Anya Ryan

This review is from the Bush Theatre in February. In August ‘Shifters’ will transfer to the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End. In ‘Shifters’, Benedicte Lombe’s follow-up to her Susan Blackburn Prize-winning play ‘Lava’, sparks fly and past emotions weave their way into the present. Why is the feeling of falling in love for the first time so profound?, it asks. Will we remember it forever? In this bittersweet, woozy rom-com the imprint of big, wild adolescent infatuation can’t be forgotten. Dre and Des met at school, joined the debating society and danced awkwardly around their romantic feelings for one another, until one day everything changed. It has been eight years since they last were together, but all their history comes rushing back. Dre’s beloved ‘nana’ has died and Des has flown over for the funeral. But in the years they’ve spent apart things have started to look a little different. They are 32 now and Des has fulfilled her dream of becoming a successful artist in America, while Dre has worked hard on realising his culinary ambitions closer to home. And yet still, their old electricity finds a way to climb back to the surface. The wonder of Lombe’s writing is that it leaves you longing for the story of what could have and should have been. Instead, we watch a poetic tale about two perfectly matched souls excruciatingly separated. The beginning of Lynette Linton’s production is a deliberate slow burn. The romance between the duo creeps in slowly, but once it land

Ah, the question of what to do with The Shrew. In 2024 any production of Shakespeare’s bleak misogynistic comedy ‘The Taming of the Shew’ requires careful rethinking. Under the right direction, it can become a cautionary tale rather than a hateful defamation of women. And, at first there are high hopes for Jude Christian’s cartoonish production. It begins with Christopher Sly drunkenly stumbling in from the back of The Globe and accidentally throwing a full glass of beer over a carefully selected audience member – he’s met with fury. Katharina – the titular Shrew – is played with fiery vigour by Thalissa Teixeira. But this makes her eventual fall into submission to her paramour Petruchio even more of an indignity. Her painful final speech is mistakenly performed without a trace of irony. The whole thing leaves a bizarrely sour taste. The style Christian goes for is something she calls ‘an absurd carnival’. It has elements of a childish fever dream: songs and dance break out; a babysitter sits on a side lined sofa, reading magazines to pass the time. The set design by Rosie Elnile has a giant white teddy bear and connecting trampolines at its centre: it is a child’s dream playground. For the wedding, Petruchio comes dressed in a furry worm-like outfit, complete with dark bobbly eyes. So yes, it looks suitably bonkers. If the hope is to show a woman broken and ripped apart by the hands of male abuse, then Christian has succeeded - Katharina ends as a shell of the person she onc

Love is set up to fail in Alice Childress’s 1962 classic play ‘Wedding Band’. It’s set in South Carolina, 1918 during the Spanish Flu pandemic. Black seamstress Julia and white baker Herman are celebrating ten years of being together. They know each other inside out: he has to ask her what size socks he wears and where to buy his shirts. They’ve shared countless wedding cakes over the years. But, they are stuck in limbo – in this state interracial marriage is against the law. And so, in Monique Touko’s production their relationship plays out across a battlefield. Julia has moved into a new home in a set of connecting rental houses. Here, she is surrounded by a sisterhood of Black women. Children scurry past yodelling; the women do their best to offer each other neighbourly favours and spend their evenings gossiping away. And yet, even in this safe haven, when Julia reveals she has a white partner, the news sends acidic ripples through the community.   Herman’s entrance disrupts the peace even further: he is an outsider that comes crashing in. On a set made up of wire fences, designed by Paul Wills, the couple are always one wrong step away from danger. Their scenes together are fuelled by passion but are back lit by a menacing red light. Does it indicate their love? Or the hell that is just around the corner? You’re never quite sure as the couple swerve from deep devotion to one another to heated conflict between each scene. Herman – played tenderly by David Walmsley – avoids

Hamlet is an actor’s Everest. Any brave soul who signs up to play the role arrives with the knowledge that they’ll be following a string of Danish princes that have come before them. Arguably, the most supreme part in the classical canon, it requires a performer at the top of their game Why then, would one want to make an already daunting task harder? Eddie Izzard comes to Shakespeare’s great script alone. In a production adapted by her brother, Mark, she plays 23 characters in total: she bounces from Ophelia to Claudius, Polonius to the rest. But is Izzard really fit to wear this Prince’s crown – and then some? Unfortunately, no. This ‘Hamlet’ truly is a real tragedy. Izzard is no stranger to marathon theatrical expedition – her previous foray, a solo ‘Great Expectations’ was largely, positively received. And yet, this sequel is more of an exercise in vanity than artistic purpose. Directed by Selina Cadell, Izzard, who started her career as a street performer, barely shows any skill as an actor at all. Channelling her stand-up past, Izzard initially looks at home onstage. She comes in, suavely dressed in black leather trousers, a power-suit blazer and a slash of red lipstick. She uses her hands, comically, as puppets to speak as the hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  But this physical confidence is as far as we get in terms of promise: even as a loud and proud Izzard fan, it is a struggle to pick out the positives from this mess. Elsinore is barely a feature. Tom Piper’s

Should a non-disabled actor be allowed to play Shakespeare’s only disabled protagonist? Historically that has almost exclusively been the case, but the recent move away from the practise of ‘cripping up’ in both stage and screen felt like it reached something of a watershed with the RSC’s 2022 ‘Richard III’, which starred disabled actor Arthur Hughes in the title role. Although a production starring non-disabled actor Adoja Andoh toured last year to little controversy, when the announcement came earlier this year that Globe artistic director Michelle Terry would play Richard III, it was met with a torrent of anger and the accusation that she was taking the opportunity away from disabled actors. This production exists under the shadow of that rage and despite its merits, feels somewhat weighted by what it could have – maybe should have, been. To be clear, Terry is not affecting a disability. The battle this production is fighting is in fact whether Richard’s disability is essential to his character. Shakespeare’s play has a complicated background context, and there is a legitimate argument for exploring it with the notion of evil untangled from disability. But a production has to be good enough to make it worthwhile.   The aim of this version from director Elle While is to explore toxic masculinity in all its damning effects. All references to the King being ‘rudely stamp’d’ have been removed and instead Terry leans into the menacing and scheming side of Richard. She performs

There’s been a frenzy of hype around Sam Grabiner’s debut play ‘Boys on the Verge of Tears’. It was the recipient of the prestigious Verity Bargate Award last year, and has found vocal support from big name playwrights Lucy Kirkwood and April de Angelis. But, the real attraction comes in the form of the director James Macdonald: a real industry legend, known for his work with the likes of Sarah Kane and Annie Baker. It is pretty remarkable that he’s take on what is in effect a fringe play – everything seems set for Grabiner to be something special. Short answer – he is. Set exclusively in a public toilet, with five main actors and over 50 characters, Grabiner has created an intimate study of men and boys, their potential for violence and pain. Following a rough chronology from boyhood to old age, with no break between the changing scenes, men from all walks of life flow in and out of the cubicles – sometimes pausing for conversation, to assess their appearance or for a second of solitude to take a breath. Although open to the world, the toilets feel like a place of private sanctuary: a home for lost, lonely children at birthday parties or a place for teenagers to get ready for the school disco. The door to the outside has the potential to swing open in an instant, but inside there is the sense of everything stopping. This is a space of confession, connection and frustration, somehow cut off from the rest of life. Yet, the potential for danger and cruelty is ever present. Fig

British theatre loves a backstage drama: in the last month alone we’ve said hello to Ivo van Hove’s divisive ‘Opening Night’ and waved goodbye to Jack Thorne’s ‘The Motive and the Cue’, both set behind the scenes of Broadway plays. Now here comes April de Angelis’s new comedy ‘The Divine Mrs S’, which goes behind the curtain of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, circa 1800. Here, De Angelis trains her lens on Sarah Siddons (Rachael Stirling), the actor known as the Queen of Drury Lane and something of an archetype for the modern celebrity. But though she was probably the greatest female actor of her day, there is still no contemporary biography of her.  ‘The Divine Mrs S’ paints a picture of what Siddons’s world might have looked like – performing on stage every evening, adored by critics and fans. But the brilliance in De Angelis’s script comes in balancing Siddons’s influence with her impotence. Despite being a ticket-selling machine, she is shown as having little to no agency offstage. Her life is ruled by her brother Kemble (Dominic Rowan) – the manager of Drury Lane – and her husband, who spends his days off with a mistress. Together, they sign her contracts, decide what roles she plays and keep control of her finances. It is very meta: Siddons’s inner frustrations and wishes are said aloud in the form of stage directions that she reads to the audience. The play looks inwards on the stage profession and the construction of theatre: ‘the best way to survive in this business is

Luckily for Mischief Theatre, the public’s enthusiasm for watching things go wrong doesn’t seem to be waning. As ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ celebrates ten years in the West End – and ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’ having recently played a winter season – here comes the company’s latest: ‘Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle’. It is a sequel of sorts to 2020’s ‘Magic Goes Wrong’, with Henry Lewis returning as the eponymous inept mentalist. As is customary in the plays created by Lewis and his co-writers Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, there’s mess and slapstick aplenty. But, is two hours-plus of slip-ups and mistakes enough to keep our attention? Well, most of the audience seems to love it. The Mind Mangler tries and fails to predict our names, gets accidentally trapped inside a guillotine and has the questionable assistance of a hapless ‘audience member’ (Sayer). But things start to feel very repetitive. Long sections of audience participation are dragged out. There’s some tired attempts to ‘smell’ people’s professions. As the first act comes to a close, you can’t shake the feeling that there’s not much more we can get from an evening of jokes about failed magic. Eventually, the show pulls the rug from underneath us. Shockingly, the Mind Mangler’s tricks start to go right. His successful and genuinely very impressive mind reading sends ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ around the audience, while the big finale is would surely make Derren Brown impressed.  But it’s a little too late to compens

Quirky, sardonic, all-female performance troupe Figs in Wigs have been performing together for 15 years. But with the theatre industry on the brink of collapse and the end of the world nigh, now might finally be the time for them to hang up their headgear for good. At least, that’s what they’re telling us.  ‘Big Finish’ is a show of two halves. The mischievous and interminably creative company starts with the tale of the world’s undoing - and it is as absurd and mind-boggling as their previous work. ‘Nothing lasts forever,’ they tell us as they take us through a series of chapters that lead to their final goodbye. They arrive onstage as a pack of dinosaur mask-wearing golfers on a buggy. Then, they perform a synchronized dance number as a group of scarlet puffer-jacketed crabs. Foam drips out slowly from a pipe at the back to resemble an iceberg, while the five Figs form a string orchestra to play ‘My Heart Will Go On’. They read out a will where they give away their remaining belongings: their studio’s tarpaulin roof gets gifted to the Globe – ‘it really needs it’, after all. A life-sized skeleton prop is left to the London Dungeons. Some of the imagery is so farcical, you’re never quite sure what is happening. But somehow 'Big Finish' still manages to feel like a fluorescent horror show and glaring warning about the impending environmental disaster. When the bizarreness breaks into a satirical ‘post-show talk’, it takes a while for us to realise the Figs are still in perfor

Four London teenagers sit, bored and trapped inside on a Saturday. They’ve been robbed of their free time, but worst of all they have been subjected to the company of their fellow troublemakers. Taking inspiration from John Hughes’s seminal 1985 film ‘The Breakfast Club’ – about a motley crew of American high school students punished with a weekend detention – Sabrina Ali sets her play in a dugsi: a term British Somalis use to describe a religious school. They turn up frustrated, brash and full of secrets: they are each reluctant to reveal the real reason why they’re here to their peers. Usually, they wouldn’t give each other the time of day but in detention, the only thing they’ve got to do is talk. As the hour ticks on and their elusive teacher still hasn’t shown his face, the girls start to bond by sharing horror stories based on Somalian folk tales and passing gossip round like its breaking news. At the play’s centre is a mystery. Where did the aloof, angry Hani disappear to for two years? The remaining trio – Munira, Yasmin and Salma, all have their own beliefs. Did she become a drug dealer? Get pregnant and had a baby in Year 9? The big reveal is held back until the play’s final moments which means the pacing feels off throughout. Often, it feels like we’re waiting for the script to kick into action. The structure can be forgiven though because Ali’s play seeps with realism, relatability and endless charm. This is a picture of adolescence in 2024: phones are clutched ti

In 2004, as his swansong at Stratford East after a 25-year tenure as artistic director, Philip Hedley programmed ‘The Big Life’. It is bittersweet then, that the hit musical returns to the venue to celebrate its 20-year anniversary in the year of his death – Hedley passed away in January. His memory lives on in this belter of a musical revival and time has done little to age its story. Today it is as infectious, heart-rendering and as achingly resonant as ever. Paul Sirett and Tameka Empson’s script takes the convoluted comedy of Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and enriches it to tell a battle of the sexes story from the Windrush generation. Dennis, Ferdy, Bernie and Lennie arrive by boat to Britain full of aspirations and big dreams. ‘The sky’s the limit,’ they sing, wide-eyed and determined to make something of themselves. Nothing will hold them back. And so, after Bernie and his wife-to-be Sybil have a spat on the ship over, the men all reluctantly promise to abjure women and booze for three years. The music is the lifeblood of this tale of suspended satisfaction: the cocktail of blues, jazz, calypso and soul is a gesture to what the Windrush generation left and lost when they travelled across the waters. The men’s bright futures soon turn cloudy. They are turned away from every B&B in the city, can’t get the jobs they’re qualified for, and are subjected to endless racist taunts. With each knockback, the sparkle in their eyes dwindles just a little bit more.  Somehow

Jade Anouka’s autobiographical play ‘Heart’ begins as a perfect love story. She’s 24, wedding bells are ringing and she’s found her soulmate. ‘All the boxes have been ticked,’ she says. But spoiler alert: this is not the dream romance. Soon, the fantasy curdles and by 28, she’s divorced, sofa surfing and trying to write the next chapter of her life as she realises she’s bisexual. But, while her play is braided with sincerity and heartache, it’s rocky as a finished theatrical package. It soon becomes obvious that the story is secondary to the form. Accompanist Grace Savage – who (another spoiler) we eventually learn is Anouka’s now wife – provides a near-constant beatbox and electro-inspired soundtrack. Anouka speaks in rhyme over the top, and while some of her poetry is marvellous, other parts are deeply forgettable. There is plenty of tired imagery too. Depression is described as a ‘beast’ that emerges from the shadows and eats away at life’s joy – it might be a strong visual painting but it is unoriginal. Often the two performers look out of balance with one another: the focus is on the play’s sound; we need a richer narrative. Anouka’s performance is electrifyingly raw. But this disjointed hybrid doesn’t feel like the right form for her story.