Wyndhams Theatre.jpg

Wyndham's Theatre

Busy West End home of serious drama
  • Theatre | West End
  • Charing Cross Road
Advertising

Time Out says

Wyndham’s is a West End theatre with genuine pedigree. It's named for Charles Wyndham, the 19th century actor who originally had it built, and he launched it in 1899 with a play where he played another acting legend, David Garrick. It was here that JM Barrie staged a series of plays from 1903; 'Rebecca' author Daphne du Maurier launched her play 'The Years Between'; fellow novelist Graham Greene chose it to premiere 1953’s ‘The Living Room’; and Edward Albee presented the autobiographical ‘Three Tall Women’ starring Maggie Smith. It is also where Madonna made her rather awkward West End debut in 2002.

Wyndham's has a grand Portland stone exterior, with neoclassical flourishes that ensure it cuts a dash on busy Charing Cross road. Inside, Wyndham's Theatre is all Louis XVI splendour. With 759 seats across four levels, it's one of the West End's more intimate venues, meaning you get a good view of the action at most price points. 

Basically the order of the day is serious plays and quality comedies, often starring big names, plus the occasional short run for a successful comedian. Runs are typically limited for this busy house, and absolutely do not go expecting to catch a musical here.

Details

Address
Charing Cross Road
London
WC2H 0DA
Transport:
Tube: Leicester Square; Rail: Charing Cross
Do you own this business?Sign in & claim business

What’s on

My Master Builder

3 out of 5 stars
There has been a note of enigma to the promotion of this new West End drama by largely unknown US playwright Lila Raicek. The official line is that it’s a response to Ibsen’s The Master Builder but not a rewrite, but there has been a pointed refusal - in cast interviews and other publicity - to say any more about the specifics of the play. Having now seen My Master Builder I’m not sure I’m any the wiser as to what the big secret was. Perhaps it’s simply that a full plot summary felt like it was virtually begging interviewers to ask star Ewan McGregor about the end of his first marriage. Or if we’re going for the idea that there was a more poetic mystery, I guess the big revelation is that the play is somewhat autobiographical. It’s *My* Master Builder because Raicek has incorporated her own life into it, or at least one experience (that she owns up to, anyway). She was invited to a posh dinner party and realised upon arrival that she’d been cast as a pawn in a weird psychosexual drama between her hosts, a married couple. First world problems and all that, but it gave her a route into updating Ibsen’s odd late play about a tortured architect haunted by a past encounter.  Henry Solness (McGregor) is a starchitect who lives in the Hamptons with his publisher wife Elena (Kate Fleetwood). They are throwing a party for the completion of a local arts centre he’s designed, that is intimately connected to the sad early death of their son. It doesn’t take long to determine their...
  • Drama

Born with Teeth

Less than a year after making his Doctor Who-era stage return in the NT’s sublime The Importance of Being Earnest, Ncuti Gatwa is back at it again. And if Earnest was a big ensemble piece in which he was a very enjoyable cog, US playwright Liz Duffy Adams’s Born with Teeth is a two-hander that is presumably pretty much wall-to-wall Gatwa. He’ll star as the legendary playwright Christopher Marlowe opposite Edward Bluemel as William Shakespeare; the year is 1591 and in a paranoid Elizabethan England the two are collaborating on Henry VI together with a mix of flirtation and suspcion. Okay, it does sound a bit like slash fiction, penned by an American playwright barely known in this country. But it’s also an RSC production, directed by the company’s co-leader Daniel Evans – if that’s not a mark of quality assurance, then what is?
  • Drama

All My Sons

Belgian super director Ivo van Hove got his big English-language break with 2014’s astounding production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, and a couple of years later lucky New Yorkers got a deluxe production of The Crucible that scored warm reviews (maddeningly it never played here despite its largely British and Irish cast). Since then, Van Hove’s career has gone into overdrive and he’s famous dedicated a lot of time to making stage adaptations of classic films, to mercurial effect.  It would be entirely misunderstanding Van Hove to imagine that he’s returning to the safety of Miller as a result of last year’s colossal West End flop Opening Night. But there will certainly be those glad he’d doing so as he tackles the US playwright’s first big hit, All My Sons.  Set in 1943, the drama concerns Joe Keller, an upstanding pillar of the local community whose business partner has been found guilty of selling faulty parts to the US Airforce. Joe has escaped any blame. But should he have? Van Hove has assembled a proper A-grade cast here, with US star Bryan Cranston – who led the director’s 2017 hit Network –  as Joe, with the wondrous Marianne Jean-Baptiste as his wife Kate and Paapa Essiedu as their son Chris. 
  • Drama
Advertising
London for less
    You may also like
    You may also like