Hampstead Theatre

There’s a nagging irony at the centre of Bird Grove. This play about the young Mary Ann Evans – aka future literary titan George Eliot – features copious scenes of her expressing frustration that only men have a voice in society. But the play itself is very much written by a man, Alexi Kaye Campbell. It more or less styles this out, but there are lines where you wonder how Campell wrote them with a straight face.  Maybe I’m being unfair as really Bird Grove is about two people: Mary Ann and her father, Owen Teale’s Robert Evans. A slightly cringe epilogue aside, Campbell’s play barely alludes to Eliot, but is firmly concerned with Mary Ann, a brilliant and unconventional young woman who nonetheless desperately needs her dad. Teale’s Robert is a gruff middle class widower who is paying a small fortune for the titular abode in fashionable 1840s Coventry, essentially in an effort to engage with society and bag his beloved daughter a suitable husband. He’s doing this out of care: independent women weren’t really a thing at the time and in the opening scene he’s shown to be both indulgent of Mary Ann and her unconventional friends – including a flamboyant French hypnotist! - and intolerant of douchebag suitors, giving Jonnie Broadbent’s amusingly pathetic suitor Horace short shrift. He wants to make sure she’s looked after. Matters between them become tested when Mary Ann works up the courage to tell her dad that she no longer wants to go to church as she no longer believes....

The excellent Chelsea Walker directs this satire from US playwright Aaron Loeb. He makes his UK debut with ROI, a play about a venture capitalist with lofty ideas for the future of humanity, chasing a unicorn investor for a project that has profound implications for the future of the human race. Sarah Lam, Lloyd Owen, Letty Thomas and Millicent Wong star.

One of the big British theatre hits of the ’90s – and probably the venerable British dramatic Michael Frayn’s most successful play – Copenhagan depicts a meeting in the afterlife between the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his protégé, the German Werner Heisenberg. The subject matter is a real life, wildly speculated upon meeting the pair had in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen in 1941, where they discussed the ethics of making an atomic bomb. West Wing star Richard Schiff will play Bohr and Alex Kingston his wife Margrethe in Michael Longhurst’s first ever UK revival.

A big coup for Hampstead Theatre here, as it bags the UK premiere of the wildly acclaimed US indie musical Kimberley Akimbo. Created by composer Jeanine Tesori and writer David Lindsay-Abaire, it’s an all-singing adaptation of Adams’s relatively obscure 2000 play of the same name, which follows the eponymous heroine, a 16-year-old girl afflicted by a rare/essentially magical disease that makes her age four times faster than usual. This means she has the appearance of an elderly woman while essentially being a teen. And apparently it’s wonderful! It bagged multiple wins at the 2023 Tony Awards – including the all important best new musical – and ran for a year-and-a-half on Broadway. Now it’s headed over here, albeit in a brand new production from Michael Longhurst, who did such a bang up job at the same address a few years back with Tesori’s Caroline, or Change.