Theatre in Covent Garden

This spectacular puppet-driven stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling novel was a massive success when it premiered in Sheffield in 2019. Festooned with five-star-reviews, a West End transfer looked inevitable, and Cameron Mackintosh is doing the honours, with the promise that Wyndham’s Theatre will be ‘transformed’ to accommodate Max Webster’s production, which is adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti and has puppets by Finn Caldwell.  The novel, if you somehow missed it, concerns Pi, an Indian boy who ends up adrift on the ocean with a small group of animals – a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan… and a giant Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

'My mummy says I'm a miracle,' lisps a pampered mini-me at a purgatorial kiddies' birthday party at the outset of this delicious, treacly-dark family show. The obnoxious ma and pa of its titular, gifted, pint-sized heroine are not, of course, quite so doting. But 'Matilda' must be making its creators, playwright Dennis Kelly and comedian-songsmith Tim Minchin, a very pair of proud parents. Opening to rave reviews in Stratford-upon Avon before transferring to the West End in 2011 and snatching up Olivier Awards with all the alacrity of a sticky-fingered child in a sweetshop, Matthew Warchus's RSC production remains a treat. With hindsight, Kelly and Minchin's musical, born of the 1988 novel by that master of the splendidly grotesque Roald Dahl, is a little too long and, dramatically, a tad wayward. But like the curly-haired little girl in the famous nursery rhyme, when it is good, it is very, very good. And it's even better when it's horrid. The past few months have seen some cast changes, including, alas, the departure of Bertie Carvel's tremendous Miss Trunchbull, headmistress of the dread Crunchem Hall School, former Olympic hammer-thrower and a gorgon of monumental nastiness, complete with scarily Thatcher-esque tics of purse-lipped gentility and faux concern. David Leonard doesn't quite match the squirm-inducing, hair-raising detail of Carvel in the role, but his more butch, granite-faced version is fantastically horrible nonetheless. And if Paul Kaye as Matilda's loathso

‘& Juliet’ is a heavily ironic Shakespeare rewrite based on the songs of super-producer Max Martin. And with the gift of that knowledge, I can fairly confidently state that you’ll probably like ‘& Juliet’ almost precisely as much as you expect to like ‘& Juliet’. Me, I grew up with Martin’s greatest hits: Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys dominated the radio when I was at school, and while I’ve never spent a single penny on his music, I’ve probably spent days of my life listening to it. These were Big Tunes to start with, and in ‘& Juliet’ they sound immense, reconfigured into lush new Tudor-nodding arrangements (a harpsichord features prominently). Most crucially, in a musical that Martin is heavily involved with, they’re deployed in ways that always find some emotional connection to the plot (by no means a given in a jukebox musical – *takes a long, hard stare at ‘Mamma Mia!’*).  The plot is fun provided you refuse to take any of what happens seriously. It’s basically ‘Romeo & Juliet’ rewritten into a sort of woke panto. The Bard of Avon (Oliver Tompsett, channelling a mid-tier ‘Love Island’ contestant) is very pleased with himself for having written the play. But his wife Anne Hathaway (Cassidy Janson, scene-stealingly bolshy) has other ideas. She browbeats Will into allowing Juliet to survive then persuades him to let her rewrite the play as an empowering feminist road trip for Juliet and her gal (and non-binary) pals. A lot of wilfully silly, somewhat subversive, occasi

Martin McDonagh’s ‘The Pillowman’ is probably the greatest play of modern times to not transfer to the West End. Its original National Theatre – starring a pre-‘Doctor Who’ David Tennant – won massive acclaim at the National Theatre in 2003, and was restaged for Broadway with Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum, but for whatever reason the West End didn’t happen, and something or other went awry with a revival McDonagh promised during the press for his last big stage hit, 2015’s ‘Hangmen’. But now it’s happening: McDonagh’s latterday director of choice Matthew Dunster will direct Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Steve Pemberton will star in the first-ever UK revival of McDonagh’s sinister masterpiece set in a totalitarian state in which a writer, Katurian, is questioned over a spate of killings with an uncanny similarity to his gristly short stories. In a fairly novel scheme for the West End, there will be 20 tickets per performance available in person at the box office at 10am and 6pm on a pay-what-you-can basis.

It's been decades since this skillful adaptation of Susan Hill's 1983 Gothic horror story first started setting West End audience a-shiver. 'The Woman in Black' remains perennially popular – particularly, it seems, with generally hard-to-please teenagers – which is testament to its rough-theatre appeal and the extraordinary and enduring potency, not of guts, gore or special effects, but of simple suggestion. Ageing Arthur Kipps is haunted by sinister events that befell him 30 years earlier. In an effort to exorcise his demons, he hires an actor to help him tell his story for an invited audience. As they rehearse, though, their staging itself becomes prey to supernatural visitations from the titular hatchet-faced, whip-thin, funereally garbed woman. Stephen Mallatratt's dramatisation and a deft production by Robin Herford exploit the peculiarly spooky atmosphere of an empty theatre, making us, as an audience, feel almost like spectral voyeurs. And the chills are irresistibly effective: swirling fog, a creaking rocking chair, a locked door, a pale visage looming out of the gloom. Only occasionally does the staging show its age. The projected image of the gaunt, sinister house of Kipps' tormented memory looks hopelessly cheap and crude, and a graveyard conjured with dust sheets struggles to convince, even within the low-tech aesthetic parameters of the piece. Yet the shrieks and gasps that greet the performance demonstrate that, even in the twenty-first century, this doughty lit

Director Dominic Cooke's stellar National Theatre revival of Sondheim's ‘Follies’ had much to recommend it, but one of its highest points was Imelda Staunton's performance as a wistful former showgirl, haunted by regrets. Now, Staunton and Cooke are reuniting for a crack at another classic musical, ‘Hello, Dolly’, which hasn't had a London revival in over a decade. 'Hello, Dolly' will have a limited (but nonetheless pretty chunky) 30-week run at Adelphi Theatre. Staunton will play s staunch matchmaker who finds a bride for her millionaire friend, then embarks on a hunt for a love of her own. It's got music and lyrics by Jerry Herman (‘La Cage aux Folles’) including the wonderful title number, plus 'Put on Your Sunday Clothes' and 'Before the Parade Passes By'. Book tickets here with Time Out. 

'Cinderella' was originally slated to premiere in the West End in late summer, but it's been delayed until October 2020 due to coronavirus. Carrie Hope Fletcher is set to star in the latest musical from Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. He's spent the past few years polishing his once-tarnished crown as king of West End musical theatre. ‘Joseph’ pulled in crowds last autumn, ‘School of Rock’ is deep in playground rivalry with 'Matilda', and the Open Air Theatre’s recent revivals of 'Jesus Christ Superstar' and 'Evita' have proved that his back catalogue still scrubs up a treat. Now, he's having a go at a totally new story for the first time in decades; 'Cinderella' will presumably be a bit gritter than yer average bedtime tale, thanks to a book by 'Killing Eve' writer Emerald Fennell (and judging by the amount of eyeliner in the grungy-looking publicity snaps). After playing no less than three different roles in the West End's 'Les Miserables', as well as racking up over 600,000 YouTube subscribers, fan fave Carrie Hope Fletcher is on board to play Cinders. Laurence Connor will direct, after helming both ‘School of Rock’ and last year's Sheridan Smith-starring revival of ‘Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat’. 

In a surprise twist worthy of ‘The Mousetrap’, ‘The Mousetrap’ is back! Agatha Christie’s indestructible whodunnit will be the first West End show to return after lockdown, complete with rigorous social-distancing measures At the end of this elegant Agatha Christie thriller, the newly uncovered homicidal maniac steps into a sinister spotlight and warns everyone never to reveal his or her identity. The production recently celebrated its 60th birthday and although Wikipedia and Stephen Fry have both blown the murderer's cover, there is a remarkable conspiracy of silence over 'The Moustrap'. The real mystery of the world's longest-running theatre show is not whodunit but, in its currently mediocre state, whydoit at all? 'The Mousetrap's ticket prices are the only element of this show that isn't stuck fast in the 1950s – although the actors' strained RP does make the odd break for the twenty-first century. Otherwise, this is a walking, talking piece of theatre history and – at £39 for a full-price stalls seat – the most expensive museum exhibit in London. Christie's neat puzzler of a plot is easier to defend. It has defied the inevitably mummifying process of more than 25,000 performances and still possesses an uncanny precision worthy of the mistress of murder's chilling geriatric creation, Miss Marple. In the 60 years since it premiered, its premise, in which six Cluedo-like middle-class stereotypes are imprisoned by snow in a country house while they try to fathom which of the

In the autumn of 2020 extremely venerable Theatre Royal Drury Lane will emerge from over a year of lavish upgrade and restoration works to play host to what is surely set to be the biggest show of the year: Michael Grandage’s musical adaptation of Disney’s ‘Frozen’, aka the most successful animated film of all time. Grandage’s lavish take has been running on Broadway for a while now, and the general feeling is that while it doesn’t do anything to reinvent the wheel, it absolutely does enough to transport fans of the film back to their beloved Arendelle and the complicated relationship between sisters Elsa and Anna (the former being possessed of powers over ice and snow, lest we forget). As with the film, the songs are by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, and yes, that does include that song, with remarkable restraint only included once.  There are no official dates yet, but it has been declared that it will open in ‘autumn 2020’. And there’s one bit of casting now announced: musical theatre actress Samantha Barks will play frosty antagonist Elsa. Tickets will go on sale to the general public March 6 2020.

‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’ transfers to the West End in October 2020. This review is from its run at the National Theatre in December 2019. Tickets for the transfer go on sale March 13 2020. Considering how popular fantasy literature and its adaptations currently are, it feels like a bit of an omission that we see so little of it on stage. But Joel Horwood’s over-twelves version of Neil Gaiman’s 2013 novel ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’ is emphatically The Way To Do It: a heady, dreamlike whirl of story, scary and beautiful in equal parts, that looks phenomenal and makes expert use of the stylised language of theatre to cram in an entire otherworldly epic.It begins as an unnamed man runs away from his father’s wake, drawn to an old duckpond near his former family home. He is haunted by thoughts of a girl, Lettie (Marli Siu), who he met on his twelfth birthday, in the early-’80s. She is gone, but he comes across her elderly grandmother, Old Mrs Hempstock (Josie Walker), who he only dimly recalls. Her presence revives suppressed memories, of Lettie and her family being an ageless coven of immortal spellcasters; of his home being invaded by Ursula (Pippa Nixon), a malevolent entity from outside the walls of reality; of the fightback, and its consequences.Gaiman’s story is hot property: Simon Pegg, of all people, is apparently making a TV version. But it’ll have to go a long way to catch up with Katy Rudd’s thrilling NT production, which is pacy, stylish and also exp