Tom Wicker

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 moved between rooms. A talented cast know their mission, steering into

American writer Neil LaBute invariably takes big swings in his plays. Debuting at the Park Theatre, his first UK premiere in an age is no exception. At a time of intense debate around euthanasia and assisted dying in the real world, he collides Brad and Jodie, an American couple who are facing her terminal cancer, with Tate, the man Jodie wants to kill her. If you want nuanced debate, look elsewhere. LaBute blasts clear through this. As Jodie, Justina Kehinde brings a powerful rawness to her character’s frustration and anger at her situation. But – no spoilers – the solution we’re eventually presented with is so convoluted and elaborate that it drowns out any believable character development. This isn’t helped by a script that repeatedly circles the same points. Instead, as is so often the case with LaBute’s work, Jodie feels like a catalyst for two men to work through their manliness. Middle-class Brad and his reluctance to help Jodie end her life is juxtaposed with the working-class Tate, a mechanic with a troubled family history who went to school with her and is willing to do what Brad won’t. Morgan Watkins brings an intriguing unpredictability to Tate, bristling and coiling him like a spring as he comes into conflict with Archie Backhouse’s condescending Brad. Under the play’s increasingly ludicrous set-up, there are some trenchant themes about small-town America, classism and lack of opportunity. But these are drenched by the pissing contest the script devolves into. Th

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be in the headlines every day, this densely philosophical techno-thriller by Beau Willimon – creator and showrunner of Netflix’s House of Cards – certainly feels timely. Computer coders Lena (Kaya Scodelario) and Sasha (Luke Treadaway) are locked in NSA waiting rooms, awaiting questioning by special agent Samira Darvish (Nathalie Armin) and their boss, Ari Abrams (Cliff Curtis). They’ve been developing a ‘kill code’ for the artificial general intelligence system, Logos, that they’ve been working on. But now it looks as though someone has tried to override the system and ‘release’ Logos into the outside world. Was it them? Or was it Logos itself? This production, directed by Ellen McDougall, jumps straight into big, ethical questions about humanity mimicking God. It’s a favoured trope of science fiction – to which Willimon brings a lot of contemporary theoretical thinking on AI and an Edward Snowdon-flavoured ‘hacktivist’ dimension. He gives Lena, a former Mennonite who is possibly, unknowingly, looking for something to replace her traditional faith, and Sasha, a Russian civil rights protestor, plenty of backstory acreage, as characters lengthily debate truth, falsehood and exactly what Logos is. This is a very talky play, to which McDougall adds movement and pacing by using Azusa Ono’s lighting design and Alex Eales’s split-level set – with the NSA agents watching Lena and Sasha from above – to weave in flashbacks and to ke

In The Lonely Londoners, Roy Williams lifts the words from the pages of Sam Selvon’s seminal 1956 novel about the Windrush generation in London and sears them onto the stage. Ebenezer Bamgboye’s hugely evocative production has secured a richly deserved upgrade to the Kiln Theatre after opening last year at Jermyn Street Theatre.  Moses (Solomon Israel) is our eyes and ears into the city as he greets – and quickly shows the ropes to – other immigrants from the Caribbean seeking a new life. This includes a swaggering newbie that Moses nicknames ‘Galahad’ (Romario Simpson), ‘Big City’ (Gilbert Kyem Jnr), dreaming of hosting a steel-band club night, and Lewis (Tobi Bakare), who’s awaiting the arrival of his wife, Agnes (Shannon Hayes), and his mother, Tanty (Carol Moses). Williams burnishes his reputation as an unflinching chronicler of the complicated and often ugly side of our national psyche. From the novel’s picaresque shape, he has crafted a story that touches on Black immigrant experiences without patronising his characters. We feel their rage in a postwar UK that has exploited their citizenship for gain but treats them like dirt.  Bamgboye’s superb staging forgoes the trappings of conventional period drama, loosening the 1950s setting to speak as much to the here and now as to the past. The blue luggage boxes that the characters carry or sit on in Laura Ann Price’s sparse set are a constant reminder of their enforced sense of impermanence in this chilly metropolis, with it

It might seem strange to put on a play set at the height of summer in the middle of December. But the colourful excess of the RSC’s latest take on Shakespeare’s comedy – transferring to the Barbican under the direction of Eleanor Rhode after premiering in Stratford in January – fits the season. This production only skims the darker depths of the magical-drugging plot device that triggers the play’s love-swapping shenanigans, when four young lovers on the run in the forest outside Athens get caught up in fairy king Oberon’s season-disrupting feud with Titania. The play’s blurred lines between love and ownership and the intoxication of lust are mostly played for laughs. There’s great physical comedy from Ryan Hutton as a strutting Lysander, counterpointed by Nicholas Armfield’s stiffly wax-jacketed brown-nose, Demetrius. Boadicea Ricketts gives Helena real emotional heft. You wouldn’t want to pick a fight with Dawn Sievewright as Hermia. Sirine Saba’s Titania is perfectly pitched for the camp tone. Katherine Pearce’s Puck is less malevolent sprite, more ‘chuck a TV out of a hotel room on tour’ type. The aesthetic of Lucy Osborne’s costume design is a decades-jumbled Mods and (Punk) Rockers. It’s a neat visual flourish that distinguishes the stuffy Athenian court from the anarchy of the forest. Andrew Richardson’s Oberon has seemingly wandered straight out of Adam and The Ants’ Prince Charming, while his version of Duke Theseus owes a country-sized debt to King Charles. It's a c

Cinderella, King’s Head Theatre’s first family panto, is packed with talent and is a lot of fun… when its elements truly mesh together. But it doesn’t reach the perfect pinnacle of festive silliness you want it to. The show’s pedigree is impeccable. Writer and director Andrew Pollard spent 15 years as Greenwich Theatre’s dame-in-residence. RuPaul’s Drag Race UK's Ella Vaday (Nick Collier) is Ugly Stepsister Peckham. Real-life Dame of the realm, Judi Dench, is our pre-recorded narrator. We also get voiceover contributions from bona fide camp British icons Su Pollard and Miriam Margolyse.  The setting is vaguely historical, the tone distinctly disco and the plot heavily aquatic. The latter doesn’t make a lick of sense but certainly gives us the groan-worthy puns we expect from panto. Lucia Vinyard’s ‘Fairy Codmother’ pops out of ‘Sadler’s Well’ – given the King’s Head’s location, we get a steady stream of jokes about Islington – to help Cinderella (Maddy Erzan-Essien) go to the ball. Which is on a boat. Pollard’s production gets off to a slow start, with some oddly subdued singing as part of its mix of classic and modern chart songs. A wistful opening ballad and an underpopulated stage gives low-energy panto, not ‘wow, kids’! While this lessens, there’s still a tendency for big solo numbers to land quietly. The appearance of Vaday as Peckham and Harry Curley as her scrunched-faced sister Dalston is a shot of adrenalin. Their rabble-rousing audience schtick – all seaside humour

‘Fawlty Towers’ regularly tops polls of the best British TV comedies of all time. But in recent years, its co-creator and star John Cleese has become a lightning rod for criticism for his proclamations that so-called ‘wokeness’ is killing comedy. So, how does his stage version of hapless hotel owner Basil Fawlty – arriving ahead of his TV remake of the series with his daughter – fare in the ‘funny’ stakes? From Liz Ascroft’s detailed, 1970s-in-aspic set design – encompassing the titular Torquay hotel’s reception, dining room and an upstairs guest room – to the elaborate coiffure of Basil’s wife, Sybil (Anna-Jane Casey), Caroline Jay Ranger’s production leans so heavily on nostalgia, it’s amazing that it doesn’t crash through the stage. Ranger has form in turning iconic British TV shows that live partly in people’s rose-tinted memories into theatre: she directed ‘Only Fools and Horses The Musical’ a few years ago. As Basil (Adam Jackson-Smith) attempts to evade Sybil’s watchful gaze while dealing with barely concealed contempt with the hotel’s guests, we get a greatest hits parade of characters from the TV series’ two seasons. Theatre legend Paul Nicholas engagingly reanimates the absent-minded Major, Kate Russell-Smith and Nicola Sanderson wander in like extras from ‘Miss Marple’ as Miss Tibbs and Miss Gatsby and Hemi Yeroham gamely hams it up as the English-mangling Spanish waiter Manuel. As Basil, Jackson-Smith has the piano-string tautness of the younger Cleese’s voice dow

Along with The Forsyte Saga in its main space, the Park Theatre is having a bit of a moment for literary adaptations. Autumn is adapted by Harry McDonald from Scottish author Ali Smith’s 2016 novel of the same name – one of four seasonally titled state-of-the-nation works that Smith wrote in quick succession after the Brexit referendum. Charlotte Vickers’s production bounces back and forth between the post-referendum present day and art lecturer Elisabeth Demand’s memories of meeting with her enigmatic, elderly neighbour, Daniel Gluck, as a teenager. As the adult Elisabeth navigates a strained relationship with her mother and what feels like an increasingly unfriendly UK, she reads to a sleeping Daniel in his care home. Vickers stages the play with fluid simplicity, using fragments to create a heightened whole. Grace Venning’s deliberately sparse set is a versatile, almost surrealistic space in which Ali Hunter’s lighting and Jamie Lu’s soundscape blur the boundaries between memories and dreams. It also nicely captures Elisabeth’s growing sensation of living in a coldly unfamiliar country. Adaptor McDonald foregrounds the book’s focus on how, via Brexit, misogyny or simply the passage of time, people’s lives are stripped of their complexity, diminished or forgotten. Real-life 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty, who Daniel knew and whose works he introduces to Elisabeth, is a through-line. Her repeated ‘rediscovery’ by artistic gatekeepers is a cycle that the play challenges in an

With the terrible exception of 9/11, increased security and passenger checks have seen the number of plane hijackings per year diminish to virtually none. The intriguing premise of Oli Forsyth’s Brace Brace is how you would move forward with your life if you did experience – and survive – such an exceptional and harrowing experience. Honeymooners Ray and Sylvia find themselves in such a nightmare when their plane is hijacked by a passenger who overpowers the pilot. A struggle ensues and Ray is incapacitated, but Sylvia stops the hijacker and the plane is saved. She becomes a media hero, to the cost of Ray’s bruised ego.  But things fall apart when she learns that their attacker has been released on psychological grounds. Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster and Wicked Little Letters’ Anjana Vasan have charisma to burn as Ray and Sylvia, quickly conjuring their relationship in the affectionate banter of the play’s lighter early scenes, as they introduce themselves to us. They make the most of their characters' increasing schism as the play moves rapidly through the dramatically fertile territory of PTSD and Sylvia’s desperate need to find somewhere to put her anger and trauma. But the self-consciousness of Forsyth’s writing is a struggle. Perhaps due to the lean 70-minute run-time, the easy-flowing dialogue at the start – before Ray and Sylvia describe the hijacking and its aftermath to us – gives way to emotional developments that feel hasty and truncated, as if steps are missing. Conver

There are distinct shades of King Lear in Tanika Gupta’s new play at the National Theatre. Meera Syal plays Queenie, a powerful matriarch and owner of a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in London. When she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she divides her assets between her three children – who she also expects to let her live with them in turn. However, this reopens wounds that have never truly healed since the loss of her husband and their father. Syal brings Queenie vividly to life, aided by Gupta avoiding the trap of the ‘saintly sufferer’. She’s fiercely proud and quick to cut her children down with her words. As her condition worsens and her sense of time begins to dislocate, the glimpses of her early years in Calcutta and her memories of the racism she faced when arriving in the UK add a greater poignancy to the loss of the life she has fought to forge.  Queenie’s decline dominates the first two thirds of Pooja Ghai’s production. Music maestro Nitin Sawhney’s compositions fleetingly evoke both her heritage and the increasing jangle of her mind. Illusions director and designer John Bulleid employs some neat visual flourishes to capture the experience of her sudden time lapses, although these sometimes distract from the story. The blank backdrop of Rosa Maggiora’s set from the outset has the effect of isolating all the characters prematurely, in spite of some dynamic lighting design by Matt Haskins. Looking a little like a Cy Twombly painting, its appearance and purpose o

The Cabinet Minister finds the Menier Chocolate Factory rocking the 1890s like they’re the 2020s, in this frothy dig at the political class. This revival of one of nineteeth-century playwright Arthur Wing Pinero’s lesser-known farces sees a convivially amoral bunch of aristocratic one-percenters face financial ruin after the dodgy-dealings of the Right Hon Sir Julian Twombley – the titular minister and head of their family – come to light. Meanwhile, dressmaker Miss Fanny Lacklustre grabs the chance to exploit Lady Katherine Twombley’s own carelessness when it comes to spending money to blackmail her way up the slippery social ladder. Nancy Carroll – who is the play’s adapter as well as playing Lady Katherine – knows her Pinero, having acted opposite John Lithgow in the National Theatre’s production of The Magistrate in 2012. Here, she’s trimmed subplots and scenes, while still giving the sizable ensemble cast plenty of one-liners to work with. Under Paul Foster’s reliable direction, they’re all characters lifted straight out of a Punch cartoon. The gaudy excess and posturing of their lives is reflected in the many fake flowers (painted or under glass) and busily vogueish furnishings of set designer Janet Bird’s drawing-room. (Think Boris Johnson’s much-ridiculed redecoration of No 10). Carroll is also the star turn here. She brings an Edina Monsoon-like AbFab energy and physical comedy to the chaotic Lady Katherine as she watches her life slide away. She’s essentially an awf

This review is from 2019. ‘Only Fools and Horses the Musical’ will return to London for a limited season at the Hammersmith Apollo with Paul Whitehouse as Grandad and Vinnie Jones (!) as Danny Driscoll. If there’s a screen still flickering in the UK at the end of the world, it’ll probably be playing on loop that bit where Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter falls through the bar. John Sullivan’s ‘Only Fools and Horses’ has long since transformed from being just a TV show into a cultural phenomenon, annually topping those breathless audience polls as ‘Best British Comedy Ever, Ever, Ever’. It’s on that tidal wave of public adoration that this musical version of the misadventures of wheeler-dealer Del Boy, his hapless brother Rodney and their granddad, living together on a Peckham council estate at the tail end of the ’80s, sails into the West End’s Theatre Royal Haymarket. It’s co-written by Jim ‘son of John’ Sullivan and comic actor extraordinaire Paul Whitehouse (who’s also on stage as Granddad). Director Caroline Jay Ranger sets out her market stall early, as Del Boy (Tom Bennett) promises ‘plonker’ Rodney (Ryan Hutton), ‘This time next year, we’ll be millionaires.’ What follows is a blizzard of catchphrases, quotes and characters. Boycie and Marlene, Trigger, Mickey and Denzil are all crammed on stage and into the Nags Head. When Del tries hawking dodgy Eiffel Towers to the audience, he’s also selling us easy nostalgia. His battered Reliant car turns up like a guest star. It’s affec