Tom Wicker

Michelle Terry, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, takes on one of theatre’s great female roles in Anna Jordan’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s coruscating condemnation of the soul-destroying endlessness of warfare, directed by Globe associate artist Elle While. Brecht wrote Mother Courage in 1939, as fascism overtook Europe, but deliberately set it several hundred years earlier, during the Thirty Years War – intending the distance to provide a kind of allegorical universality. Jordan’s version goes further, never naming the conflict, only identifying sides by differing colours. ‘Grids’ replace countries. References to drones give it modernity, but it’s clearly meant to be anywhere and everywhere. It’s an approach that enables us to map its grimly picaresque story of a mother trying to keep her children alive, while seeking also to profiteer from the ruthless supply-and-demand of war, on to any conflict. The sweary, grubby dialogue has a carelessly cynical authenticity. However, while the relentless repetition of opportunity, gain and loss is key, the lack of specificity in Jordan’s translation highlights its heavily episodic nature. This makes an anchoring central performance – one that gives us a toehold during the play’s grim carousel of events – particularly important. Thankfully, Terry is astonishingly good as Mother Courage. She’s bawdy, broken and ferocious, with a physicality always halfway between entreaty and attack. While she’s more sympathetic than Brecht

Lyric Hammersmith associate director Nicholai La Barrie’s revival of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 mirth-y morality play has flair to spare. Performed by an all-Black cast, in both tone and energy, it follows on the impeccably stylish heels of the National Theatre’s extravagant The Importance of Being Earnest. The play pivots on the difference between outward appearances and inward realities. The glamorous life of seemingly ideal husband and politician Lord Chiltern (Chiké Okonkwo) looks set to fall apart when Mrs Cheveley (Aurora Perrineau) – a schooldays frenemy of his wife – blackmails him into supporting a fraudulent canal-building scheme by revealing she has evidence that he built his fortune on insider-trading. La Barrie nails the heady rush of wealthy excess. This is a stunning-looking production, thanks to Rajha Shakiry’s vibrant set and costume design, which draw on a wealth of cultural and high-fashion references. The Chilterns and their coterie of friends and hangers-on live in a world textured like an art gallery. Script tweaks referencing Hello! magazine and a bookshelf glimpse of a title by gay Black writer James Baldwin add to a setting that’s more of a retro-modern vibe than a concrete era. Ms Dynamite’s music co-exists with letter-writing instead of mobile phones. There are some exquisitely crafted comic performances, including Tiwa Lade’s doll-like turn as Lord Chiltern’s beady-eyed sister, Mabel, brightly cutting a swathe through everyone. Jamael Westman is also great

This review is from 2025. The Comedy About Spies returns for 2026. Following in the vein of 2016’s The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, Mischief Theatre – they of The Play That Goes Wrong – are now aiming their slick brand of ever-escalating theatrical farce at the spy genre in this West End premiere. When a top-secret file is stolen by a turncoat British agent, a deeply mismatched pair of KGB agents and a CIA operative and his over-enthusiastic mother collide in pursuit of it – along with an over-the-hill actor and a young couple – at the Piccadilly Hotel in London in swinging 1961. General chaos ensues. Writers and original Mischief Theatre members Henry Shields and Henry Lewis mine plenty of daft comedy from spy staples like bugged radios and improbable gadgets while paying homage to a decade in the UK rocked by the revelations of double agent Soviet Union spy rings. It’s low-hanging fruit, of course, but ramped up by Mischief Theatre’s trademark ability to spin seemingly minor mishaps into total comedy meltdowns. Director Matt Dicarlo handles these set-pieces and Shields and Lewis’s penchant for fast-moving wordplay deftly, allowing us half a knowing wink before whisking us on to the characters’ next blunder. He’s greatly aided by David Farley’s set design, a colourful cartoon of ‘60s London. A split-level cutaway of the Piccadilly Hotel is a neat visual shorthand for introducing us to the characters and snappily showing us the chaotic consequences of a bugged radio being mov

This 1968 play by the great dramatist of the fractured American Dream isn’t one of Arthur Miller’s best. But The Price is compelling in its uncompromising cynicism, originally written as a rebuke to how Miller perceived the abstract, consequence-free tone of 1960s theatre. New York cop Victor (Elliot Cowan) has returned with his wife, Esther (Faye Castelow), to his long-dead father’s home to sell off the furniture before the house is demolished. This re-opens old wounds about what he feels he sacrificed to care for his bankrupted parent while his brother, Walter (John Hopkins), became a doctor. A heavyweight creative team led by director Jonathan Munby makes the weight of this past almost tangible. With Anna Watson’s lighting picking out chairs and lamps and mementos as if they were bones, Jon Bausor’s forced-perspective set is mausoleum-like. There’s a dusty, stifling density to the piles of things that crowd out the stage.  Into this tale of family strife drops wily furniture dealer Gregory (Henry Goodman), knocking on 90 years old and a man of many lives. He’s someone who – in contrast to everyone else on stage – relentlessly adapts to the present rather than hopelessly seeking meaning, blame or absolution in the past. Nostalgia isn’t his game. He’s a show-stopping character, played to twinkly inscrutable perfection by Goodman, whose shambolic bluster hovers beguilingly between sincerity and lived-in pragmatism as he informs Victor that these things from his past don’t hav

  This Tony and Olivier Award-winning musical – adapted by Harvey Fierstein with songs by Cyndi Lauper from the 2005 Britflick – was first seen in the West End a decade ago. And now it struts back into town with energy to spare. It arrives at the London Coliseum in a production directed by Nikolai Foster, artistic director of Leicester’s Curve Theatre, where it debuted last year.  Charlie Price (Matt Cardle) has reluctantly inherited his recently deceased dad’s Northampton shoe factory, which will be forced to close in a matter of weeks due to dwindling sales. But a chance encounter with cabaret and drag performer Lola (Johannes Radebe) and the broken heel of a boot she used to whack a couple of bigots sparks an idea. Together, can they meet a market need for durable, fabulous footwear while saving the factory by making boots not brogues? Fierstein’s book steers hard into the connection between two seemingly completely different people linked by a shared struggle to find their place in the world and a sense of not living up to their fathers’ ambitions (in Lola’s case, not following her dad into the boxing ring). Lauper’s music similarly aims directly at the heart in duets like ‘I’m Not My Father’s Son’. However, while the show follows a well-trodden path to self-acceptance, it does so with an intoxicating exuberance. Foster’s staging is gorgeous, cutting through the industrial tones of Robert Jones’s multi-dimensioned set – production lines of shoes and sewing machines – wit

Jim Hacker is finding negotiating old age as baffling as government in this follow up by writer-director Jonathan Lynn to 2010’s Yes, Prime Minister – a stage rendition of the seminal Westminster-set TV satire he co-wrote with Antony Jay. Ex-prime minister Hacker (Griff Rhys Jones), now in his eighties, is master of an Oxford College which he bankrolled and bears his name. We meet him hiring – and immediately clashing with – Black, working-class care worker and Oxford graduate Sophie (Stephanie Levi-John). He’s facing attempts by the college populace to oust him after a series of idiotic remarks. So, of course, he turns to his former permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Clive Francis) for assistance. If the TV series, its sequel Yes, Prime Minister and Lynn’s previous play took aim at the state of British politics, that feels more like window dressing here. Yes, there are some funny takedowns of Brexit and the crassly self-serving nature of the modern political class, but these don’t feel hugely new. Instead, where the play works best is the elegiac tone it strikes. Beneath the wit is a warning: be careful of reaping what you’ve sown. Hacker and Humphrey are still monstrous in their own quippy way – respectively buffoonish and manipulative, they are privileged political dinosaurs of an extinct era. But they are also old men who have fallen foul of the system they helped to create, friendless and family-less. We learn that Humphrey has been shunted into an institution by

The far right on the streets, an agenda-filled press and a nation caught in a cost-of-living crisis being encouraged to blame immigrants for its woes. It’s not hard to see why this new musical – set in the lead-up to and aftermath of the real-life 1936 stand against the march of Oswald Mosley’s black-shirt fascists by the residents of Cable Street in London’s East End – resonates so powerfully now. Written by Alex Kanefsky, with music and lyrics by Tim Gilvin and directed by Adam Lenson, it’s at Marylebone Theatre following two runs at Southwark Playhouse in 2024. Told in flashback via a present-day tour of Cable Street, it follows the fatefully linked lives of Irish Mairead (Lizzy-Rose Esin-Kelly), who dreams of being a poet while supporting her family, Jewish ex-boxer Sammy (Isaac Gryn), for whom faith isn’t enough in the face of bigotry, and Northerner Ron (Barney Wilkinson), whose desperation at the lack of work is manipulated into racism and violence.  Esin-Kelly’s Mairead is a charismatic, no-nonsense presence, while Gryn shades her would-be love interest Sammy with a bruising anger. Wilkinson plays Ron as someone lost and dangerously confounded by harsh reality. There’s some excellent work from the rest of the ensemble cast, who bring to life their families, neighbours, Mosley’s sneering thugs and the ineffectual police. Lenson ensures that these characters are impactful threads in the social tapestry.      There are shades of Les Misérables when this social tinderbox

The Orange Tree’s artistic director Tom Littler brings the same assured touch to Richard Sheridan’s eighteenth-century comedy of identity confusion as he did to Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer this time two years ago. He’s aided by a top-drawer cast who know how to tap into the play’s brand of jubilant absurdity. To test the sincerity of the love of heiress Lydia Languish (Zoe Brough), the equally loaded Captain Jack Absolute (Kit Young) has wooed her in the guise of the lowly Sergeant Beverley. However, this backfires when, due to matchmaking by his dad, Sir Anthony Absolute (Robert Bathurst), and Lydia’s aunt, Mrs Malaprop (Patricia Hodge), Jack discovers both that he has become his own ‘rival’ and that other suiters are piling up. Littler treads nimbly through the archly funny contrivances that make up this play. He keeps the same setting – the city of Bath – but has cannily shifted the time period to the 1920s and made a few minor modernisations to the language. The decade’s changing social and gender morés, signified by between-scene bursts of joyful Charleston dancing, neatly serve to renew the focus on the male pomposity and anxiety that drive the plot. Because, make no mistake, the joke is on the boys here. A twinkly eyed Young makes for a charmingly incorrigible Jack, but his plan absolutely deserves to fail. From Bathurst’s amusingly histrionic Sir Anthony to James Sheldon’s clownishly insecure ‘Faulty’ Faulkland, who tests the affection and patience of fia

The groanworthy title sets the tone for this fun re-telling of Dracula via close harmony singing and a stream of winkingly awful puns. Co-writers Dan Patterson (Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Mock the Week) and Jez Bond, also directing, feed an irreverent combination of Bram Stoker’s novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film version through a Mel Brooks musical mangle. Dracula (Ako Mitchell) is moping around his castle in Transylvania until English solicitor Jonathan Harker (Stephen Ashfield) turns up bearing deeds to a property and a portrait of his wife, Mina (Lorna Want), who looks eerily like the vampire’s long-dead love. He imprisons Harker and sets off to find Mina, who’s staying with her friend Lucy (Keala Settle) in Whitby. These are the bare bones of a production that may be gothic in origin but is panto in spirit. Patterson and Bond delight in sending up the clichés of the Victorian novel and stage conventions. Every line is basically a set-up for knowing jokes gleefully tossed at us and accompanied by a cappella versions of cheesy pop anthems, from ‘Eye of the Tiger’ to ‘Somebody to Love’. Are you looking for a wilfully anachronistic duet on space hoppers? Seek no further. There’s the well-pitched revelry of the dressing-up box in the cast’s on-stage costume changes and rapidly abandoned sight gags, as well as some first-class reworkings of some song standards, notably ‘Midnight Train to Dover’. This production ultimately stays on track by never pausing for anything, w

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

This big-hearted new musical is rooted in a brilliant episode of real life. In 1985, three female mechanics, Ros Wall, Annette Williams and Roz Wollen, set up a car repair shop in Sheffield to create work in short supply in their male-dominated industry. Named in honour of trailblazing racing car driver Gwenda Stewart, the garage became a hub for women’s rights and protest in Thatcherite 1980s, notably against Section 28, the law prohibiting the promotion of the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ in education. Sheffield-based theatre company Out of the Archive – whose goal is to make work amplifying the lives and histories of working-class LGBTQI+ people – have crafted their own story and characters out of interviews with surviving Gwenda’s Garage member Roz and its customers. Here, Carol (Eva Scott) is trying to keep the business afloat, while her colleagues, free spirit Terry (Sia Kiwa) and aspiring parent Bev (Nancy Brabin-Platt), navigate their complicated romantic relationship and trainee Dipstick (Lucy Mackay) gets to grips with the mechanics of life. You can strongly feel the DNA of Northern comedies like Brassed Off or The Full Monty and queer films like Pride in Nicky Hallett and Val Regan’s book and lyrics. The characters are vividly drawn and the set-up is a storytelling gift through which to explore the turbulent 1980s and the profound impact of the political on the personal, from industry-gutted economic deprivation to media-inflamed sexism and homophobia.  If anything, the

Ella Hickson’s Wendy-centric RSC retelling of JM Barrie’s classic tale of lost boys, pirates, a ticking crocodile and perpetual childhood finally lands in London after premiering in Stratford-upon-Avon over a decade ago. However, some clunky characterisation and awkward modernisation mean that it never truly soars. Original director Jonathan Munby’s production is certainly visually sumptuous. From the vintage toy-filled nooks and crannies of the children’s nursery to the colourfully salvaged look of Neverland, Colin Richmond’s set is a playbox spilled delightfully across the stage. And Taiki Ueda’s video design of crashing waves and twinkling stars pattern atmospherically across the theatre as the children fly or fight Captain Hook. There’s also a bold directness to some of the changes that Hickson makes to the story. Here, Wendy and her brothers go with Peter to find the brother they ‘lost’ a year ago. Barrie’s tale of ageless children who had fallen out of their prams was always a ghost story beneath the fairy dust, with mortality haunting everyone from Hook to Wendy, being shot out of the sky. This version sets the emotional stakes high from the start.  It's also refreshing to see Wendy reject the role of ‘mother’ assigned unquestioningly to her by the Lost Boys, paralleled by her mother’s determination to forge her own life as a seamstress in scenes in early twentieth-century London. Unfortunately, Hannah Saxby only really has one note of stressed-out exasperation to play