Plays on in London

‘Nine Lives’ ran at the Arcola in 2016 and now transfers to the Bridge for it season of socially-distanced monologues. Ishmael is one of the people who make up those immigrant ‘swarms’ we’ve been hearing so much about. He’s also the narrator of Zodwa Nyoni’s monologue, which comes to the Arcola after a nationwide tour. It’s a stark, sparse piece that urges, above all, kindness. After fleeing Zimbabwe, where the authorities found out he was gay, Ishmael is in limbo in the UK as he awaits a verdict on whether he can stay. Lladel Bryant darts around the stage in this energetic performance, building the world and characters he’s describing with gestures, accents and leaps. Director Alex Chisholm keeps the stage completely bare. A suitcase, a light bulb: that’s it, that’s all Ishmael’s got. No contact with his family, no friends, pitiful amounts of money on which to survive, and just the lonely turmoil in his head. He is completely exposed to the audience in a play about the fear of being exposed.Nyoni writes with a gentleness that doesn’t seem designed to provoke shock or outrage; instead it seeks to humanise Ishmael – and all those people who have been degraded and humiliated by governments, border agencies and ignorant, fearful racists. By giving Ishmael’s character depth and warm wit, and by focusing on how intensely solitary it is to live in a strange country where people hate your presence, Nyoni fights against the toxic language that populates lazy tabloid headlines and pol

Here we go then: the National Theatre is back! Or at least, one of its three theatres is, with greatly reduced capacity. Nonetheless, after keeping us sane during lockdown, it’s wonderful to have our flagship theatre back with us. And the handily reconfigured Olivier Theatre still has a robust capacity of 500, making it comfortably the biggest of London’s reopened venues. Moreover, it’s the only venue in town to be staging a play that speaks to the summer of Black Lives Matter. Playwrights Roy Williams and Clint Dyer began writing this sort-of-sequel to last year’s ‘Death of England’ back in March. But their decision to pen a follow-up to their play about white English identity in which a working-class Black Englishman squares up to white Englishness feels nothing if not timely.  We don’t know a huge amount about the specific plot to ‘Death of England: Delroy’. But the Dyer-directed play will star Michael Balogun as the eponymous Black best friend to Michael, the deeply conflicted, self-destructive protagonist played by Rafe Spall in the first play. (Giles Terera, previously cast in the role, had to drop out due to complications from surgery that have necessitated six weeks of recovery).

Bloody Covid. Bloody Tories. That’s pretty much the moral to ‘Beat the Devil’, David Hare’s new autobiographical solo play, performed by Ralph Fiennes as the flagship production in the Bridge’s new two-month season of monologues. Directed by Bridge boss Nicholas Hytner, it is not exactly Hare’s most sophisticated work, nor is it the play it probably could be if it was given more development time. Really, it’s a posh middle-aged man playing a posh old man having a moan about the issues of the day.  And with some reservations, it feels really good to have that moan in a roomful (well, one third full – social distancing, baby!) of people. ‘Beat the Devil’ combines an engrossingly horrible account of the playwright’s trippy battle with Covid, combined with some fun potshots at our government’s incompetence (the best bit is a pedantic riff on the misuse of the word ‘mediocre’ with regards to current ministerial talents). The illness stuff is more illuminating than the political stuff, which tends to verge on the obvious. There are bits – like Hare’s observations on how annoyed people in his social circle seemed to get with him for coming down with what they perceived to be a disease for poor people and minorities – that are crying out for deeper exploration. It’s a disposable sort of play that seems pointedly determined not to stand the test of time. But for now it’s timely, a breezy cocktail of the raging and the urbane, despatched with plummy self-deprecation by the likeable Fie

In the unlikely event you were worried a leap to the stage for JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series would result in it becoming aggressively highbrow, self-consciously arty or grindingly bereft of magical high jinks, just chill the hell out, muggle.  ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ is an absolute hoot, a joyous, big-hearted, ludicrously incident-packed and magic-heavy romp that has to stand as one of the most unrelentingly entertaining things to hit the West End. Writer Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany and a world-class team have played a blinder; if the two-part, five-hour-plus show is clearly a bit on the long side, it’s forgivable. ‘The Cursed Child’ emphatically exists for fans of Harry Potter, and much of its power derives from the visceral, often highly emotional impact of feeling that you’re in the same room as Rowling’s iconic characters.  There’s also a sense that this story of wizards and witches is being treated with the respect its now substantially grown-up fanbase craves. No disrespect to D-Rad and chums, but the leads here are in a different acting league to their film counterparts’: Jamie Parker and Alex Price are superb as battered, damaged, middle-aged versions of old enemies Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Sam Clemmett and Anthony Boyle are a fine, puppyish, sympathetic engine to the play as their awkward sons Albus and Scorpius, trying to escape their parents’ shadows. It is a bit of a sausage (wand?) fest in terms of the lead parts, although in the most

Working with young people who’ve had experience of the care system, Big House theatre company was never going to let a pandemic stop it. Indeed, it’s grasped the bull by its horns with ‘The Ballad of Corona V’, a darkly comic drama about the ’rona performed by a cast of 19. As far as we can gather, Maggie Norris’s production – which is written by David Watson – is a perambulatory affair, in which audiences travel through the scenes in groups no bigger than six. The show itself promises to be a riotous response to our rollercoaster of a year.

This production of Willy Russell's timeless two-hander about a jaded tutor whose life is turned around by an unorthodox news student named Rita has had a busy summer: it and stars Stephen Tompkinson and Jessica Johnson were one of the first things back on a UK stage this year, after performing a memorable summer season at Cornwall’s stunning outdoor Minack Theatre. Now it’s taking a lengthy, slightly ad-hoc tour around the UK, the centrepiece of which is this two-week stand at the Rose Theatre Kingston.

Another fine double bill of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues, both from the 1998 second series. In the Marianne Elliott-directed ‘Nights in the Garden of Spain’, Tamsin Greig plays Rosemary, a woman who begins to reflect upon her own marriage after her next-door neighbour kills her abusive husband. And Sarah Frankcom directs Maxine Peake in ‘Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet’, about a woman who has a complicated relationship with her chiropodist.

It’s a tough one but this double bill of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues surely has to stand as the most enticing pairing of the four in the Bridge’s monologues season. Partly that’s due to the plays themselves: ‘A Lady of Letters’, about the epistle-penning busybody Miss Ruddock is one of only two inclusions from the peerless 1989 original series. And ‘Playing Sandwiches’, about Wilfred, a parks attendant with a shadowy past he’s struggling to escape, is the outstanding play from the 1998 second series. Really though, it’s about the actors: Imelda Staunton and Lucian Msamati are major headline stars in their own right, and in normal circumstances it would be ridiculous to be able to see them on a bill like this, with tickets still available.

In a surprise twist worthy of ‘The Mousetrap’, ‘The Mousetrap’ is back! Agatha Christie’s indestructible whodunnit will be the first West End show to return after lockdown, complete with rigorous social-distancing measures At the end of this elegant Agatha Christie thriller, the newly uncovered homicidal maniac steps into a sinister spotlight and warns everyone never to reveal his or her identity. The production recently celebrated its 60th birthday and although Wikipedia and Stephen Fry have both blown the murderer's cover, there is a remarkable conspiracy of silence over 'The Moustrap'. The real mystery of the world's longest-running theatre show is not whodunit but, in its currently mediocre state, whydoit at all? 'The Mousetrap's ticket prices are the only element of this show that isn't stuck fast in the 1950s – although the actors' strained RP does make the odd break for the twenty-first century. Otherwise, this is a walking, talking piece of theatre history and – at £39 for a full-price stalls seat – the most expensive museum exhibit in London. Christie's neat puzzler of a plot is easier to defend. It has defied the inevitably mummifying process of more than 25,000 performances and still possesses an uncanny precision worthy of the mistress of murder's chilling geriatric creation, Miss Marple. In the 60 years since it premiered, its premise, in which six Cluedo-like middle-class stereotypes are imprisoned by snow in a country house while they try to fathom which of the

Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s civil rights classic ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ took Broadway by storm – and caused a fair amount of controversy after the producers aggressively tried to shut down productions of other adaptations of Lee’s 1960 masterpiece. And now Bartlett Sher’s production is coming here, under the auspices of Sonia Friedman Productions, who are having set to have a very big 2020.  Rhys Ifans will star as principled white Southern attorney Atticus Finch, who defends black man Tom Robinson in a rape trial in deeply prejudiced Alabama. It’s slightly unusual casting, that will surely see the gifted but somewhat wild Welsh actor play defiantly against type. Still, the powers that be are presumably not leaving this to chance.