The best new London theatre for 2021 – shows not to miss

Four-times Oscar-nominated Irish-American film star Saoirse Ronan takes on the role of Lady Macbeth in the mighty Yaël Farber’s new production of The Scottish Play. Here going out under its official name ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’, we’re promised a production that will place equal emphasis on Ronan’s Lady M and James McArdle’s Macbeth.

Well this looks heavy, if necessary: ‘Grenfell: Value Engineering – Scenes from the Inquiry’ is a verbatim dramatisation of – as the title suggests – select passages from the Grenfell Inquiry. Condensing the lengthy report into a digestible work of drama, it will aim to succinctly explain how it is that 72 people died in the terrible fire on June 14 2017…

Arinzé Kene plays Bob Marley in this long-awaited new musical based upon the reggae legend’s life and songs, directed by Clint Dyer and written by Lee Hall.

This spectacular puppet-driven stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling novel was a massive success for Sheffield Theatres just before the pandemic and should finally make it to London in autumn 2021.

Moira Buffini’s dark gentrification satire stars Nancy Carroll as the owner of a shabby old London manor house that shelters a motley group of people during a storm, including charismatic right-wing leader Ted Farrier, played by Shaun Evans.

The National Theatre’s hauntingly beautiful Neil Gaiman adaptation finally transfers to the West End.

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir? Well, maybe not without dinner first. But come the end of 2021 you will have the option to spend your evening at ‘Moulin Rouge! The Musical’, the acclaimed Broadway stage ‘remix’ of Baz Lurhmann’s fabulous jukebox musical feature film.

Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley star in Kander & Ebb’s dark musical masterpiece, in a thrilling immersive production.

Eighteen years after the NT’s blockbuster ‘His Dark Materials’, director Nicholas Hytner moves on to the (still incomplete) follow up trilogy, as Bryony Lavery adapts prequel ‘La Belle Sauvage’.

The National Theatre’s first big musical of the pandemic era is ‘Hex’, an all-singing adaptation of the Sleeping Beauty…

Alistair McDowall hit upon a rich, dark seam of magical realism (or surrealism) with the Lovecraftian ‘Pomona’ and the brain-melting sci-fi ‘X’. The follow-up to ‘The Glow’ sounds like it will continue down that path.

Whimsical auteur Emma Rice directing Emily Brontë’s darkly elemental romance is a match made in pure heaven.

Film star Taron Egerton makes his West End debut opposite ‘Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey in the first major revival for Mike Bartlett’s brilliant 2009 sexual satire.

Eight years after ‘The Drowned Man’, the mighty Punchdrunk – hands down the best immersive theatre company in the world – finally return with this immense new show…

Jeremy Herrin directs the magnificent Amy Adams as she makes her London stage debut in the role of monstrous southern matriarch Amanda Wingate in Tennessee Williams’s classic play.

Jodie Comer makes her stage debut in a monologue about a brilliant, competitive young working-class barrister whose upwards ascent is suddenly stalled when a colleague rapes her…

Mark Rylance reprises the greatest performance of the twenty-first century as the original production of ‘Jerusalem’ returns for 2022.