Haymarket Theatre Royal

The tried and sometimes true conveyor belt between Bath Theatre Royal to Theatre Royal Haymarket continues rumble on, bringing big old fashioned productions of big old fashioned plays with big name actors. Terence Rattigan’s maudlin masterpiece The Deep Blue Sea with Tamsin Greig as tragic heroine Hester Collyer follows in the wake of A View From the Bridge (Dominic West) and The Score (Brian Cox) and lands somewhere between the two.  It’s never much of a chore to see this play, one of the most well made of the well made plays, with its perfect substructure of unspoken feeling and roiling passion. But it’s also a play that summons a long history of brilliant performances. The most recent big one, the National Theatre production in 2016 with Helen McCrory, was pretty great.  As for this, it isn’t bad at all. Even though there’s nothing wrong with the direction by Lindsay Posner (who also did A View From the Bridge in a similarly perfectly good way) or the rundown set by Peter McKintosh, or the day-to-night lighting by Paul Pyant, not much particularly stands out either. It all does the job – all gets out of the way of the play, and maybe that’s the best thing. Let the play speak for itself.  Tamsin Greig takes on the role of Hester, former wife of a judge. She’s now shacked up with a young and sexy test pilot and has tried to kill herself when he forgets her birthday. Across the course of a long career in lighter and comic roles, Grieg has often brought unexpected depth and...

This review is from the original 2024 National Theatre run of Till the Stars Come Down. It will transfer to the West End in 2025 with casting TBA. Tickets go on sale March 20. Beth Steel has earned her debut at the National Theatre, slowly grafting her way up via a string of working-class dramas at Hampstead Theatre, on to the hipper Almeida for 2022’s ‘House of Shades’, and now finally arriving at the dizzying heights of the Dorfman. ‘Till the Stars Come Down’ is a beautifully observed and often bruisingly hilarious play that centres on Hazel, Maggie and Sylvia, a trio of sisters from Mansfield, who have reunited for the wedding of Sinead Matthews’s Sylvia. The first half hour of Bijan Sheibani’s production is luxuriant character building, nary a man in sight as the sisters chatter about Sylvie’s imminent wedding, catch up on lost time – Lisa McGrillis’s Maggie unexpectedly left town a little while ago – and banter. Banter a lot: all of Steel’s characters have a way with words, a quintessentially English, working-class wit. But Lorraine Ashbourne’s dissolute Aunty Carol is something else, a veritable one-liner machine: even if you hate everything else about the play you’d have to be made of stone not to laugh like a drain at something like half of her lines. As the drama warms up, it looks like it’s going to be about the white working class’s response to EU migration – Sylvie’s husband-to-be Marek (Marc Wooton) is Polish, and the family is divided about him, to say the...

This revival of Shakespeare’s great tragedy of race and jealousy won’t get a fraction of the attention that the 2025 Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal production received, but there’s every hope it’ll be the better Othello. Certainly it doesn’t have $3,000 tickets, so that’s something. The work of director Tom Morris has been little seen in London since he co-directed War Horse and then went off to run the Bristol Old Vic – but now he’s back with a bang, as this production marks the start of a five year partnership with Chris Harper Productions to direct Shakespeare plays for the West End.  Of course you need names for West End Shakespeare, and Morris’s cast is headed by a fascinating choice of Othello. As a big Black British star, David Harewood is a shoo-in for the role. But what’s most interesting about his casting is that this is his second time doing it: as a young man he was famously the first Black actor to play the role at the National Theatre, in 1997; he’s indicated he’s looking forward to returning to the part without all the cultural baggage and weight of expectations. He’ll be joined by Toby Jones as Iago, looking to shed his saintly Mr Bates vs the Post Office image, while Desdemona will be played by US actor Caitlin FitzGerald, probably best known here for her role as Kendall’s trobled girlfriend Tabitha in Succession.  In terms of clues at to how Morris’s revival will play out, we’re told it’ll be modern dress, and it seems reasonably likely that the...