The best new theatre shows opening in London June 2022

Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ calls in at the Palladium for the summer, some two decades after the stage version of the hit cartoon was last seen in London.

This new drama from the legendary Clean Break company follows Leila, a young Muslim woman who has been living happily at home with her traditionalist grandmother Noor. But things are shaken up drastically when her fun-loving mother Aleena returns from a stint behind bars. 

Almost a decade after their epic West End flop ‘I Can’t Sing!’, comic Harry Hill and his writing partner Steve Brown have joined forces again for this musical adaptation of the Tony Blair story which, frankly, looks like a right laugh.

This ‘girl power musical’ comes from playwright Chris Bush and songwriters Miranda Cooper (Girls Aloud; Kylie Minogue) and Jennifer Decilveo (Miley Cyrus). It’s basically a cheerful romp through the lives of various inspirational women including Frida Kahlo, Marie Curie and Emmeline Pankhurst, whose descendent Kate Pankhurst wrote the book the show is adapted from. 

The eighth play in the great American playwright August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, 1982’s ‘Jitney’ takes its name from US slang for an unlicensed cab, and follows the lives of eight Black men in post-Vietnam America, united by their connection to Jim Becker’s cab company, which goes to parts of Pittsburgh that other drivers will not. 

David Harbour and Bill Pullman star in ‘Mad House’, Theresa Rebeck’s dark comedy about a group of siblings who converge on their dying father’s rural Pennsylvania home, with one eye on divvying up his inheritance. Harbour will play Michael, the sensitive, mentally unwell sibling who has cared for their father while the others were away; Pullman will play Daniel, the gracelessly dying father.

The great Kathryn Hunter takes on the title role of ‘King Lear’ in the flagship play of the Globe’s 2022 season. Hunter is one of the strangest, most striking stage actors of her times; she’ll be joined by Globe boss Michelle Terry, who makes her traditional showing of the season to co-star in the dual roles of the Fool and Cordelia. 

Yup: ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ is indeed a sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 proto-feminist masterpiece ‘A Doll’s House’. Written by US playwright Lucas Hnath, it sees heroine Nora return home 15 years after she walked out on her own marriage in an effort to pick up the shattered pieces. The brilliant Noma Dumezweni will play Nora, in her first stage role since her Olivier-winning turn as Hermione Granger in ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’.

It’s the mystery that has been consuming some of the more hipsterish bits of the theatre world for some time now: who is Dave Davidson, the never photographed, first-time writer author of this thriller about stolen online identities? It’s all very curious, and hard to exactly take at face value, but the truth should be unveiled soon.