Partially Obstructed View

I hope what I've seen so far of the 2026 summer season at Shakespeare's Globe isn't a sign of things to come, as it could spell the beginning of the end of my relationship with one of my favourite venues: After avoiding it for years due to the original management's insistence on original practices sounding a bit theme parky, once I started going I loved the genuine exploration of how the space helps actors play with the text, as well as it becoming one of the few companies where you could count on catching the odd Shakespearean rarity. The latter has been stymied to the point of non-existence recently by economic demands, and the venue has depended a lot on the four most popular comedies - AMND, As You Like It, Much Ado and Twelfth Night.
I thought we were out of the Enema Rice/Covid financial hole but the announcement of three of those four in a single season, with zero Shakespearean tragedies, the mid-table Love's Labour's Lost being classed as a rarity, and only one left-field choice coming up, was concerning for anyone who likes variety. Now the season actually opens with Emily Lim's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which certainly doesn't assuage any worries I might have about the venue going full tourist trap.

It comes less than six months after the company's last production of the same play indoors, and at least it returns it to its status as a comedy after that downright aggressive reinterpretation. But this Dream does have something in common with Holly Race Roughan and Naeem Hyat's, in that neither is going to let what's actually in the script get in the way of its high concept. Here that focuses on the community theatre aspect of the story, which sees a group of amateur actors rehearse a very silly play to perform at a royal wedding.

So the production leans very heavily on audience participation, with Puck (Michael Grady-Hall) conducting the crowd in singalong moments, and Quince (Victoria Moseley) holding auditions before the show starts, for groundlings to take part in the performance later. There's definite shades of panto, as well as of the edited and slightly sanitised productions aimed at younger audiences. But I've enjoyed some of the Globe's Deutsche Bank productions specifically tailored to schools more than this, and in any case if this is Baby's First Shakespeare it would have been nice for it to be advertised as such.

These scenes of the Rude Mechanicals are the strongest of the afternoon, with Adrian Richards as very much a drama camp Bottom in a Cats T-shirt, enthusiastically hogging the spotlight, and Jamal Franklin's Snug also getting a nice little comic through-line as he tries to learn how to roar. But the lovers (Gavi Singh Chera as Demetrius, Sophie Cox as Hermia, Mel Lowe as Lysander and Romaya Weaver as Helena) feel like they've very much been left to their own devices, and while most of the audience did laugh a lot over the course of the afternoon, what is usually this quartet's funniest scene went by unusually quietly.

And I think this is ultimately what failed to grab me: I love Shakespeare comedies being mined for all the physical and visual gags the setups suggest, as well as the dialogue being adapted to fit the time and place it's being performed in. But outside of the 400-year-old standup routines there's actually a lot of funny lines that do still work for a modern audience, and it's a bit sad to see all the inspired nonsense in Pyramus and Thisbe getting tumbleweed because it's being rushed through so we can get to the next pratfall or ad-lib.

There were some encouraging moments: Rather than getting bogged down in deciding Theseus' (understudy Jason Battersby) "I wooed thee with my sword" is the only line of any significance in the whole play, Lim quickly dismisses a lot of its problematic implications by giving it to Hippolyta (Audrey Brisson) and making her the dominant one in the power dynamic. We also get a tweak of "do you marry him" to make it an actual joke that might conceivably work in the 21st century. Plus the whole thing's quite short. These three positives aside though, this sexless production which deals with the chaotic story by giving up on even trying to tell it was not for me.
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 29th of August at Shakespeare's Globe.
Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.

The National Theatre's recent Importance of Being Earnest found a new angle by introducing a formidable Caribbean take on Lady Bracknell, and now Nicholai La Barrie extends that idea by giving us another Oscar Wilde play where the entire cast of characters has been reimagined as first or second generation Caribbean British. In An Ideal Husband class, power and money are constantly intertwined in a relationship that proves precarious as Lord Chiltern (Chiké Okonkwo,) a politician whose career benefited from his personal wealth, gets blackmailed about the source of that wealth: The unscrupulous Mrs Cheveley (Aurora Perrineau) has obtained a letter proving that, at the start of his career, he benefited from his parliamentary knowledge to do a bit of insider trading. She has an investment project of her own on the go, and if Chiltern publicly endorses what is very obviously a scam, she'll keep his secret.
Before worrying about the truth becoming known to the world at large, Chiltern's first concern is what the news will do to his beloved wife Gertrude (Tamara Lawrance,) and turns to his best friend for advice.

Jamael Westman gets his teeth into the most dandyish character even in an Oscar Wilde play, and his bisexual-coded Lord Goring takes great delight in flirting with pretty much everyone, but is also appealingly genuine in his love and protective instinct for his friends. Westman has an entertainingly bitchy take on Wilde's famous epigrams, but his funniest scenes are those with Chiltern's younger sister Mabel, whom he intends to propose to when he can be bothered to get round to it. Tiwa Lade's giggly, enthusiastically girlish performance sparks well off his mannered nonchalance.

The production's Caribbean conceit is probably most effective in Goring's relationship with his father the Earl of Caversham (Jeff Alexander,) whose constant grumpiness reflects his disappointment at his son's determination to do absolutely nothing with the power and status he's secured for him. It's generally a fun evening although it does falter in the second act - Wilde going to a darker dramatic place while still insisting on filling the script with bitchy bon mots is a tonal dissonance La Barrie never quite finds a way around.

There's also an imbalance between the performances that sucks some of the energy out of the room: Lyric Hammersmith audiences tend to be loud in the best way - that of being properly invested in the action - and they were not holding back at the interval about Perrineau's stilted performance. It stands out particularly as everyone else in the cast is throwing everything into a heightened, borderline drag queen performance style to milk every laugh from the show in Rajha Shakiry's attention-grabbing costumes, from Suzette Llewellyn and Nimmy March's gossipy aunties to Sule Thelwell's destined-for-disappointment suitor to Mabel.

Even the Chilterns' almost entirely silent butler seems to have an unspoken storyline of his own being told, with his employers a little bit terrified of Emmanuel Akwafo's furiously flouncing Mason. Once the tone shifts radically again into outright farce for the third act the evening gains momentum again, so while there are a couple of things holding the show back from quite soaring, it does offer a lot of moments of brightness.
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde is booking until the 6th of June at the Lyric Hammersmith, and from the 10th to the 20th of June at Bristol Old Vic.
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.

Tim (Gerard Horan) is an established wildlife photographer - well-regarded and sometimes award-winning, but not quite successful enough to have made an international career out of it: He's spent much of his life in the same wooden hut by a lake near where he grew up, taking photographs of birds and urban foxes. In recent years he's become keen to find a successor he can pass on the tricks of the trade to, and perhaps even replicate an image that has, for better or worse, defined his career: A rare Siberian Firewing that somehow made it to England, an event so unlikely he was accused of forging the photo. He's begun advertising a weekend apprenticeship programme for aspiring photographers, and after various disappointing applicants he's hoping Marcus (Charlie Beck,) a young man from the same, still-deprived area as him, will be the one.
So David Pearson's Firewing treads fairly familiar ground as a two-hander between a curmudgeonly older man and a cocky young one, their initial personality clash turning into a grudging respect as they find common ground.

And all the weaker elements of the play come from how familiar this setup is, not just to the audience but seemingly to the playwright himself: We know the dynamic of this genre so well that Pearson throws us abruptly into it, with Tim impatiently snapping at Marcus and calling him an idiot within seconds of the latter first setting foot through the door.

The story continues with familiar beats - moments of connection, a tentative new trust that the younger man is planning to betray, and a revelation about just why the older one is suddenly so keen to find an heir to his legacy. But if the framework is one we've seen before at least it's executed nicely, with some snappy dialogue and a premise that, through its exploration of photographic composition and the way a single image can tell a complete story, gives quite a literal take on the idea of how we see and frame the world.

Alice Hamilton's briskly unsentimental production also helps, smoothing over some of the clumsier storytelling moments, and letting Horan and Beck build an interesting relationship. It never feels essential, but it never feels like a waste of time either.
Firewing by David Pearson is booking until the 23rd of May at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs.
Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith.

Playing in the West End at the same time as one of his earlier plays that's starting to show its age, David Hare's latest one consciously harks back to an even older tradition of performance than Teeth'N'Smiles: Grace Pervades centres on the most celebrated actress of the Victorian theatre, Ellen Terry (Miranda Raison) and her longstanding professional and personal relationship with actor-manager Henry Irving (Rafe "Ralph" Fiennes.) The latter chose her as his leading lady when he was setting up his own theatre company, convincing her to come out of retirement after she'd decided she would never be as good an actress as her sister. But once they start working together it's Terry who has the bigger impact on him, helping an actor who was admired for his intensity but criticised for his stiffness, to find a style with more connection to castmates and audiences alike.
But while he shows her a lot of respect for a man of his time the power imbalance is never entirely overcome, and despite promising her she could play Rosalind, his preference for tragedy and for putting himself centre stage meant he didn't keep it, and Terry never played Shakespeare's biggest female role.

There's a few themes of how the theatre can be a place where contradictions live together: Terry had two illegitimate children but although this was sometimes snidely referred to in reviews, her talent was enough to have her remain respected and beloved in a society superficially obsessed with propriety. Those two children serve as the play's narrators, and the huge contrast between them is suggested to be because of the different standards their mother held them to.

So Terry saw herself in her daughter and was stricter with her, and Edith (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) grows up to be a brisk, sensible feminist living in a lesbian throuple with Chris (Maggie Service) and Tony (Kathryn Wilder,) ending up building a small local theatre in tribute to her mother. In her son Ellen sees the man who left her but she still loves, and Teddy (Jordan Metcalfe) is an insufferable brat with ties to the Nazis, constantly declaring his own theatrical genius while failing to produce any watchable work of his own.

But the figure who serves as the play's comic foil does evidently have an appeal we never quite see, as Teddy is surprisingly successful with women, including an affair with the famous American dancer Isadora Duncan (Saskia Strallen,) and despite his own failure as a producer and director, Edward Gordon Craig's writing ended up becoming hugely influential later in the 20th century with the likes of Peter Brook.

But the amount of time spent on her children means I could never quite find the focus on Terry and her relationship with Irving that I wanted to see at the heart of the story. And while Raison is magnetic enough in the lead to show the actress the public always wanted to see more of (but Irving held back from them,) Hare teases an insight into her darker side he doesn't fully explore.

Bob Crowley's sets and Fotini Dimou's costumes give Jeremy Herrin's production the lush but severe look of 19th century staging that recreates the kind of event theatre that Irving was aiming for, and we also get a strong sense of his and Terry's commitment to taking the show to the people, often leaving London for regional UK and US tours. (They also seem to have had a few opinions about theatre that align with my own, like Irving's statement that "Hamlet works because it's a play, Romeo & Juliet doesn't because it's a poem.") An interesting sweep through the lives and legacies of these Victorian legends and Terry's in particular, but it does come out of focus a lot.
Grace Pervades by David Hare is booking until the 11th of July at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.
Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

As the title gives away, Tom Wright's Please Please Me deals with the Beatles - or at least with the outsider credited with making the world sit up and pay attention to them, their gay, Jewish manager Brian Epstein. That's Brian Epstein. We first meet Brian (Calam Lynch) working in his family's department store, nominally in the closet but with his various encounters with rough trade (all played by William Robinson) often proving dangerous, his father (Arthur Wilson) is well aware of what's going on. Following the advice of one of his regular hook-ups, he visits the Cavern Club to catch the band that's got Liverpool's teenage girls screaming, and despite having no experience in the field decides he has to become their manager - and convinces them to give him a go.
It's long been thought that Brian was in love with John Lennon, and Please Please Me is firmly in the camp that says this was what encouraged him to take such a career risk. But it also goes on to question whether this went further, and if the two ever slept together.

Wright's play is structured as a pretty straightforward telling of the Beatles' early days from Brian's perspective, taking us through his rebranding of them from generic rockers to wholesome boys who wouldn't scare off their fans' parents, and the meteoric rise that follows. For him, though, that's the beginning of the end, as he starts spiralling into the drink and drug use that would end up killing him at 32.

The crux moment here is his and John's mysterious holiday to Spain, where the two have sex (Lennon publicly denied this happened, but according to Yoko Ono he privately confirmed it.) The chemistry between Lynch and Noah Ritter's John is part of what makes this last scene before the interval the play's most memorable one - director Amit Sharma ramps up the tension as John all-out seduces Brian, who's frozen by having his obsession confronted quite so directly.

The second act sees Brian's fall, possibly as a result of how this encounter with John panned out. The play remains consistently interesting and sexy - possibly too sexy, as Ian "complained" that Lynch is far too good-looking to play Epstein and everyone is too gym-toned to realistically be young men from the 1960s. But this second half did drift off a bit for me, especially towards the end as Wright doesn't seem quite confident in how he wants to approach Epstein's death.

Lynch's performance anchors the evening though, with great support from the cast, especially Eleanor Worthington-Cox in all the female roles. Composer David Shrubsole is left to provide the musical atmosphere of the time since Beatles songs are too expensive to licence; we do get a bit of Cilla Black's "You're My World," though fortunately this cuts out before we find out if Worthington-Cox can accurately emulate the sound of a goose going through a shredder.

If Please Please Me isn't entirely slick it is an interesting take on the story, and what may have happened behind closed doors. We do find out that the road Lennon grew up in was called Menlove Avenue, and I can't decide if a play about him having sex with a man not making a joke about this is admirable restraint or a criminally missed opportunity.
Please Please Me by Tom Wright is booking until the 29th of May at the Kiln Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Mark Senior.

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The show has not yet officially opened to critics.   Dave Harris' Tender is the latest play to deal with a modern crisis of masculinity, although maybe one without quite the same level of toxicity as some of its predecessors. Darren Bennett plays a former adult performer who now leads a trio of male strippers called the Dancing Bears: Exploiting a loophole in New Jersey law, they are to all intents and purposes prostitutes, the mostly-female clientèle being allowed to do a lot more than just look when the men take their clothes off. But business has been tailing off lately, which turns out to be largely down to a new copycat club opening down the road - where the performers are a bit fresher, better dancers, and a couple of inches better-hung. The club's owner sends her daughter in to freshen up the show, but having previously attempted to be an artist and then a therapist, Bea (Jessie Mei Li) is less interested in choreography and more in deconstructing the men's feelings.
So Bennett's daddy figure turns out to have more than a few issues around how he's raised (or completely failed to) his own daughter, while youngest dancer Trey (Kwami Odoom) is so obsessed with being a great lover to his girlfriend he hasn't figured out how to enjoy sex himself yet.

Meanwhile Jeff (Dex Lee) has become prone to panic attacks on stage, while offstage he hides his insecurities behind an exaggerated persona - his gradually revealing the real person behind the comedian is one of the most interesting performances in an evening that isn't short of them. Jeff also manages to turn the tables on the frosty Bea, who turns out to be even less qualified to lecture anyone on "trusting us with your pleasure" than she initially appears.

Matthew Xia's production is very entertaining, even when it's only been previewing for under a week - it feels like it'll tighten up a bit and get even slicker after a few more performances. The quirky ending could definitely feel a bit tighter though. Harris has written a comedy-drama that wears the drama side lightly and reaps the benefits when those more serious moments do come. The overall effect is of a very funny evening with likeable characters.

It's also sexy when it needs to be, even if the whole point is that that sexiness has gone slightly off the boil. Hen parties who book by accident certainly won't get what they expected but there are a few moments of the Dancing Bears in action (the show has gone to some lengths to ensure that any audience participation is reserved strictly for those audience members happy to get involved.) Its premise could attract a lot of interest, but whatever the reason people end up at Tender what they'll get is funny, clever and indeed tender.
Tender by Dave Harris is booking until the 30th of May at Soho Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Alex Brenner.

After Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx (both contributing music and lyrics) and Jeff Whitty's (book) Avenue Q closed (for the third time) its original West End production, my favourite musical didn't stay away too long, with smaller-scale productions and tours meaning I and a group of similarly addicted friends could keep getting our live fix. It's been away for a few years though, meaning what I think is my fourteenth time seeing it live is in fact a 20th-anniversary production of it opening at the Noël Coward (the first show to play there after the theatre had been renamed.) Now at a reduced-capacity Shaftesbury Theatre while its upper level is being repaired, original director Jason Moore returns for a show that was always being tweaked to keep up with the times, and has now had a few extra rewrites to bring it into 2026.
But not too many, as this is definitely a show that wasn't broke and didn't need fixing: You know the drill, it's Sesame Street's mix of real humans, puppet humans and puppet monsters, in scenes and songs that teach life lessons. About porn, racism, romantic disappointment and noisy sex.

Recent graduate Princeton (Noah Harrison) moves into the titular New York neighbourhood, makes new friends and a potential romantic connection in Kate Monster (understudy Meg Hateley,) and faces up to the fact that his life won't work out the way he always thought it would. Along the way we also get the wedding of Brian (Oliver Jacobson) and Christmas Eve (Amelia Kinu Muus,) plus a falling-out between definitely-not-gay flatmates Rod (Harrison) and Nicky (understudy Jonathan Carlton.)

The show is a mix of the original Broadway script and the West End one along with the new changes - the (better) West End introduction to Gary Coleman is back, but per the original staging the former child celebrity is played by a woman - Dionne Ward-Anderson's beaming grin very much defining him by his best song, "Schadenfreude." We got front row seats for this, which is always fun when possible because you get to see the details of Rick Lyon's puppet designs, and get the full blast of the as-cute-as-they-are-evil Bad Idea Bears (Carlton and understudy Jasmine Beel.)

A number of the original cast (notably Giles Terera, Jon Robyns, Julie Atherton and Simon Lipkin) have become award-winners and stage stalwarts, and it's easy to imagine the new batch of actors doing the same over the next couple of decades. Along with the updates to the script there's a couple of technical upgrades - playing for the first time on a stage with an orchestra pit means Anna Louizos' set no longer has to accommodate the musicians and can incorporate some slightly more elaborate changes, while I'm sure Lucy the Slut's introduction with "Special" has got a lot more... acrobatic. But upgrades are never introduced where they're not needed, and Nina Dunn's video designs retain a scrappy educational TV feel.

One of the posters outside the theatre has nailed the show's attraction: "The musical for everyone still figuring it out." It's still true for those of us now twenty years older, but if there's nostalgia in this revival it's a very Avenue Q brand of nostalgia which looks suspiciously like trolling its ageing audience. Most obviously in "Mix Tape," which in the original was about a literal tape, later becoming Princeton burning Kate a mix CD, and which by now is a playlist: The rewrite where Kate explains that making a mixtape is a form of flirting from the olden days gets one of the biggest and most knowing laughs of the night. So the existing fans come away satisfied, but I've no doubt this iteration of Avenue Q will also create a new generation of fans who'll be coming back in 2046.
Avenue Q by Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty is booking until the 29th of August at the Shaftesbury Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Matt Crockett.

A new production of Christopher Hampton's best-known play, an adaptation of a novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos at the Lyttelton, marks Marianne Elliott's first time back at the National since Angels In America. Although this, and most other elements of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, seem to have been overshadowed by Lesley Aisons Manville, who's turned out to be surprisingly camera-shy for a film star. Manville plays the Marquise de Merteuil, the most in-demand guest of 18th Century Paris aristocracy's social life. Merteuil is a widow who, comfortable in her wealth and standing, entertains herself by taking numerous lovers, as well as orchestrating affairs and scandals for others. She's particularly fond of corrupting wide-eyed innocents, but has managed to keep her activities in the shadows, and her own reputation spotless.
The Vicomte de Valmont (Aidan Turner,) by contrast, maintains his position in society but his many sexual conquests are widely rumoured, and aristocratic ladies warn their daughters against him.

The pair often play their games of manipulation together, and the play begins with both of them wanting to take revenge against a rival, by corrupting a young woman close to them: Merteuil has been dumped, and wants Valmont to seduce the ex's virginal new fiancée Cécile (Hannah van der Westhuysen.) Valmont finds that far too easy a challenge, instead mentoring her music teacher Danceny (Darragh Hand) in how to do it himself - at least to start with.

He's set himself a greater challenge in Madame de Tourvel (Monica Barbaro,) the famously faithful wife to an often-absent husband. She becomes the subject of a bet between him and Merteuil, but her nature ends up making the notorious rake fall in love with her for real, with tragic consequences.

Elliott's production is characteristically stylish, with Natalie Roar's costumes a punky twist on period styles, Rosanna Vize's mirrored set dominated by a huge stylised chandelier that looks as dangerous as it does dramatic, and choreography from Tom Jackson Greaves that doesn't only provide spectacle but also tells a lot of the story beats energetically. Though full of exits the stage feels claustrophobic as behind every door is someone listening in, and the effect comes to a head in the climactic duel when the saucy paintings on the wall come down to trap Valmont with Danceny.

A lot of the evening plays out as a particularly sinister sex comedy and there are plenty of audience laughs at the vicious quips from the leads, but it's 2026 and the darker side couldn't go unexplored; Turner's Valmont may be charming and, on the surface, essentially affable, but when circumstances change so it does suit his interests to seduce Cécile himself, we're left uncomfortably aware of the coercion and grooming going on.

Manville and Turner live up to their billing, and spark off each other verbally and physically in a way that makes you forget the almost three-decade age difference. Turner also appears to have learned his lines, which is nice. Barbaro struggles a bit to make the terminally nice Tourvel interesting but the production does find an unexpected centre in van der Westhuysen, whose Cécile transforms from insipid little girl, through victim to something stronger, and eventually monster of Merteuil's own making. A long evening that doesn't feel as long as it actually is, there are still ways for Les Liaisons Dangereuses to scandalise. And Manville may have famously banned curtain call photos, but I guess it's fair to keep some surprises secret. Who knew she could do that with a ping-pong ball?
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, is booking until the 6th of June at the National Theatre's Lyttelton.
Running time: 3 hours including interval.
Photo credit: Sarah Lee.

Former Deputy Artistic Director of the National Theatre Clint Dyer moves down the road to the Old Vic to direct a somewhat reimagined look at One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dale Wasserman's play based on Ken Kesey's novel about order versus anarchy - where order comes across very much as the bad guy. In a 1960s New Orleans mental asylum, the patients appear to be steadily and quietly getting on with their treatment under Dr Spivey (Matthew Steer) and Nurse Ratched (Future Dame Olivia Williams.) But when R.P. McMurphy (Aaron Pierre) arrives on the ward, having accepted a diagnosis of psychopathy and committal instead of a five-month prison sentence, his rebellious attitude quickly reveals the real power dynamic in the asylum. He makes it his mission to bring some fun and unpredictability to the inmates, but has no idea the lengths Ratched is willing to go to to stop him.
FDOW was a late replacement in the role of Ratched, and Ian said later he'd been worried beforehand that she seems too nice to really do justice to the role. In a way this affable image is what sells the performance though.

So we meet a head nurse who appears to be strictly but gently looking out for the wellbeing of her patients, following a precise daily schedule of activities, therapy and chores to help calm them (as well, of course, as the constant dosing up with drugs, although that felt to me like a less foregrounded part of the story here than in the past.) So there's an insidious quality to the way she reveals her hold on power to be the only thing she cares about: The discredited treatments like electroshock and lobotomies she dishes out may have still been in use at the time, but not in the way she uses them as punishment, not cure.

Physically, Pierre is far from the scrappy little troublemaker usually cast as McMurphy - at a muscular 6ft 3, when he first arrives in the ward and asks to fight the top dog he seems like he'll be a credible threat to the other patients, before revealing the sense of humour that's more self-destructive than anything else. It's particularly notable in his scenes with the giant Chief Bromden - the 6ft 4 Arthur Boan seems positively twinky next to his scene partner, and his comments about being "little" don't seem as bitterly ironic when they can look each other in the eye.

It does lend McMurphy a different quality though, of someone whose physicality has made him sure he's in control at all times, and who learns the hard way that this isn't true. Probably the most interesting thing about Pierre's performance is the ambiguity he puts around the character's sanity: In the past I've felt the character has been played firmly as the con-man who's made a terrible mistake in his attempt to get out of jail, but here there's a jitteriness that suggests maybe the initial psychiatric assessment wasn't entirely wrong.

The third marquee name is Giles Terera as Dale Harding, the fussy inmate designated as president of the ward (yes, once again Terera plays a character with "president" somewhere in the job description) in an attempt to give the patients the misconception they have any control. He's an amiable, funny and gently sad presence that leads a supporting cast of patients including Kedar Williams-Stirling, who strongly suggests Billy Bibbit's stutter was the only issue he ever had until his mother and Ratched built up his numerous other insecurities.

Which does lead on to a couple of ways where the play hasn't aged well, and where the production could have acknowledged this more than it does. Dyer's production has a majority black cast, and though this extends to the orderlies it does give the added element of a group of black men being controlled and told their place by a carefully-designed system. There's also an idea of linking the story to the origins of the New Orleans Mardi Gras in black and Native American communities, and although I can see the link in carnival being a time for the kind of release and chaos that the inmates aren't permitted, the idea doesn't quite come together. And while Ben Stones' in-the-round design is great at making the front row look uncomfortably close and complicit, it remains a clinical space.

This high concept not quite clicking means some of the more dated themes that are in the original story stand out: Some of the mentally ill characters are treated as sideshows or comic relief by Kesey, even if the cast including Ene Frost, Jason Pennycooke, Javone Prince and Mo Sesay give them a bit more depth than that.

But even more so, between Harding's wife and Billy's mother being blamed for their conditions, and the main villain Nurse Ratched also puppeteering the nominally in-charge Spivey, there's definitely a strain of misogyny to the narrative, and a lot of references to emasculation and castration that could have come straight out of a manosphere influencer's mouth. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has uniformly strong performances and works very effectively as a dark thriller, but at a time when stories are being reframed around toxic masculinity whether the conceit works or not, it's ironic to see a high-profile one that could have done with more of that reframing.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Dale Wasserman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey, is booking until the 23rd of May at the Old Vic.
Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Anya Reiss' adaptation of A Doll's House is a faithful one in that it follows the story beats and motivations of Ibsen's original, but also a modern one in that it identifies an archetype we can all recognise and agree is the villain of the piece: Finance bros. At the beginning of Joe Hill-Gibbins' production Nora (Romola Garai) has prepared for Christmas by maxing out her husband's credit card on decorations and gifts for their family, to make up for a pretty miserable time the previous year. She's not worried about paying off the debt: Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) is selling his investment company and they'll be millionaires by January. Her excitement seems indistinguishable from anxiety though, as their successful year has come after Torvald's addiction issues almost brought their family down, and only very expensive rehab got him out of it.
She paid for this by asking the company's lawyer, Nils (James Corrigan,) who'd already been in prison for embezzlement, to help her "borrow" investors' funds, which she intends to pay back as soon as the sale goes through.

So when Torvald fires Nils a couple of days before Christmas, Nora's only way of paying the money back without her husband finding out is gone. Leaning for moral support on dying friend Petter (Olivier Huband,) a doctor who's long been in love with her, and Kristine (Thalissa Teixeira,) an old university friend she'd forgotten about until very recently, Nora tries to get Nils reinstated by Torvald, or find another way of getting out of a hole that could implicate her entire family.

Reiss and Hill-Gibbins lean heavily on the anti-capitalist elements of the story: Hyemi Shin's set design is stripped-back chic, leaving the vast pile of branded shopping bags to be the main visual focus. Garai and Mothersdale play the Helmers as a genuinely sexy couple with a very real connection, which leads some of the revelations towards the end of the play to hit particularly hard, but outside of the physical their love language is materialistic, which is ultimately their relationship's downfall.

So Garai's Nora feels like a harsher look at the character than I've seen before: The wife who's sacrificed a lot for her husband is still there, but though her love for him is genuine the fact that she's spent almost a million pounds on his rehab comes in part from a place of believing only the best is good enough for them, and a hurry to get back to the comfortable life they're used to. She's a character racked with anxiety (early on it's suggested this has manifested in an eating disorder but that's not followed up much as the evening goes on) but also a selfish one, who'll instantly lean heavily on her friend after years of cutting her out of her life because she didn't want to deal with Kristine's own time of need.

Courtesy of Alex Lowde's costume design, Garai is probably the first Nora to have to do all her most dramatic scenes in a naughty nurse's outfit, and yet she brings a lot of extra nuance and complexity to what's already one of the most famous and analysed roles in theatre. But Reiss doesn't let us forget the root of all this corruption, and Mothersdale's generally affable Torvald goes to extremely dark and cynical places as a solution to all their financial problems comes at the expense of global chaos and loss of lives.

This take on the final plot twist, which also takes us back to the idea of financiers being the true villains of the piece, is one of the very effective ways the production has found to bring the story into the present day. And either the adaptor, the director or both have also chosen to leave us on a question mark that Ibsen doesn't - between this and Romeo & Juliet, we could be looking at a 2026 meme of productions that leave some ambiguity over what are usually very well-known endings.

There's a couple of things that don't quite make sense: Having all the characters have met an university but not necessarily remember each other sort of holds up until we get to Kristine and Nils having had a past relationship, which feels like a much harder coincidence to swallow here than in a small Norwegian town in the 1870s. And the house has plenty of security on the front entrance but anyone can seemingly wander in through the basement whenever they feel like it. But otherwise this works very effectively as a financial thriller that increasingly dives into the lies the characters have been telling themselves and each other.
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen in a version by Anya Reiss is booking until the 23rd of May at the Almeida Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Crumbling country estates have in recent years been at the centre of controversy over the suggestion that maybe the visitors, whose tourist cash is pretty much keeping them standing, might want to know about the darker parts of the building's history, like how much its glory days were supported by the slave trade. They're also the setting for many a gothic mystery, and what Winsome Pinnock's new play The Authenticator does very effectively is bring those two elements together to touch on a hot-button topic in entertaining fashion. Eccentric aristocrat Fen (Sylvestra Le Touzel) is the last descendant of the Harford family, and the first woman to inherit the estate following centuries of male primogeniture. Digging through family history, she's unearthed the previously unseen diaries of 18th century ancestor Henry Harford, the founder of the family's wealth.
Although it was no great secret that he made his fortune in Jamaican plantations, he had later rather ostentatiously tried to distance himself from the slave trade, and allied himself with abolitionists. The diaries will need to be authenticated, and Fen is convinced to give the job to Abi (Rakie Ayola) in some part because of the enthusiasm of her protégée Marva (Cherrelle Skeete,) who remembers visiting the estate with her grandfather.

In fact Marva has a secret reason of her own for wanting to work in this house, and in among the dry lists in the documents the two academics are inspecting are little details that show Henry didn't leave his involvement in slavery as far behind him as he would have liked people to think. They also hint at a secret that changes everything about the Harford family and its history.

Pinnock's play is very nuanced and even-handed: Fen can be oblivious to quite how priviliged she's been and prone to cultural appropriation, but while she can be a comic foil at times she's never made a villain. Meanwhile there's a look at the fact that this kind of story doesn't come down to something as simple as black and white, and two modern black people's connection to the story can vary greatly: While Marva's family history is full of missing pieces and misfortune, Abi's own background includes Nigerian royalty who themselves facilitated the slave trade.

But all this is given in a play with a light touch and an admirable lack of overwriting (having seeded the idea that the twins who run through the Harford family are fraternal, there's questions to be asked about whether a pair of twins who were separated in the past were done so on the basis of skin colour; I could easily see some playwrights add an unnecessary half-hour of discussion here but Pinnock trusts the audience to go off and make connections ourselves.) It's also very funny, with its humour ranging from the clever to the silly, and some lines that are both (when the authenticators first arrive, the estate is being used to film a music video for a "grimy artist" called Phallus-E.)

Jon Bausor's set, meanwhile, is a big contributor to the way Miranda Cromwell's production adds in a touch of the gothic thriller - the various parts of the traverse set revolve and twist to create different parts of the old building the becomes the fourth character, with Aideen Malone's lighting giving us the requisite dark shadowy corners and Tingying Dong's sound design providing the creaks and cracks, and the sudden bursts of noise from forgotten ghost tours of the dungeon. The Authenticator knows when to be restrained and when to go all out, and as a result gets the balance just right between powerful drama and a lot of fun.
The Authenticator by Winsome Pinnock is booking until the 9th of May at the National Theatre's Dorfman.
Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Oh to be a fly on a rehearsal room wall:"OK Stuart, so we're going for the big finale now and you're giving us some of your most emotionally-charged vocals and Ian Charleson-nominated acting, really belting the song out, tears streaming down your face, the works. But GET THIS! Nobody will notice any of it, because they'll all be looking at the bloke dressed as a giant space turtle flailing around on the floor trying to get off the stage before the bows. Yes, I thought you'd like it."Theo Jamieson (book, music and lyrics) and Adam Lenson's (co-creator and director) musical Flyby has, it's fair to say, quite a lot going on. Astronaut Daniel Defoe (Stuart Thompson) disappears from a space station during a mission, hijacking an escape pod in what appears to be an act premeditated and planned for years in advance.
As he floats away into oblivion, a chorus of employees at the European Space Agency (Rupert Young, Gina Beck and Simbi Akande) try to piece together what could have possibly caused... bad breakup, it was all down to a bad breakup.

We flash back to his relationship with Emily (Poppy Gilbert,) daughter of a famous movie director (Young) known for his many affairs and disturbing children's films, and a mother (Beck) with early-onset dementia. It's left her with a very abrupt nature that tips into outright enjoying cruelty, whether her own or that of the bullying boss she idolises. How she and Daniel, a sensitive scientist who appears to be neurodiverse* and has mentally logged every instance of cruelty he's experienced since his birth, ever ended up together for more than five minutes is a mystery, but the relationship does inevitably fall apart.

So we've got a setup with multiple high concepts vying for attention and a central couple it's impossible to root for. I might have been more on-board if Jamieson's music had clicked with me, but while it's got some of the catchier elements of modern UK fringe musicals, it also has a lot of influence from the off-Broadway likes of Dave Malloy and Michael John LaChiusa, the sort of complex, often discordant sounds I tend to struggle with.

If I can't say the show itself was for me Lenson's production is at least impressive: Thompson's vocals and performance are powerful, Gilbert injects some humanity into a sadistic character, and the chorus do their best in the rather awkward role of hovering around a young couple's relationship. Libby Todd's set manages to mix the sci-fi with the domestic, as well as providing a lot of screen space for the (uncredited on the show's website) projections, which include a lot of fun Easter Eggs like the complete list of things Daniel has taken umbrage at throughout his life. It's all very well put-together, but didn't really add up to anything that hooked me into its story. And then Great A'Tuin turns up, trying desperately not to crash into the front row.
Flyby by Theo Jamieson and Adam Lenson is booking until the 16th of May at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre.
Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Alex Brenner and Tristram Kenton.
*Emily does make a passing reference to Daniel possibly having Asperger's but, in completely on-brand fashion, only to make fun of him

When Copenhagen was scheduled for a revival at Hampstead Theatre it probably felt like a timely choice because of the recent success of Farm Hall and the film Oppenheimer, but as invariably and depressingly seems to happen, current affairs have delivered another reason for Michael Frayn's play about nuclear physicists to feel topical. In the first six years of me writing this blog I could reliably catch Big Favourite Round These Parts Damien Molony on stage once a year, but he's been absent for nearly a decade before returning to play Werner Heisenberg, the leading nuclear physicist who led the German team attempting to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War. His other most famous accomplishment is the Uncertainty Principle, and the play centres on a historical mystery that even the participants seemed uncertain about, with both central figures giving conflicting accounts later in life.
In 1941 Heisenberg went to Copenhagen, during the German occupation of Denmark, to meet with his former mentor Niels Bohr (Richard Schiff) and his wife Margrethe (Alex Kingston.)

There was a parent-son dynamic between them that persists even though Heisenberg was present when one of the Bohrs' actual sons drowned, and that isn't even quite shaken by the tense circumstances of this unusual reunion. The conflicting forces and possibilities of how the meeting could have panned out are represented by Frayn framing this as a memory play, with the trio looking back after their deaths and recreating the scene with the full knowledge of what came after: Heisenberg was working for the Nazis but his team never came close to developing the bomb; Bohr has the moral high ground in 1941 but he eventually joined the team that did end up obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Michael Longhurst's production takes place on a double revolve, which Joanna Scotcher has placed in the middle of a pool of sometimes-choppy water. Together with Neil Austin's lighting it provides a hazy backdrop of the titular city that helps create the suggestion of a world part-real, part-memory, part-rewriting of history. The circular stage also means that the characters get choreographed into the positions of particles as they discuss the physics that plays into the history.

It's the latter that's of more interest to me - my mind did wander during some of the technical discussions about quantum physics, not helped by Schiff not always being entirely audible, and sometimes letting his dialogue tail off entirely with Molony needing to fill in the gaps. But I do find a grim fascination in this element of history, and how the German scientists were nowhere near developing a bomb, but the Americans were so convinced there was a genuine arms race they poured enough money into it to make it a reality.

I hope we don't have to wait as long for Molony's next stage appearance - not just for obvious reasonsbut because he's what holds the evening together, his charm on the one hand showing how easily the Danish couple return to their old affectionate relationship with Heisenberg after being determined to shun him, but also making us wonder to what extent he's manipulating the story to minimise his own culpability. As the play goes over different versions of the visit we get theories that he's essentially there to spy for the Nazis and find out what Bohr knows about the Manhattan Project, or trying to get clues to help his own research.

But the version Heisenberg himself wants to promote is that he's there to suggest both sides self-sabotage so that the bomb never gets developed in the first place. He ultimately suggests that this is what he did anyway, with the recordings from Farm Hall showing that he was perfectly capable of doing the right maths once he knew the race was over but had, presumably deliberately, wildly miscalculated while it was still possible he might deliver the bomb to Hitler. Heisenberg certainly says something to Bohr offstage that the older man finds unforgivable, but it's interesting that while Bohr is furious with his former assistant for aligning himself with the Nazis for self-preservation, at no point does he think he might agree with them ideologically. (Meanwhile on the way out an American audience member concluded "So Michael Frayn is a Nazi?" which is definitely... a take.)

Kingston is also strong as Margrethe, whom the scientists have always used as a litmus test for their theories - they believe anything they put into an academic paper should first be comprehensible to her as a non-physicist - but who has also given herself the role of their moral compass. Copenhagen asks for a lot of the audience's time to delve into scientific theory, moral quandaries and historical mysteries, and at times it can be overwhelming, but at its best the heated dialogue really draws you in, and Longhurst's production uses a simple setup to keep things surprisingly visually interesting.
Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is booking until the 2nd of May at Hampstead Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

A Henry V that doesn't feel horribly topical when a foreign war is launched to distract from a domestic crisis must be as rare as one that doesn't co-opt something from the Henry IV plays to build its world. Both themes are present together as 50% of the RSC's Artistic Director reunites with Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch: Tamara Harvey's production opens with Enoch's Hal mistaking his sleeping father for dead and prematurely taking the crown. It feels notable that he shoos away a servant as the old king (Valentine Hanson) admits his claim to the throne was tenuous, and then goes on to advise his son to solidify his own position by invading France. This becomes pretty much the whole plot of the play that follows, but Hal's statement that the weight of responsibility led Henry IV to his early grave turns out not to be as relevant to him.
It used to be that productions of this play could choose between playing the lead as a hero or a psychopath, but it feels like a long time since the former option seemed viable. So when Enoch's Henry becomes king he talks about the moral weight of the crown but it's hard to believe he means or even understands it.

So we get a smiling assassin: Henry is seen early on as being in a romantic relationship with Scroop (Diany Samba-Bandza) but this doesn't stop him from having her executed with the others when she turns out to have conspired against him (Harvey stages these hangings, throwing the trio off the revolving wooden tower that's the centrepiece of Lucy Osborne's set; it makes sense as a way of showing his brutal pragmatism, as an audience seeing this independently of the other plays in the sequence won't know of his connection to Emmanuel Olusanya's Bardolph.)

Of course psychopaths can be charming and Enoch certainly is, but he directs this charm offensive mostly at the audience, at whom he's aiming his attempts to go down in history as one of the greats. But "Once more unto the breach" is delivered to a stage full of injured and dying soldiers who've been dragged into his war and aren't remotely stirred by the speech - Harvey regularly has her cast drop dead to the stage then get up to serve as the next round of cannon-fodder.

This brutal take is everywhere: Even the famous comic "English lesson" takes place as Katherine (Natalie Kimmerling) tends to injured French soldiers, and the later "wooing" scene is even colder: Henry proposes to her over the dead body of her brother the Dauphin (Michael Elcock.) Elsewhere we get a fresh take on the usually solid and composed King of France: Jamie Ballard makes him shrill, emotional and jittery, his Queen (Catrin Aaron) clearly the one keeping this court together.

Harvey's production is the polar opposite of the jingoism a lot of people still associate with the play - it's stark, with no rousing fight scenes but a lot of movement sequences showing the deadly consequences, and to avoid even any light relief, Paul Hunter plays Pistol. It's not a dull production of a play that can be prone to that, and it certainly feels like a Henry V for today, but I could have done with a little more break from its coldly smiling ruthlessness.
Henry V by William Shakespeare is booking until the 25th of April at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.

The ultimate accolade shouldn't be a gold record, it should be a golden hypodermic. Parklife!
David Hare's play with songs Teeth Apostrophe N Apostrophe Smiles, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1975, is set six years earlier in 1969, when disillusionment with rock music and the counterculture it spearheaded was starting to set in. Maggie Frisby and The Skins are a once-popular group on its last legs, doing tours around UK universities that barely cover their expenses - Rebecca Lucy Taylor Also Known As Self Esteem plays vocalist Maggie, with Michael Abubakar, Bill Caple, Samuel Jordan, Jojo Macari and Noah Weatherby as a band at various levels of frustration at the way their careers have turned out. Maggie is a former heroin addict, but while we're given no reason to doubt that she's given that up, she's still unapologetically and indisputably an alcoholic who may or may not perform on any given night - it's the shows she's really looking forward to that the band know to be most worried about.
The play takes place over one night when the band are scheduled to perform three sets in Cambridge as part of a spring ball, and on top of their usual issues with substance abuse, they get visits from songwriter Arthur (Michael Fox,) also Maggie's ex, and their manager Saraffian (Phil Daniels,) who's there to finally sack the singer per her musicans' request.

Hare's play has original songs by Nick Bicât (music) and Tony Bicât (lyrics,) with Taylor Also Known As Self Esteem supplying some additional ones for Daniel Raggett's revival. If the sound mix on some of these is a bit muddy that could probably be handwaved as accurate to the kind of 1960s student gig where it's set, and these energetic, grungy performances are a highlight of the evening, and certainly its most confident element. Elsewhere the play itself is consistently entertaining but doesn't quite hold together.

A lot of this may just be down to the passage of time: When Teeth'N'Smiles premiered we hadn't quite had punk yet so the fact that the play channels some of that anarchic attitude will have come across as more revolutionary than it now does. It also teases looking into the double standards around gender that have never really gone away in the music industry, where Maggie's drinking problem is everyone's problem but Peyote's (Macari) shooting up before every show and passing out for much of the evening is barely considered an issue. Similarly it's a given he'll sleep with a groupie (and on this night end up wearing her ballgown after she steals his clothes) but Maggie's sexual conquests, including student journalist Anson (Roman Asde) are always considered worthy of note.

Daniels' Saraffian is entertaining, but the amoral wide-boy manager is by this point a cliché that Hare doesn't really do anything different with, although the fact that he's so detached from caring about the band's fortunes that he's already brought his next big money-making hope Randolph (understudy Guy Amos) along is an extra dose of callousness. Meanwhile the reunion with Arthur, which really feels like it's meant to be the heart of the story, doesn't manage that effectively, while a suggestion that there's a love triangle with tour manager Laura (Aysha Kala) is so slight I'm still not sure if I imagined it or not.

But actual pop star Taylor Also Known As Self Esteem brings some of that authentic presence to the songs that break up the action, as well as being a strong enough actress to convince in the character's exhausted fury. Teeth'N'Smiles is damning of the music industry's business model of bleeding an act dry then abandoning them to their fate once the money stops coming in, but it also increasingly suggests that this self-destructive tendency is what attracts a certain kind of person in the first place. You can see the attraction as a showcase for its multi-talented lead, but the fact that this sort of point has been made several times, and better, in the last half-century, may explain why a play that's being sold as a revolutionary landmark is also one I'd never heard of before this revival was announced.
Teeth'N'Smiles by David Hare, Nick Bicât, Tony Bicât and Rebecca Lucy Taylor Also Known As Self Esteem is booking until the 6th of June at the Duke of York's Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.

At last, the musical about antimicrobial resistance that someone, somewhere has presumably been clamouring for! Alexander Fleming (Alan Vicary,) Phlegm to his friends if Lifeline is to be believed, won a Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of Penicillin, but by 1950 was already warning that the overuse of antibiotics could lead to bacteria developing a resistance, leaving patients as helpless as they were before their introduction. In the present day, Scottish-American musician Aaron (Nathan Salstone) survives a radical operation to cure his colon cancer, only to succumb to sepsis in the Edinburgh hospital where his childhood sweetheart Jess (Maz McGinlay) now works as a paediatrician. The will-they/won't-they of whether they'll get back together has to take second place to the question of whether Aaron will survive at all.
Phlegm's story is also framed within a romantic subplot, as the widowed scientist resists admitting his feelings for his Greek colleague Amalia (Kelly Glyptis, giving easily the best vocal performance of the evening,) even as his lab partner Merlin Pryce (Kieran Brown) tries to matchmake the pair.

It's a surprise to find that writers Robin Hiley (music and lyrics) and Becky Hope-Palmer (book) are actually Scottish as the show, which even ends with a bagpipe solo, has big "Americans-doing-Celtic" energy, all fiddles and diddly-dee. The music never reaches the rousing levels it's so clearly aiming for, and the attempts to anchor both timelines in love stories also fail: The modern-day strand gets lost in preaching against overprescribing antibiotics, while Amalia disappears for most of the second act as Phlegm is mostly seen in flashbacks to two world wars (and no world cups.)

At one point during one of these scenes Phlegm's oldest childhood friend is mortally injured and brought into the field hospital, resulting in a bizarre exchange that suggests Phlegm's memory only works if you're incredibly specific with him:Nurse: A wounded officer's come in, he says he knows you.Phlegm: Who is it?Nurse: He says you used to go fishing together.Phlegm:Phlegm:Phlegm:Nurse: For trout.Phlegm: OMG Clowes!

The dialogue is very heavy on exposition, with Aaron being frequently informed he's an international rock star, Jess and Aaron's friend Julian (Robbie Scott) mentioning he's married and Aaron's mother Layla (Helen Logan) clarifying that it's to a man so the audience knows the show's ticked off its minimum LGBTQ+ representation, and Phlegm and Amalia reiterating to each other how prestigious the new job she's landed in Athens is.

The show's big selling point is that it was the first musical to be performed at the United Nations, something which goes a long way to explain how preachy it feels, and its weird insistence that the audience is personally responsible for ensuring antibiotics stop getting overprescribed. Alex Howarth's production throws everything it can at the stage to ensure an emotional response, including a rotating chorus of real-life health workers who introduce themselves and their work at length at the curtain call, but in the end the story is too haphazardly built around a dossier of information to actually be moving.
Lifeline by Robin Hiley and Becky Hope-Palmer is booking until the 2nd of May at Southwark Playhouse Elephant.
Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Charlie Flint.

What if, instead of giving a written instruction to a servant who can't read, you gave it to one who can? If Capulet (Clark Gregg) had handed the invitations to his ball to the Nurse (Clare Perkins,) she could have found the guests herself. Instead the illiterate Peter (Jamie Ankrah) needs help from a stranger in the street, who invites himself along to the party to stalk a girl he fancies. Once there Romeo (Noah Jupe) falls for Capulet's daughter Juliet (Sadie Sink,) who enthusiastically returns his interest. This teenage infatuation is given an entirely unnecessary sense of peril and urgency by the fact that the pair's families have an unexplained, deadly rivalry, leading them into an elopement within hours of their first meeting. A number of other avoidable accidents and violent acts interfere over the next couple of days, and trying to navigate them while keeping their big secret sees the affair end in tragedy.
This Sliding Doors element is one of three high concepts in Robert Icke's production of Romeo & Juliet, which identifies a few such moments along the way, like if Juliet had met her prospective husband Paris (Lewis Shepherd) at the party as planned, if monks were a reliable delivery service, or if Mercutio could shut the fuck up for two minutes.

Hildegard Bechtler's design revolves around Juliet's bed, which doubles as everything from Romeo's bed to their joint tomb. She spends a lot of her time in there and it serves as a focus for a second, similar high concept that sees us let into Juliet's dreams - the opening fight scene between the families is framed as one such dream, ending in the fighting boys about to kiss because evidently, in Juliet's fantasies at least, this rivalry is of the heated variety. It serves as a counterpoint to the theme of tipping point moments elsewhere in the play - if those are the production identifying what could have been averted because we know the story, the dreams are Juliet imagining possibilities. It culminates in a striking fantasy sequence and even an ambiguous element to the ending that Anne Hathaway would have been happy with.

The third big idea comes via Ash J Woodward's video design, in a tweak to Icke's love of countdowns that instead regularly projects the date and time onto the set, focusing on how quickly events turn sour: In this telling the title characters first spot each other in the wee small hours of Monday morning and are both dead by Wednesday night, less than 72 hours later (Icke has moved the discovery of the "dead" Juliet to Wednesday morning, without changing the dialogue that would set it a day later.)

It's largely effective although it does lead to a rare misstep into bathos from the director, when the title characters finally consumate their marriage at the end of what the projections have driven home has been a very eventful Monday, while Giles Thomas' sound design gives us a slow cover of "I Don't Like Mondays." On the other hand it does provide a painfully honest sign of how long it's likely to take a couple of horny teenagers to lose their virginities, as we go into the interval with Romeo and Juliet getting into bed a little after midnight, and rejoin them fast asleep at twenty past.

Regular readers will both know how I feel about this play, particularly about everything that happens from this point on, and which very few productions manage to convince me isn't a very tiny amount of plot being dragged out to breaking point. In a way Icke flips the usual trend: Although not actually dull, I was worried by how the first 90 minutes feel rather flat, with a constant van Hove-style droning sound in the background giving a sense of menace but, ironically given the way the production shows us how quickly things escalate, there isn't the action and pace that tends to liven up this part of the story.

On the other hand the final hour after the interval has benefited from some editing - we still get the Apothecary scene but at least there's no detailed description of his shop - and overlapping of scenes which means I didn't quite get the feeling of the action dragging interminably. Some cuts might have been a step too far, as Sink's Juliet comes round from her fake death with very little emotional reaction to discovering Romeo's very real one. Perhaps it's meant to show how far she now just accepts that the worst will always happen, but it does cap off a fairly cold performance.

Otherwise the leads are decent - Sink is definitely giving a sense of emotional distance that only really thaws at all in Romeo's presence, while Jupe starts off a bit stilted but warms into his performance once the shit really starts to hit the fan and people around him start dying. Despite being one of the most unabliguously glamorous and attractive starcrossed pairs you're likely to see, there's a suggestion that shared social awakwardness is what brings them together: The focus on Juliet's bed reminds us how much time she spends there in isolation and perhaps depression. And it doesn't matter how many hours Romeo clearly spends in the gym, Rosaline won't notice him if he spends an entire party moping in a corner.

He also hangs out with a friend so overpowering he has little chance to develop a personality of his own, and I feel like Icke is with me on how much Mercutio is to blame for what happens to him and everyone else: Kasper Hilton-Hille makes him an unfunny attention-seeker whose comedy stylings mainly consist of showing people his arse, so unable to spend a second not being the centre of attention he deliberately provokes Aruna Jalloh's Tybalt, then spends his dying breath blaming Romeo for a situation he had actually completely defused before Mercutio put his foot in it, and goading him into deadly revenge.

There are moments that feel like missed opportunities: In one of those moments where a line becomes clearer than I've ever noticed it before, Gregg really clarifies the fact that Juliet is an only child because he and his wife lost so many other babies. He's also very clear in his, unusual for the time, insistence that Juliet consent to her own marriage, and I thought we might get some exploration of how Tybalt's death flips a mental switch that makes him and Lady Capulet (Eden Epstein) turn so violently against their daughter. Unfortunately this still plays out as the two of them having a complete character change.

Icke's Romeo & Juliet is frustrating in how it doesn't quite hit the mark, and its multiple high concepts do come up against the common problem of none of them really fulfilling its potential. It never quite tells us what its definitive take on the play is, and the alternate possibilities gimmick is probably only of much use to anyone who already knows the play. It's a fairly humourless approach that only really breaks when Perkins embraces the extent to which the Nurse is essentially a Carry On character, but despite threatening to lose momentum it never quite does, and ends up more watchable than most productions.
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare is booking until the 20th of June at the Harold Pinter Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Like a female version of Inua Ellams' Barber Shop Chronicles, Jocelyn Bioh's 2024 play Jaja's African Hair Braiding spans a working day in the titular Harlem salon where four African immigrant women compete for customers, tell stories and bicker: Miriam (Jadesola Odunjo) is the quiet one on the surface, cheerfully getting lumbered with a complicated job that'll take her all day, but able to open up and show a nuanced inner life when she connects with someone. Aminata (babirye bukilwa) is outwardly confident but her determination not to let her deadbeat husband James push her around is easily dented. Ndidi (Bola Akeju) is temporarily occupying a chair as the salon where she usually works, having clawed her way up to a full-time position, burned down. And Bea (Dolapo Oni) would be the group's mother figure, if she hadn't managed to piss all of them off at some point or other.
The titular owner herself only briefly appears, because today is Jaja's (Zainab Jah) wedding day, in what is a barely-disguised Green Card marriage; but her daughter Marie (Sewa Zamba) has been working in the shop while trying to find a way to tell her mother she wants to be a writer rather than the hoped-for doctor.

Karene Peter, Renee Bailey and Dani Moseley play all the customers over the course of the day, including a demanding nightmare who insists on telling Aminata how to do her job before promptly falling asleep in the chair, and a wannabe boss-bitch businesswoman whose important calls are forgotten when she gets sucked into the soap opera of the braiders' arguments. And Demmy Ladipo plays all the men, including the incredibly dodgy James and various hawkers trying to sell socks and jewelry to the customers.

So it's a sitcom, and a very funny one at times, but Monique Touko's production is keenly aware that sitcom is actually a very effective genre for introducing much darker themes, because it's so reliant on quickly making you know and like a variety of characters. The story is set in 2019, during Trump's first presidency, and there's throwaway references to ICE and the kind of crackdown that's become even more familiar during the second one. It reminds us that the characters whose company we're enjoying are in some cases on quite shaky legal ground, and sets up a big rug-pull near the end.

It's also a bright, energetic and very loud evening with some great visuals - I particularly liked Jaja's wedding dress, courtesy of costume designer Jessica Cabassa, which has the kind of glamour tipping over into just the right amount of camp that any self-respecting wedding dress should have. It's got a serious core, but Jaja's African Hair Braiding never loses track of the lightness of touch and genuine heart that are its big attraction.
Jaja's African Hair Braiding by Jocelyn Bioh is booking until the 25th of April at the Lyric Hammersmith.
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Set at the height of #MeToo in 2018, Kimberly Belflower's John Proctor is the Villain asks how 16-year-old girls would respond to that movement coinciding with them starting to understand their own sexuality and their relationships with men - through the prism of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. That's the text being studied by the English Literature class in a tiny Georgia town's high school when Beth (Holly Howden Gilchrist) decides to set up a feminist society - although how it'll look on her college applications might be more of a motivator than how much it'll actually engage with the discourse. She's joined by Nell (Lauryn Ajufo,) a new arrival to town who's found more friends here than she ever did in Atlanta, and Raelynn (Miya James,) still smarting from her boyfriend Lee (Charlie Borg) cheating on her with her best friend Shelby.
Shelby herself (Sadie Soverall) has been absent for several months, with the rumour mill spinning stories of her having left town after a nervous breakdown. Her return kicks off a number of dramatic revelations at the same time that classmate Ivy's (Clare Hughes) father is accused of assaulting a female employee.

Another crucial figure is English teacher Carter Smith (Dónal Finn,) who's got the air of the cool, progressive teacher and is most of the girls' big crush. But his big idea for getting the feminist society off the ground is to let more boys in, particularly to give injured basketball player Mason (Reece Braddock) something to do with his time; and his sex education classes are strictly abstinence-focused.

It's an entertaining and heartfelt play that's hugely sympathetic to the teenagers navigating the way the world actually works, but it does take a while to get to a crucial plot point that's more or less inevitable. So for the first hour or so John Proctor is the Villain actually does feel like it's mainly about a group of high school students discussing The Crucible, and coming to the titular conclusion. Once we do get to the real crux of the story things pick up, and an excellent cast - rounded out by Molly McFadden as school counsellor Bailey - navigate the tricky waters, and I thought Danya Taymor's production particularly sensitively handled the way their determination to believe women falters when faced with accusations against men they know and assumed they could trust.

There's been a huge amount of hype around the play - the run is currently sold out and there's a waiting list for "future opportunities to see the production" that strongly implies a transfer - and after a particularly strong run of shows for it to live up to I was perhaps a bit underwhelmed, and spent a lot of the evening wondering when things would kick up a notch. I can't say I ever really responded to it quite as enthusiastically as everyone else seems to, but there's no question it builds to a powerful ending, as the ongoing discussion of the "witches'" dancing in Miller's play and what it represents comes to a head.
John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower is booking until the 25th of April at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs (returns and day seats only.)
Running time: 2 hours straight through.
Photo credit: Camilla Greenwell.

Sarah Power's Welcome to Pemfort had kind of gone under my radar - as anything buried somewhere in the clutter of Soho Theatre's schedule is apt to do - until its cast was announced, and offered the chance to see Sean Delaney back on stage for the first time since the Oh My God They Killed Kenny incident. Whatever my motivations I'm glad to have caught it, as the strong cast is matched by an impressive play that balances light and dark to offer something genuinely thought-provoking and heartbreaking. Pemfort is a small Mediaeval castle (despite the name nobody can quite confirm if it's technically a fort) on the outskirts of a village of the same name, and for all that the locals consider a Civil War battle on its grounds to be a major historical event, the world at large doesn't agree and the site barely gets any visitors, even during the summer season.
Despite this a small team led by Uma (Debra Gillett) looks after the grounds and runs the gift shop, and after meeting ex-con Kurtis (Delaney) at Narcotics Anonymous she offers the young man a job as the fort prepares for a fundraising Living History event.

He joins the pedantic Glenn (Ali Hadji-Heshmati,) whose neurodivergent side finds a lot to fascinate him in the building's rich and often bloody history, as well as in his very precise idea of how that history should be told; and Ria (Lydia Larson,) who feels like she wasted her twenties chasing after a man and now finds a purpose communing with nature in the castle's grounds. But Uma and Kurtis have been vague about exactly what the newcomer did to land in prison, and as he and Ria start to get closer he has to be honest with her.

Power's play doesn't put a foot wrong, and Ed Madden's production - on Alys Whitehead's detailed set of a gift shop you'd genuinely want to root around in - is so absorbingly charming and funny it leaves you fully exposed for the darker elements to really hit home. So Uma's scatty brand of nurturing, Glenn's fussiness, Ria's sweetness and Kurtis' vulnerability all contribute to a lot of laugh-out-loud scenes that don't entirely go away even when the truth about Kurtis threatens to put these new relationships at risk. There's also a real sense of beauty in the writing - a running subplot sees Ria describing trying to help a deer with wire caught in its antlers, and afterward Jan said it was told so vividly he felt as if he'd watched it play out in front of him.

The setting in a location full of stories from history is a very clever one for Power's theme of when, exactly, past crimes and horrors lose their emotional rawness and whether forgiveness is ever possible - after all most of the events that are being recreated for the Living History day as reenacted swordfights and ghost tours are worse even than what Kurtis did, but the passing of centuries gives them a touch of camp along with the distance. Power is pretty unambiguous about Kurtis' rehabilitation and genuine regret, which is refreshing enough in itself when the storytelling cliché here would be to have him relapse.

She still comes up with a brutal twist of the knife though, leaving us both sympathetic to Kurtis' right not to have his past define him, and to Ria not deserving the weight of the decision she has to make. There's an almost fairytale quality of friendliness and warmth to Pemfort, which makes the stark darkness of the story told there even more devastating.
Welcome to Pemfort by Sarah Power is booking until the 18th of April at Soho Theatre.
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Camilla Greenwell.

Nicholas Wright's 2002 play Vincent in Brixton is a work of fiction, but it does have its basis in a few interesting facts, for example that before becoming an artist himself, Vincent van Gogh worked as an art dealer - an ironic job for someone whose own paintings would fail to sell during his lifetime, before becoming among the most valuable in the world after his death. In 1873 he was briefly transfered to the London office, and the play begins with him walking all the way from Greenwich, where he was staying, to Brixton, where he'd found a church close enough to the strict and stark Dutch Reform tradition he'd been raised in. Vincent (Jeroen Frank Kales) then takes a room at a local house, officially to live closer to his church of choice - but he's really picked it because he's spotted the landlady's daughter Eugenie (Ayesha Ostler) and decided he's fallen in love at first sight.
But Eugenie is already in a secret relationship with the other lodger, Sam Plowman (Rawaed Asde,) himself an aspiring artist who makes a living as a painter and decorator, and who believes art belongs to everyone, and should not be bought and sold.

But Vincent's most important relationship will end up being not with Eugenie or her boyfriend, but with her mother: Landlady Ursula Loyer (Niamh Cusack) still wears mourning black 15 years after being widowed, and the other residents make oblique references to her having much darker days than Vincent's seen from her so far. She and the young man whose own mental health problems would become as famous as his art find a connection in recognising each other's darkness, that turns into a romantic relationship.

Wright's play is a gently funny and sad story that feels, in Georgia Green's production, like a painting itself, a scene (in Charlotte Henery's design of a working Victorian kitchen) of people's lives intersecting that gives us a few clues to what's happening but also leaves a lot of space to fill in the blanks. Particularly, given that Vincent's life is so well-known, we can see sad echoes of some of the tragic events that followed for the man Kales makes a likeable little eccentric, whose naïve and narrow outlook on the world is widened by Mrs Loyer's quietly radical household. There's real warmth between him and the always-excellent Cusack as a woman whose life seems to be have been given an unexpected second act.

But in the play's actual second act we get the arrival of another lodger in the form of Vincent's sister Anna (Amber van der Brugge,) at first an amusingly brisk and blunt figure but increasingly seeming like a true villain in the way she cuts down everything that's come to matter both to her brother and everyone around him. Given the significance attached to the kitchen table, and Ursula's having buffed down the wood to find beauty in something rustic and practical, Anna's insistence on finding a tablecloth for it feels almost like an act of violence.

Inevitably we get references to some of van Gogh's most famous works, and while there is an actual sketch of Ursula that becomes a plot point, Wright mostly paints her as a muse in a different way, her description of the coexistence of light and darkness in particular becoming an obvious inspiration for "The Starry Night."

I had a few reservations about the play - Asde's Sam is so charming and flirtatious it feels like there's an underdeveloped story there about how loyal he actually is to Eugenie, and the jumps in and out of the story are quire abrupt. But seeing the play as a snapshot or painting rather than a conventional narrative helped with the latter, and there's a lot to take away from this warmly melancholy look into what may have contributed to a very famous talent.
Vincent in Brixton by Nicholas Wright is booking until the 18th of April at the Orange Tree Theatre (returns and rush tickets only.)
Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.

Maxim Gorky's Summerfolk was written in 1904, the year Anton Chekhov died; Nina Raine and Moses Raine's new version for the National moves the action to one year later, possibly so that the characters can make reference to his death, and the obvious comparisons to Gorky's playwrighting contemporary aren't left to be the elephant in the room. Because this all feels very familiar: A large group of well-off Russians (in this case explicitly said to be self-made, nouveau-riche) are on their annual extended summer holiday at a dacha. Some are related: The house belongs to Varvara (Sophie Rundle) and her laywer husband Sergei Bassov (Paul Ready,) while her brother Vlass (Alex Lawther) is nominally Sergei's clerk, but in practice seems to be there mainly to moon over an older woman, the doctor Maria Lvovna (Justine Mitchell.)
There's also a wider circle of friends, relatives and hangers-on whose exact relationship to anyone else isn't always clear, in fact an even bigger ensemble than Chekhov usually manages: The stage is so full of rich people complaining on holiday, it's like The White Lotus with less rimming.

In fact Robert Hastie's production is so stacked with familiar faces I found myself forgetting, and being repeatedly surprised to see the likes of Doon Mackichan return to the stage: Daniel Lapaine is Shalimov, a famous writer invited largely because Varvara remembered being attracted to his flowing locks of hair; having gone bald since she last saw him, he finds himself ignored with no real purpose in the group. Peter Forbes' Semyon is a lonely millionaire with no children, who thinks he might move in with the nephew who's his sole heir; but the corrupt building magnate Pyotr (Arthur Hughes,) the least likeable character even in this grim collection, is only interested in his uncle's money, not his company.

Pyotr's personality may be a major reason why his wife Yulia (Adelle Leonce) is pretty openly having an affair with Nikolai (Brandon Grace,) while another unhappy couple comes in the form of Sid Sagar's doctor, Kirill - because if everything has to be that little bit bigger than Chekhov, why settle for his usual one doctor when you can have two? - and his wife Olga, who Gwyneth Keyworth makes one of the comic highlights with her utter dislike for the numerous kids she's given birth to. Pip Carter is Pavel, another admirer of Varvara's who she's more or less completely unaware of, while Maria's teenage daughter Sonya (Tamika Bennett) is having a flirtation with the student Maxim (Thomas Barrett.)

Mackichan plays Bassov's sister Kaleria, a poet at the same time haughty and rather fragile; Sergei himself is equally contradictory, his sense of insecurity around his young wife sometimes coming out in bursts of aggression towards her. Largely the evening consists of the various plot strands and tensions between the guests tightening and cracking over their summer stay, with some interesting little twists along the way - I liked the way the assumption that there's something Oedipal about the age-gap relationship between Maria and Vlass becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and ultimately the thing that breaks them up even though it was never really true when they first got together.

I had to really go on the hunt for the NT's free yellow cast sheets for this show but they were worth finding, as it does lay out what the relationship between everyone is, and Ben and I spent much of the interval piecing together who was who and what they were doing in this group of people who, under surface niceties, are at best all fed up with each other. Like The Cherry Orchard, which this could almost be a sequel to, there's the feel that this is the end of an era and the common people - who are often grumbling on the sidelines - are going to rise up, but in Gorky's version that may not even be necessary, as these upper middle classes are more likely to turn on themselves.

This is the overall thrust of where the story is going, and Ben and I agreed afterwards that for all the similarities to Chekhov this looseness of structure was one big difference: It never feels as if individual plotlines are as sharp as they could be, or resolve quite as satisfactorily. Having said that there's a wittiness to the Raines' writing that keeps the evening entertaining; tonight an already-long show started late because of a fire alarm that meant the whole National had to be evacuated, and despite this I still never felt the show dragging on as late into the night as it actually was. Although how anyone was supposed to pay any attention to the dialogue at the top of third act, when Brandon Grace was wandering the stage wearing only wet, see-through long johns, is anyone's guess. As is why this obvious selling point hasn't been used in any of the released production photos, oh well I guess I'll just have to go back to one of his previous appearances at the National instead.

There, that's better.

Also providing strong visuals is Peter McKintosh's design of half-built walls flying in and out of the set: One of the subplots, this time bringing to mind The Seagull, is the guests entertaining themselves by staging a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and this could be part of the inspiration behind Hastie's production having the dreamlike feel of being lost somewhere in the middle of the woods. The play itself may feel at times likes it's lacking in narrative drive, but the adaptation is cleverly written and the luxury casting brings its own energy.
Summerfolk by Maxim Gorky in a version by Nina Raine and Moses Raine is booking until the 29th of April at the National Theatre's Olivier.
Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.

Joe (George Naylor) is an out-of-work actor with a thing for posh boys, who's working in a bar when one of the regulars offers him a well-paid acting job - of sorts. David's nieces will be visiting the family's country pile for a week, and he's promised them an appearance from a resident ghost with a regular routine: It Walks Around The House At Night. One of the things about Tim Foley's ghost story that lets you know you're in (un)safe hands is the way he immediately wrong-foots the audience's mental image of what that title means - never setting foot inside the building, the ghost literally walks around the house, circling it in the surrounding dark woods. Joe is put up at a nearby lodge, asked to leave it only when dark falls and it's time to follow his assigned route through the trees.
But right from the first night's walk he starts to hear noises suggesting he's being followed, and things only get worse when he returns to the lodge, his night's sleep being disrupted by scuttling noises, sinister shadows and the fridge door opening by itself to spill out eerie light. As his week goes on, the days seem to get shorter and shorter until the dark is all that's left.

The show is not quite the monologue it appears to be, and where most stage ghost stories will sneak in an uncredited cast member to provide some jump scares, It Walks Around The House At Night does credit Oliver Baines as The Dancer (among other, more shadowy roles.) I was torn on the scene where the voice of Paul Hilton catches us up on a lot of exposition and the background to what's really in the woods and lodge while Baines dances in flashback - on the one hand it's an unexpected change of pace and style that gives a whole new flavour to the story, on the other it does puncture a lot of the creepy tension Naylor has been building up.

But that aside Foley's story is expertly told, and the writer seems to have an instinctive grasp of how horror, comedy and sex work together: The play is consistently funny, controlling how and when the audience gets to build tension then release it (a play featuring a haunted fridge could never take itself entirely seriously.) Meanwhile sex is as much a motivator as money in why Joe sticks around in what increasingly looks like a dangerous situation: He's hoping to hook up with David, and his nighttime hauntings mean he spends much of the play scurrying around in his underwear chased by shadows. This fondness for posh boys also feeds into a political theme that becomes increasingly apparent as the story goes on, as those with money and class advantages pass on horrors to those without them.

The shadows feel as fresh as anything else despite horror theatre being in a resurgence at the moment, and the technical aspects of Neil Bettles' production are another highlight: As well as the lighting Joshua Pharo is responsible for the video design which is sparingly but effectively used (although given the amount of references to Paragon Hall being a black and white Tudor building, the fact that the image in the projections doesn't match that annoyed me.)

But Pete Malkin's sound design gets all the right cracks, creaks and footsteps in, Bettles and Tom Robbins' set hides all manner of secrets, and the practical effects are impressively slick: Naylor gets clipped in and out of a bungee cord at lightning speed, and a coup de théâtre jump-scare I'll describe in a footnote to keep spoilers out of the main review* is as gracefully choreographed as anything the Dancer performs. Ending as it started, with another twist on what the title might actually mean, in any fair theatrical landscape where stunt-casting didn't trump quality, It Walks Around The House At Night would be a bigger hit than 2:22 A Ghost Story.
It Walks Around The House At Night by Time Foley is booking until the 28th of March at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre.
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
*in one of the haunted fridge's appearances, the door opens, a rat rushes out of it and scuttles under the bed, where it transforms into the hooded figure that's been haunting the shadows and looms over Joe in bed

After a wobbly start to the Young Vic's new regime - a Mr Sloane that bafflingly ironed the gay out of Joe Orton, and a Bengal Tiger that was just baffling in general - it settles into a stronger groove with Jordan Fein's take on Arthur Miller. The Broken Glass in his 1994 play is Kristallnacht, the 1938 attacks on Jewish businesses that became the first major sign of the extent to which Nazi Germany was willing to turn its antisemitic rhetoric into action. As stories and photos appear in the newspapers worldwide, New Yorker Sylvia Gellburg (Pearl Chanda) suddenly loses the ability to walk. Referred to Dr Hyman (Alex Waldmann,) he and the experts he consults with are unable to find a physical cause for her disability, and he starts to lean towards theories of something psychosomatic: Confronted with both these brutal images and everyone around her's seemingly blasé responses to them, part of Sylvia has shut down.
But in a story with elements of a psychological mystery, her response to the situation in Europe might have got wrapped up in her mind with her relationship with her husband Phillip (Eli Gelb.)

Phillip is a conservative Republican with controlling and even abusive tendencies, an accountant and advisor to a real estate magnate (Nigel Whitmey) and, in something that becomes a theme, proud of being the first and only Jew hired by the company. His inward self-hatred can look suspiciously like outward antisemitism, and the pieces start to come together about why his wife's brain is finding it hard to separate her reaction to him from that to the Nazis.

This puzzle-like element is one of the things that draws you into a play full of very dark themes; another is the relationship between doctor and patient, which always feels on the verge of tipping over into something far less professional. Chanda is characteristically good in a role that puts her at the focal point while rarely allowing her to move, there's a real charm to her relationship with Waldmann and a real tension to the one with Gelb's monolithic Phillip.

There's obvious modern relevance in the story of people turning, if not a blind eye to the rise of the Far Right, then a deliberately myopic one that says "it could never happen here." Miller even gives Dr Hyman a background in Germany - ironically because it was more tolerant than the US of admitting Jews into medical school - to build up Sylvia's horror at the gentle, cultured people he remembers standing back and letting this happen. Rosanna Vize's set commandeers the front row of audience seating, piling it up with newspapers from both the 1930s and recent weeks.

But what feels even more contemporary is the theme of people's mental health cracking under the pressure of constant news of horrors from around the world. If Sylvia is crippled by newspapers, what hope is there for anyone with a smartphone? Nancy Carroll and Juliet Cowan as Hyman's wife and Sylvia's sister respectively are criminally underused, but otherwise this is a very satisfying if intense evening.
Broken Glass by Arthur Miller is booking until the 18th of April at the Young Vic.
Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Tristram Kenton.

Alexi Kaye Campbell throws a little dig at himself in Bird Grove, as a male writer telling the story of how women's voices needed to be heard, and how one woman made sure hers was one of them. She did do it under the male pseudonym of George Elliot, but in 1841 she's still Mary Ann Evans (Elizabeth Dulau,) a woman whose family is starting to worry might be getting too old to attract a husband. Her father Robert (Owen Teale) has recently retired after a lifetime of hard work which has, however, left him financially very comfortable: He's bought Bird Grove House in Coventry for him and his daughter to live in; the idea is that they'll settle into a new area as a respectable family who'll attract eligible young men to propose to Mary Ann. This isn't getting off to the best start though, as her brother Isaac (Jolyon Coy) has brought along a very bad match in Horace (Jonnie Broadbent.)
So the play begins as a Victorian comedy of manners as the stuffy Horace, who's wildly overestimated how much Mary Ann might return his interest in her, is thrown and offended by her actually wanting a say in her own life, and marrying him so he can get an inheritance is not part of the plan. Horace also has diarrhoea.

But Mary Ann's newfound outspokenness, encouraged by her radical new friends Cara (Rebecca Scroggs) and Charles Bray (Tom Espiner,) will have much bigger repercussions than just embarrassing a local fool, and a few days later she announces to her father that she won't be going to church with him as it no longer aligns with what she believes. We've already seen Robert be the family member who has a bit more understanding of who Mary Ann is and how she might be happy, but this is a step too far for him.

So this becomes more of a drama with the central conflict between father and daughter variously trying to find a compromise that balances their love for each other with their own principles, and playing a game of one-upmanship that sees Robert use his will to get the last word even after death. With a lot of modern language and ideas - Robert talks about finding the right way to love his daughter, Mary Ann wants to find her own truth - Campbell may be suggesting that George Elliot was a crucial moment in developing the way we think about identity and individuality today.

The shift in styles is both a help and a hindrance to the play: It can all feel a bit unfocused, but it does also make it unpredictable, with the final scene causing a few audience gasps. Anna Ledwich's production for the most part makes the most of this, adding tension to what at first feels like quite a creaky throwback style. Sarah Beaton's set design also looks rather grand and stark to start with, but lends itself to a dramatic snowstorm later on, as well as Mary Ann's angry rejection of the endless books on the shelves, all written by a small circle of men.

Dulau gives a contained, emotionally effective performance as Mary Ann finds her voice, but there's a quieter character development going on at her side as her friend and former teacher Maria (Sarah Woodward) learns how to properly support her unusual friend's needs, not just try to fit her into society's expectations like she does at the start. For all its bells and whistles Bird Grove still feels old-fashioned at heart and definitely could be shorter, but it's got enough twists and turns to keep it an interesting evening.
Bird Grove by Alexi Kaye Campbell is booking until the 21st of March at Hampstead Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.

Shakespeare's Globe's winter season is one they can't really make a profit out of due to the Swanamaker's size, so traditionally it's been the one where less obviously commercial choices are made. In the past this has tended to mean expanding the repertoire to less famous Jacobean playwrights and beyond, but for the 2025/26 season it involves two of the more popular Shakespeare plays getting eccentric reinventions. And unlike Holly Race Roughan's Midsummer Night's Dream, which simply took the common trope of finding the play's dark side to its natural extreme, Tim Crouch's look at The Tempest is grounded in ideas I've seen applied to the play a lot less frequently. It is very recognisably Crouch's work, even without the fact that he also appears in it, because in a theme that runs through a number of his plays it takes place in a theatre - specifically this one.
Prospero (Crouch,) his daughter Miranda (Sophie Steer) and the indigenous inhabitants, human Caliban (Faizal Abdullah) and magical spirit Ariel (Transphobia Ltd Employee Naomi Wirthner,) both of whom Prospero enslaved as soon as he arrived on their island, are here recast as a quartet of storytellers who open the play.

Among the various things I don't much like about The Tempest is the honking great Basil Exposition speech at the start, and one advantage of this approach is that it it significantly breaks this up, sharing Prospero's monologue among all four characters who, for reasons that will become apparent later, recite the events before the play's start with the slightly weary edge of people who know the story a bit too well. (Also becoming apparent later is why Ariel's hopes for freedom are never stated in the singular, but always "we" encompassing the quartet.)

So the former Duke of Milan, Prospero was usurped by his sister Antonia (Amanda Hadingue) and banished with his then-infant daughter, ending up on this island. Using Ariel's magic, he has now caused the shipwreck of Antonia, her collaborator Sebastian (Colin Michael Carmichael,) and the loyal but tedious advisor Gonzalo (Tyrone Huggins.) Also on the ship was Neapolitan king Alonso (Jo Stone-Fewings,) whose son and heir forms a major part of the wider plan Prospero is cooking up for regaining and increasing his power.

The four who start the play as residents of the island may already be on stage but the rest of the cast are hiding in plain sight in the audience, being called up only when their character appears in a scene, and returning to the their seats in between - even if this means repeatedly having to crawl over the real audience members. Among the fun touches this leads to is Antonia and Sebastian sniping from the sidelines like Statler and Waldorf.

Probably gaining the most out of this conceit is Joshua Griffin as Ferdinand: Making him one of the Globe ushers gives an extra dimension to one of Shakespeare's most thanklessly dull romantic leads, as he gets to fuss around cleaning up after the characters, and deal with the tourist using her phone to translate the dialogue, who then becomes Trinculo (Mercè Ribot,) and the drunken latecomer who turns into Stephano (Patricia Rodriguez.) The latter two are both Spanish, and along with Rachana Jadhav's cluttered design that brings to mind items pilfered from across the world, the use of Spanish from them and Malay from Abdullah - and the other characters' dismissive attitude towards their languages - are among the production's nods to the play's colonial themes. (The Spanish duo also means we get a surprise reference to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in the form of "Amigos Para Siempre.")

As my first Shakespeare outing of 2026 this was a promising one, taking a play I'm no big fan of and giving me one of the most entertaining productions of it I've seen (there were quite a few pre-teens in the audience this afternoon, and from their reaction I'd say this also makes for a very strong introduction to Shakespeare.) The four narrators device means their characters don't really come into definition early on but this does build up over the course of the performance - there's a sense of Crouch and Wirthner as an old married couple, with Ariel the long-suffering wife having to calm down Prospero's sudden bursts of fury, Abdullah increasingly fighting for independence and Steer longing hopelessly for an escape. Because we build to the concept that these four characters are trapped not on an island but in a story that they're doomed to repeat forever, a sad but satisfying tying up of the themes and clues that we've been teased with in the previous hours.
The Tempest by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 12th of April at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.
Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.