London theatre reviews

The great Irish playwright Conor McPherson returns from his long absence with a bang this year. Next up at the Old Vic is a return for his hit Dylan’s musical Girl from the North Country; later this autumn he’s the adapting playwright for the stage version of The Hunger Games. But before that is what the real McPherson heads have been waiting for: The Brightening Air, his first original play since The Night Alive in 2013…

Never at any point during The Great Gatsby’s near century in copyright did F Scott Fitzgerald or his heirs allow a musical adaptation and you have to hand it to them: they were right…

American writer Neil LaBute invariably takes big swings in his plays. Debuting at the Park Theatre, his first UK premiere in an age is no exception. At a time of intense debate around euthanasia and assisted dying in the real world, he collides Brad and Jodie, an American couple who are facing her terminal cancer, with Tate, the man Jodie wants to kill her…

Not even the world’s most slavish Ibsen junkie will ever be able to fully appreciate the impact Ghosts had upon its London debut in 1891. ‘A dirty act done publicly’ thundered an infamous Telegraph review, genuinely horrified by the Norwegian dramatist’s dabblings with STIs, incest, adultery, euthanasia and a lil’ bit of good old blasphemy. Still, even if your jaw no longer drops that it would ‘go there’, Ghosts has hardly lost its edge: STIs, incest, adultery, euthanasia and blasphemy haven’t become twee…

I choose to believe that the name of Mohammed-Zain Dada’s new drama about a speed awareness course in Birmingham is a nod to the seminal Keanu Reeves ‘90s thriller of the same name. Okay, it would have to be an ironic nod. But not as ironic as you might think. Speed starts off in wilfully mundane Britcom territory, but ends up somewhere rather more Reeves-friendly…

Half a century’s worth of history squashed down into just 80 minutes is a mission so ambitious that it feels doomed to fail. Which is a particular misfortune in the case of Shanghai Dolls. Amy Ng’s play about the little-known relationship between Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong and Sun Weishi, the first female director in China, is ripe with dramatic potential.

Robert Icke made his name directing boldly reimagined takes on some of the greatest plays ever written. But despite the sense that he has genuinely added something to millennia old works, it’s still a big deal to make his debut as a ‘proper’ playwright. Even his most outrageous rewrites have had somebody else’s ideas at their core. Manhunt, his play about Raoul Moat, is all him. And to be clear – and I’m going to shock you here – it’s not as good as Hamlet.

To assume that’s this play is just going to be a pastiche of a fast-patter period piece is to underestimate Ryan Calais Cameron who, after all, smashed the West End with his beautiful play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy. 

One of the biggest winners of Euro 2024 was undoubtedly the playwright James Graham. Having promised to update his smash Gareth Southgate drama Dear England following the final tournament of his subject’s tenure as England men’s team manager, Graham must have been thrilled when our boys neither crashed out nor triumphed, but rather did precisely as well as they had done in Euro 2020.

Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s off-Broadway hit Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors isn’t that bad: it’s a goofy, gag-filled but fundamentally quite tame parody of Bram Stoker’s immortal 1897 novel that basically adds up to an old-fashioned BBC radio comedy.