Royal Court Theatre

Nicola Walker is a brilliant TV actor: her sullen, sarcastic charisma brings an edge to sundry MOR terrestrial Brit dramas – we’re talking Spooks, Last Tango in Halifax, River, The Split, Annika – in which her career has flourished. But even though she has done some great stuff on stage – notably her excellent turn in Ivo van Hove’s landmark production of A View from the Bridge – I’m not sure Nicola Walker has ever truly successfully brought her innate Nicola Walkerness to bear in a theatre role. Until now.  Nick Payne’s new Royal Court play The Unbelievers isn’t the instant classic his last one (2012’s Constellations) was. But its star gives a turn that is absolutely, magnificently, unfettered Nicola Walker. Her unique gift for proper nuanced acting filtered via an unshakeable deadpan grumpiness is harnessed to perfection as she plays a grieving mother whose sorrow and grief at the unexplained disappearance of her son has curdled into something darker and more disturbing. The play is set in three timelines, albeit heavily jumbled up and somewhat blurred. There’s the immediate aftermath of Oscar’s disappearance, when Walker’s Miriam is terse and snappy but fundamentally reasonable in both her grief and her burning desire to make progress on the case. There’s one year on, where things are beginning to slip with her. The play opens with a scene from this timeline in which a somewhat out of it Miriam is tending to a wounded hand which has arisen from a complicated series of...

David Byrne’s tenure at the Royal Court has undoubedly seen the return of luxury theatre to the Upstairs venue. While Sophia Chetin-Leuner is a relatively up-and-coming writer, her intriguing new drama about a young female academic addicted to violent porn is blessed with an A-list director in the shape of Josie Rourke – her first showing at the Court for aeons – a great cast headed by Ambika Mod, and even Wayne McGregor doing the movement. Needless to say it’s sold out to high heck, but remember all tickets to Royal Court Mondays go on sale on the morning of performance.

There are three obvious ‘wow’ moments in the Royal Court Theatre’s seventieth birthday programme. Two are starry revivals of classic plays from the theatre’s past: Man to Man starring Tilda Swinton and Krapp’s Last Tape with Gary Oldman.  The third is a very modern coup: the modestly-sized new writing theatre has bagged the UK debut of Kimberley Belflower’s US smash John Protcor is the Villain, a wholesale transfer of Danya Taymor’s hit Broadway production. The play does in fact have a link to the Royal Court, being a very playful post-#MeToo riff on Arthur Miller’s landmark The Crucible, which premiered at the Court during its very first season, 70 years ago in 2026. Here the action is set in a high school and a class studying The Crucible, with a debate over the morality of the actions of the play’s nominal hero Proctor finding head-spinning parallels in the student-teacher relationships in the ‘real world’. Plus: there are pop songs from the likes of Lorde and Taylor Swift. The play’s Broadway success owes a lot to the star casting of Sadie Sink of Stranger Things fame – casting has not been annoinced for this UK production, and Sink seems like an outside chance at best. But it is co-produced by West End big hitters Sonia Friedman and Wessex Grove, so don’t be surprised if it has a name cast and life beyond this initial run.

You have to assume that this Gary Oldman designed, directed and (of course) starring production of Samuel Beckett’s high concept elegy for youthful ambition Krapp’s Last Tape would have run at Theatre Royal York earlier in 2025 regeardless of the Royal Court’s 2026 seventieth anniversary season.  But here it is, gaining a new London life at the Court. And it’s a doubly appropriate piece of programming for the seventieth birthday season. Beckett’s play about an old man listening back with mounting horror to the megalomaniacal tapes he recorded on his birthday in his younger years had its debut at the Court in 1958, and was revived again for its fiftieth birthday with no less than Harold Pinter in the title role.  And it’s a homecoming of sorts for Oldman, who was a prolific theatre actor and Royal Court regular in the ’80s before he drifted off into film (his last stage role was in Caryl Churchill’s 1987 masterpiece Serious Money). Curiously for such a landmark play, Krapp’s Last Tape started life as a ‘curtain raiser’, the secondary event before a production of Beckett’s longer Aftermath. In that spirit, Oldman’s performance will have a curtain raiser of its own in the form of Godot’s To Do List, a short Beckett-inspired play from young writer Leo Simpe-Asante.

There are lots of highlights to the Royal Court’s seventieth anniversary season. But where the Gary Oldman-starring production of Krapp’s Last Tape and the hit Broadway play John Proctor is the Villain would have been expected to come to London eventually, Man to Man is altogether more of a surprise. Manfred Karge’s hallucinatory solo play about a widow who assumes her late husband’s job and identity in inter-war Germany had its UK premiere at Edinburgh Traverse Theatre in 1987 before transferring to the Court the following year. Stephen Unwin’s production provided a breakthrough for an androgynous young actor named Tilda Swinton, starting her down the path to global cult fame.  Now, in a similar way to the Court’s 2025 revival of 4.48 Psychosis, the whole band is back together for a revival of Man to Man once again starring Swinton and directed by Unwin. Although Swinton has starred in the odd stage role in Europe since, she’s not performed in the UK for over three decades, and who knows if she’ll do so again.