Plays on in London

  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...

A fascinating feminist hybrid of EastEnders, Samuel Beckett and Wolf Hall, Ava Pickett’s 1536 is set in some marshland on the outskirts of an Essex village in – you guessed it – 1536, the year Anne Boleyn was executed.  Not that this is a by-the-numbers Tudor drama: the story focuses on three young women – Jane (Liv Hill), Anna (Sienna Kelly) and Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) – who never come within a sniff of the royal family. They see the monarchy as an important but distant constellation: in the opening scene Hill’s innocent Jane struggles for Henry VIII’s name beyond ‘the king’. The engine of the play is Pickett’s superb dialogue and the sweary, lairy modern-language chats had by the women in the trampled bulrushes of Max Jones’s set.. Hill’s Jane is an adorable naif, Reynolds’s midwife Mariella is gawkily sarcastic. Each has their own complicated relationship with men in the village. But it’s Kelly’s Anna who is effectively the lead: beautiful and poor, she is deserted and scorned by the townsfolk, especially her wealthy lover Richard (Adam Hugill), who at the start of the play we discover is set to be married off to Jane. It begins as a funny, even goofy, drama. Three Tudor women, effing and blinding away in an Essex field, using language that would make Danny Dyer blush is inherently funny, as is the fact that each of the early scenes begins with Anna and Richard going at it hammer and tongs in the reeds. But things start to curdle: aside from various village tensions...

The great Irish playwright Conor McPherson returns from his long absence with a bang this year. Next up at the Old Vic is a return for his hit Dylan’s musical Girl from the North Country; later this autumn he’s the adapting playwright for the stage version of The Hunger Games. But before that is what the real McPherson heads have been waiting for: The Brightening Air, his first original play since The Night Alive in 2013. It’s a slow, wistful start, the dial firmly tuned to ‘Chekhov’. The setting is a semi-dilapidated County Sligo farmhouse, at some point in the ‘80s. McPherson - who also directs - meticulously builds up a sprawling cast of characters centring on the trio of siblings who inherited the farm from their father. There’s intense, troubled Stephen (Brian Gleeson), who does most of the running of the place; there’s train-mad Billie (Rosie Sheehy), whose tar-thick accent and general lairiness briefly distracts you from the fact she’s obviously on the spectrum and incapable of independent living; and there’s Dermot (Chris O’Dowd), a deeply annoying, reasonably successful businessman. Dermot has long since moved out, but the occasion of their reunion is the arrival of their uncle Pierre (Seán McGinley), a blind, discredited priest who they regard with a mix of fondness and pity.  McPherson probably has a couple more characters than he strictly speaking needs here, but it’s still deft stuff, a slow-burn, bittersweet drama about a family finally disintegrating under...

New shoots keep growing from Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, its legend quietly bubbling away for 20 years and its strange, unsettling magnificence never wavering. First performed in 2005, it was a solid rejection of stuffy plays where the actors say their memorised words each night in the same way. Instead, every performance has a different actor performing alongside experimental theatremaker Crouch, now almost 400 of them, including Hugh Bonneville, Mike Myers and Alanis Morrissette. They come on stage, follow Crouch’s instructions, take on the part of a grieving father and generally look very nervous while doing it. The actor has never seen or read the play before, and the audience doesn’t know which star guest they’ll get. For this twentieth anniversary production, the list of actors eager to submit themselves to this grief-laden improv show is impressive: David Tennant and Indira Varma are on the roster, while on press night it was Jessie Buckley pulled up from the front row.The performer is instructed very precisely by Crouch what to do and say. She is Andy, a middle aged man, grieving the recent loss of his daughter who was killed by a driver. The driver was a stage hypnotist – Crouch flits between being authoritative man in charge of the show, and hapless entertainer in silver waistcoat and stumbling patter – and Andy attends one of his rubbish performances to find answers. At every moment, Crouch lets Buckley know what to do, either through a headpiece, a script in her...

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...

There’s a lot of big spectacle in the West End at the moment. Big musicals, big stars, big budgets. Which makes Ryan Calais Cameron’s fifties-set three hander about a potentially commie actor seem pretty conventional. We’ve got sharp suits, big pours of scotch, a haze of cigarette smoke. We’ve got a no-bullshit lawyer who speaks in cliches (‘now we’re cooking with gas’ etc) and a nervy wannabe writer trying to break the big time. All a bit familiar, a bit old-fashioned.  But to assume that’s all that this play’s going to be – a pastiche of a fast-patter period piece – is to underestimate Calais Cameron who, after all, smashed the West End with his beautiful play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy. Because in walks Sidney Poitier, the guy who’d go on to become the first Black man to win an Oscar, and then the whole thing gets richer and tenser, with big speeches that borrow the cadences and blueprints of the golden age, becoming a play that feels both completely contemporary and like an instant classic.  The play is a transfer from the Kiln Theatre, directed by its artistic director Amit Sharma, and it works so well in the West End, maybe because it’s a really simple idea: Poitier is about to be cast in a big breakout role, but NBC’s lawyers want him to sign an oath that he’s not a communist, as well as denounce a friend. It’s three actors arguing in a nicely furnished office. That’s literally it.  First there’s the initial tension of...

This feels modestly momentous: while Arthur Miller’s classic Salem witch trials drama-slash-McCarthyism allegory is revived relatively frequently, The Crucible has never been staged at the Globe’s oudoor theatre before. That’s because nobody has been staged here except Shakespeare and specially commissioned new writing – Ola Ince’s revival of The Crucible is the first outdoor Globe revival of another playwright There is, one suspects, a subtext: new writing was intended to make the theatre more than a museum to the Bard, and to give living playwrights a chance to write for the Globe’s idiosyncratic space. But it can be a hard sell to a tourist-centric crowd and new plays have become much less frequent during the post pandemic years. This ticks the ‘non-Shakespeare’ box while likely offering a decent box office return. It’ll be intereresting to see how this all develops, but it should be noted that The Crucible feels like a tremendous fit for the Globe: set in a superstitious New England just a few decades after Shakespeare’s death, its sprawling cast and epic structure demand a huge space, and by heck the Globe is going to give it one. 

Everyone loves a grifter. From Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley to Anna Delvey, we’re suckers for the charming anti-hero, the confidence artist who plays by their own rules. So it’s no surprise that House of Games — David Mamet’s 1987 film, adapted by Richard Bean for the Almeida in 2010 — still exerts a certain pull. Restaged at Hampstead Theatre, Bean’s revival invites us back into an underbelly of sleaze, scams, and high-stakes hijinks. We open in a therapy session between Dr Margaret Ford (Lisa Dillon), a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, and Bobby (Oscar Lloyd), an erratic gambler. When he mentions a shadowy place called The House of Games, Margaret follows him there (ethical code be damned) –ostensibly to help, but really because she’s bored and on the hunt for material for her next book. Here’s where you’ll need to suspend your disbelief: after just one visit, she’s in deep –drawn into the orbit of Mike (Richard Harrington), part Al Pacino, part De Niro, who offers her an insider’s view of the con. This crew are less Ocean’s Eleven, more low-rent grifters Dillon plays Ford with a cool restraint. Across her, Harrington’s Mike isn’t quite the smooth talker we might expect (there’s a whole conversation about dinner in between kisses), but he serves the story’s purpose: the man who knows exactly how to spot a crack and wedge himself into it. Mike’s crew are less Ocean’s Eleven, more low-rent grifters. A frail old-timer, a blustering ‘bartender’, and a sleazy gambler round...

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...

Although most news coming out of America this year is hysterically awful, we are, at least, getting Stereophonic. The most Tony-nominated play of all time, the drama by David Adjmi with songs by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler is a fictionalised account of the legendarily tense sessions that led to the birth of Fleetwood Mac’s all conquering Rumours album, written and recorded while the various couples in the band were in the process of splittling from each other with degrees of prejudice. Hugely acclaimed Stateside, it’ll go straight into the West End for its London transfer. Running for over three hours, it’s long – note the earlier 7pm nightly start time – but by all accounts very much worth it.  Three of the original US cast members – Andrew R Butler, Eli Gelb and Chris Stack – will returnfor the Daniel Aukin-directed production. They’ll be joined by Brits Zachary Hart, Lucy Karczewski (both of whom were in the recent Barbican Seagull with Cate Blanchett), Jack Riddiford and Nia Towle.