Tom Wicker

A ballad tells a story and writer Samuel Adamson starts his with a narrative misdirection: a woman is filmed playing a piano at St Pancras International and the footage goes viral, reuniting her with a man who professes still to love her. This looks like it’s going to be that story. But it’s not. And that’s precisely the point. As the play zips between the 1970s, 1990s and pre- and post-COVID-19, nonconformist Hattie (Sophie Thompson) and uptight James (Charles Edwards) meet as very different, talented teenage pianists at a cross-school production of Benjamin Britten’s one-act opera ‘Noye’s Fludde’. They rub each other up the wrong way, but like Velcro – forging a friendship that flies catastrophically apart after a tragedy. Like his previous play at Kiln Theatre, ‘Wife’, Adamson plays deftly with gender and expectation. The script wheels around and upends what we think we know about Hattie’s decline into self-destructive alcoholism and James’s success as a composer for an anodyne, oh-so-’90s Richard Curtis-style film about a cutout of a female character whose cancer teaches all the other male characters something. Richard Twyman's assured production doesn’t stint on showing the pain of the betrayal at the heart of the story, but also doesn’t neglect the beauty of the music. This is embodied by pianist Berrak Dyer, whose on-stage presence is far more effective than Edwards and Thompson pretending to play. She’s like a witness – providing fleeting moments of grace as they rest

It wasn’t all about Poirot’s little grey cells or Miss Marple solving murders at the vicarage. In her lifetime, crime writer extraordinaire Agatha Christie wrote 16 plays and a massive 73 novels. Apart from the immortal ‘Mousetrap’, ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ – which Christie adapted in 1953 from an earlier short story – is one of the most famous. Like most of Christie’s work, you can’t say much for fear of ruining the ending. Leonard Vole (a butter-wouldn’t-melt Jack McMullen) is on trial for murdering an older woman who has left everything to him in her will. He insists he’s innocent, but it all rests on the testimony of his wife, Romaine. What will she say on the stand? When Christie adapted her original story, she shifted the focus almost exclusively to the Old Bailey courtroom. Here, Lucy Bailey’s production has the gift of being in the main chamber of London County Hall. Big, austere and grand, it’s the perfect setting for the legal theatrics of Christie’s forensically precise plotting. Some audience members are even addressed as the jury. If the courtroom is a stage, this play is all about performance. Few are as good as Christie at leading us down the garden path, expectations-wise. She constructs her plot like Vole’s barrister, Sir Wilfrid Robarts QC (a charismatic David Yelland), builds his case, before knocking over apparent ‘revelations’ like dominoes. Bailey plays up the melodrama beautifully, in some scenes lighting the judge’s bench like something from a ho

If any writer has made equal success of stage and cinema, it’s playwright and screenwriter John Logan, whose films include ‘Gladiator’, ‘Skyfall’ and ‘The Aviator’ and stage work takes in the likes of smash Rothko drama ‘Red’ and the musical ‘Moulin Rouge!’. In his latest play, he brings screen to the stage to explore the high-stakes power-dynamics of the big screen by simultaneously playing out tense relationships between real-life directors and their stars: Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren while making ‘Marnie’ (1964), and Michael Reeves and Vincent Price during ‘Witchfinder General’ (1968). In Jonathan Kent’s production, both pairs weave obliviously around each other in the same detailed cottage set, which stands in for Hitchcock’s recreation of a bit of Britishness in a Californian backlot, and the real place Reeves lived in while filming his cult classic in the UK. The script makes a feature of certain items being in both. This is a little confusing at the start, but Kent’s inventive use of the space – at one point, all four sit and eat in tense silence at the same table – is engaging. The counterpoint is a fascinating if not wholly enlightening device. Hitchcock’s horrific treatment of his women stars is given full airing here, as Ian McNeice’s director switches between manipulative avuncularity and a constant, ‘cinematic’ commentary on her body that objectifies Joanna Vanderham’s exhausted Hedren, as he forces her to rehearse the psycho-sexual nastiness of ‘Marnie’. V

What’s that you say? You want a show about cowboys that’s also a soap opera, which also involves disco? And you want it to be one of the year’s best new musicals? Well, slap my thigh and roll up to ‘Bronco Billy’. Adapted by Chicago-born writer Dennis Hackin from his own 1979 film, it’s inspired by his parents, who always wanted to be cowboys. It sees a down-on-their-luck troupe of Wild West entertainers head to Hollywood for an audition they hope will transform their fortunes. They’re accompanied by a chocolate company heiress (in disguise) and pursued by her slimy husband, murderous stepmother, a lawyer and a hitman.   Director Hunter Bird takes the late-’70s setting and runs with it, casting its madcap caper vibe in bright colours and every orange of beige. It’s a beautifully pitched, disco-ball reflection of an era of TV and film, complete with great practical effects and some genre-bending choreography, which feels new and unique. The revolving set also sees the troupe’s van becoming a ramshackle character in its own right. It's all anchored by the well-balanced mix of sweetness and saltiness in Hackin’s script, which is both a sly wink to its inspirations and a touching ode to family wherever you find it, as well as some stupidly catchy songs by Chip Rosenbloom and John Torres. These provide the connective tissue that holds the production’s mash-up of genres together, from telling a love story to revelling in arch soap opera excess. The latter is grabbed with both hands

Actress Helen George swaps the aprons of the BBC’s ‘Call the Midwife’ for this revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s 1951 Golden Age musical. But Bartlett Sher’s production is an equally starchy affair. Adapted from Margaret Landon’s 1944 novel ‘Anna and the King of Siam’ – in turn, based on real events – the plot sees George’s English widow Anna Leonowens arriving in mid-nineteenth century Thailand (then Siam) to teach the king’s many wives and children. They immediately clash. With the distance of time, this is a strange show. The arrangements are beautifully done. ‘Getting to Know You’ is charmingly sung by George, who channels an exasperated Julie Andrews in her engaging performance. Darren Lee’s manchild king, whose curiosity about the world turns him stroppily insecure, makes for a strong scene partner. When the show zeroes in on their zingy chemistry, it’s fun. And at the level of spectacle, it’s pretty gorgeous to look at. But its politics are a mess, as Rodgers & Hammerstein seek to offer a critique of imperialism while introducing a white woman to show everyone what’s what. The king’s many wives play largely the same role as the sumptuous set design – to provide a theatrically painterly backdrop to Anna’s modernity. An in-show interpretation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ links the king’s court and slavery, but does so here for a character who is barely sketched in.    Unlike other recent revivals of shows with tricky subject matter, Sher’s lavishly res

This musical version of the now-classic 1999 film is a pure blast of nostalgia. But like the original screenplay, it’s sharper and spikier than your average high-school-set, singalong teen drama. That’s because of their shared roots that ’90s/’00s trope of taking the bare bones of plot from a much earlier work. Here, the story maps the deviousness of the fin de siècle Parisian high society depicted in eighteenth-century novel ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ onto an elite New York private school in the 1990s. Step siblings from hell, Sebastian Valmont (Daniel Bravo) and Kathryn Merteuil (Rhianne-Louise McCaulsky) treat their classmates as playthings. Kathryn wants revenge on an ex-boyfriend by getting Sebastian to seduce Cecile Caldwell (Rose Galbraith), the girl he dumped her for; Sebastian wants to corrupt Annette Hargrove (Abbie Budden), who’s written about chastity before marriage. Kathryn and he bet on the outcome: she wins, she gets his car; he wins, she’ll sleep with him. It's a deliciously nasty little conceit which, in the film, spun out into a series of MTV-worthy moments. Here, Roger Kumble, the film’s writer, along with Lindsey Rosin and Jordan Ross, turn it into an opportunity to drop in classic ’90s tunes. Loved ‘Genie in a Bottle’? Broke your heart to ‘Torn’? Sang gleefully along to ‘Only Happy When It Rains’? You’re in luck. They – and more – are all in here, like exploding memories. The effect is a deliciously sly jukebox musical, with the songs sometimes reflectin

‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ returns to the West End as part of a UK tour, having closed in 2021. It has an all-new cast headed by Ivano Turco as Jamie. This review is from 2017. ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ is a burst of joy in the heart of the West End. This new British musical, transferring from the Sheffield Crucible, is the real deal. Watch out, tired revivals: there’s a new kid in town. Inspired by a 2011 BBC documentary about a teenager who wanted to be a drag queen, the show follows 16-year-old Jamie on his journey to be himself – out of a classroom in a working-class part of Sheffield, away from the bigotry of a deadbeat dad, and into high heels. Director Jonathan Butterell’s production is a high-impact blaze of colour, combining video projections with seamless scene changes and a live band above the stage. It captures the frenetic energy of being a teenager. Every element of this show works beautifully together. The music, by The Feeling frontman Dan Gillespie Sells, is a deft mix of irresistibly catchy, pop-honed foot-tappers – try not to hum ‘And You Don’t Even Know It’, I dare you – and truthful, heart-wrenching numbers. This is Sells’s first foray into writing for musicals, but he’s always excelled at telling stories in song. He is matched by the show’s writer and lyricist Tom MacRae. Apart from notable exceptions like Punchdrunk’s ‘Doctor Who’-themed kids’ show ‘The Crash of Elysium’, he’s largely written for TV, but this works well here. His dialogu

This review is from the 2019 UK premiere of ‘Afterglow’, also at Southwark Playhouse. It returns in 2024. Josh, a theatre director, and Alex, a graduate student, are a married couple in New York in their thirties, in an open relationship. After they hook up with Darius, a massage therapist who’s ten years younger, Alex lets Josh continue seeing Darius alone. How will this affect their relationship?Open relationships aren’t limited to gay couples, but they’re certainly a discussed aspect of twenty-first-century gay dating. In principle, then, ‘Afterglow’ has an intriguing, topical premise. But US writer S Asher Gelman’s hit off-Broadway play – and Tom O’Brien’s UK premiere staging of it – woefully fails to follow through.There’s one funny line in ‘Afterglow’, about the Bible inventing polyamory. But the rest is a turgid slog through clichés, half-baked philosophising about love and the kind of self-important earnestness that makes you crave the deadeningly bland club beat that divides scenes.Lurking at the play’s edges, there’s some potentially interesting stuff about the emotional toll that living in a ruthlessly expensive city like New York takes on relationships. The age gap between Darius and Alex and Josh, who are having a baby, also looms as a complicating factor. But this flattens out into yet more lifeless dialogue.It’s also depressing to see yet another gay production in London implicitly perpetuating a gym-toned body and a six-pack as the desirable physical standard.

No one writes plays quite like Tom Stoppard, as Nina Raine’s revival of 2006’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ reminds us. They demand the same close attention, philosophically and theoretically, as Shakespeare. But the sweep of their intellectual terrain can draw you in as surely as something more overtly emotional. The play spans decades, taking place between the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets following the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Rolling Stones playing a post-Velvet Revolution Prague in 1990. Czech PhD student Jan (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) returns home from the UK after clashing with his Cambridge University professor, dyed-in-the-wool communist Max (Nathaniel Parker), over the tension between communism and socialism. As history unfolds, Jan learns that ‘evolution’ and ‘compromise’ twist and turn in their pairing. This production’s performance space runs down the middle of the audience, literally dividing us into two sides in a neatly embedded irony given the play.     Rock ‘n’ roll – in the records that Jan smuggles into Czechoslovakia, which are ultimately smashed to pieces by the authorities – is threaded through the play not simply as West versus East, but as politicised self-expression. Among the uncompromising clash of conformity and dissidence, which fuels many of the characters’ arguments, the long-haired opt-out it represents is dangerous. Via legendary Czech group The Plastic People of the Universe, Stoppard debates identity and nationhood. As Jan, Fortune-Lloyd c

Seeing a one-person show by Chris Thorpe is like sitting around a campfire, having a cup of tea while your brain is ablaze and you’re full of worry and questions. And yet, you’re punching the air because of how absolutely alive it all feels. We’re not just an audience; we’re individual faces flickering in the flames lit by a drily funny Mancunian storyteller with both feet rooted in the world. Thorpe’s latest show ‘Talking About The Fire’ – created with its director Claire O’Reilly – taps into the same potent mix of headline and existential concerns as ‘Status’ (2018), which dealt with Brexit and nationhood, and ‘Confirmation’ (2014), which explored how dangerously easy it is it is for us to start constructing our own realities. Here, it’s the ever-present threat of nuclear war that’s on Thorpe’s mind. It's a heavy topic, he freely admits, as he tells us about the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which makes it illegal for signatories to develop or store a nuclear arsenal. He tells us about how Veronique Christory – who saw one of his previous shows – turned out to be senior arms advisor to the UN and to have negotiated the treaty. He tells us that none of the main nuclear powers have signed. He shows us footage of Beirut airport blowing up. Via the Google-style ‘Nukemap’, he shows what would happen, if a nuclear bomb was exploded on the Royal Court. And throughout all of this, Thorpe is also proffering biscuits as prizes for a quiz about world facts. He gets to

There’s a lot that’s unlikely about ‘Pacific Overtures’. First, it’s a musical about the westernisation of Japan, starting in 1853: not your standard plot. Second, the book, music and lyrics are written from the perspective of the Japanese by two famously white New Yorkers – John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim. Since making its Broadway debut in 1976, this has been one of Sondheim’s least-performed shows. In part, this is because it was ahead of its time in actually requiring an all-Asian cast. In the third of the Menier Chocolate Factory’s trilogy of Weidman-Sondheim musicals – following ‘Assassins’ and ‘Road Show’ – director Matthew White’s staging uses the shortened 2017 version of the musical. A co-production with Japanese company Umeda Arts Theater, it features traditional Japanese movement and cultural consultancy provided by You-Ri Yamanaka, and dispenses with the male actors playing the women’s roles. In many ways, then, ‘Pacific Overtures’ has travelled a long way from where it began. And part of the experience of watching it is, to be frank, the potential cultural minefield of its existence. This is something that White’s framing gestures at. As we trundle into our seats, the cast scrutinise props from the set as though they’re elements in a trendy exhibit. A guard warns: ‘no touching’. As the narrator, a puckishly charismatic Jon Chew darts in and out, his attitude and modern dress never letting us forget that we’re watching a narrative of first encounters heavily me

The Orange Tree Theatre scores a hit with new artistic director Tom Littler’s raucously enjoyable revival of Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy classic, ‘She Stoops To Conquer’. With judicious modern tweaks to the script, it’s buoyed along by a top-tier cast who go full ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ on this production’s updated 1930s setting. The plot is a ridiculous confection of contrivances. Mr Hardcastle (played brilliantly by David Horovitch, like a Punch cartoon come to life) has invited a would-be-suitor for his daughter to visit. However, via the machinations of his layabout stepson, Tony Lumpkin (Guy Hughes, by turns twinkly and petulant), his visitor ends up thinking he’s staying at a country inn, not his potential father-in-law’s home. This description doesn’t even scratch the surface of Goldsmith’s escalating tangle of relationships and intrigues, which pit rural England against London in a comedy of manners. Richard Derrington rivals Mrs Overall for doddery service as servant Diggory; while, as Mrs Hardcastle, Greta Scacchi sweeps through like a tornado, trying to set up Tony with his wealthy cousin, Constance (Sabrina Bartlett, who appears to be having as much fun as her character). Littler uses the theatre’s in-the-round setting beautifully, coupling the cosy oak panelling of Anett Black and Neil Irish’s set with the characters’ many conspiratorial asides to the audience. He keeps the play wry and light on its feet, as everyone frothily falls foul of class pretension. We re