alabama twang, Spall simply *sounds* less like a wise...

There is evidence to suggest that giving the hero of Edmond Rostan’s French classic a big prosthetic nose is increasingly considered passé. Certainly the last major London revival – a brooding, rap-battling affair directed by Jamie Lloyd – was a case in point. James McAvoy starred as Cyrano, the brilliant wordsmith with an obtrusively big schnozz. But he did it sans stuck-on snout – it worked by suggesting Cyrano’s inability to directly woo his love Roxane was down to a crippling case of low self-esteem, amounting to body dysmorphia.  Lloyd’s take was a modern-dress masterpiece. So when posters appeared of this RSC transfer – with Adrian Lester in period clobber and sporting a spectacularly fake conker – it looked kinda stuffy by comparison. But not a bit of it! Yes, co-adaptors Simon Evans (who also directs) and Debris Stevenson restore the work to 1640 France – a time when the country was stuck in the Thirty Years’ War – and yes, it comes with all the trimmings of that era (pocket swords! Mournful violin players!). It’s very much the romantic tragicomedy Rostand wrote, but despite its period setting, it feels wholly current.  Lester’s Cyrano appears as a man of swaggering confidence – a soldier as adept with a sword as with a quill. Though there’s no mistake his nose has held him back in life – it seems to prompt a Tourettes-like response from those who meet him – he takes it on the chin, keeping his insecurities stoically bottled up. Rarely does limerence sound as...

Clint Dyer may no longer be National Theatre deputy artistic director, but he remains front and centre of its 2026 programming as he helms a widescreen Olivier Theatre UK premiere of Tracey Scott Wilson's 2003 play. Based on a series of real-life stories, it follows four journalists as they frantical scrabble to land the story of a white teacher murdered in a Black neighbourhood. Letitia Wright of Black Panther fame is the big name in the cast – other members include Ashley Thomas, Lorraine Toussaint and Wilf Scolding.

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...

Read our review of The Oresteia HERE. Aussie prodigy Simon Stone seems to be the de facto resident director at the Bridge these days: last year he directed Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, and next year he’ll direct Chekhov’s Ivanov. This year, he tackles The Oresteia, which is credited as ‘Aeschelus and others’. That’s a nod to the fact that Stone’s adaptations are extremely free and easy and you can expect only the loosest relationship to any one specific version of the story of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon who takes violent revenge on his mum Clytamnestra for his father’s murder. Excactly how Stone’s Oresteia will play out is TBC, but the sole line of description suggests a typicaly free adaptation: ‘A contemporary family wakes up in a Greek myth and can’t seem to find a way out of their hellish destiny.’ Stone’s plays invariably come with big names attached, and The Oresteia boasts a cast headed by US star Mary-Louise Parker as Montie (the character names seem to have little bearing on the originals), David Morrissey as Christopher, Tom Glynn-Carney as Augie, Rosie Sheehy as Alice, Lloyd Hutchinson as Melville, John Macmillan as Jerome and Archie Madekwe as Lorenzo.

Read our review of Cleansed. ‘You can have empathy for anyone’ – Rebecca Frecknall on staging Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. Sarah Kane’s harrowing masterpiece about love and torture was last revived a decade ago, when Katy Mitchell’s production caused audience members to faint. Now Almeida deputy Rebecca Frecknall waves goodbye to the theatre that made her name with a revival, and a rare deviation for her from the classic American plays she tends to direct. The plot isn”t exactly easy to describe, but it follows a group of inmates in a hospital-like inistitution presided over by the monstrous Tinker, who tortures them, experiments on them, and commits various other unspeakable acts both physical and psychological. Leo Bill, Pearl Chanda, Luke Cinque-White, Lizzy Connolly, Jack Riddiford, Parth Thakerar and Stuart Thompson star. Genuinely about as extreme as art gets, it’s not for the faint of heart.

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...