Partially Obstructed View

Theatre review: Heated Rivalry:The Unauthorized Musical Parody

2026-10-15T21:45:00.000+01:00

In recent years quickly churned-out parody musicals based on the latest pop culture hit have become increasingly common and I've largely avoided them as likely to be cheap and easy cash-ins. In the case of Horny Hockey Show there's been multiple competing parodies at the same time, but with actual established musical theatre actor Zheng Xi Yong playing Shane Hollander I figured Dylan MarcAurele's (book, music and lyrics) Heated Rivalry Colon The Unauthorized Musical Parody seemed the most promising. And while I can't comment on the quality of any of its, well, rivals, I can say that Alan Kliffer's production is slick fun. Lots of studios have recently announced knock-off sports romances, invariably with straight couples in the lead, having presumably missed the point entirely and thought the big attraction was the hockey.

From the off this show knows exactly what the point was, namely that a lot of straight women, possibly all named Susan, like watching young men with big asses getting naked together.

So May Tether as the Main Susan is our narrator, telling us of rising Canadian ice hockey star Shane, his incredibly supportive (as long as he never fails at anything ever) Mom (Sylvie Stenson,) and his Dad, who doesn't have enough of a defined personality to appear in this musical. Shane's career is on the rise until Russian player Ilya Rozanov (Joseph Dann) scores a point off him, which for some reason means they're now famous rivals.

But behind the scenes they're eye-fucking at the gym, sneaking off to hotel rooms together and exchanging highly cryptic messages that nobody around them can make head nor tail of, like "tonight, we do anal." The story keeps jumping forwards in time several months to whenever the two have their next match against each other, and at one point leaves them completely to tell the story of smoothie bar employee Kip (understudy Kush Hitesh Pattni,) just your average nerd with an eight-pack, his relationship with another professional hockey player, and his best friend whose dialogue consists entirely of the word "girl" in different cadences.

So Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody hits all the right notes of affectionate parody - making fun of the jarring jumps around the story, the lead characters' abrasive parents, Ilya learning the valuable lesson that you should probably read the whole of your dead mother's last letter to you before building your whole personality around it, Shane attempting a fake relationship with the female star of Kidnapped and Kidnapped: For Good, and a whole song about Ilya's ass. It also skewers the rabid fandom around the show and the obsession with every aspect of the characters' and actors' lives: Ilya's great shame is his parents finding the YouTube videos of a camp young Connor Storrie bitching about Katy Perry lyrics.

At the same time Yong and Dann recreate some of the genuine sweetness and sexiness of the central relationship, meaning that for all that it's a piss-take it's not a cheap and cheerful one. MarcAurele has delivered a lot of laughs, some very silly songs and something impressively slick considering the show only blew up a year ago, and the vocal powerhouses of the cast also make this worth the visit.

Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody by Dylan MarcAurele is booking until the 1st of November at Underbelly Boulevard (previously the Boulevard Theatre.)

Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Matt Crockett.

Theatre review: The Hungry Ghost

2026-10-13T23:07:00.000+01:00

What does a monologue for two people look like? In Mei Leng Yew's debut play The Hungry Ghost Mei Mac plays the Girl, a character in her twenties trying to figure out how to balance her need for independence with the demands of her family and her Chinese heritage. She's recently moved out of her parents' home to move in with her girlfriend of three months, Naomi, except she's not told her parents that: Every morning she tells Naomi she's going to pick up more of her stuff, before creeping into the house to pretend she's been sleeping there all night. In the middle of all this upheaval she forgets her mother's warning that it's the Chinese month when ghosts roam the earth, and picks up a coin from the street - a trap laid by a ghost (Isabella Wei) who latches onto her, hanging around in the background at first but increasingly possessing and controlling her body.

The titular Hungry Ghost is indeed hungry for food, making her host binge-eat but never finding satisfaction, but as she starts to take over the girl's life she becomes hungry for experiences and human interaction as well, to the point that she and Naomi might be in danger from her constant demand for attention.

The play feels like a monologue because that's how Mac plays the narrator, frantically taking on all the characters from the girl herself, to her domineering mother (her son has full freedom to choose his own career; any kind of engineer is fine) and the boss' detached assistant in a memorable cameo. But just like the ghost invades the character's life Wei begins to haunt the narrative as well, and even as Mac gives us a lovely collection of characterisations for the supporting characters, she starts to lose control of her own.

In Ailin Conant's production this is a funny, frantic and sometimes moving show - it doesn't really lean into the horror aspect much but it does flash a couple of creepy images along the way. And while Mac has the showy role Wei gradually makes as much of an impact in the more still but intense role of the ghost, whose reasons for latching onto the girl and her relationship slowly become apparent. And while the show's steeped in specifically Chinese culture, there's something universal about the mum who insists her daughter take her superstitions seriously, then dismisses it when she actually does.

The Hungry Ghost by Mei Leng Yew is booking until the 31st of October at the Bush Theatre's Studio.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Corinne Cumming.

Theatre review: Affluenza

2026-10-12T22:51:00.000+01:00

Riverside Studios have taken the unusual step of launching a major season of five plays, importing off-Broadway director Andy Sandberg to curate the season and direct all the shows, as well as writing the opener. As far as I can tell Sandberg doesn't even seem to be a particularly big name in New York so I'm not sure what led to the red carpet being laid out for him to this extent - maybe the venue was hoping people would misread his name as Andy Samberg and get some ticket sales in? In any case I'm sure their confidence in him is justified, and he wouldn't open the season with a show whose title has already become a byword for disaster within days of its opening, would he? Affluenza opens in the aftermath of a car crash, in which 16-year-old drunk driver Dylan (Noah Schnapp) has caused a three-car collision, killing at least two people.

His lawyer Bradley (Rupert Young) finds him alarmingly unable to take any responsibility for his actions, an attitude that's matched by his wealthy parents (Juliet Cowan and Donald Sage Mackay.) Bradley decides that this incredibly unlikeable defendant might actually win with what he calls the Affluenza Defence - putting the blame on his parents for using their extreme wealth and privilege to raise him unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. It sets the scene for a potentially exciting courtroom drama, so the play naturally chooses to... skip that part entirely.

Instead the rest of the first act deals with the wider fallout from the case, in what is probably meant to be a sweeping overview but actually ends up feeling like Sandberg pulled the topic for each scene out of a hat at random. At best it's almost gloriously incoherent, but even this is gone by the second act, a single long scene in which, 20-odd years later, an adult Dylan now played by Young is living off his earlier notoriety by starring in a reality show with his girlfriend (Wallis Currie-Wood - an American woman called Wallis moving to the UK, and it turning about as well as the last time that happened.) Schnapp now plays his own character's son Todd, essentially getting two cameo roles in a show sold entirely on his name.

The play's climax, a term I am here using inaccurately, is a bizarre case of the point it's trying to make being painfully obvious, while simultaneously failing entirely to convince that point - the parallels with the first act - makes any sense.

Affluenza feels like an experiment in how many different ways you can sabotage a single script: What is probably aiming for realism in the dialogue invariably lands on the banal, the clumsy humour gets stony silence, except for one attempt at black comedy that completely misses the point that you're supposed to put some wit in there somewhere, so it just ends up as a deeply unpleasant non-sequitur*.

At times the straw man arguments Sandberg makes also wind up feeling offensive, like a lawyer (Janette Manrara) earnestly informing us that the US media will only care about a black or Hispanic victim, not a young white girl. As director Sandberg can't or won't do anything to salvage his own script, delivering a series of flat, lifeless scenes for all the human drama that's supposedly going on in them. The play starts and ends with a car crash, which is at least honest commentary on what happens in between.

Affluenza by Andy Sandberg is booking until the 28th of November at Riverside Studio 2.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Danny Kaan.

*"It's my sister, she's got cancer. It's OK, I don't like her."

Theatre review: What The Animals Say

2026-10-09T21:49:00.000+01:00

Playwright David Ireland has fans among Hollywood stars but the 50-seat Finborough Theatre remains a regular venue for some of his older work, and now that includes his debut play, which features a couple of men trying to impress one such star. But being a work by a writer who's inspired by the scars left by decades of sectarianism, the star in question is one who's not exactly known for embracing all peoples and beliefs. What The Animals Say features two characters who grew up in Northern Ireland but, having premiered at Òran Mór in Glasgow, its starting point is the Scottish city's own history of Catholic vs Protestant rivalry, most famously expressed through the two local football clubs. Eddie (Robbie Martin) is a professional footballer from Belfast, who after a fight with Alex Ferguson ended up transferred to Celtic - despite being a Protestant.

He's also on the Northern Ireland squad, and on his way back to Belfast to train for an international match he meets Jimmy (Matthew Blaney) in the waiting room for the Stranraer ferry, and they realise they went to school together.

Jimmy is an aspiring actor who's not had much luck getting parts so far, but has managed to get an audition for a new film Mel Gibson's making about The Troubles. The two chat and awkwardly catch up, never having had a lot in common before and even less now, but they part on friendly enough terms. In the second scene they reunite some months later on the movie set - but it's Eddie who's got the trailer, and the role.

Having been written for a lunchtime theatre slot the play is inevitably short but while it doesn't have a lot of plot it throws in a lot of things that would become Ireland's trademarks - a very dark sense of humour that includes a lot of casually racist and homophobic language from the start, a sense that these men being brought up in a world built on division has traumatised them in different, perverse ways, and a blokey masculinity always teetering on violence.

The chemistry between Blaney and Martin is the kind that really plays on this tension, and gives Harry Burton's production a restless comic energy - the show also gives designer Alex Marker another opportunity to show how he can fit a big set change into this tiny theatre. Short, definitely not sweet, but with early signs of the mix of comedy and cruelty that have served the playwright so well since.

What The Animals Say by David Ireland is booking until the 24th of October at the Finborough Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour straight through.

Photo credit: Gavin Watson.

Theatre review: Hay Fever

2026-10-08T22:39:00.000+01:00

Noël Coward's Hay Fever returns to the West End, this time in a production by Emily Burns whose star turn of Christine Baranski convinced me to book; but while I can't accuse it of not being an entertaining evening, I think this should probably be the last time I give this particular play a go. Baranski plays Judith Bliss, a recently-retired stage actress who made her name in torrid melodramas, and keeps threatening to return to them as her new life in the country has been boring her lately. So much so that she's invited a devoted young fan of hers, Sandy Tyrrell (Ash Hunter) to stay with her for the weekend. She hasn't forewarned her family though, and as it turns out all four of them have got surprise guests on the way - and all four of them have gone for a vague acquaintance some decades older or younger than them whom they plan on flirting with.

So her daughter Sorel (Ophelia Lovibond) has invited the socially awkward diplomat Richard Greatham (Charles Edwards) and her son Simon (Will Close) has set his sights on Judith's frenemy Myra Arundel (Nancy Carroll.)

Meanwhile her novelist husband David (Richard E. Grant) is expecting mousy flapper girl Jackie Coryton (Lucy Karczewski,) although in his case the official line is that she's there to provide inspiration for one of his characters. Once the quartet of guests have arrived, they soon find themselves trapped by a storm in a house with a family of narcissistic eccentrics whose games aren't restricted to their unnecessarily complicated variations on charades.

The first act introduces the characters, the second sees everyone swap around their various guests until they find someone more age-appropriate to declare themselves in love with, and the third sees the fallout the next morning. And when Coward's famously bitchy lines are in full flow they're very funny, and the cast deliver them well (although there's no reason Baranski couldn't have stuck to her own accent. At least her character means I could make it my headcanon that she was Moira Roseing it.)

But if individual parts are great, the whole really doesn't have any greater depth than just "privileged people can be really weird," and when something's got so little to say the jokes really have to come a lot thicker and faster than they do here. Although I've always been a bit dubious about Coward I don't know that I would add him to the list of playwrights I completely avoid; but maybe this particular play of his has said all it can to me.

Hay Fever by Noël Coward is booking until the 12th of December at Wyndham's Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review: The Standard of Living

2026-10-06T22:44:00.000+01:00

Combining arts, politics, economics and bisexuality, James Graham has already chosen John Maynard Keynes for Radio 4's Great Lives, it was only a matter of time before he wrote a play about him. The Standard of Living takes us from the start of the First World War to the fallout from the Second as the economist Keynes* (Rory Kinnear) starts to get the ear of the government despite being a conscientious objector. He spends his days with the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf (Naomi Frederick,) Vanessa Bell (Claire Price) and his ex, Lytton Strachey (Pip Carter,) and this immersion in the world of the arts combines with his economic theories when he manages to convince an already debt-ridden government to invest in the art collection of the recently-deceased French painter Edgar Degas.

He argues that because the auction taking place in the middle of a war will mean bargain prices, the paintings will eventually become a reserve for the UK as their value rises; but he's equally forceful about the fact that having them on display in the National Gallery will enrich the lives of the people.

This holistic approach that sees financial investment and growth as inextricably linked with the quality of day-to-day life becomes the heart of Keynesian economics, but politicians become harder to convince as time goes on. His arguments against the disastrous Treaty of Versailles fall on deaf ears, and for decades the prevailing theory of Laissez Faire defeats his pleas for investment to actually stimulate the economy.

His private life is equally messy but much more successful: After a lifetime of only sleeping with men, falling hard for painter Duncan Grant (Thomas Flynn) while filling a whole notebook with other conquests (including Luke Cinque-White as a German civil servant he's meant to be negotiating with, and possibly trying to pull Einstein,) the surprising love of his life turns out to be Russian ballet star Lydia Lopokova (Natalia Osipova,) whom he marries and builds the Cambridge Arts Theatre for - the first of his major contributions to public arts that culminate in the creation of The Arts Council.

The lead might be bi but Graham's play is a surprisingly straight biography, and Nicholas Hytner's production doesn't do much to distract from that despite little ballet breaks, and Luke Halls' videos bringing to life both the changing times and their art. The old-fashioned structure is a reflection of Keynes' no-nonsense delivery of his theories but not so much of their spirit, but it's the only thing about the play I didn't find particularly interesting.

Graham relying on Keynes' life to be interesting enough still gives us plenty of drama, including a disciple turned nemesis in the young Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston,) who goes from admirer of Keynes' arguments against the Treaty of Versailles to the most vocal proponent of Laissez Faire. On the flipside his political antagonist William Beveridge (George Taylor) ends up giving his name to the famous report that created the welfare state and most drastically made use of Keynesian economics.

Kinnear is very much in everyman mode as he delivers clear arguments in favour of making capital work rather than hoarding it, including a metaphor about a pound making its way around a village that got a spontaneous round of applause. This play has probably been brewing for a while as it would have felt very topical in the middle of Austerity politics but unfortunately the theme of failing to convince those in power to let go of even a little of their wealth never feels dated. But The Standard of Living makes as good an argument as anyone can for the theories of a man whose economics were driven by the first question he asked anyone new he met: "What is a good life?"

The Standard of Living by James Graham is booking until the 12th of December at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

*to rhyme with "pains," not "beans"

Theatre review: Table 17

2026-10-05T22:34:00.000+01:00

Douglas Lyons' Table 17 opens with something of a personal theatrical nightmare for me: An announcement informing the audience that any time a character in the play asks a question, we are very much expected to answer it. The effect this has probably varies from performance to performance but, combined with the glitterball and pre-show soundtrack of hen night favourites, tonight it resulted in an evening of whooping, heckling, gasping, shrieking and yaaaas queening to make a 1980s American sitcom audience sound demure. And that was just the teenage boys. The question is, under the noise, did the show itself have much to say? A couple of years after their breakup, Dallas (Jamael Westman) has invited his ex-fiancée Jada (Marisha Wallace) out for a drink. We open with Jada fretting over what to wear for an evening that may or may not be a date.

Jumping between scenes together and asides to the audience about how they really feel under the awkwardness and bluster, the play also flashes back from this night out to the one where the pair first met, and various other ones over the course of their relationship.

Westman and Wallace are big names and in the leads they don't disappoint, bringing as much charm as they do insecurity to characters neither of whom is sure where they stand, or even where they actually want this evening to lead. But the star of the show turns out to be Michael Rishawn - he plays all the other roles but predominantly two very contrasting ones: River, the bitchy waiter and occasional narrator, and in flashback Eric, an aggressively heterosexual trolley dolly with a part to play in their breakup.

Add in a douchebag barman and Rishawn is really showing some serious range, both in characters and in providing both the comedy and the sexy, the latter leaving me conflicted because yes, it's lovely that despite the mainstream constantly trying to drag the country to the far right we still live in a world where a row of boys on what looked like a school trip unashamedly shriek with excitement when Rishawn gets his tits out; but it is quite annoying in practice. Also, I hope the Kiln gave those seats a good clean after the show.

In any case, the way Zhailon Levingston's production seems to be trying to outright distract from Lyons' play itself only made me want to scrutinise it more: My feeling is that the comic lines are pretty good, and really don't need the audience to be hyped up to the point of "Oprah's just given everyone free bees."The attempts at something more serious feel a lot flimsier though, and where I would normally enjoy an ambiguous ending, after an evening that's skirted around saying much of substance it feels like a cop-out.

Table 17 by Douglas Lyons is booking until the 24th of October at the Kiln Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Steve Gregson.

Theatre review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

2026-10-02T23:28:00.000+01:00

Back to @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's learnt almost half the moves to the "Tragedy" dance, and a new revival of one of the definitive 20th century American classics. In Edward Albee's pitch-black 1962 tragicomedy Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Question Mark Gillian Anderson plays Martha, the daughter of the elderly president of a university. Her husband George (Billy Crudup) is a lecturer in the History department, briefly its head but only when all his other colleagues went off to World War II. Other than that it's been a pretty mediocre career, despite his marriage which was, at least partly, originally a strategic one to help him advance. The fact that it hasn't is just one of the disappointments that has made the relationship a sharp, bitter one, but strangely resilient.

It's 2am when the couple return from a work party to introduce the new faculty members; but Martha's father has high hopes for the new Biology tutor, and has asked her to make sure he and his wife feel welcome.

So Nick (Josh Dylan) and Honey (Phoebe Horn) have been invited to join them for a nightcap that will last until dawn, and as all four get increasingly drunk they start revealing information about their lives and relationships. But while the seemingly Alpha Nick does end up being manipulated into showing some vulnerability, whether there's any truth to anything his hosts have to say is a different story entirely.

Miriam Buether has previously designed sets for some of Mike Bartlett's fight-themed plays and there's a similar feel of this being a combat arena here: A couple of extra rows have been added to the Stalls to make the in-the-round stage actually round, a smaller circular pit surrounded by a sort of short curtain on which are projected the titles of the three acts, beginning with "Fun and Games." Even though George and Martha do talk about games a lot, this opening caption alerts us even more to the way they're toying with the couple they're supposed to be impressing.

Marianne Elliott's production really makes use of the venue's much-publicised ability to create intimacy even from the back row, drawing us into the games the characters play with each other, while the very slowly-moving revolve adds a sense of disorientation to match how very drunk the characters are. What Anderson and Crudup do particularly well in their take on Martha and George is ambiguity: Although they're constantly scoring points off each other and using the younger couple as ammunition, you can never shake the possibility that destroying Nick and Honey was always the real point.

And in Elliott's production it's hard to argue that the blandly attractive younger couple don't deserve it: Horn's Honey is frail both physically and emotionally but with a manipulative streak that's landed her in a marriage to Dylan's superficially intelligent dullard with a superiority complex. Casting such a perfectly Aryan-looking pair sheds a light on how George jumps to the pretty extreme conclusion that Nick's branch of Biology must be Eugenics; the fact that the young professor doesn't take offence at the suggestion speaks volumes in itself. This marriage isn't even one of convenience, it's one of absolute indifference, the childhood sweethearts getting married just because everyone around them assumed they would.

If George and Martha's marriage is built on lies at least they're lies the share, putting an extra layer on the twisted story that plays out. Although I liked the 2017 production I liked this one even more, Elliott once again finding that little extra spark of life in a show that's already acclaimed. I did wonder if knowing the final twist from the start actually increased my enjoyment, watching exactly how the big game of deception plays out to rules only half the players know. It certainly lends an edge to the very funny lines that keep landing throughout, to know the darkness that's underneath them all along.

This is a long evening - and kudos to the venue for not only correctly advertising the time, but also warning in the pre-show email that the interval comes early on, with the second part (consisting of the second and third acts, "Walpurgisnacht" and "The Exorcism") coming in at nearly two hours with only a short pause and no time to leave the auditorium. But I've always said that while I prefer short shows, they can be as long as they like if they justify the running time, and Elliott and her cast more than justify it - and make the evening fly by faster than many shorter shows I've seen.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? by Edward Albee is booking until the 19th of December at @sohoplace Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval and a pause.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

Theatre review:My Son's a Queer, (But what can you do?)

2026-09-30T21:54:00.000+01:00

After a popular short run a few years ago which I wasn't able to make, writer/performer Rob Madge's My Son's a Queer Comma Open Brackets But what can you do Question Mark Close Brackets gets a second West End run for someone who, it's probably fair to say, felt like they belonged there from a very early age. Madge performs a tribute to their own childhood, particularly the parts of it spent at home, putting on Disney^TM parades in their parents' living room, in an increasingly large collection of outfits and ever more elaborate sets, some bought, most made by the grandparents. Despite John and Jan Madge realising early on that it would be best to sign their child up to Stagecoach as soon as possible, the young Rob struggled to make friends at school, becoming bullied and alienated.

So the enthusiastic support for a very camp pastime made home a much-needed sanctuary, and the mostly unspoken subtext of My Son's a Queer is that it's a tribute to all the girls, gays and theys who grew up without that sort of safety net.

Not that Madge's parents always got it right - their father at one point admits he deliberately bought the wrong costume because letting Rob play the Beast might make them get over the fact that they actually wanted to be Belle. Although the young performer did quickly find a way around their disappointment once they realised being the Beast meant carte blanche to boss everyone around and direct the show.

We know all this because, being born in 1996 as the only child of older parents who'd spent years trying IVF, it was possible to film and preserve every moment, which the indulgent parents duly did. In fact for all that Madge performs songs (composed by Pippa Cleary) and narrates the story, it does often feel like the entire show is a framing device to play back the very funny videos of a telegenic young Rob performing not only their homemade shows, but essentially demanding the limelight every time they suspected the camera might be on.

In fact young Rob is such a star that their adult self has a job to do keeping up, but Luke Sheppard's production does a good job of making what essentially still feels like a fringe show fit on a huge stage. It's a good show although I was never quite sure why this over other queer memoirs has captured people's imaginations so much. But then you won't find any videos like these of me as a child performing. I was, obviously, directing them.

My Son's a Queer, (But what can you do?) by Rob Madge and Pippa Cleary is booking until the 3rd of October at the Apollo Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.

Theatre review: Tartuffe (Remixed)

2026-09-28T23:14:00.000+01:00

Mark Rylance helps promote Intermission Youth, a community theatre project he's long been a fan of, by starring alongside a cast including alumni of Darren Raymond's company in a new version of Molière's Tartuffe. The 17th century satire of hypocrisy and the ease with which the unscrupulous can use religion to con the unwary always feels ripe for reinvention and Tartuffe Open Brackets Remixed Close Brackets relocates the story to a modern-day blended British-Nigerian-Jamaican family, as Rylance's Pastor Blake takes advantage of toxic patriarchy to wrap them all round his finger. Adanna (Sara Mokonen) is due to marry Sinclair (Ivandro Da Cruz Leite,) and everything's going well between the families until her father Oga (Usifu Jalloh) suddenly decides the groom isn't religious enough to marry his daughter.

He does have an alternative husband in mind for her: Pastor Blake, who just so happens to be the one who planted the idea that piety should be the only value worth looking for in a potential son-in-law - well above actually loving the bride.

His new guru is also getting Oga to sign quite a lot of legal documents without looking at them too carefully, and eyeing up Grandma's (Suzette Llewellyn) savings, but trying to seduce Oga's second wife Elmire (Nakeba Buchanan) might be taking on the one person who can beat him at his own game.

This is a much more rough-and-ready approach to Molière than the National's most recent attempt, but a hell of a lot more entertaining. Given it's more often than not the thing I complain about the most, perhaps the most impressive thing about Raymond's script is that he's kept the whole thing in rhyming couplets and made it work for the entire length of the play. So instead of smug, convoluted plays on words there's just the right level of tongue-in-cheek silliness and laboured rhymes - Nike/Crikey - to make the lines actually funny.

Never one to go for a character interpretation that makes sense, Rylance's Tartuffe figure becomes a 1970s sitcom vicar, complete with buck teeth and sandals with socks. It's an odd fit to have seduced an ageing Nigerian man you'd expect to have come from a more charismatic church background, but after a while you just accept it as a kind of surreal element of the story.

The character is sparingly used in the first act but gets a lot more, and sillier things to do after the interval as he pushes his luck with Elmire. This is where Raymond's production embraces the sex farce elements, and in a cast with a very diverse range of experience it's Buchanan who most confidently holds her own against the Oscar-winning ham hock, although Morenike Onajobi as Adanna's no-nonsense friend Kemi also has some scene-stealing comic moments.

The show loses some of the necessary pace due to the seemingly non-stop movement of furniture on and off ULTZ' set, and Raymond flubs the ending somewhat with a drawn-out sequence that seems designed to reassure the audience he means no religious offense - ironic in a play that nearly got its original author excommunicated. But if the details are sometimes clumsy at least the show has funny bones.

Tartuffe (Remixed) by Darren Raymond after Molière is booking until the 24th of October at Marylebone Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.

Theatre review: As You Like It (Shakespeare's Globe)

2026-09-27T16:57:00.000+01:00

After a very dodgy start this summer's season at Shakespeare's Globe has significantly improved, and it ends with one of my favourite Shakespearean comedies - one of the least coherent plots, but a jumble of confusions and setpieces that can respond well to just embracing the chaos. So where I was a bit disappointed that last year's Western Romeo and Juliet didn't do anything with the high concept beyond the visuals, Sean Holmes, who this time co-directs with Charlie Josephine, gets better results with a loosely-applied setting for As You Like It. That setting is Regency, and Paul Wills' costumes provide some stunning visuals, some... interesting character choices as well as a few good gags of their own. Also coming over from last year's season is Lola Shalam, and Holmes' confidence in her to step up from Juliet to Shakespeare's biggest female lead is well-placed.

Shalam is Rosalind, awkwardly placed at a court that used to be ruled by her father but has now been usurped by her uncle (both played by Colm Gormley,) until the latter runs out of patience and has her banished to the nearby forest, where Rosalind takes on a male identity for her own safety.

This backfires when she bumps into Orlando (Josephine,) another banished noble she'd recently fallen in love with at first sight. In order to try and keep up the flirtation with him while maintaining her disguise, she comes up with a plan that, as her cousin Celia's (Gracie Oddie-James) reactions really should make her realise, is really, really terrible, and ends up in a quadruple wedding involving her and Celia marrying Orlando and his brother Oliver (Thomas Josling,) plus two more broadly comic couples.

Lumbered with a verbose Robert Armin fool, Jonnie Broadbent gets away with Touchstone basically by acknowledging the fact that 400-year-old topical puns are a hard sell and thanking the audience for just going along with it; why he's dressed as a big baby is probably best not looked into too hard. My favourite visual gag was Celia going full Little Bo Peep for her attempt to fit in as a shepherdess.

If the costumes deliver comedy the other big visual conceit offers huge amounts of charm: The dry, soulless court of Duke Frederick is full of pomp and circumstance in the outfits but their colours are up against a literal blank canvas. As the scenes move into the forest the cast and crew start to paint trees onto them, gradually adding leaves and eventually flowers. If Twelfth Night is autumnal and The Winter's Tale and A Midsummer Night's Dream are fairly self-explanatory, As You Like It is spring, and the blossoming from dead branches into colour is really effectively done. If there's a third big theme it's in Katie Richardson's music, with even more of the lines than usual being turned into songs, building on the idea of this as a proto-musical.

The production does a good job of integrating the secondary couples of Silvius (Busa Wickramasuriya) and Phoebe (Molly Madigan) along with Touchstone and Audrey (Phoebe Naughton) considering how late in the day Shakespeare remembers to introduce them, and even the very brief appearance by Audrey's other suitor William (Jurell Carter) becomes memorable when a combative Touchstone gets more than he bargained for. Meanwhile there's a nice twist in making Jaques (Katherine Pearce) another woman in male disguise, giving a fresh explanation for her outsider status and making her a kindred spirit to Rosalind.

There's a lot going right here but at the centre of it all is Shalam stepping up to the challenge - her bobbed wig as Ganymede even helps her seem like a young Judi Dench in the sense of awkwardness with a steely underside she brings to Rosalind. While I still hope this season's over-reliance on the more obviously crowd-pleasing comedies is a blip and not what we're going to get every summer, Holmes and Josephine's production proves why As You Like It so easily fits into that category.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 25th of October at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review: Golden Boy

2026-09-25T23:32:00.000+01:00

One of the most successful and memorable shows of the Almeida's Gooldilocks era was Rebecca Frecknall's rediscovery of Summer and Smoke, which took an obscure Tennessee Williams play and revealed it as equal to some of the playwright's most famous works. It came to mind with the penultimate show programmed by Goold, as director Sam Yates has spotted the potential for a striking night at the theatre in a 1937 play by the influential but largely forgotten American playwright Clifford Odets. Where the comparison doesn't hold up is in convincing us that Golden Boy itself should be reevaluated as some kind of masterpiece. The production marks a return to the stage for Josh O'Connor - when I first saw him in 2013's Farragut North I called him "one to watch" and he's one of those cases who's proven me right and then some, as people have very much enjoyed watching him in the intervening 13 years.

The fact that as the titular Golden Boy, Joe Bonaparte, he spends a lot of time in just boxing shorts showing off an especially buff new physique explains some of that, but he also leads the show with the kind of quiet charisma that he's shown from the start.

Joe is an aspiring boxer who talks his way into a match and proves to be a natural talent - but one who's holding something back. His new manager Tom (Transphobia Ltd Employee Daniel Mays) discovers that as a boy Joe was an aspiring violin player whose father (Stanley Townsend) still harbours a hope that he might make his living through music rather than violence. The question arises of whether Joe is pulling his punches so as not to damage his hands, but as more people get invested in his success, the pressure increases for him to go all in.

In a less convincing subplot, he's also contending with falling for Tom's girlfriend Lorna (Hayley Squires,) but if the play has something of significance to say it's in its understated reflection of the Depression Era it's set in, and Joe's pragmatic view of what can actually make him enough money to get by even if it's brutal, versus the nobler but less realistic dreams of his father, who immigrated from Italy but whose accent immigrated from Transylvania.

That's the last time the word "understated" applies to Odets' play though, a pretty straightforward melodrama that's not so much heavy-handed as it is perfunctory in the way it ticks through the points it's trying to make, culminating in an ending with all the subtlety of "Note: Poochie died on the way back to his home planet." It does make what Yates, his cast and creatives have turned the play into even more extraordinary though: At its heart Yates' production is one that's haunted, not by ghosts but by other possibilities and missed opportunities.

So the play opens with the child Joe (Oscar Prout or Anton Vehring) playing the violin, and he often remains on stage at the same time as O'Connor, reminding him of who he once wanted to be. The music itself also hants him: Rosanna Vize's set has a balcony on which a string quartet plays, and Joe has to close the shutters on them just to drown the sound out; sometimes Roman Lytwyniw's lead violin still follows him out onto the stage though, impossible to quite get rid of.

The fight scenes are also done in a dreamlike expressionist style: Imogen Knight's movement direction and Kate Waters' fight direction places O'Connor and Patrick Martins either side of a punchbag filled with cameras; in one of the most striking visual motifs Jack Phelan's video design projects the spinning images of Joe's mental and physical anguish onto the walls.

Being able to play some of the melodrama for comedy also helps the evening work - I strongly suspect that Zubin Varla's scene-stealing comedy gangster Eddie Fuseli is written as an entirely serious gangster (I was genuinely surprised that Bonaparte Sr survived after Fuseli heavy-handedly said he'll shoot dead any obstacle to getting what he wants) but his scenes now have a surreal tinge to the menace. Jason Barnett as the salt-of-the-earth trainer and Richard Fleeshman as Joe's brother, who's only really there to deliver the clumsy dénouement, also do a lot with thankless roles.

So Golden Boy, as Yates delivers it at least, is a pretty strange experience - a great piece of theatre and an absorbing couple of hours well worth seeing, that still leaves you with no illusion that the raw material was any kind of masterpiece. The Almeida's really made a silk purse out of a sow's ear or, as one of the characters mangles the phrase in a way that probably says a lot about Odets' writing in general: "He's made a purse out of, er, someone's ear."

Golden Boy by Clifford Odets is booking until the 31st of October at the Almeida Theatre (returns only.)

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review:Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

2026-09-24T21:59:00.000+01:00

It's billed as an adaptation of a novel, but Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky actually turns out to be three of them, a trilogy of interconnected stories about working class Londoners in the 1920s. It means Simon Reade's adaptation of them into a single two-hour show can be called brave at the very least, possibly foolhardy - it does explain something about the rather stilted evening we end up with, always hovering on the edge of something charming but never really getting there. At the centre of the story is a pub, The Midnight Bell, and two of the bar staff: Bob (Jordan Scowen) has been carefully building up his savings, but his inability to stand back when someone he cares about is in need means he's lately become prone to sudden acts of generosity, handing out cash to people like his longtime friend and coworker Ella (Rosalind Lailey.)

The trouble starts when he falls in love with prostitute Jenny (Yanexi Enriquez,) who's very convincing at appearing to return his feelings, but is actually using him to fund her own revenge plan.

Meanwhile Ella is dealing with an overly-attached customer of her own - ageing bachelor Ernest (Michael Maloney) has become smitten with her, and she's left with the dilemma of a marriage proposal from someone completely inappropriate that would at least leave her a bit more financially comfortable. This feels like the least strongly defined of the three story strands, and a look at the book's synopsis suggests Ernest is written as significantly more doddery and confused than Maloney makes him, which would explain why Ella has so much trouble working out what he wants from her.

The cast are doing all the heavy lifting in this adaptation though, giving us characters we can at least slightly feel for. But while I haven't read the books - they might in fact be incredibly light on plot for all I know - it's still clear that squeezing all that in has resulted in Reade delivering a fairly plodding adaptation that dutifully delivers each plot point before moving on to the next one.

Matthew Iliffe's production is also pretty businesslike, most notable in the third story strand that follows Jenny's history with George (Alex Bhat,) the man who ruined her life, and what turns out to be her incredibly low-stakes revenge*. It's told in a mix of linear time, flashback and flash-forward, but while it's not hard to work out where we are in the story once a scene's got going, there are no visual or sound cues to help us get there, just the next scene in the script dutifully put on stage.

If this is the sad underside to the party between the wars Reade and Iliffe give us all underside and no party and certainly none of the epic scope the title implies: For all the mentions of flapper haircuts and nightclubs the lack of flourish makes this more the Whispering Twenties than the Roaring ones. But the efforts of the cast, including Lucy Gray in various drily comic supporting roles, make this infinitely more watchable than it has any right to be.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Simon Reade, based on the novels by Patrick Hamilton, is booking until the 17th of October at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mitzi de Margary.

*"I have hunted you down through time and space, and now you're going to pay! ...£1† more than we had previously negotiated, mwahahahaha."

†for context, she's already fleeced the naïve but entirely blameless Bob of somewhere between £50-80 by this point

Theatre review: Thelma & Louise

2026-09-22T23:12:00.000+01:00

35 years on from the 1991 film, original screenwriter Callie Khouri revisits Thelma & Louise as a stage musical, providing the book to Neko Case's new music and lyrics. When she gets the keys to a colleague's holiday cabin for the weekend, Louise (Rachel Tucker) invites her put-upon friend Thelma (Amy Lennox) to join her for a short break, but the road trip turns into a getaway drive when they stop off at a dive bar along the way. After dancing with a stranger in front of witnesses, Thelma is sexually assaulted by him, and her friend comes to the rescue - by shooting him dead. Knowing that having been seen with him, Thelma won't be believed when she says his attentions were unwanted, the two women go on the run to Mexico, but the more they try to stay under the radar the worse their unintended crime spree gets.

Trip Cullman's production looks great, with a wide set from Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis that recreates the many bars and motels they end up visiting, full of framed photos, neon signs and stuffed animal heads that evoke a very particular kind of Americana.

Along with Sonia Friedman's presence on the production team it all suggests there's an eye on a transfer, although quite how well the show would stand up to the scrutiny of a bigger space I'm not sure: Led by the very likeable title pairing the cast are great and there's a lot of fun moments, but there's a couple of major elements that don't quite work, including the comic lines, which in the first half especially got a whole lot of tumbleweed from tonight's audience.

There's also Case's songs, which are a strange mix of more traditional musical theatre and something more discordant, in a way that doesn't feel entirely intentional: They tend to start out tuneful enough, then become a kind of stream of conscience spilling out with no concern for rhyme or scansion, and the cast are left desperately trying to squeeze a lengthy sentence into a bar without enough notes in it.

Maybe this bothered me more than it might because the show's visuals, with Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber's choreography leaning into barn dance, so strongly suggest the musical theme is going to be Country and Western. So to get only little hints of that is disappointing when (a) it's a genre known for its pithy, witty lyrics and (b) as far as I can tell 90% of modern female-led Country is on the theme of "I'm fairly certain my boyfriend cheated on me so I murdered him just in case." The second act picks up both the energy and the humour, helped by an opener in which Thelma robs someone in the front row, and setpieces like the pair holding up and stripping a State Trooper (Jack Butterworth.)

And even if I didn't click with the songs the show is pretty generous with the way it dishes them out not only to the leads and supporting cast but the ensemble as well. The two-woman feminist crusade is occasionally backed up by a female chorus, and we get a varied group of men helping and (mostly) hindering them. Samuel Edwards' possessive husband Darryl contrasts with Alex Gibson-Giorgio's supportive but ineffectual Jimmy, while Jordan Luke Gage charms in his scenes as dodgy drifter JD.

The only man who actually seems to be trying to help Thelma & Louise is the one meant to be hunting them down, Hal (Trevor Dion Nicholas) and there's a nicely sly little dig at issues that remain current when the black detective has to make sure he always wears his badge to stop his own deputy (Alex Given) from shooting him on sight. All things told this is an entertaining evening that sticks pretty closely to the original without entirely justifying its musical expansion; and you've got to admire a certain amount of - admittedly misguided - chutzpah in Cullman staging a road trip without once putting his characters into a car. Especially given the famous ending.

Thelma & Louise by Callie Khouri and Neko Case, based on the screenplay by Callie Khouri, is booking until the 24th of October at the Young Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

Theatre review: Night City

2026-09-18T21:47:00.000+01:00

Max Wilkinson's Night City, which premieres at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Little Theatre, follows three London workers in the gig economy, and opens by warning us that one of them will wind up dead by the end of the story: Jack (Jack Ambrose) works for a fictional rideshare company, and despite finding out he has a congenital heart condition is, at the start of the play at least, the one out of the trio who most embraces the stressful, intense conditions of working on a zero-hours contract. One of his passengers is Tia (Bex Smith,) an aspiring writer who's only recently arrived in the city, and who's making ends meet at a café chain. The two start a casual relationship that grows into something more serious. Less directly connected to them is Tamara (Helena Pipe,) a carer whose employer has recently been bought out by a firm looking to maximise profits.

But the consultant now running the service and demanding nobody spend more than 10 minutes with a patient (or "customer") doesn't want the same treatment for his own family, so Tamara is assigned to spend whole days caring for his elderly mother.

The two strike up an odd-couple friendship, and many of the show's funnier moments come from Smith as the imperious old lady namedropping weird encounters with the various celebrities she claims to have known during her life. Meanwhile for Jack his enthusiasm for the gig economy takes a blow when one of the other drivers is seriously injured, and their employer takes it as an opportunity to crush attempts to improve workers' conditions.

The backdrop to the story is the buildup to the Employment Rights Act 2025, which shadowy corporate forces are trying to defeat or at least severely defang. Ebenezer Bamgboye's production has a set from Olivia Jamieson that uses chains linking the ceiling to the floor to create a claustrophobic environment for the characters to navigate; it keeps up a dynamic pace thanks to the physicality and intensity of the actors, although Rose Ryan's movement work was largely lost on me - it's usually accompanied by very bright, flashing lights from Arnim Friess that mean anyone even the slightest bit photosensitive will have to avert their eyes.

Wilkinson's play is generally strong although it can't quite decide how naturalistic it wants to be - the ending could have edged into something dreamlike, but instead we get a courtroom finale that doesn't ring true, but doesn't quite go into the realms of fantasy either. And with the cast multi-roling, Bamgboye's production could have been clearer in how it handles this - I'm pretty sure that one recurring character was played by more than one actor but that wasn't entirely clear, perhaps in part because it didn't make sense for him to be involved in all the story strands in that way. Still, some interesting ideas flying around even if they don't all land.

Night City by Max Wilkinson is booking until the 3rd of October at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Little Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Lidia Crisafulli.

Theatre review: The Story

2026-09-17T23:13:00.000+01:00

Sometimes when a new Artistic Director takes over a building it can feel like there's been a deliberate effort to get designers to reimagine how the stages can be used, and as we go into Indhu Rubasingham's second year at the National I can't help wondering if that's what we're getting there: After Electra/Persona's staircase going down to meet the front of the Lyttelton Stalls, Anna Fleischle cuts the front apron off the Olivier and adds a back wall to turn the vast stage into something comparatively intimate, a high school basketball court to frame Clint Dyer's production of The Story. This mix of the epic and the intimate is something that's reflected elsewhere in Tracey Scott Wilson's 2003 play, which has a large supporting ensemble building up the background of racial tensions ramping up in Philadelphia, but is ultimately focused on a quartet of journalists and the way they investigate them.

A white teacher has been shot dead in a predominantly black neighbourhood; his widow (Antonia Bernath) stating that the killer was black sees her accused of racism, while giving the police an excuse to double down on profiling young black men.

But the actual identity of the killer is what's missing from the story, and what the reporters at the local newspaper are as keen to pin down as the police are. Yvonne (Letitia Wright) is a promising young journalist who's dating the nepo-baby editor of the news team. To avoid being too obvious about giving his girlfriend a job, Jeff (Wilf Scolding) gets her onto one of the supplements, a predominantly black team investigating social justice issues and led by the formidable Pat (Lorraine Toussaint.)

Yvonne struggles to impress her new boss until she finds a new angle on the big case of the moment: She says the killer is ~~vaccines~~ a gang of teenage girls dressing as boys. But while Pat and Jeff encourage her to chase the lead, fellow reporter Neil (Ashley Thomas) has his doubts both about the informant Yvonne spoke to, and about the new journalist herself, whose qualifications as long as her arm seem too good to be true.

One thing The Story does very well is balance its racial politics - taking in both the wider tensions and violence, and the experience particularly of female black journalists trying to make a career - with the thriller that's built around it, and the growing suspicion that the real sociopath might be right in the middle of the story. Dyer's production makes particularly good use of Lucie Pankhurst's movement direction of the ensemble to build this frantic energy.

Where the thriller element is weaker is in leaving the reveal too late, so it's become pretty clear what the twist is going to be long before the plot gets there. But I did like how even-handed Scott Wilson is with her characters, and even in a play largely about the experience of black women, it's left to the black male to worry about the impact the story they're pushing will have on young black girls, who might have to get used to the sort of casual profiling and violence boys like Neil grew up with.

As Pat, Toussaint's scenery-chewing performance is visible from space but always watchable, so there's even an element of high camp to the evening. Despite the main plot trying to hold on to its reveal longer than really works the play doesn't overstay its welcome, and Scott Wilson is very good at finding the right moment to defuse the tension with humour. Although I do wonder how the first read-through went when this particular cast got to the running joke about Letitia being the most basic name imaginable for a young black woman.

The Story by Tracey Scott Wilson is booking until the 24th of October at the National Theatre's Olivier.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Feruza Afewerki.

Theatre review: Man to Man

2026-09-14T22:01:00.000+01:00

The Royal Court's 70th Anniversary season has included looking back at a few landmark productions, and in Man to Man we get the most direct revival yet, as the original creative team of Manfred Karge's monologue has returned, along with the original star who hasn't appeared on stage since she was last here in the same role: Tilda Swinton plays Max, an elderly man who takes us through the story of his life, revealing that he is, in fact, his own widow: Max died of cancer in a provincial part of Weimar Germany, leaving his young wife Ella without a source of income. So Ella buried Max in a grave with her own name on it, took on his identity and his job as a crane operator and lived through the rest of the 20th century as a man, very occasionally becoming Ella again if it was to her advantage.

And this being Germany in the 20th century there will be many occasions when she has to find her best advantage, whether to get ahead or simply survive.

In fact for all that it features the most famous rice since Anneka in a chest binder and vest, with a lucky rabbit's foot providing a bulge in her red Y-fronts, this feels a lot less like a play about gender and bending it, a lot more like the story of a Mother Courage figure who'll survive at all costs, especially if those costs are to someone else, to get to her comfortable retirement of drinking beer in front of the TV.

There's a remarkable five minutes in Karge's play where Ella reenacts the days of a prisoner kept in a cell by a sadistic SA officer, only to casually reveal at the end that she was the officer not the prisoner. It makes the play's argument about the twisted morality of the survivor beautifully, the trouble is there's another 90 minutes of Stephen Unwin's expressionistic production around it.

This features Swinton roaming around scribbling on Bunny Christie's white box set, putting on various coats as she takes on new personas, and squirting ketchup on the walls. It's German, is what I'm saying. And as so often with European directors' theatre I'm left thinking maybe this is all disguising a script that doesn't really rise up to its premise and that I eventually found very dull. I've seen Man to Man before and wasn't convinced then, but this extended version - it now also takes in fascism rising again in the 21st century - I found a slog. I think I liked Tilda better when she was Tom Lenk dressed in bubblewrap.

Man to Man by Manfred Karge in a version by Anthony Vivis revised by Stephen Unwin is booking until the 24th of October at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs (returns and rush tickets only) then touring to Edinburgh, Berlin and New York.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Ruediger Glatz.

Theatre review: Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy

2026-09-11T22:56:00.000+01:00

It's been a summer of rewriting and reinterpreting the House of Atreus, and after Simon Stone gave us a version so loose it was unrecognisable, and Benedict Andrews a comparatively faithful one that took an abrupt turn into a different story altogether, Ava Pickett decides the only way left to take the story is Essex. Bloodsport Colon After Helen of Troy takes us to the part of the return from the Trojan War that doesn't get looked at much by the original Greek Tragedies: What happened when the woman an army spent a decade trying to bring home actually got there, and what did she think about that homecoming anyway? Helen (Michelle Dockery) was never abducted; she just met a charming and handsome foreign man called Paris in the pub, and realised that the life she'd been living wasn't the only option available to her.

So she left her husband Marcus (Jay Taylor) and ran away, but her old life wasn't ready to let her go. Particularly Marcus' controlling older brother Mario (Gerard Monaco,) who took his dislike for both his sister-in-law and foreigners, and turned them into riots, and eventually a decade of civil war.

A seemingly meek and broken Helen has finally been captured and brought back to Mario's home, but is she really prepared to go along with the men's version of the story that says everything is back to how it should be? Despite the presence of a Chorus-like Messenger (Ethan Moorhouse) it takes a little while for the details of the modern Trojan War Pickett has constructed to properly come together, but eventually the way racism and misogyny have entangled to create viciously opposed armies starts to become uncomfortably familiar.

There's a lot of strands here for Pickett to explore, not least of all the way the narrative can be twisted to make the woman the villain in her own story - Helen is demonised in many versions of the original myth, and the way this modern version of her is blamed for war crimes committed by the men feels straight out of the tabloids. But the evening's main conflict is between Helen and the Clytemnestra expy.

Cee (Laura Aikman) is her oldest friend and now sister-in-law, and unlike her Ancient Greek equivalent has stood by her husband's actions, accepting his version of the story, including the part about how their daughter's death was nothing to do with him. Helen hopes that confronting her with the truth will bring her back to her side, in a plan that also involves Cee's cleaner Dani (Maimuna Memon.)

1536 was good but I didn't see how it garnered quite such a rapturous reception; although uneven, for my money Bloodsport is the more striking play in its ideas and execution: Lisa Spirling's production juggles the horror behind its story with the banality of its suburban setting to both dramatic and comic effect, whether it's a wounded soldier (Joshua-Alexander Williams) staggering around Polly Sullivan's blandly luxurious set, or Helen's pregnant daughter Hermione (Emma Monnickendam) coming round to ask what mum's been up to for the last ten years.

But possibly because of the many years I've spent complaining about Multiple Ending Syndrome, what may stick with me most is the way Pickett goes in a very different direction to deliver a climactic coup de théâtre: Proving once and for all that you don't need to tap into every argument and last word your characters might be thinking of; and that sometimes it's worth leaving things unsaid, messy and with questions hanging in the air as the audience leaves.

Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy by Ava Pickett is booking until the 10th of October at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

Running time: 2 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith.

Theatre review: Kimberly Akimbo

2026-09-10T23:12:00.000+01:00

A multiple Tony-winner gets a comparatively low-key European premiere as David Lindsay-Abaire (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori's (music) Kimberly Akimbo opens at Hampstead Theatre in Michael Longhurst's glossy but intimate production. The title character turns 16 during the course of the story but she's played by 66-year-old Maria Friedman because Kimberly Levaco has a rare, unspecified genetic disorder that makes her age at 4-5 times the normal rate. And 16 is the average life expectancy of someone with her condition, so she has to deal with her own mortality at the same time as social awkwardness and first romances because she doesn't have long left. But rather than rest on what could be a rather maudlin subject, Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori have instead surrounded Kimberly with an anarchic family life that doesn't shy away from some darker moments but is also full of comedy and ridiculous adventures.

So her parents, the alcoholic Buddy (Peter Hannah) and narcissistic Pattie (Niamh Perry) have abruptly moved the family to New Jersey and cut ties with their former life - they're cagey about the details but it seems to involve fleeing Pattie's criminal sister Debra.

But Aunt Debra (Alice Fearn) still manages to track them down, and soon she's got Kimberly and her new school crush Seth (Gilli Jones) caught up in a cheque fraud scheme. Sara Hajizadeh, Ronav Jain, Robin Simões Da Silva and Aviva Tulley complete the cast as the school's showchoir, who provide a chorus, accomplices and a tangle of unrequited teenage longing of their own.

Friedman is an elfin heart to the show, managing to convey the contradiction of someone who's simultaneously grandma and giddy teenager, the underlying sadness of the child who knows her time's nearly up always present but never overwhelming the mischievous enthusiasm. The show also refuses to pick a lane and that's what makes it work - its unapologetic messiness (down to being nominally set in the '90s but not really doing anything with that setting) is its charm.

So we do get those dark moments, particularly when Kimberly's essentially loving but deeply flawed parents make thoughtless comments about their daughter's condition, with Pattie heavily pregnant with a second child that's pretty much openly hoped to be a "better" replacement for the one that's soon to die. For all that their good intentions are doomed though, they are always meant genuinely at the start.

Debra is potentially a harmful influence but she's played much lighter, as a comic Lord of Misrule dragging a bunch of kids into her dodgy schemes so they can fund Dreamgirls outfits for a choir competition (although how exactly the cheque fraud scheme is meant to work when it leaves a paper trail with Seth's name all over it is beyond me.)

The kids themselves are the most unambiguously sweet element of the show - leaving out completely anyone who might make Kimberly's school life miserable we just get the other misfits, including the choir none of whose sexualities align with the person who fancies them, a running gag that gets a great, blunt payoff from Debra. And the show sells its central premise so well there's no sense of ickiness to the casting, making you actively ship Friedman's premature septuagenarian with Jones' geeky heartthrob.

Soutra Gilmour's bulky, three-level design is clearly designed for a hoped-for transfer somewhere bigger and can overwhelm the Hampstead stage at times, but I did like how low- key the rest of Longhurst's production is. Even if it takes a couple of songs for the sound levels to quite let the vocals become clear, I liked the way it avoided the ubiquitous Broadway vocal histrionics. Putting the focus on fun, it doesn't try to hard to be moving, which is ultimately why it is.

Kimberly Akimbo by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori is booking until the 7th of November at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review: Electra/Persona

2026-09-04T22:01:00.000+01:00

The latest production to employ the staging conceit of the lead actors alternating roles is Benedict Andrews' Electra Forward Slash Persona, a show that already has a pretty high concept as its starting point: Andrews' play is a mashup of Sophocles' Electra with Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, about the relationship between an actress who's suddenly turned mute and the nurse assigned to look after her. So the play opens with Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss asking an audience member in the front row to toss a coin (or in tonight's case, fling it to the ground in a wild panic.) Given the winner gets to choose which part she wants to play this would be a very easy way to rig the system and have the actors pre-agree who was going to do what*, but regardless of how much it's actually down to chance, tonight saw Blanchett opt to play Clytemnestra in the Greek Tragedy half of the evening.

Clytemnestra is the queen who murdered her husband as soon as he returned from his ten-year war in Troy, so Hoss plays her daughter Electra, who wants revenge for her father's death. But her mother's act didn't come out of nowhere, and Clytemnestra has her own argument for why Agamemnon deserved to die.

Even as a straightforward adaptation of Sophocles' play I liked what Andrews is doing here, certainly a lot more than the last ham-fisted attempt to do a starry auteur version of the story. There's genuine emotion as well as an unusual amount of humour in the way Blanchett's Clytemnestra gets Hoss' Electra and Ella Lily Hyland's Chrysothemis to act out the original sins that underpin the Tragedy. It's a version that's more sympathetic than most to the queen's fairly understandable motive for wanting to kill her husband, although Blanchett still gets to show some of the negative way Sophocles portrays her, very imperious for someone who can't spell Kate. Or Blanket.

I thought this was going to be dipping in and out of the two source texts but it's pretty much a game of two halves, and after a final interesting spin on the original story that's essentially a mirror image of the central twist in Robert Icke's Oresteia, Electra kills Aegisthus (Patrick Robinson) but freezes when it comes to her mother. Hoss is now Elisabeth, an actress who stopped mid-performance and turns selectively mute.

Her doctor sends her off to stay in a remote country home with nurse Alma (Blanchett) who, faced with a wall of silence starts to unload her own confessional thoughts on her patient; eventually her own sanity starts to feel the strain. The change in story comes with a change in style too, and I have to say I preferred the first half's use of Magda Willi's vast staircase, with its mix of classical and modern tropes - the cast paint their faces in a nod to ancient Greek masks, but also tip bags of clothes onto the stage to use in their storytelling. Persona's heavy reliance on live monochrome projections of the action has become too common a technique in the last decade, but the extreme close-ups on Hoss' silent, expressive face are very effective.

For a long while it remains unclear why these two stories in particular have been spliced together, but it does mean that when the penny finally drops on the connection to this specific version of Electra, as well as the alternating casting, it makes for a satisfying reveal. I approached this as one of those shows that really could go either way and while there were parts of it that didn't work for me - I don't know what the extended repeated section at the end was meant to achive - I largely found it a satisfying tying together of initially unrelated-seeming narratives.

Electra/Persona by Benedict Andrews after Sophocles and Ingmar Bergman is booking until the 10th of October at the National Theatre's Lyttelton.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus.

*looking at the production photos it does look like the similar-but-not-identical costumes by Merle Hensel have a black T-shirt for Electra and an open-necked shirt for Clytemnestra, so the leads have already come onto the stage dressed for the roles they're going to play

Theatre review: A Month in the Country

2026-09-03T22:58:00.000+01:00

Ivan Turgenev predates Chekhov by a few decades but his work certainly shows him as a likely influence on the more celebrated playwright's world of terminally disappointed upper middle classes turning ennui into their whole personality - or at least Brian Friel's adaptation of A Month in the Country suggests as much. Lyndsey Turner's production at the Donald and Margot Warehouse moves the action from sitting rooms to a greenhouse, which in Lesley Travers' design rises to reveal the household of Natalya (Sophie Okonedo) and her husband Arkady (Thomas Arnold.) The couple have a young son as well as a 17-year-old ward, Vera (Rachelle Diedericks,) and after a series of stuffy old men they have decided to employ a 24-year-old recent graduate from a lower-class background as their latest tutor.

Vera takes a shine to Aleksey (Patrick Gibson) but so does Natalya, and while the tutor is embarrassed by the idea that his young student might have got the wrong idea, the glamour of the older woman and the difference in their station means he returns her interest.

Friel's play leans more heavily on the comic side of the tragicomic potential in a play with very little actually happening, but a lot of characters caught up in infatuations that are doomed to end in disappointment. So Natalya's old friend Michel (Alistair Petrie) has long been in love with her, but she's too emotionally dependent on him to entirely disabuse him of his hopes; the clueless Arkady realises his wife's affections lie elsewhere, but always manages to get the wrong end of the stick.

Probably the darkest turn the story takes is Natalya going along with the suggestion that Vera marry a local landowner 30 years her senior because it'll remove her as a potential rival for Aleksey, who has of course charmed her for reasons of acting.

Vera ultimately finds a pragmatic way around her romantic dilemmas and Turgenev seems to suggest this is the way to avoid a lot of heartbreak: Arkady's mother Anna (Susan Brown) has maintained a fond memory of her late husband by accepting the fact that he had a mistress, the local doctor (Transphobia Ltd Employee Daniel Rigby) and Anna's companion Lizaveta (Amanda Wilkin) make a businesslike marriage arrangement they seem happy with, and the only complication in servants Matvey (Jonathan Livingstone) and Katya (Jessica Brindle) getting together turns out to be their busy workloads.

Friel's version of the play balances heartbreak and disappointment with a bit of hope and a lot of witty lines - there's also Mark Hadfield's German visitor whose only purpose at the house seems to be to deliver malapropisms - but what was really notable to me was that, even watching this very tired after a few days ill, I found the time absolutely flew by. Not a lot happens on the surface, but the cast in Turner's intimate production - which is even blocked properly, unusually for the Donmar - give us a whole lot of life changes going on underneath.

A Month in the Country by Brian Friel after Ivan Turgenev is booking until the 3rd of October at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

Theatre review: How the Other Half Loves

2026-08-29T18:10:00.000+01:00

It's a cliché about farce that it relies heavily on characters running in and out of multiple doors, but most of Alan Ayckbourn's plays have premiered in the round. Maybe this is why he came up with his signature style of incredibly technically convoluted comedies that include conceits like time travel and multiple interlocking plays telling one big story. The latter, The Norman Conquests, was the first show to get the Old Vic specially reconfigured, and after quite a lengthy in-the-round season at the end of Matthew Warchus' tenure we get the playwright's return with How the Other Half Loves: This is the one whose high concept is multiple overlapping scenes, some taking place simultaneously, one 24 hours apart at two dinner parties - and in Phillip Breen's production, Rob Howell's design has the dinner tables literally overlap.

Fiona Foster (Dorothy Atkinson) returns home at 3am; in another house that shares the same living room set, Bob Phillips (Rowan Polonski) does the same. Bob's boss is Fiona's husband Frank (Roger Allam,) and to put him off the scent she tells him that she was up all night consoling the wife of one of his other employees.

Meanwhile Bob is telling his wife Terri (Ayesha Antoine) a similar lie, leaving both spouses convinced that a third couple are having martial problems. The unpreposessing pair of William (Adam Gillen) and Mary Featherstone (Laura Elsworthy) are the unwitting alibi, and the lie gets more complicated when both spouses decide to invite them to dinner on consecutive nights to try and help them get over the rough patch in their marriage.

The play premiered in 1969 but Howell's design has taken it a couple of years later, leaning into a similar orange-and-brown colour palette to Abigail's Party which definitely makes the show feel even more like a 1970s sitcom than it already might. And not one of the ones that's aged particlarly well either - Bob is forever putting Terri down for being a lazy housewife while doing very little himself, and William's subjugation of the already-timid Mary always threatens to tip over into actual violence.

It means that perhaps what's kept Ayckbourn revived so frequently into the 21st century is exactly his skill with those high-concept comic contrivances: Once we really get into the bones of the central scene where we see the Featherstones attend two dinner parties simultaneously, the writing stops relying so heavily on misogynistic gags and can relax into just being a mix of incredibly witty lines wrapped up in a ridiculous premise - the spinning chairs the Featherstones sit on to take them instantly between dining rooms only add to the frantic energy that's already building in the panicked couples around them.

Breen has got his cast drilled down to perfect comic timing, and although there's some attempt to make it feel like the two unpleasant younger men make some kind of progress by the end, Allam's forgetful Frank is the only likeable man, possibly because he's too out of it to say anything too mean to anyone. There as still moments when the attitudes of the time rear their ugly head - one audience member audibly said "what did he say?!" after one particular line of William's - but they shock because the rest of the comedy is done so well that it can make you forget the unpleasantness the story is couched in. Unquestionably a throwback, but it undeniably still works.

How the Other Half Loves by Alan Ayckbourn is booking until the 19th of September at the Old Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Theatre review: A Slow Fire

2026-08-27T22:40:00.000+01:00

Simon Stephens has had shows open in major West End houses but his latest gets its UK premiere in one of the most intimate spaces in the middle of Theatreland: Written for Irish theatre company Glass Mask, A Slow Fire transfers to Jermyn Street, a venue famous for having to make such inventive use of a small space that the audience has to cross the stage to get to the toilets. And a cramped space is appropriate for a story set in a nuclear bunker: Ashton (Ross Gaynor) and Reece (Ian Toner) share a space built by the former, once a theology lecturer at the university where the latter was a porter. How they ended up in there together is down to pure chance as much as anything, but they've managed for three years now since the unnamed apocalyptic event that seems to have killed most of the population.

The world outside isn't entirely out of bounds to them: Occasionally they feel safe enough to go outside, see what's changed - people seem to be stealing the railway tracks for some mysterious purpose - and get supplies, but food and water remain scarce.

In a play about holding on to hope even, and perhaps especially when, it threatens to destroy you, the two men have developed a regular pastime that comforts them as much as it can infuriate them: "A moment of hope that defined your life," in which they live out significant moments from their lives, taking turns to play each other's significant figures. Not just moments where the hope is fulfilled - Reece relives the moment where he realised his son didn't feel much of a connection to him, as well as first asking out the boy's mother; Ashton remembers being turned down for a promotion as well as times with the first boy he had a crush on.

In the second act this two-person dynamic is broken up by the arrival of Presley (Fionn Ó Loingsigh,) a volatile character who disrupts the survival tactics the men have developed. There's also a fourth character played by Holly Demaine and I have no idea why the production keeps her uncredited - her brief appearance comes way too early in the story to constitute any kind of twist.

This is an eccentric little slice of dystopia but Rex Ryan's production keeps you interested. The first act could be a bit shorter perhaps, the actors have very well established their codependent but oddly sweet relationship by the time it's challenged. But with touches of Philip Ridley in both the setup and the way it's essentially a dark meditation on hope - what with one character being called Presley that comparison can't be accidental - I found a lot to enjoy here.

A Slow Fire by Simon Stephens is booking until the 26th of September at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Alex Brenner.

Theatre review: Abigail's Party

2026-08-25T22:57:00.000+01:00

Mike Leigh's name might always be brought up in relation to a kind of bleak, gritty realism, but it's his 1977 black comedy Abigail's Party that remains his most famous, beloved, and frequently-revived play. Of course we never see Abigail or her party - that's going on a few doors down in a street in suburban Essex. Instead we're at what's meant to be a much more sophisticated, adult soirée at the home of Beverley (Tamzin Outhwaite) and Laurence (Kevin Bishop,) who've asked round new neighbours Angela (Lauren Patel) and Tony (Omar Malik) to welcome them to the neighbourhood. An awkward fifth wheel in the group is Abigail's mother Sue (Pandora Colin,) who's been invited along so she can escape the teenage chaos going on in her own house. But with Beverley in charge things don't stay much calmer here for long.

Plying her guests with bottomless gin and tonics and necking two herself for every one she gives them, Beverley launches into a passive-aggressive evening of humblebragging, sniping at her husband and instilling paranoia in Sue.

Nadia Fall's production doesn't try to reinvent the wheel - Peter McKintosh's set and costumes throw as much 1970s orange and beige at the stage as it can take, and then throw in a little more, while Demis Roussos and cheese-and-pineapple on cocktail sticks are all present and correct. Fall does also bookmark the acts with slightly dreamlike dance breaks that give Outhwaite a chance to hint at the sexually aggressive side that Bev will enthusiastically aim at Tony.

Outhwaite gets to make the character her own as she very quickly gets her guests drunk enough that she can drop any pretence of being the gracious host and can just openly show contempt and score points off them. What I really liked about her performance was how well it was pitched to the size of the theatre - even from the Balcony, some of her funniest moments come from little head-turns and expressions that flash across her face for a second.

All five characters get their moments but Ange is the other reliable scene-stealer and Patel gives us a timid little bird woman who has an abrupt personality change once she gets a drink in her, chattering enough to make up for all the silence she endures with her monosyllabic husband.

Making the younger couple South Asian is an understated way of highlighting what some of the tensions going on under the characters' surface might be, particularly when it comes to Laurence's "concerns" about the changes to the local area, while turning the gag about Ange's pilchard curry into a whole different joke. The production really hits all the comic notes, perhaps to the detriment of the darker underside - Bishop is giving more henpecked husband than exhausted workaholic so the abrupt ending feels unearned. But overall this provides a recognisable portrait of suburban monsters that's far more universal than the '70s trappings it's presented in.

Abigail's Party by Mike Leigh is booking until the 19th of September at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.

Theatre review: Game of Thrones: The Mad King

2026-08-22T22:12:00.000+01:00

In the latest attempt to plug the Les Mis-shaped hole in their budget the RSC have taken a break from Celebrity Antisemite Roal Dahl and moved on to Celebrity Pirate George Arrr! Arrr! Martin, and his A Song of Ice and Fire saga. And Stratford-upon-Avon seems an apt enough home for a story conceived as a fantasy version of the Wars of the Roses since Shakespeare wrote eight* plays about them. And with roughly the same amount of concern for historical accuracy. Game of Thrones Colon The Mad King is the most immediate prequel to the original novels and Game of Thrones TV series yet, and fleshes out events known from the stories but not previously told in this much detail. And there's... certainly no shortage of detail in a play with a cast bigger than some West End musicals and a running time that just scrapes in under the four-hour mark.

So the titular mad king is Aerys II Targaryen (Michael Shaeffer,) ruling Westeros after centuries of his family sitting the Iron Throne, kept there by the power of their dragons. But the creatures now appear to have gone extinct, and without them maybe a capricious dictator with a twisted sense of humour doesn't need to be accepted as inevitable.

A conspiracy is growing to kill the king and crown his son Rhaegar (Noah Ritter) in his place, a comparatively noble and level-headed member of the in-bred dynasty. The main action begins at a jousting tourney, where the Stark brothers Brandon (Luke Brady,) Eddard (Michael Abubakar) and Benjen (Miles Barrow) are taking their sister Lyanna (Harmony Rose-Bremner) to meet the man she's been betrothed to in a political alliance, Callum Woodhouse's Robert Baratheon.

At the tourney the king makes an unexpected appearance to make fun of the recent death of Robert's parents, while Rhaegar and Lyanna fall in love and run away together, robbing him of his fiancée. The double insult prompts a change in the direction of the conspiracy, which now starts to consider getting rid of the Targaryens altogether and replacing them with Robert as king.

So no, this is probably not a great jumping-on point for anyone who wasn't already familiar with Grrm's universe, and even with me knowing the general story and many of the central characters Duncan Macmillan's play can feel confusing and dense, especially at the start. Although having just watched all three seasons so far of House of the Dragon, where all the sides are different branches of the Targaryen family, at least this multi-family saga is easier to follow than one where everyone's got the same blond frightwig and all the women are called Rhaena, Rhaenys, Rhaenerys, Rhaenée & Rhaenato.

With just over a month's run for a show with such an obvious huge budget a London run must be hoped for, and presumably in a purpose-built or specially adapted space, as Chloe Lamford's cross-shaped stage, one of the most notable things about the production, is a bit of an awkward fit to the RST: I was reminded of the line from The Producers: "You've all heard of Theatre in the Round? You're looking at the man who invented Theatre in the Square! Nobody had a good seat!" At least if I leaned forwards I could see the Iron Throne when it popped out of the stage, but only just.

To be fair for the most part Dominic Cooke's production manages to keep the action fairly central and visible, with the convoluted political intrigue of the story being interspersed with spectacle in the form of pageantry, jousting and battles - although there's a couple of grisly death scenes anyone who's mainly into the TV shows for the notorious gratuitous gore and nudity will be disappointed: The only person to get their tits out is Luke Brady, though to be fair that's going to be the right choice in most circumstances.

Among all this testosterone the second act does give the women more of a chance to make their mark, as Elizabeth Ayodele's Princess Elia, Mariah Gale's Queen Rhaella and Tanisha Spring's Ashara Dayne try to find a way out of being just pawns in the men's power plays. Both acts have moments that really shine with energy and intrigue, as well as others where the sheer amount of story and characters bloat the action - Maxim Ays' Jaime Lanister was always going to have to turn up for plot purposes, but a couple of major recurring characters are clearly there for fan-service alone.

Overall this doesn't feel like a pure cash-in, the RSC lending not only kudos but also the experience of the cast and creative teams to take dragons and magic seriously without looking ridiculous. It doesn't convince that it would ever have needed to exist without the hype over the franchise either, but for those of us who enjoy the books and shows it's an enjoyable enough addition. Unless you're only in it for the tits and the head-squishing, in that case you're out of luck.

Game of Thrones: The Mad King by Duncan Macmillan, based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R. R. Martin, is booking until the 5th of September at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Running time: 3 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

*if you count buildup and fallout as part of the story