The best theatre shows in London for 2024 not to miss

‘Minority Report’ is now best known for the action-packed 2002 Spielberg sci-fi movie starring Tom Cruise. David Haig’s adaptation promises to cleave more closely to the original Philip K Dick book. But it looks like it will still be very much its own thing…

Word from the extensive regional tour of the latest show from Emma Rice’s Wise Children company is ecstatic: it sounds like Battersea Arts Centre has scored quite the coup in bagging the London run of ‘Blue Beard’.Written and directed by Rice, it’s a spin on the centuries-old French folktale about a wealthy man who murders his succession of wives. 

Aussie director Benedict Andrews’s 2012 Young Vic production of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ was a swooningly uninhibited, hugely inventive masterwork, and by all accounts his 2011 Sydney production of ‘The Seagull’ was no slouch. Somewhat over a decade later and he’s finally returning to wistful Russian titan Chekhov with a take on ‘The Cherry Orchard’…

Stage-loving Studio Ghibli fans are being treated like never before at the moment: hot on the heels of the RSC’s hugely acclaimed ‘My Neighbour Totoro’, here comes this spectacular Japanese production of Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 masterpiece ‘Spirited Away’. 

John Cleese adapts his and Connie Booth’s sublime ’70s sitcom about a tightly wound hotelier for the West End stage.

Denise Gough brings back her tour de force performance as Emma in Duncan Macmillan’s play, originally seen in London in 2015 and 2016.

French acting legend Isabelle Huppert teams up with US avant-garde theatre legend Robert Wilson to perform monologue ‘Mary Said What What Said’, a solo performance designed and directed by Wilson with its text drawn from Mary Queen of Scots’s letters that she wrote while imprisoned and awaiting her execution. Performed in French with English surtitles.

Finally making its UK debut almost two decades after it premiered in the US, idiosyncratic rock musical ‘Passing Strange’ is an autobiographical work by musician Stew. It’s directed by heavyweight US director Liesl Tommy and stars the wondrous Giles Terera, alongside Rachel Adedeji and Keenan Munn-Francis.

Super-director Jamie Lloyd is renowned for his powers of celebrity wrangling. But even by his standards this is quite the coup: his production of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ will star Tom Holland, aka Spider-Man himself.

The first main house play in David Byrne’s reign at the Royal Court sees the great Brit auteur Katie Mitchell remounts her 2019 German adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s ‘Bluets’, with a cast of Ben Whishaw, Emma D’Arcy and Kayla Meikle.

Even by Complicité’s lofty standards, 1999’s ‘Mnemonic’ is regarded as something truly exceptional…

Jeremy O Harris’s frenzied satire about a trio of interracial couples who seek to get their sex lives back on track by indulging in Antebellum-styled master-slave roleplays was both a massive smash and wildly controversial over its two Broadway seasons (for reasons that are presumably obvious from that description).

After a decade or so away, cult Argentine physical spectacular Fuerza Bruta returns to London in a new guise. Following the brooding machismo of its previous incarnation, ‘Aven’ is, apparently, an upbeat burst of sunshine and light.

Twenty years after the classic comedy film briefly threatened to make Lyndsey Lohan a global icon for the right reasons, Tina Fey’s musical adaptation of her smash ‘Mean Girls’ finally makes it to the West End in 2024.

Perhaps more so than ‘Cats’, more so than ‘Phantom’, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Starlight Express’ is his most quintessentially ’80s musical, its world of highly competitive trains played by people on rollerskates somewhat unimaginable as a product of any other era…

Inspired by interviews with actual pop star fangirls, Yve Blake’s transferring cult musical follows Edna, a 14-year-old Australian girl madly in love with one ‘Harry’, a member of a massive-selling pop group (hmm, rings a bell). When the band comes to Sydney she’s determined to meet Harry – at any cost.

Director Dominic Cooke's stellar National Theatre revival of Sondheim's ‘Follies’ had much to recommend it, but one of its highest points was Imelda Staunton's performance as a wistful former showgirl, haunted by regrets. Now, Staunton and Cooke are reuniting for a crack at another classic musical, ‘Hello, Dolly’, which hasn't had a London revival in over a decade.

Mark Rosenblatt’s John Lithgow-starring ‘Giant’ looks set to be the defining piece of programming of David Byrne’s Royal Court tenure, or certainly of the first year.

This heavily adapted version of Sophocles’s ‘Oedipus Rex’ by erstwhile Almeida wunderkind Robert Icke stars Mark Strong and Lesley Manville. A modern version, it’s set on the night of politician Oedipus’s great electoral victory – but some very disturbing revelations will come to light about his wife.

On the face of it a stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s immortal Cold War satire 'Dr Strangelove’ is as hubristic a conceit as adapting ‘2001’ or ‘Full Metal Jacket’. Nonetheless, here we are: the Kubrick estate has given the stage rights to master satirist Amando Iannucci (‘The Day Today’, ‘I’m Alan Partridge’, ‘The Think of It’, ‘Veep’. ‘The Death of Stalin’, etcetera etcetera) to adapt Kubrick’s classic about a rogue American general who decides to pre-emptively nuke Russia. Iannucci has in turn cast his old mucker Steve Coogan as the lead.

Elton John’s musical adaptation of the fabulous Meryl Street and Anne Hathaway-starring fashion industry satire relaunches in London in revamped form, with US singer and actor Vanessa Williams starring.