Hampstead Theatre

A celebrated wildlife photographer and Marcus – the latest in a long line of apprentices – attempt to photograph the elusive firewing bird in David Pearson’s debut play, which is directed by Alice Hamilton and stars Charlie Beck and Gerard Horan.

The stage or screen kiss has always made audiences speculate (often correctly; my mother is still not over Brad and Angie) as actors negotiate something that’s both intimate and sterility professional. It's the tension Sarah Ruhl toys with in Stage Kiss, finally receiving its UK premiere at Hampstead Theatre 12 years after it debuted in New York. We open in a classic audition room: mismatched chairs, institutional lighting, a flamboyant director (Rolf Saxon) who wants his actors to ‘follow their instinct’. The trouble is that nobody's instincts are particularly good. He reaches for the word ‘slippery’ to describe his first play - apt for everything that follows. MyAnna Buring's She arrives in a ball of anxiety, fumbles her lines, drops her bag, and gets the part anyway. The play she's cast in, a forgotten 1930s melodrama called The Last Kiss, is packed with longing and terminal illness, and also coincidently features He (Patrick Kennedy), her old flame. His expression upon recognising her suggests that the flame was never quite extinguished. Because of this, the first act is comedically theatrical – Stoppardian, even – a loving homage to the absurdity of the rehearsal room, the set blooming gradually into the full gilt aspirations of the play. After the interval, Robert Innes Hopkins’s design makes a decisive lurch from red velvet to the grubby reality of He’s flat, and then to a director’s nostalgia project set in ’70s New York, featuring a Bronx sex worker and an Irish...

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.