Partially Obstructed View

Theatre review: Flyby

2026-04-14T22:08:00.001+01:00

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

Theatre review: Copenhagen

2026-04-13T23:28:00.040+01:00

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 reasons

but 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.

Theatre review: Henry V (RSC/RST)

2026-04-11T21:04:00.053+01:00

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.

Theatre review: Teeth'N'Smiles

2026-04-09T23:02:00.161+01:00

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.

Theatre review: Lifeline

2026-04-07T22:27:10.021+01:00

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:

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.

Theatre review: Romeo & Juliet(Empire Street Productions / Harold Pinter Theatre)

2026-04-03T23:22:00.277+01:00

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.

Theatre review: Jaja's African Hair Braiding

2026-04-02T22:24:00.001+01:00

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.

Theatre review: John Proctor is the Villain

2026-03-30T22:16:00.143+01:00

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.

Theatre review: Welcome to Pemfort

2026-03-26T22:12:00.144+00:00

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.

Theatre review: Vincent in Brixton

2026-03-21T18:24:56.620+00:00

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.

Theatre review: Summerfolk

2026-03-19T23:56:31.343+00:00

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.

Theatre review: It Walks Around The House At Night

2026-03-13T21:33:00.195+00:00

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

Theatre review: Broken Glass

2026-03-05T22:34:00.046+00:00

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.

Theatre review: Bird Grove

2026-03-03T23:34:00.044+00:00

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.

Theatre review: The Tempest(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

2026-03-01T18:10:00.001+00:00

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.

Theatre review: Shadowlands

2026-02-26T22:48:00.046+00:00

Star of Bonekickers, Hugh Bonneville makes a rare venture to the stage in Shadowlands, William Nicholson's play about Narnia author C.S. "Jack" Lewis, his late-blooming love life and the way it put to the test his Christian treatises on why god lets humans suffer. Lewis opens the play delivering a lecture on this theme, before returning to his fellow Oxford dons (Tony Jayawardena, Fode Simbo, Giles Taylor and Timothy Watson,) who see him as a poetry lecturer with a funny little sideline in children's books. He's also known for his arrested development as far as sex is concerned, a pious bachelor who lives with his brother W.H. (Jeff Rawle) and barely speaks to any women unless he's addressing the WI. He does, however, have a female pen-pal in Joy Davidman (Maggie Siff,) a married New York poet who heard of Lewis through her son's love of Narnia but started corresponding with him because of his religious writing.

When Joy and her son Douglas (Ayrton English, alternating with Nathan Jago and Louis Wilkins) visit England over Christmas they meet with the Lewis brothers; when her husband divorces her they move to Oxford permanently.

Jack suggests a chaste, secret civil marriage of convenience to give them UK citizenship, as his beliefs won't let him marry a divorcee in the church, and he only considers their relationship to be a friendship. It's only when Joy is diagnosed with terminal bone cancer that he realises he's been in love with her all along.

Bonneville is as understatedly good as you'd expect, something which applies to Rachel Kavanaugh's production more broadly as well: Shadowlands is a gentle drama, quietly effective but hugely old-fashioned; I can't imagine many people are coming to this for fireworks and surprises, so they won't be disappointed when they don't get them.

They will get an entertaining enough evening - Nicholson provides a lot of funny moments from the coterie of stuffy professors, the sharp-tongued American woman, and the clash between them when she talks back to Watson's spiky atheist Christopher. But there is definitely a sense of stripping things back so far that they're at a bare minimum: Douglas is all but mute, as if the playwright felt that giving a child character a personality was a bit too much wasted effort.

Inevitably this will be a more emotionally effective evening for people with a personal connection to Jack's situation and/or his religious convictions, but while Siff is very good at making you like her quick-witted but vulnerable character, it's not enough to feel like the subject's been explored in any kind of depth.

Shadowlands by William Nicholson is booking until the 9th of May at the Aldwych Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

Theatre review: Dracula (Noël Coward Theatre)

2026-02-24T22:22:00.042+00:00

After an incredibly high-profile couple of years on the Wicked promotional tour that blurred the lines between press junket and mental breakdown, Cynthia Erivo returns to the West End to hold space with the undead. Kip Williams adapts Bram Stoker's Dracula into a one-woman show although in reality, apart from a couple of added fucks near the end, this text is more abridgement than adaptation: Keeping the epistolary form of the novel, Erivo narrates the story of an ancient Romanian vampire who moves to the UK to build up his real estate portfolio and/or army of the damned. On stage she predominantly plays the three rather dull narrators, Jonathan Harker, the lawyer who first visits Dracula's castle and nearly dies there, Jonathan's fiancée Mina, whose best friend Lucy becomes the vampire's victim, and Dr Seward, who's also there.

She also plays all the other characters, but for the most part these are pre-recorded performances that are projected on a screen, with cameras following her around the stage so that the live Erivo can interact on stage with her digital alter egos.

This is evidently Williams' signature style which has got him a lot of praise in the past, but on this evidence it's a highly flawed concept that plays out as if Jamie Lloyd thought "but what if we could get the audience to engage even less with what's actually happening on stage?" It certainly doesn't help that the production isn't a particularly good fit to the Noël Coward, so for those of us sitting in the higher levels the screens where everything's going on aren't actually visible a lot of the time.

Fortunately Marg Horwell's designs cleverly move the screens around the stage, so when they come downstage we get to see the idea behind Craig Wilkinson's video designs: Erivo in a variety of costumes and frightwigs to play the characters she then gets blended in with, and why Renfield has a ponytail is anybody's guess, when you'd think an actor with a shaved head would have a fairly obvious look ready to go for a Victorian asylum inmate.

But when the screens aren't visible there's little to go by other than Erivo's vocal performance, which is admittedly a feat, not of acting but of endurance: She has to rattle through an entire novel so quickly and incomprehensibly there's little room to get any actual acting in; I don't know who ordered a two-hour performance of Not I but it definitely wasn't me. It's not like you can even see her on stage half the time - if she hasn't scuttled into a little separate chamber she's usually surrounded by steadicam operators. With little to look at and the narration on fast forward I spent a lot of the time staring at the Coward's chandelier while wondering if "Kip" is short for "Kippers for breakfast Aunt Helga, is it St. Swithin's Day already?"

Also Dracula has a Nigerian accent which is never explained but does seem to be deliberate; given a few final words from him I suspect this is meant to be a reference to, and inversion of, the original novel's xenophobic narrative. But as Williams hasn't actually relocated him in the script and the castle is still surrounded by Transylvanian peasants, it just seems like old Vlad just spent a lot of time building up his property portfolio in Lagos before moving on to Whitby, and picked up the accent. And at one point the stage is dominated by a big red love heart so I guess that bit takes place in a themed sex motel? All in all, a weird evening without ever managing to turn the weirdness into something interesting.

Dracula by Bram Stoker in an abridgement by Kippers for breakfast Aunt Helga, is it St. Swithin's Day already? Williams is booking until the 30th of May at the Noël Coward Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours straight through.

Photo credit: Daniel Boud.

Theatre review: American Psycho

2026-02-20T23:43:00.265+00:00

The Almeida will continue to have shows programmed in the Rupert Goold era running for the rest of this year, but for his final show there as director he does what Rufus Norris did when exiting the National, and revisits a hit musical he directed there just before taking on the Artistic Director job: Here that means American Psycho, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (book) and Duncan Sheik's (music and lyrics) adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' twisted satire of capitalism. Patrick Bateman (Arty Froushan) is the archetypal young Wall Street broker working in Murders and Executions (or is it Mergers and Acquisitions?) flashing the latest tech, fashions and products to show how well he's doing for himself. But for all that he's the go-to man at his firm for questions of 1980s etiquette, he always feels sure someone else is doing just that little bit better than him.

His nemesis at the moment is Paul Owen (Daniel Bravo,) who's landed the coveted Fisher Account, can get same-day reservations at the hottest restaurant in town and, most gallingly of all, never remembers Patrick's name.

So Patrick takes out his frustrations in the middle of the night, killing prostitutes and the homeless before choosing riskier victims closer to home. Apart from the black comedy of his killing spree American Psycho gets most of its laughs from the constant eighties references, and Patrick's invariably skewed opinion on the cultural phenomena that will stand the test of time: His Walkman is state-of-the-art, Tom Cruise's Cocktail is a lock-in for the Best Picture Oscar and, most famously, "Hip To Be Square" is the pinnacle of musical achievement.

Actually what amounts to lists namechecking stuff that was popular, or at least first popular, in the eighties could come across as a cheap way of getting laughs, but Sheik's music and Lynne Page's choreography are so relentlessly, effortlessly stylish (even in their own archness) that the show easily gets away with it. Es Devlin's design is a thrust stage that takes inspiration from the disused New York Subway tunnel of Bateman's favourite bar, and Katrina Lindsay's costumes mix the funny with the unsettling - the see-through, skin-coloured costumes of the ensemble near the end are a perfect example of how the production blurs the line between sexy and genuinely creepy.

The original creatives may be back but this is a thoroughly reworked show - having my review of the 2013 version to hand has helped me confirm some of the changes I spotted, like the show no longer opening with "Clean," which now only appears in its short reprises, or the coked-up Tim (Oli Higginson) not disappearing early on, but instead sticking around to be a jittery thorn in Patrick's side throughout. Patrick's fearsome mother (Kim Ismay) and slacker brother Sean (Alex James-Hatton) feel like bigger presences here, "Oh, Sri Lanka" has had its chorus completely rewritten to take out Sri Lanka and replace it with "The Death of Downtown," and it's probably no surprise that Patrick's hero-worship of Donald Trump and determination to own The Art of the Deal (but not actually read it) is much more prominent after the last decade's events.

Again reflecting recent discourse this now feels even more like a show about toxic masculinity: There is of course the way Patrick treats all women with a kind of baffled misogyny, from Emily Barber's very funny fashion victim girlfriend, to her best friend Courtney (Tanisha Spring) with whom he's having an affair, to his mousy assistant Jean (Anastasia Martin,) who he starts to think might be the perfect match for him - if only because she's the only person in his life who seems to have the slightest idea what his actual personality is.

But his equally confused reaction to the men around him is even more prominent, and it's not just when co-worker Luis (Zheng Xi Yong) gets the wrong signals from him and causes a full on Gay Panic^TM that Patrick clearly has no idea how he's supposed to fit in with other men - between this, the show once again assembling a cast filled with London's hottest Musical Theatre gays, and the short-shorts that are a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen (sadly it didn't happen tonight,) American Psycho is somehow even more wildly homoerotic than it was the first time around. Vanessa has a tendency to cheerfully assume actors are wearing some kind of comedy muscle suit before realising it's their actual bodies; in this show that confusion extended to pretty much the entire male cast.

In the middle of this Froushan is outstanding, dripping with sweat from the effort but totally providing the focus as a character who, if it wasn't for the extreme ways he directs his frustrations, could be outright sympathetic as a little boy lost in the middle of all this testosterone-fuelled consumerism-worship. From the start his Patrick is visibly more a collection of neuroses than a human being, something that washes right over everyone but Jean just like nobody actually pays attention to his constant, outright confessions of multiple murder and torture. Froushan's so distractingly handsome and charming it could be implausible that he would be like this, but then the whole point is that so is everyone around him: If he looks right everyone can happily ignore literally everything he says and does, and while Paul might be the only one who actively confuses him with someone else, the rest of the characters also treat him as one of the interchangeable yuppies surrounding him.

The 2013 production never got its rumoured West End transfer after a failed attempt to conquer Broadway (Gooldilocks might have learned a lot of things in his decade plus at the Almeida, but the fact that however popular he might be in London, New York fucking hates him doesn't seem to be one of them.) This production feels bigger, not just in the size of the stage and ensemble but in its confidence and ambition, so maybe plans are for that further life to finally happen. Dark, outrageous fun, it definitely feels like it should get to capitalise on its sold-out run this time around.

American Psycho by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Duncan Sheik, Roland Orzabal, Ian Stanley, Chris Hughes, Your Mum, Gillian Gilbert, Stephen Hague, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner, Phil Collins, Bill Gibson, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah and his brothers, Sean Hopper, Huey Lewis, Jo Callis, Philip Oakey and Philip Adrian Wright is booking until the 21st of March at the Almeida Theatre (returns only.)

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review: The Shitheads

2026-02-17T22:49:00.056+00:00

Humans have a number of evolutionary ancestors, with some of the subspecies having co-existed in prehistoric times and fought for dominance. Jack Nicholls' debut play at the Royal Court Upstairs imagines one such time of uneasy meeting between the two, but doesn't call them by names like Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal: Clare's (Jacoba Williams) family of cave-dwellers call themselves the Magic people, as their superior ability to communicate, hunt and survive seems miraculous; they call their nomadic neighbours The Shitheads. They've been known to kill and eat their rivals, particularly their brains as they believe this will pass on all their victim's knowledge, thoughts and dreams to them, but when Clare goes on an elk hunt with Shithead Greg (Jonny Khan,) not only can he speak but he tells her a story, opening her up to the idea that there might be other ways of dealing with the other species.

So when the end of the world (aka winter) approaches, Clare invites a young Shithead mother, Danielle (Ami Tredrea) and her baby (puppeteered by Scarlet Wilderink) to spend it in her warm cave with her, rather than migrate to somewhere hotter.

But she shares the cave with her angry, wounded bear of a father Adrian (Peter Clements) and little sister Lisa (Annabel Smith,) neither of whom can be trusted around a couple of vulnerable strangers. And at some point she's going to have to deal with Danielle's questions about what exactly happened to Greg. Part-thriller, part-sitcom, David Byrne (not that one) and Aneesha Srinivasan's production is for the most part entertaining, but can be frustrating and drags out its ending.

Matching Nicholls' language and comically banal modern names, Anna Reid's design mixes a moody cave complete with scratched paintings of mammoth hunts on the walls with chintzy carpets and lamps, with the costumes a similarly schizophrenic mix of eras, although for me the Sports Direct mug was a cheap gag too many that took things into too arch a place. Because although very funny, The Shitheads' humour is of a very dark kind that jumps between the domestic comparisons to modern man and the brutal reality of our ancestors' lives.

There's a lot to recommend The Shitheads, not least of all the cast's performances that enthusiastically embrace the production's unusual style, and some impressive shocks and setpieces including the opening elk hunt which is pretty intense in such an intimate space (puppet design by Finn Caldwell.) I also liked the way the play stayed vague on which of the tribes are modern humans' most direct ancestors, leading us to reach our own conclusions.

But it's in its wider themes that I found it disappointing: As the play goes on I got the idea we might be in for a story about the origins of empathy, but by the end this has become an origin of humans othering and destroying each other for no good reason, and of violence and cruelty being what humans are to their core; messages as generic as they are bleak.

The Shitheads by Jack Nicholls is booking until the 14th of March at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs (returns and day seats only.)

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Camilla Greenwell.

Theatre review: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

2026-02-12T23:33:00.001+00:00

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry seemed like one of those shows I have an extreme reaction to: The sort of heartstring-tugging story that'll either have me sobbing uncontrollably or cringing halfway out of my skin. Neither really ended up happening in the end - certainly in the first half-hour I found it pretty unbearable, but Rachel Joyce (book) and Passenger's (music and lyrics) adaptation of Joyce's novel does end up more or less bearable. Recently-retired Harold (Transphobia Ltd Employee Mark Addy) lives a joyless life in Devon with funsponge wife Maureen (Jenna Russell,) until one morning he receives a letter informing him that old friend Queenie (Maggie Service) is in a hospice with terminal cancer. He writes a perfunctory response but when he tries to post it finds himself constantly putting it off and walking to the next postbox.

Eventually he just decides he's going to walk more or less the whole length of England to Berwick-upon-Tweed to deliver a more personal message to a woman he hasn't seen in twenty years, but who helped him in a difficult time in ways he never quite acknowledged to her.

Beginning with an unusually earnest garage attendant (Nicole Nyarambi,) Harold's pilgrimage largely involves interacting with sentient fortune cookies who tell him he can do anything he puts his mind to if he has faith, and while Addy doesn't sing or even say that much himself, he's accompanied by an invisible Balladeer (Noah Mullins) who expresses a lot of his inner life. And I'm not saying the Balladeer has major Dead Kid Symbolism, but he's dressed as Robert Sean Leonard as Puck in Dead Poets Society.

As he crosses the country in increasing exhaustion he picks up followers, starting with a stray dog (Timo Tatzber) and then humans after an influencer (Gleanne Purcell-Brown) makes him go viral. With Harold's journey not only having him confront the debt he owes Queenie but also the trauma he experienced 20 years earlier, there's a lot of quietly genuine emotion being explored here but unfortunately the folksy style of the storytelling and particularly Passenger's music tips far too much of it over into insufferably twee: Apart from belatedly coming to life in the finale "Here's One for the Road" the songs make no impact.

What brought me back to Katy Rudd's production after the interval was the occasional turn into something a bit more genuinely quirky and modern - one of the people seeking Harold's advice is an older gay man with a shoe fetish (Daniel Crossley,) who wants to know how to tell the younger man he meets up with for dom sessions that he actually loves him. And when the journey passes through Exeter, Samuel Wyer's design represents the city entirely through rugby shirts and stolen traffic cones which, in my experience, fair.

So I can't recommend The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - the people sitting next to me did leave at the interval so it's clearly not for everyone - and I wanted the songs to end as soon as they began. But the cast are generally good and Rudd manages to cut back on the cheesiness just enough to make it watchable.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce, Peter Darling, Katy Rudd and Passenger, based on the novel by Rachel Joyce, is booking until the 18th of April at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton.

Theatre review: Man and Boy

2026-02-11T22:53:00.050+00:00

So far Indhu Rubasingham's approach to classics at the National has involved a quirky sensibility from her directors to keep things feeling fresh, but with a light enough touch not to frighten Aunt Edna. For the era's first Dorfman show we go to the ever-reliable Terence Rattigan, and a production that takes him out of the naturalistic confines that gave him an undeserved stuffy reputation for many years, but doesn't detract from the cleverness of his writing: The lesser-known Man and Boy takes place in 1930s New York, with the country in the throes of the Great Depression but a few wealthy financiers still having held on to their money. One of them is Gregor "GA" Antonescu (Ben Daniels,) a Romanian radio magnate whose luck might be about to run out: Rumour has it that a huge merger has fallen through, and his stock is plummeting.

GA turns up at the Greenwich Village apartment of Basil Anthony (Laurie Kynaston,) the estranged son who's never had the closest relationship with him, but who finally cut him out of his life and changed his name after discovering some damaging secret about his father five years earlier.

The two awkwardly reconnect as the newspapers and radio bring more rumours of the magnate's upcoming financial collapse, but this isn't a social visit at a difficult time: GA's right-hand man Sven (Nick Fletcher) is there to help prepare for a business meeting, as rival company boss Mark Herries (Malcolm Sinclair) has been invited in a last-ditch attempt to salvage the merger.

It's not that hard to guess that GA's business practices might not always have been entirely above board (the play premiered in 1963 so the references to his dealings with Hitler and Mussolini have the full benefit of hindsight to point to his character,) but the way Rattigan gets to this is a lot more surprising. Man and Boy plays out as a financial thriller where you can't predict what's round the next corner. Especially when we find out why he's chosen his son's flat as the venue for meeting Mark, a twist that takes things into downright creepy territory; before we get to some more genuine emotion as the father and son confront just how bad things have got.

GA's success is largely based on his own personal charm, which he uses to steamroller over any awkward questions, and Anthony Lau's production takes this as a springboard for an expressionistic production that does away with a naturalistic apartment. Instead Georgia Lowe's traverse set has simple office tables and chairs being pushed around and climbed on by the cast to establish dominance, with dance and movement from Aline David twisting their bodies around. Daniels takes GA's Romanian accent as his cue to go full Dracula, charming, manipulating and overbearing his verbal sparring partners. Angus MacRae's music and an illuminated cast list that hangs over the set increase the feel of this being a big 1930s movie.

There's memorable supporting turns from Phoebe Campbell as Basil's bright but easily dazzled girlfriend, Isabella Laughland as the trophy wife whose charitable fund GA has been pilfering from, and Leo Wan as the accountant whose attention to detail caught out some dodgy bookkeeping, but whose personality stands no chance against the financier's abrasive brand of charm. Rattigan was going through his own professional fall from grace by the 1960s, but this example of the work he was coming up with at the time only goes to confirm how undeserved it was.

Man and Boy by Terence Rattigan is booking until the 14th of March at the National Theatre's Dorfman.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Theatre review: Arcadia

2026-02-06T23:11:24.480+00:00

Scheduled at the Old Vic before his death but ending up serving as a tribute, Arcadia is probably Tom Stoppard's best-loved play - for me it's certainly the one that's most effective in its use of esoteric knowledge, as the way it muses on science and poetry makes the audience feel clever, as opposed to some of his works that make us feel sneered at. In a country house in 1809, precocious 13-year-old Thomasina (Isis Hainsworth) is being taught maths and classics by her tutor. Septimus (Seamus Dillane) is flirtatious with her mother Lady Croom (Fiona Button,) but is even more indiscreet elsewhere, getting caught in various locations and positions with the wife of Ezra Chater (Matthew Steer.) The house guest and notoriously bad poet issues various challenges to duels, but Septimus always seems able to convince Ezra he was doing him a favour by cuckolding him.

Meanwhile Lady Croom's garden is being remodelled by Richard Noakes (Gabriel Akuwudike) to a romantic ideal that includes a hermitage on the grounds. Almost 200 years later a specialist on the Romantic poets, Hannah (Leila Farzad) is drawn to the estate by a story about an actual hermit having occupied the shack for a couple of decades, eventually dying and leaving behind a pile of unintelligible writings.

Hannah believes unmasking the identity of the mysterious mad hermit could be an explosive subject for an academic paper, but her overbearing rival Bernard (Prasanna Puwanarajah) is convinced he's got an even bigger story: He believes - correctly - that Septimus' old schoolmate Lord Byron was staying at the house during the events of 1809. But Byron is never connected enough to this story for us to actually ever see him on stage, and the great discovery Bernard thinks he's made relies on him wildly misinterpreting clues left behind by the 19th Century characters.

If Arcadia opens with Thomasina throwing together maths and poetry in her lessons, it continues with a theme of finding the beauty in both art and science, and in those like Bernard who dismiss one or the other coming a cropper as a result. In 1993 the descendant of the original family, Valentine (Angus Cooper) is a mathematician whose use of the house's detailed grouse-shooting records for statistical purposes provides the poetry experts with vital evidence for their theories, but which could also overshadow both of them with the possibility that the teenage Thomasina was a forgotten maths genius, making calculations and connections a century ahead of her time.

Although Carrie Cracknell's production does start to feel a bit overlong in the second act it's for the most part successful, with a very strong cast providing the kind of emotion and enthusiasm that brings the philosophising to life. I think there's a couple of secrets to why the play manages to make the audience feel so invested in something that muses so much on maths, poetry, life, death, fate, chaos and the universe among other things, one of which is the sometimes earthy sense of humour that makes the characters human. Another, though, and the pleasure that's quite particular to this play, is the puzzle that he allows us to piece together, while watching the characters, Bernard in particular, build an entirely wrong picture from the same pieces.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard is booking until the 21st of March at the Old Vic.

Running time: 3 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Theatre review: Beautiful Little Fool

2026-02-05T21:39:00.088+00:00

I'm pretty convinced we're only a few years away from the point where all the new work ever produced will be some kind of adaptation of The Great Gatsby, but until then Hannah Corneau (music and lyrics) and Mona Mansour (book) give us its writer, and the woman whose contribution to it we're led to consider might be larger than we thought. F. Scott (David Hunter) and Zelda Fitzgerald (Amy Parker) were known for their hard-drinking party lifestyle and both died young - the story is narrated by their daughter Scottie (Lauren Ward,) who's just turned 48 and thereby outlived both her parents. At an archive dedicated to their work Scottie goes through records, diary entries and letters that bring her parents back to life and reveal the side of them she had never quite realised was there under the self-obsessed façades and histrionics.

Meeting more or less by chance when they were both very young, they reunited after the First World War and moved to New York where they enjoyed some success as writers, but never anything like the popularity Fscott's most famous novel would achieve after his death.

Michael Greif's production has a great two-level set design from Shankho Chaudhuri, but Ben Stanton's lighting shines directly into the audience's eyes during an early number about the couple's famous parties, meaning I had to look away from the entirety of the show's engagement with this vibrant if destructive element of their lives. Which leaves us with my disliked trope of a show that asks us to follow a relationship falling apart, without first giving us a reason to invest in it: Zelda soon tires of Fscott hogging the limelight while he tires of her extravagant spending of money they don't have.

It constantly feels like Corneau and Mansour are trying to make this a show about rehabilitating Zelda's reputation as a talent in her own right: There's an early thread about how the pair co-wrote a lot of early work but only Fscott was credited, but this fizzles out just when we think it might raise questions about Zelda's contributions to his more famous works. We also don't get a lot of insight into her famous mental health issues, and I was left wanting some digging into whether it was in fact a case of a woman being medically pacified for behaving in a more spirited way than the men would like. Right at the end Scottie asks us to consider it the latter, but at this point it's telling when it should have been showing all along.

Similarly she ends by realising her parents genuinely loved both each other and her, something you'd think the scenes we've just watched might have got around to showing us: Ward is generally very good but it's a bit of a thankless task to have to keep telling us the conclusions the story itself never really reached. The songs to me were an indistinguishable collection of rock ballads that felt like spending 100 minutes in the closing moments of Rent, so all in all Beautiful Little Fool never came close to sparking to life.

Beautiful Little Fool by Hannah Corneau and Mona Mansour is booking until the 28th of February at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith.

Theatre review: Maggots

2026-02-03T22:25:00.041+00:00

Maggots tells an inherently downbeat, pessimistic story but Farah Najib's writing constantly upends this, leaving you feeling like you've watched a story of hope, however many times its narrators assure you of the contrary. Sam Baker Jones, Safiyya Ingar and Marcia Lecky are those narrators, reminding you at the outset that they're actors and the story isn't true ("but it could be") in an unfussy style that's typical of Najib's story and Jess Barton's production: They tell the story of Linda, who one day during a heatwave googles "what does death smell like?" She's got a nasty suspicion about the sickly-sweet smell that's coming from somewhere in her block of flats, and asks the building's WhatsApp group if they've seen the woman in number 61 recently, but gets no response. The story gently adds more characters as other neighbours start to notice something wrong, beginning with the young mother on the other side of the flat.

As post starts to pile up at number 61 and the signs that someone has died and been forgotten become more obvious - including the titular maggots that spread out to the flats to the side and below - the housing authority manages to ignore them altogether, refusing to pay any attention to the tenants' concerns and meeting them with responses ranging from boredom to laughing in their faces.

The trio telling the story complement each other - Lecky has a kind of exhausted warmth, Ingar is the one who comes closest to energy and optimism, while Baker Jones' flat Midlands pragmatism rounds out characters whose day jobs as cleaners and carers leave them really needing their homes to be havens of rest at the end of the day, but also too tired to kick up quite as much fuss as is needed to get anyone to pay attention. They're engaging enough storytellers to almost let you overlook the more implausible elements, like quite how long the tenants take to think of calling the police or the press.

Like a lot of shows at the Bush recently the design seems to be channelling London Road, although this time the flowers aren't a sign of life blooming - the bunches of dried flowers that hang over Caitlin Mawhinney's set could be there to stave off the bad smell hanging over the story, and similarly the community of neighbours that builds is never quite as inspiring as this sort of story traditionally results in.

But for all that these are people who can't quite connect in any significant way, and at the heart of the story is a woman who was all too obviously forgotten and literally left to rot, there's something quietly beautiful to what we get here: Najib is insistent that there's no triumphant silver lining to what ends up being a year of discomfort and neglect, but just as insistent that there are tiny victories being made as well, and maybe that's more than enough.

Maggots by Farah Najib is booking until the 28th of February at the Bush Theatre's Studio.

Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Ross Kernahan.

Theatre review: "Oh, Mary!"

2026-01-28T21:58:00.044+00:00

Americans have a tendency to overestimate how much other countries share their national preoccupations, and you can't say that's not the case in whoever decided that London probably cares enough about Mary Todd Lincoln to sustain two different shows about her, a couple of streets apart. For me personally this seemed a bit too much of Abraham Lincoln's first lady to invest in both, so despite Keala Settle playing her in a dramatic version down the road, I went instead for the much more deranged show that's been an award-winning cult hit in New York, Cole Escola's Quote Oh Comma Mary Exclamation Mark End Quote. Mason Alexander Park plays Mary, the drunken First Lady who took to whiskey once she realised being married to the President during a Civil War meant she probably wouldn't be able to realise her dreams of cabaret stardom.

To try and pacify her, Mary's Husband (Giles Terera, getting upgraded from playing a Vice-President to a President) arranges for her to have acting lessons, never intending for the outcome to be seen in public. But Mary's Teacher (Dino Fetscher) is a failed actor with an all-too-familiar name, so this is clearly not going to end well.

Escola's show has marketed itself largely with the word "stupid," and "Oh, Mary!" definitely delivers, revelling in its own stupidity. Park shows why the title role has attracted a rotating cast of stars of all genders across the Pond, with a frantic, very funny performance that jumps wildly from confused desperation to a kind of Miss Piggy growl at any suggestion that people don't take her entirely seriously. Her favourite target is her Chaperone (Kate O'Donnell,) who early on makes the mistake of admitting to enjoying an unusual use for ice cream, and is never allowed to live it down.

The play also takes the speculation around Abraham Lincoln's sexuality and runs with it - Terera's Lincoln is as easily distracted by his Assistant (Oliver Stockley) bending over as he is by trying to win a war. This is a comedy that misses no opportunity for a gag - Ben thought it had the best hit rate since Police Cops - and Sam Pinkleton's production complements this with a frantic physicality that includes Mary getting stuck on top of her husband's desk and completely forgetting how a human being might move to get down.

Mary's love of cabaret means we know the show is going to climax in one of her trademark, deranged medleys, and when it does come it's a suitably random collection of songs that allows Park to showcase their pipes alongside their comic skills. Other than that it's once again a case of being able to say little more than listing jokes, so I'll just say that if you're someone who usually enjoys the sort of incredibly silly comedies that I tend to recommend, this one is probably right up your street as well.

"Oh, Mary!" by Cole Escola is booking until the 25th of April at the Trafalgar Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.