National Theatre

Simon McBurney’s legendary theatre company Complicité basically has two modes: clever but fairly narratively conventional takes on difficult-to-stage classics, and brain melting experimental odysseys that’ll rewire your cerebellum. Their 1999 play ‘Mnemonic’ - reimagined and redevised for 2024 - is very much in the latter camp, although to a certain extent the problem with brain melting experimental odysseys is that they can be hard to describe in a way that accurately conveys their appeal. Does a play that explores the parallels between the act of memory, the act of migration, the act of ancestry and the act of storytelling sound intrinsically thrilling to you? It doesn’t to me. But it truly is.  ‘Mnemonic’ begins slow, with actor Khalid Abdalla delivering a rambling, slightly Richard Curtis-y speech about the nature of memory, his personal background as a Brit born in Scotland with Egyptian ancestry, and the fact that Compicité is reviving its 25-year-old hit ‘Mnemonic’, with Khalid assuming the role director McBurney originally played. Eventually it unfurls into two separate strands: the mystery of what happened to Alice (Eileen Walsh), the wife of Omar (Khalid), who abruptly disappeared nine months ago after her mother’s funeral; and a fictionalised version of the true-life mystery of a body discovered on the border of the Austrian and Italian Alps in 1991 due to a freak glacier melt, which was discovered to everyone’s great surprise to have been 5,200 years old. It’s ess

The National Theatre’s River Stage returns to the South Bank for a month of outdoor live music, dance, performance, workshops and family fun. Weekend evenings will see a varied programme of entertainment take place in front of the theatre, with special take-over weekends from The Glory, Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, Rambert and the NT itself.  The takeover weekends will be…  July 5 - 8: The Glory, hosted by Jonny Woo and John Sizzle. They’ll be calling on all their top drag queens, kings alongside cabaret artists and DJs to help them pull-off a sparkling weekend of queer music.  July 12 - 14: Greenwich+Docklands International Festival will bring a cracking line-up of street theatre and circus performers.  July 19 - 21: Rambert. This London-based contemporary dance company’s teachers and artists are gracing the weekend with performances and tutorials.   July 26 - 28: National Theatre. The closing weekend looks set to be a family–friendly mish-mash of live music, theatre, dance and workshops with some tours of the iconic building being thrown in too.  See the National Theatre website for updates.

This rambling but impassioned Pulitzer-winner from Kaitori Hall (‘The Mountaintop’, ‘Tina’) follows a group of middle aged gay Black men in Memphis, Tennessee who have said goodbye to the certainties of a conventional life and are now trying to dream it all up again.  Cordell (Kadiff Kirwan) left his wife and two sons five years ago for the sake of his relationship with Dwayne (Simon-Anthony Rhoden), and he is still trying to come to terms with that decision – his kids won’t talk to him, and there are tensions between the two men. The only real certainty in Cordell’s life is his obsession with chicken wing perfection: he is determined to take the coveted title of the Memphis hot wing king, his various creations include blueberry wings, lemon wings (wet and dry), parmesan wings and this year’s masterpiece: the spicy Cajun alfredo with bourbon-infused crumbled bacon. Roy Alexander Weise’s production of Hall’s play is a peculiar, often enthralling mix of serious naturalism, spiky comedy and flights of hyperreal whimsy. Most of the lols comes from Jason Barnett and Olisa Odele as Big Charles and Isom, the other couple – or sort-of couple – in the house. Charles, a barber, is schlubby, sports-loving and blokey by the standards of the group. Isom is affably ludicrous, an ultracamp urban dandy who gets the show’s funniest lines (and the night’s biggest gasp thanks to a catastrophic spice mishap). We don’t actually learn a huge amount about their backgrounds, but they feel vital to t

John Steinbeck’s 1939 masterpiece about a desperate Oklahoma family forced to migrate to California to escape the ravages of the Dustbowl is one of the most famous books of the twentieth century. And Frank Galati’s award-winning 1990 adaptation is pretty much agreed upon as the definitive stage version. Throw in the great American actor Cherry Jones as the family matriarch Ma Joad and you have a very handsome summer blockbuster indeed for the NT, which will be directed by the reliable Carrie Cracknell. Further casting – including the central role of Tom Joad – is TBA.

The last major London production of Coriolanus was way back in 2013, when Tom Hiddleston took on the role at the intimate Donmar Warehouse. Eleven years on and here’s something a bit bigger in scale: screen star David Oyelowo makes his debut in the National Theatre’s huge Olivier to play the role of Shakespeare’s heroic Roman general turned embittered national foe after his distaste for the plebs becomes public knowledge. NT regular Lyndsey Turner will direct, her first shot at a Shakespeare play since her blockbuster Benedict Cumberbatch-starring Hamlet back in 2015.

Oscar Wilde’s drawing room comedy pretty much invented twentieth century British comedy, and as such it’s become something of a cliché. It’s not that ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is never staged – it was last seen in the West End in 2018 – so much as the major theatres tend not to touch it. The NT hasn’t tackled it since the early ’80s, but here, intriguingly it is, finally getting a splashy Christmas revival that’ll star newly-minted Timelord Ncuti Gatwa as lusty young idler Algenon, who alongside his BFF Jack (Hugh Skinner) must infiltrate the stately home of the formidable Lady Bracknell in order to go a-wooing.  It’s a great cast and Gatwa alone will ensure it sells out its relatively brief festive run. But is there anything new to be found in Wilde’s play? If there is, director Max Webster is the man to find it – with his extravagent visual style and innovative recent takes on Shakespeare (notably his binaural ‘Macbeth’ with fellow Doctor David Tennant) you can expect something more than period dress and wobbly country house sets. 

‘Dear England’ returns to the National Theatre in March 2025. This review is from June 2023. Now onto its fifty-seventh year of hurt, the capacity of the English men’s football team to be the focal point of ruinous national self-mythologization is well documented. As such, a play about the squad’s resurrection under Gareth Southgate feels like a potentially hubristic idea – dangerously overhyping a gifted man who still hasn’t taken home any actual silverware.  However: ‘Dear England’ is written by James Graham, a playwright who has made genuinely classic work out of such esoteric subjects as the quiz show ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, and the Labour whips office during the 1970s. Unlike the England team, his form is so impeccable that you kind of have to trust that whatever he has planned is probably going to work. And with ‘Dear England’, he’s hit the back of the net once again. Reuniting Graham with Almeida boss Rupert Goold (following last year’s musical ‘Tammy Faye’ and 2017’s Rupert Murdoch drama ‘Ink’), ‘Dear England’ essentially works because Graham and Southgate are interested in the same thing: why is the England men’s team burdened with such high expectations? And what do those expectations do to the psychology of both the team and the nation? Helpfully, Southgate’s penalty miss against Germany in Euro ‘96 is the perfect embodiment of England’s problems. Goold’s widescreen production starts off with a flashback to it, and when we first meet him, it’s come to def