London theatre reviews

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. 

Sathnam Sanghera’s 2013 novel, Marriage Material took its inspiration from Arnold Bennett’s classic, The Old Wives’ Tale, transposing the story of two sisters who work in their mother's draper’s shop to a Sikh family in Wolverhampton. Now, it undergoes further evolution, as Sanghera’s book is reimagined for the theatre by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and directed by Iqbal Khan…

After premiering at the New Diorama Theatre in 2023 and touring the UK, Breach Theatre’s verbatim musical about Section 28 – the heinous legislation introduced in the late ’80s to prevent the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools – lands at the Royal Court Theatre after some tweaking and with a mostly different four-strong ensemble cast. It’s funnier, sharper and more damning than ever before.  

For a script penned in 1893, Mrs Warren’s Profession still feels remarkably fresh. Absence has probably made the heart grow fonder when it comes to George Bernard Shaw’s problem play. From the very beginning, it’s had a fraught staging history. In Victorian England there was general social outcry over its subject matter, and you can understand why: its attitude towards sex work as a functioning product of the capitalist labour market feels bracingly current even today.

Ola Ince’s recent productions for the Globe include a gritty police procedural Othello and a modern dress Romeo and Juliet that was so progressive it made the front page of The Sun (‘Wokeo and Juliet’, the headline screamed). It’s therefore somewhat surprising that – aesthetically speaking – hers is by far the most trad take on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible I’ve ever seen: full-on period pilgrim garb from designer Amelia Jane Hankin, including a magnificent array of funny little conical hats.

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Corn.