London theatre reviews

It’s a trap, almost, to think of Eugene O’Neill’s final play A Moon for the Misbegotten as a sequel to his miserable masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Sure, they share the character of Jim Tyrone, a dissolute young actor in Long Day’s Journey and a dissolute older actor here. But you go in expecting despair and instead find something that’s more like an episode of Steptoe and Son.

It’s been more than a decade since Dickie Beau broke through with his uniquely weird shows that involve him lip-syncing to archival recordings, while he embodies the voices with movement and props and fun stuff like that. But Showmanism, expanded from its first iteration which premiered in Bath in 2022, feels like a reckoning with the form and with himself.

James Macdonald’s original 2000 production of Sarah Kane’s final play returns to us as somewhat luxury theatre…

Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac.

Storehouse is absolute nonsense, a pretty but torpid vanity project that’s the brainchild of businesswoman Liana Patarkatsishvili, who I assume also bankrolled this expensive show, staged in a gargantuan Deptford warehouse. 

There’s something relatable – and deeply funny – about a grandmother demanding to be brought potatoes and mixed spice, then grinning at her own audacity. That warmth and wit is central to Danny James King’s Miss Myrtle’s Garden, a tender play in which every cast member is as magnetic as the other.

Nicholas Hytner’s exuberant 2019 take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream was simply too much fun to leave to the history books: what a joy it is to have it back.

A theatre industry truism is that playwright Terence Rattigan – a titan of the mid-twentieth century British stage – had his career unfairly derailed by the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, and is surely due a revival soon. I’m skeptical about this, mostly because I remember people saying it for at least the last 15 years, a period in which I have seen an awful lot of Terence Rattigan plays, usually revived to great acclaim.

Well, this is certainly different: a dystopian musical tribute to the life and works of Oscar Wilde in a basement venue dressed to look like a mashup of a Berlin club and Mad Max: Beyond the Hippodrome. If you’re eagerly looking for a meaty plot, you’re in for slim pickings. Originating in New York and the brainchild of its book-writer Mark Mauriello (also playing ‘Oscar’), this is a production big on vibes: a loud confection of shiny surfaces, breathless choreography and a thumping, punky score.

This musical masterpiece is fiddly in more ways than one. Written by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein, 1964’s Fiddler on the Roof is a brilliant but disarmingly complicated work, for which every production must find a balance between the lighter stuff – shtetl nostalgia and the weapons-grade quipping of its milkman protagonist Teyve – and the fact that it’s a story about the end of rural Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, that clearly foreshadows the Holocaust.