Royal Court Theatre

There has been some opaque messaging around this 25th anniversary revival of Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis. Gathering together the original creative team and cast – which includes current RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans – I’d half got the impression this would be a case of ‘same people, different take’. But it’s clear from a cursory look at any photo from 2000 that this is that show, brought back. And James Macdonald’s production returns to us as somewhat luxury theatre. 4.48 Psychosis was originally staged in the Royal Court’s tiny Upstairs studio. Which made sense: mounting a formally challenging work that heavily foreshadowed its writer’s suicide was obviously a delicate business in the immediate aftermath of her death. Now, however, her passing is less raw, the play is an acknowledged modern classic, and this revival sold out aeons ago (although you can still get tickets on Mondays).  Why restage this production when 4.48 Psychosis never really enjoyed a major UK revival? (the Young Vic did it with a Romanian actor and a French director… 16 years ago). Why not at least transfer it to the bigger Downstairs theatre? Is it meaningfully different from how it was 25 years ago? I can’t answer those questions, but I can tell you that I was rapt for the entire 70 minutes. Is 4.48 Psychosis bleak? I mean duh, yes, The critic Michael Billlington famously described the orginal production as ‘a suicide note’. I’m not sure that’s true, though it’s obvious why he said...

This review is from 2024. ECHO returns for 2025 with a guest list that includes Daniel Kaluuya, Dominic West, James Corden, Milly Alcock, Nish Kumar and Juliet Stevenson. Nassim Soleimanpour’s global cult smash ‘White Rabbit, Red Rabbit’ was an ingenious response to the fact that the Iranian playwright was at the time unable to leave his home country. He wrote a sly subversive script designed for a different actor to perform cold every night, pointedly acting as stand ins for the writer who was physically banned from travel. It was good, but was it so good that it justified him making an entire career out of variations thereof? As with 2017’s ‘Nassim’, ‘ECHO’ – staged as part of this year’s LIFT festival – has its moments but struggles to really find a truly compelling reason for being performed by a cold reader (on press night the redoubtable Adrian Lester). What the production - directed by metatheatrical master Omar Elerian - does bring to the table is a heap more cool techy stuff than the ultra lo-fi ‘White Rabbit…’, and an awful lot more of Soleimanpour himself. Early on, our performer (Lester) is put into apparent live video contact with Soleimanpour, who merrily bumbles about his Berlin flat – where he lives with his wife, and dog Echo – chatting away inanely to his bemused star.  ‘Echo’ does two things well.  It is excellent on the nature of what it is to have a divided self as a result of emigration, as most specifically embodied by the fact Soleimanpour finds...

Katie Mitchell’s second play for the David Byrne-era Royal Court threatens makes last year’s non-linear poetry adaptation Bluets look positively commerical. A collaboration between the legendary avant-garde director, playwright Nina Segal and sound artist Melanie Wilson, Cow | Deer – apparently you’re not allowed to say it ‘Cow-slash-deer’ – it’s a wordless work about a dsy in the life of a cow and a deer that aims to further the eco-minded bent of Mitchell’s work by ‘decentring’ humans from a work. Truly, who can say what this will mean or look like, but presumaby it’s about as out-there a thing as you’ll see on a stage this year. Actors will apparently be involved, though it’s unclear precisely what they’ll be doing.

David Byrne’s Royal Court seasons have proven almost aggressively eclectic so far, with surefire commercial smashes rubbing up against stuff that comes across as genuinely quite mad. Coming a year after West End transfer Giant made its debut, Nick Payne’s The Unbelievers certainly looks like another big hit: the great Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Curious Incident) will make her debut at the venerable new writing theatre, in Payne’s first Court play since his huge hit Constellations, with design by the legendary Bunnie Christie. The cherry on the cake is the marvellous Nicola Walker, who will star as a woman whose son disappeared seven years ago and for whom time has now fractured, causing her to experience every minute of every year gone by simultaneously. Okay, that’s a pretty mad concept, but if anyone can pull it off it’s this A-Team of theatrical talent.