Plays on in London

Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac.  Specifically, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band’s mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members ‘Holly’ (aka Christine McVie) and ‘Diana’ (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band’s menfolk in favour of their own condominiums.  Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir).  Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile...

  General advice is to stay away from hornets’ nests, especially if you are the West End and you want people to have a nice time and pay lots of money for a ticket. Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play goes against general advice. In fact he finds the biggest hornets’ nests he can and prods at all of them, and sees what comes flying out. What does come out is pretty spectacular. Despite recently winning what seemed like every single award that had ever been invented, and turning round the faltering fortunes of the Royal Court Theatre, there was never a guarantee that his play about (‘about’ seems like a fairly inadequate word) Roald Dahl’s antisemitism – and the deep trenches of dispute about Israel – would work in the West End. At the Royal Court you expect that kind of politics. The West End is for musicals and celebrities.But it does work, just as brilliantly. First off there’s John Lithgow (also all the awards) stooping and scowling his way into Dahl, charming in his grandpa-ish grumping at the beginning. He’s a walking metaphor: a giant – of literature, of stature – and big. But friendly? If you knew nothing about him except the good stuff – Charlie, Matilda, Mr Fox – you’d be charmed by his strong will, his passion and compassion. It’s 1983, he’s got a bad back, his house is being noisily renovated, he’s recently got engaged, and has a new book coming out so no wonder he’s grumpy. When his publisher suggests he moves temporarily to a nearby cottage, his crabby reply is, ‘I...

This review is from Soho Theatre in 2022; it transfers to Kiln Theatre with a partially changed cast that includes Liz Carr and Leah Harvey. The rainbow flag offers an idealised portrait of the LGBTQ-plus community: people of different stripes co-existing in harmony, each taking up an equal amount of space. But the reality is messier, scribbled over with conflicts and inequalities. Iman Qureshi's warm, complex play 'The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs' explores just how difficult it is to create a queer space, while showing how beautiful it can be when the stars align. Things start out in pretty formulaic style. Each week, a disparate gaggle of lesbians meet up in a leaky-roofed hall to sing in a choir, with the lofty goal of performing on the main stage at Pride. There's wildly confident womaniser Ellie (Fanta Barrie), hyper-woke academic Ana (Claudia Jolly), and her reluctantly-tagging-along butch engineer girlfriend Lori (Kibong Tanji) who turns out to have an amazing singing voice, all arranged into an approximation of harmony by self-styled OWL (older wiser lesbian) Connie (Shuna Snow). It could all be the beginnings of a dykier, hopefully less doomed remake of 'Glee'. But Qureshi's play is way smarter than that. She toys enjoyably with lesbian cliches (sensible footwear, veganism, buzzcuts) only to reach beyond them to tell less familiar stories. Like that of Dina (an engagingly puppyish Lara Sawalha), a Muslim woman who throws herself into choir as an escape from her...

Having made her name by working through Tennessee Williams’s core plays, the Almeida’s Rebecca Frecknall now seems to be lining up the rest of the mid-twentieth century American canon. She’s already directed Cabaret and has Miller’s Death of a Salesman booked in at the National Theatre in a couple of years; and now she tries her hand at Eugene O’Neill. A Moon for the Misbegotten is O’Neill’s final play, that serves as a sequel to his great autobiographical work Long Day’s Journey Into Night (although somwhat confusingly the author famously didn’t allow the first play to be produced in his lifetime). Less bleak than the first work, A Moon… is set on an isolated, crumbing Connecticut farm and follows a group of characters who live or visit the place. Ruth Wilson will play Josie Hogan, the quick tongued daughter of tenant farmer Phil Hogan; Michael Shannon will play their grieving, alcoholic landlord James Tyrone Jr, aka an older version of Jamie Tyrone from Long Day’s Journey. Shannon actually played the role in a 2016 Broadway production of Long Day’s Journey, meaning this will potentially serve as a sequel for him, if not for many audience members.

There has been a note of enigma to the promotion of this new West End drama by largely unknown US playwright Lila Raicek. The official line is that it’s a response to Ibsen’s The Master Builder but not a rewrite, but there has been a pointed refusal - in cast interviews and other publicity - to say any more about the specifics of the play. Having now seen My Master Builder I’m not sure I’m any the wiser as to what the big secret was. Perhaps it’s simply that a full plot summary felt like it was virtually begging interviewers to ask star Ewan McGregor about the end of his first marriage. Or if we’re going for the idea that there was a more poetic mystery, I guess the big revelation is that the play is somewhat autobiographical. It’s *My* Master Builder because Raicek has incorporated her own life into it, or at least one experience (that she owns up to, anyway). She was invited to a posh dinner party and realised upon arrival that she’d been cast as a pawn in a weird psychosexual drama between her hosts, a married couple. First world problems and all that, but it gave her a route into updating Ibsen’s odd late play about a tortured architect haunted by a past encounter.  Henry Solness (McGregor) is a starchitect who lives in the Hamptons with his publisher wife Elena (Kate Fleetwood). They are throwing a party for the completion of a local arts centre he’s designed, that is intimately connected to the sad early death of their son. It doesn’t take long to determine their...

Ola Ince’s recent productions for the Globe include a gritty police procedural Othello and a modern dress Romeo and Juliet that was so progressive it made the front page of The Sun (‘Wokeo and Juliet’, the headline screamed). It’s therefore somewhat surprising that – aesthetically speaking – hers is by far the most trad take on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible I’ve ever seen: full-on period pilgrim garb from designer Amelia Jane Hankin, including a magnificent array of funny little conical hats. But after a little while adjusting to the production’s rhythms it becomes apparent that Ince has done something quite distinctive with The Crucible: she’s directed it like an episode of The Archers. By that I mean she’s tuned down the bombast and supernatural elements and essentially played it as a naturalistic drama about the eccentric, bickering inhabitants of Salem, Massachusetts.  This is carried off surprisingly smoothly, at least at first. Aside from the fact Miller wrote some genuinely funny village oddball characters (most notably the hyper litigious Giles Corey), it’s important to remember that The Crucible starts off small. As the play begins, some local girls have been reported as dancing in the woods, and one of them – Betty Parris – seems to have fallen ill. Another of them, Hannah Saxby’s Abigail Williams, has been having an affair with brooding local farmer John Procter (Gavin Drea) – they’re still affectionate when they briefly meet at the beginning, though he insists...

There’s something relatable – and deeply funny – about a grandmother demanding to be brought potatoes and mixed spice, then grinning at her own audacity. That warmth and wit is central to Danny James King’s Miss Myrtle’s Garden, a tender play in which every cast member is as magnetic as the other. The story does indeed unfold in the overgrown Peckham garden of Miss Myrtle (Diveen Henry) – a space dense with ghosts and flowers. Into this tangled setting steps her grandson Rudy (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay), who has just moved in with his (secret) boyfriend Jason (Elander Moore). Rudy, wary of his sharp-tongued Jamaican grandmother and constrained by his job at a Catholic school, isn’t ready to come out, placing strain on them both. Moore’s Jason is vibrant and warm; Ahomka-Lindsay captures Rudy’s internal battle with a mounting heartbreak. Meanwhile, Henry’s comic timing is electric, and her facial expressions alone tell stories that stretch across decades. Myrtle is also slipping into dementia – a disease that disproportionately affects Black and South Asian communities. Her beloved cat, Sarah, is missing. She spends her days bickering with Eddie, her kind but slightly oafish Irish neighbour (a charming Gary Lilburn), whom she first catches urinating near her flowerbeds. What begins as comedy softens into a portrait of two lonely people reaching – awkwardly – for connection. The actors orbit each other with care, often lingering in meaningful silences or glances. New Bush...

For a script penned in 1893, Mrs Warren’s Profession still feels remarkably fresh. Absence has probably made the heart grow fonder when it comes to George Bernard Shaw’s problem play. From the very beginning, it’s had a fraught staging history. In Victorian England there was general social outcry over its subject matter, and you can understand why: its attitude towards sex work as a functioning product of the capitalist labour market feels bracingly current even today. Yet upon first glance, director Dominic Cooke’s production is as traditional as they come; Chloe Lamford’s costumes are all lace and ruffles, and ‘by Jove!’ is exclaimed ad nauseum. But something darker bubbles beneath the surface, hinted at by the ghostly chorus of white-clad women who circle the stage. The words ‘prostitute’ or ‘brothel madam’ are never uttered – doing so in polite society would, of course, be wrong – not even by the titular Mrs Warren (Imelda Staunton) whose profession it is. Yet Staunton, as one would expect, is able to create a character rich with contradiction in this vivid production. There’s nothing ahistorical in her performance, yet Mrs Warren’s monologues could be quoted verbatim by anti-criminalisation campaigners today without the batting of an eyelid. The version of England that greets us, however, is worlds away from Mrs Warren’s seedy life. In fact, it’s her daughter Vivie (Bessie Carter, Staunton’s real-life offspring) who greets us from the revolve stage, which Lamford...

This review is from the original 2017 Old Vic run for Girl from the North Country, in July 2017. It returns to the theatre with a new cast in July 2025. Whatever you do, don’t call it the ‘Bob Dylan musical’. Yes, the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman may have once described himself as ‘a song and dance man’. But playwright-director Conor McPherson’s bleak, Dylan-soundtracked ‘Girl from the North Country’ is a play with songs that avoids the trappings of musical theatre like the plague – there are no dance routines, no happy endings, and the Old Vic stage remains dimly lit and half-shrouded in darkness. Dylan himself had no creative input, but one assumes it was always implicit in his licensing of the songs that it wasn’t ever going to be a big tits-and-teeth West End show with Bob’s name in lights. Taking place in the Dustbowl at the height of the Great Depression, ‘Girl from the North Country’ extracts the Steinbeckian strand from Dylan’s oeuvre, and might be imagined as an extra story that didn’t make Todd Haynes’s haunting, Dylan-inspired film ‘I’m Not There’. It’s set at an inn in Duluth, Minnesota (Dylan’s hometown) in 1934. Nick Laine (Ciaran Hinds), the gruff owner of the establishment, has many problems, not least the apparent dementia of his wife Elizabeth, played by Shirley Henderson in a truly bewitching turn, intense, otherworldly, almost rockstar-like. The show is set entirely in the inn, and follows the Laines and their patrons, who range from Joe (Arinze Kene), an...

Burlesque seems to be having a moment on the London stage at the moment. Alongside the ongoing success of the Moulin Rouge! musical and the imminent arrival of a West End stage adaptation of Christina Aguilera’s film Burlesque, here’s Diamonds & Dust, a perculiar affair that sees ’90s legends Dita von Teese (US cabaret star) and Faye Tozer (UK member of Steps) join forces for what sounds like a burlesque review with a loose plot. Said plot concerns Miss Kitty LeRoy, a Wild West card sharp trying to make it in a man’s world, looked over by Lady Luck (Von Teese at selected performances). Will it be ‘good’? The odds are it’ll be stronger burlesque than drama, but who knows eh?