Partially Obstructed View

Theatre review: Cats

2026-08-14T23:46:00.000+01:00

T.S. Eliot is probably best known for The Waste Land, but for a true vision of apocalyptic despair you need only look at the stage version of his book of children's poetry Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. It is of course his famous collaboration with His Exalted Britannic Excellency, Master of all he Surveys, The Right Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, KC, MD, P.I, Mother of Dragons, FSB, which Eliot agreed to primarily because he was much too dead at the time to say no. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Richard Stilgoe was in Countdown's Dictionary Corner quite a lot so he was the next obvious choice to provide additional lyrics for the show's opening, with "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats" giving a framework.

The result is Cats, just one of the C words closely associated with Lloyd Webber, which follows the story of the Jellicle Cats, a group of London felines who gather once a year to party, describe themselves to each other, arrange themselves in a Human Centipede and repeat the word "Jellicle" what they hope is enough times to make you think it means something.

At the end of the night Old Deuteronomy (Melanie La Barrie) will choose one cat to be reincarnated, and nobody really mentions the fact that for this to happen the "winner" will have to die first so we just go along with the idea that this is something to aim for. This... let's call it a plot, why not, is the device by which Eliot's largely unconnected poems about various quirky cats are strung together.

So early on we meet Rum Tum Tugger (Jaydon Vijn,) a "curious cat" because he's really contrary and always wants the opposite of whatever his owners give him and ma'am that is not a curious cat, that is a cat operating on factory settings. Other notable characters include Matthew Caputo's lively Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat and Gary Wilmot's hammy old thesp Gus the Theatre Cat, who gets a second number to himself as he relives a celebrated old role.

The show is as quintessentially 1980s as crack but only about 90% as harmful to your mental health, and for all that Drew McOnie's production is a new and fresh one the whole thing does still leave you wondering how this became quite such a global juggernaut. Granted, it's one of the last ALW musicals where he actually wrote a different tune for every song so it does have a sense of frantic variety. And I will give him his due in that the famous 11 O'Clock number "Memory" (with lyrics by original director Trevor Nunn) is one of the rare musical theatre songs that absolutely earns its showboating vocals, something understudy Taziva-Faye Katsande nails as Grizabella.

Ultimately Cats is one of those musicals built around dance, so much so its original home was renamed after its choreographer Gillian Lynne, so having McOnie take it on was one of the main attractions for seeing it again as an adult, and he certainly puts his cast through their paces. In fact I preferred the second act, where more of the titular characters don't actually sing on their own songs, allowing Dianté Lodge's Macavity (full name: Phil Macavity) and especially Jet Yau's breakdancing magician Mr Mistoffeles to steal the show through movement alone. Although McOnie never quite succeeds in getting the cast to lick their own arseholes, so the physicality isn't completely accurate.

At the end Grizabella goes off to be, I don't know, tied into a bag and thrown into the Thames, like I say it's never quite made clear how she's going to be ritually sacrificed, and while Sami Fendall's design does give it a slightly grungier aesthetic I was left thinking that while I can absolutely see why kids would still love this, I'm not sure how its original iteration captured so many adults as well. As Jim said on the way out, "I saw this 40 years ago and I've seen it now. In another 40 years I'll be dead so at least I won't have to see it again."

Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber, T.S. Eliot, Richard Stilgoe and Trevor Nunn* is booking until the 19th of September at the Open Air Theatre, Regents Park; then continuing on tour to Plymouth, Hull, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, Llandudno, Glasgow, Nottingham, Canterbury, Sunderland, Aberdeen, Norwich, Belfast, Dublin, Oxford, Southampton, Edinburgh, Bradford, Liverpool, Woking, Cardiff, Milton Keynes and Newcastle.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.

*the latter two seem to have been completely wiped off the writing credits for this revival, I wonder what they did to offend His Lordship

Stage-to-screen review: Our Town

2026-08-12T22:02:00.000+01:00

The comparative theatrical quiet of August often means a chance for me to catch up on some digital versions of shows I'd missed, and NTatHome have just added Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in its recent touring co-production from The Actor Michael Sheen's Welsh National Theatre and the Rose Theatre in Kingston*. Sheen plays the Stage Manager, a figure who it occured to me this time I would be interested to see played quite sinister - Sheen doesn't go there, giving the affable character we usually see, but he does stress the way the play's narrator knows all the dark secrets of how the other characters' lives and deaths will pan out. I also felt we really got the idea of why, within the play's universe at least, it makes sense to give him that title: Especially in the final act he's seen engineering the story and the way it'll be told.

Of course the more obvious reason Wilder called his narrator the Stage Manager is the metatheatrical nature of the storytelling, a stripped-down look at a few average and not-so-average days in the life of early 20th century New Hampshire town Grover's Corners.

Although we get a sweeping view of the whole town's notable figures, the first act starts to focus on next door neighbours Dr and Mrs Gibbs (Matthew Trevannion and Sian Reese-Williams) and Mr and Mrs Webb (Rhodri Meilir and Nia Roberts.) The second act zooms in even further on their children, Emily Webb (Yasemine Özdemir) and George Gibbs (Peter Devlin) as they prepare for their wedding day, and we flash back to the moment when the teenage friends first realised they wanted to be something more.

Emily is also the focal point of the final act as we jump forward a few - but not many - years to a much more sombre occasion, and it's this section whose extraordinary conceit of how to look at life and death has raised the play into an enduring classic still being produced nearly a century on, rather than the somewhat twee slice of Americana it looks like at first.

Not that Americana is particularly the first thing you think of in Francesca Goodridge's production, which unsurprisingly keeps all the cast's native Welsh accents, as well as having the hymns that occasionally punctuate the story being sung in the Welsh language. All the references in the text remain American, and I did wonder if the show could have gone the extra step and changed some of the script, but ultimately the disconnect between the words being said and the accent they're being said in adds to the play's general universality. The accent does lead to a weirdly laboured way of saying the town's name, but having been in this play at school I can sympathise, "Grover's Corners" is very much The Rural Juror of unpronounceable place names.

For the most part Goodridge's production is traditional, although she does make it overt that choirmaster Simon Stimson's (Rhys Warrington) alcoholism and depression stem from his being closeted. Hayley Grindle's designs lean heavily on planks of wood that the actors turn into all the props and furniture, and I really liked the conceit of having the final act take place up stepladders to represent the cemetary on a hill overlooking the town. This can be a tricky play because the first 90 minutes can feel like it's wringing everything it can out of wholesome American values before the ending pulls the rug out from under you, but Özdemir is the real standout here, whose journey through the highs and lows of life keeps you invested.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder is available to stream on NTatHome.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

*no, she went of her own accord

Dance review: The Car Man

2026-08-06T22:48:00.000+01:00

For my roughly annual trip away from Dame Theatre to Baroness Dance, it's one of the Matthew Bourne ballets I've managed to miss on its numerous previous visits to London since its 2000 debut. The Car Man is based on Bizet's opera Carmen, although only musically - the story is apparently more directly inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice. Set in a small town in 1950s America, whose economy seems disproportionately based on the auto repair and cabaret industries for a population of 375, drifter Luca (Will Bozier at tonight's performance) arrives looking for work. He makes quite an impression, seducing both the boss' wife Lana (Eleanor McGrath) and bullied young man Angelo (Harry Ondrak-Wright.) When Lana's husband Dino (Cameron Flynn) catches them, she and Luca kill him and frame Angelo for it.

Like a lot of Bourne's work this is a show about testosterone, both as a destructive force and as a spark for the homoeroticism that's another New Adventures trademark, and the two often blur into each other here.

So the men are as likely to dance with each other as with the women, and there's at least one other same-sex couple established in the story, plus the opening group shower scene that includes a quickFULL FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!from two of the ensemble. But Luca first gets Angelo's trust by teaching him to box, the latter is physically abused by a prison guard (oddly my second night in a row in Islington watching bloody violence portrayed through the gift of dance) and the whole thing culminates in a town-wide brawl.

As ever I can't comment on the quality or technique of the dance but it's muscular in more ways than one, and maintains that sense of energy and danger, with Lez Brotherston's set giving the dancers lots of precarious levels to traverse. The music is based on an arrangement of Carmen by Rodion Shchedrin, with additional music by orchestrator Terry Davies, and part of the fun of the show is hearing very familiar tunes reworked and put into unlikely new situations - like a barn dance.

On the downside the second half isn't as strong as the first, and the storytelling loses impetus just when it should be building it: I wondered if the big fight scene might have been better off slightly earlier, because once Angelo escapes from prison and kidnaps Lana's sister Rita (Anna-Maria de Freitas) you want to see the central story resolve itself rather than zoom out to the ensemble. But overall it lives up to its publicity as a big sexy dangerous show.

The Car Man by Matthew Bourne, Georges Bizet, Rodion Shchedrin and Terry Davies is booking until the 29th of August at Sadler's Wells; then continuing on tour to Bristol, Newcastle, Southampton, Nottingham, Norwich, Birmingham, Bradford, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Canterbury, Eastbourne and Amsterdam.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

Theatre review: Cleansed

2026-08-05T22:32:00.000+01:00

A pair of fraternal twins are separated; the female twin, believing her brother to be dead, goes to a strange and possibly dangerous place where she takes on his identity, only to reconnect with him in an unexpected way. It's one of the main plots of Twelfth Night, which Sarah Kane cited as an inspiration for Cleansed, but it's fair to say that she interpreted it in a slightly different way than Shakespeare did. A lot more incestuously, for one thing. Grace (Pearl Chanda) tracks down the hospital-like place where her brother Graham (Jack Riddiford) died of a heroin overdose. The body's long since been cremated so she isn't able to say goodbye to him in that way, instead wearing his clothes and starting to take on his mannerisms. She willingly puts herself under the control of Tinker, the violent and twisted man everyone calls a doctor, but who seems to be anything but a healer.

As played by Leo Bill Tinker is a dead-eyed, lumbering psychopath, but I still interpreted him in the same way as I did when I saw the play before: He's a man fascinated with love but unable to understand it on a fundamental level, so he treats both the emotion and the people who feel it as things to be ripped apart, dissected and put under extreme pressure.

With Grace this culminates in an extreme body-horror interpretation of the way she wants to become one with her brother, whose ghost she interacts with throughout the play. With another couple he's even more relentlessly violent: The young and starry-eyed Carl (Luke Cinque-White) swears he would die for his boyfriend Rod, and has this put to the test in slow and grisly fashion. The older and more world-weary Rod (Parth Thakerar) doesn't believe in making promises he can't keep, but having to sit back and watch the degradations his lover is put through is a different kind of torture that has a profound effect on the way he expresses love.

Tinker is much more hands-off, although still abusive in different ways, with the childlike, illiterate Robin (Stuart Thompson,) who's just looking for someone to love and has landed on Grace; for the most part he's allowed to let his emotions destroy him from the inside. And Tinker himself becomes fascinated with Grace, pouring his confused emotions into a vicarious relationship with an unnamed woman (Lizzy Connolly) in a stripper booth. In a way, maybe love will destroy him in the end as well.

Which is all to say that while Cleansed may have a reputation as a gratuitous nihilistic bloodbath there is a throughline to be found in it, and even a twisted kind of tenderness and beauty. Rebecca Frecknall's production particularly seemed to clarify for me the Carl/Rod storyline - if Grace/Graham is Twelfth Night, there's clear Titus Andronicus in the way Carl gets Lavinia'd, and particularly the reason: Every time Carl finds a way to express himself, Tinker brutally gets rid of it, but he always seems to find another way. It's a strange kind of celebration of resilience, even if the play keeps knocking it down.

The references to rats and the way declarations of love are pushed to the limit also have nods to 1984, and the way the story inverts that book's final twist of despair could also be seen as a kind of hope. In some ways Frecknall's production is almost restrained - there's numerous instances of nudity but the men at least avoid the usual full-frontals, and while some of the violence is bluntly literal some of it is more stylised, while I wasn't sure at first if everyone would have clocked quite what happened to Carl and Grace at the end.

The use of dance, Lee Curran's lighting and Angus MacRae's music all also lend a dreamlike, more metaphorical edge that stops the violence from being entirely harsh and clinical all the time; the way George Dennis' sound combines with the incongruous flower meadow in Madeleine Girling's set to give the impression of rats without us ever actually seeing one, is one of the most memorably nightmarish effects of the evening, more so than any literal gore.

It's odd to see so much of the production's marketing being about how a leading female director tackling this play is a "once in a lifetime" event, given Katie Mitchell did it at the National a decade ago: Whose life expectancy are they going by, a Victorian chimney sweep's boy? That production was hugely memorable so this one didn't have quite the same effect on me, but one thing it did have in common with it is that even if the precise meaning isn't always clear it's obvious that there is one, and it makes it hard to dismiss the play as a simple collection of attention-grabbing shocks. And maybe the reason I keep seeing something beautiful in the play is that it's so ugly, that every tiny glimmer of hope feels like a triumph.

Cleansed by Sarah Kane is booking until the 29th of August at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review: Love's Labour's Lost(Shakespeare's Globe)

2026-08-02T16:54:00.000+01:00

I've got a couple of shows planned for later this week notorious for their nudity, and it feels like the theme has started early with Love's Labour's Lost: While everyone more or less keeps their kit on at the Globe, Ned Costello spends much of it in matador pants so tight he might as well be naked. It's all done for highly plot-significant reasons, honest, because Indiana Lown-Collins' production turns the delegation of noble ladies from France into one from Spain, and makes flamenco the show's visual and musical language. The King of Navarre (Costello) has vowed to spend three years in study, his many ascetic rules including no contact with women, and roped his best friends Berowne (Transphobia Ltd Employee Philip Arditti,) Dumaine (Jax Guerrero) and Longaville (Philip Labey) into the agreement.

No sooner have they signed the contract than they realise it can't be kept, because the Princess of Spain (Norah Lopez Holden) is on her way on a diplomatic mission that can't be ignored, and she and the King instantly hit it off. Her entourage of Rosaline (Bea Segura,) Katherine (Suzanne Ahmet) and Maria (Katy Stephens) conveniently provides a romantic interest for each of his friends.

Love's Labour's Lost is being sold as this summer season's Shakespearean rarity, and if all performances are as busy as this afternoon's was it'll hopefully encourage the Globe to risk going back to the more varied programming of past years. There are good reasons for its comparative obscurity - as Shakespeare's only all-verse comedy it's unusually reliant on convoluted classical puns for its humour, something which isn't guaranteed to make sides split 400+ years down the line.

It's also a relatively early play so while it's got a solid gold comic premise which Shakespeare utilises to farcical effect in the first half, it does feel like he's losing control of the plot after the interval, a series of loosely-connected comic setpieces before we even get to the notoriously abrupt ending. It's one that benefits more than most from a bold approach and a high concept, and this is where the flamenco comes in.

Choreographer Carmen Igarza's frequent dance breaks become an injection of energy any time the action threatens to slow down, as well as part of the play's language - dance becomes a big part of how the couples flirt with each other, literally peacocking around the stage; it also becomes a bullfight that replaces the original's deer hunt, as well as the way Joshua Hill's Costard and Andro Crespo's Don Armado duel over Jaquenetta (Jimena Larraguivel.) And yes, still having a character whose whole gag is his incomprehensible Spanish accent when most of the characters are now Spanish as well doesn't make sense, but just go with it.

Composers Michael McMahon and Adrián Solá also get to set some of the play's love poetry to music, and if it's not always clear to a modern audience which of the florid verses are meant to be earnest and which are meant to be ridiculous, setting the latter to the tune of "Livin' La Vida Loca" certainly helps get some of those laughs in. Katie Lias' designs complement the Mediterranean feel, as does the current hot weather - I guess we've found the one good side-effect of climate change. Love's Labour's Lost is a play that takes a little creativity to bring to life, but Lown-Collins' production has put in the work and yielded results.

Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 13th of September at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton.

Theatre review: The Oresteia

2026-07-31T23:51:00.000+01:00

By now I think we can take it as read that Simon Stone's adaptations of classic texts will actually be devised riffs vaguely inspired by a general theme, that share little with the original other than the title. I've had some very different responses to them over the years, and I suspect I like them in inverse proportion to how well I know the classic versions. And regular readers of this blog will both recall that I know Aeschylus' version of The Oresteia very well. Stone's version opens in 2016, in Lizzie Clachan's revolving glass house, where a privileged family are preparing for a 21st birthday party for their twin daughters. We know they're privileged because Christopher (David Morrissey) is genuinely annoyed with his cousin Jerome (John Macmillan) for buying several cases of Bollinger champagne for the party. Because it's too cheap.

Their ostentatious wealth comes from Christopher and his brother Melville's (Lloyd Hutchinson) company, which has supplied weapons to Putin's Russia, a business model they unconvincingly insist they dropped once they figured out what their parts were being used for.

One of the twins, Isobel, is missing her own party because she's at a protest against her father's company while the other, Alice (Rosie Sheehy,) is at home wallowing in the fact that even when she's not there her sister gets all the attention. The first of three acts is mostly spent getting to know the extended family and their dynamic, but it ends with a jump forward ten years to 2026, and younger brother Augie (Tom Glynn-Carney) confessing to the murders of his mother Montie (Mary-Louise Parker) and Jerome, by this time her second husband.

The next two hours play as a thriller that time-jumps between the unpreposessing evening in 2016 that will end in the incident that turns the family against each other, the confession in 2026, and various points in between as they start to kill each other. Unlike the very public revenge killings of Aeschylus and Sophocles, here the murder of Christopher/Agamemon is succesfully disguised as a suicide, and it's left to the play's Cassandra figure Chandra (Rakhee Thakrar) to voice suspicions that are initially dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theories.

So the story turns into a murder mystery, which is where it being neither one thing nor the other became a problem for me: It's absolutely not the story of The Oresteia as we know it, but there's enough of it there to mean that I knew the shape the story would take once the pieces had been put back together. So ironically, where some more avant-garde adaptations of Greek tragedy are incoherent to anyone who doesn't go in knowing the story, this one is probably best experienced blind, as I heard people in both intervals saying they were hooked and wanting to know what the family's deep secret was. For me though, it's hard to make a Shock!Twist! out of the basic premise of a 2500-year-old story.

I don't think I'd have minded it not being the original tragedy so much if the end product felt like it was a whole new tragedy of its own, but for all the moody visuals of Clachan's spinning glass house there's nothing epic about this. The various lesser plot twists along the way - like the revelation that Augie has been having an on-off affair with Jerome's son Lorenzo (Archie Madekwe) - come in as melodramatic touches that just make a long evening even longer. There are interesting elements and it's unexpectedly funny - especially from a very much cast-against-type Sheehy as an awkward posh girl. But instead of a new tragedy Stone has given us a Netflix Harlan Coben thriller-of-the-week, so much so I spent the evening wondering when the pointless Richard Armitage cameo was coming up.

The Oresteia by Simon Stone after Aeschylus and others is booking until the 19th of September at the Bridge Theatre.

Running time: 3 hours 45 minutes including two intervals.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

Theatre review: The Cherry Orchard (RSC/Swan)

2026-07-25T21:37:00.000+01:00

Kenneth Branagh has a long history with the RSC: Playing Hamlet there; not getting the Artistic Director job; starting a petition to ban anyone who didn't go to RADA from ever being employed there (probably.) Now he's reunited with something else he left behind decades ago: His Belfast accent, as he plays Chekhov's representative of a rising new monied middle class in The Cherry Orchard. SirKenBran's Lopakhin is a voice of brutal pragmatism in a world of aristocratic old romantics who've not quite got to grips with the new Russia that's been growing up around them ever since the serfs were emancipated. Madame Ranyevskaya (Helen Hunt) has just been on a European tour with her daughter Anya (Chumisa Dornford-May,) where she's been spending cash liberally, cheerfully ignoring the fact that her family's fortune is long gone.

In fact she returns to the ancestral country home just in time for it and all the surrounding estates to be put up for auction, just to pay the debts. Lopakhin, a businessman descended from the serfs who once worked the land, has a plan to help her.

But she's too attached to the house and the past it represents to consider his suggestion that the estate be cleared to build holiday dachas, a solution that could quickly pay off their debts because a new rail line has transformed the surrounding area. Ranyevskaya is so determined to keep hoping that things will somehow manage to stay the way she remembers them, that she risks being left behind when the world moves on.

And Tamara Harvey's production feels a bit too close to that itself. Laura Wade's new version of the play isn't fusty as such - it picks up on and focuses on the play's comic elements as well as the nods to Hamlet - but it doesn't have a particularly strong focus either. There's something a bit too vague and understated about both Lopakhin's capitalist drive and eternal student Trofimov's (Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch) idealism, leaving us with little sense of competing visions of the future.

With little sense of what could be, we're left mostly with reminders of what no longer is: Anna Fleischle's costumes are pristine but old-fashioned, the set a much dustier affair; dead trees reminding us the titular orchard hasn't yielded fruit in a long time, the furniture covered in dust sheets, and in the most effective visual, you can sometimes spot faces peering eerily out of the sheets covering the stage, like ghosts of the past.

With the big picture never really building up, and Hunt and SirKenBran oddly subdued, it's smaller moments and performances that stand out. Andy Rush and Guy Henry are largely used to comic effect as Yepikhodov and Pishchik respectively, the endearing klutz and the classic Chekhovian nonentity who doesn't realise he's a nonentity. There's a slightly panicked edge to the comedy of Sophie Stone's Sharlotta, while Esther Smith as Varya gives us the sadness of a woman who's spent her life working to make up for her family's mistakes, but will still get left with nothing because of them.

Michael Elwyn's Firs is memorable as the servant who refers to his own freedom as The Catastrophe, an old man put into a new world but not told how to fit into it. Best embodying the mix of comedy and tragedy though is Bill Pullman as Ranyevskaya's brother Gaev, who retreats into an imaginary billiards game any time an awkward conversation comes up. His denial of the facts is less pig-headed than his sister's, more of an awareness that there's a problem that he's too old and tired to acknowledge.

The production most comes to life in the third act, when the characters throw a party even while the auction to determine their futures goes on in the background. The RSC's contractual use of live musicians comes into its own here, Laura Rossi's music helping build a giddy energy as Ranyevskaya & co fiddle while Rome burns. Wade's version isn't as long-winded as many a Chekhov adaptation so the show doesn't drag; it doesn't really feel like it's made much of a point though, either.

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov in a version by Laura Wade is booking until the 29th of August at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

Theatre review: The Jonathan Larson Project

2026-07-23T21:30:00.000+01:00

Jennifer Ashley Tepper's collection of lesser-known songs by Rent and tick, tick... BOOM! creator Jonathan Larson opens with a video medley of his best-known one, "Seasons of Love," being sung by different groups in different languages, and laments the fact that Larson never lived to see the effect his music had on people and musical theatre as a whole. Although as ever I have to wonder if there would have been anything like that much influence if he hadn't died young - his sudden death aged 35 the day before its first performance is so tied into the legend surrounding Rent and so perfectly fitting to its story that you have to wonder if it might have become a well-liked but obscure show without that unwanted publicity push, rather than a global phenomenon. Does The Jonathan Larson Project go any way to answer how much his success owes to the fact that it's posthumous?

Well it certainly suggests that we missed out on a lot of much better work that he might have produced later in life: If the gap in quality between these early songs and the more famous ones is anything to go by, Larson's songwriting was improving massively in his thirties.

But these largely date from the 1980s when he was in his twenties, and while a couple have decent tunes, almost all of them are let down by the lyrics. I think the earnest sentimentality is one of the reasons Rent took a lot longer to gain traction in the UK than in the US, and there's far too many instances where it seems like a teenager's angsty poetry about how nobody understands him has been set to music. He also seems to have contributed to a lot of one-off topical cabaret shows, and the examples we get here suggest why he's not particularly remembered for comedy.

Although being able to hear the comedy lyrics properly might have helped: The five-strong cast of Max Harwood, Imelda Warren-Green, Natalie Kassanga, Marcus Collins and understudy Edward Flynn Haddon seemed to be constantly adjusting their mics and earpieces in the face of a dodgy sound mix, and mics only four out of five of which worked at any given time, with no apparent choice of which four it would be. Meanwhile the show's original off-Broadway director John Simpkins leans right into the over-earnestness.

For all that there are songs that stand out for the right reasons: Clumsy lyrics about the Exxon Valdez oil spill aside, "Iron Mike," sung by Collins, is a decent musical theatre tune; "Love Heals," sung by Kassanga, was written about a friend of Larson's who died of AIDS, and the genuine emotion makes it stand head and shoulders above some of the more mawkish efforts. The highlight is "Valentine's Day," sung by Haddon, and its mix of catchy music and dark, violent lyrics shows why it was a personal favourite of Larson's that he tried and failed to squeeze into a number of projects, including Rent itself. But for the most part, when the show repeatedly reminds us that some of these songs were never publicly performed in his lifetime, I got the sense that Larson knew what he was doing when he kept them that way.

The Jonathan Larson Project by Jonathan Larson and Jennifer Ashley Tepper is booking until the 22nd of August at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Danny Kaan.

Theatre review: Pride

2026-07-16T23:22:00.000+01:00

Twelve years after the film shone an overdue light on the relationship between the LGBTQ+ and mining communities that were equally targeted by Margaret Thatcher's Britain, director Matthew Warchus reunites with original screenwriter Stephen Beresford, who provides the book and lyrics, plus composers Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde to stage Pride the musical. In 1984, young gay activist Mark Ashton (Jhon Lumsden) is looking for a way to mobilise his and his friends' Pride protests into something that has a wider effect, and lands on the idea of joining forces with another group that are struggling to have their voices heard: The coal miners' unions are on strike and being demonised in the press as "the enemy within," while the small town communities they support are feeling the financial strain.

Mark launches LGSM - Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners - to fundraise in support of the unions, and when the headquarters refuse to be associated with a group labelled perverts in the press, go for a grassroots approach and find a small Welsh town happy for the support.

Mike (Matthew Durkan,) Reggie (Jordan Shaw,) Steph (Courtney Stapleton) and Bromley (Lewis Cornay) become founding members alongside Mark and bookshop owner Jonathan (Samuel Barnett,) despite the latter's Welsh boyfriend Gethin (Chris Jenkins) objecting because he's still scarred by the way he was treated in his home country when he came out. In the town itself, union chair Hefina (Kirsty Malpass) leads the charge for embracing the visitors.

Look, this is undoubtedly a fun and powerful evening with a moving message, and I can't complain about an unapologetically queer show that's sold out so far and looks likely to have a further successful life. But I did get the strong impression it's been in development ever since the film came out, and the end result seems pretty determined to stick to the original message, without engaging with or acknowledging the regression in rights since then.

Obviously the villains and horrors of the story will be those of the 1980s when the real events took place, but it feels striking to have the play end on a coda telling us where things stood 30 years later at the film's release, when in fact we're more than 40 years on and we could have been pointed to where today's frontline battles on trans rights are being fought. Forgive me if I'm not uplifted by an ending celebrating a resolution passed in the 1980s, by a Labour Party that's now the face of throwing the LGBTQ+ community under the bus.

I did have other, less political issues with the show: I can't see Nightingale, Cohen and Ward's songs troubling too many people's playlists - the catchiest number in the first act is the closer "Bread and Roses" which isn't original to this show - although unusually for a musical the second act is the stronger on standalone numbers. Also while some changes to the story and characters are inevitable, I have to mention getting a text from Andy on the way back who, though generally enjoying it, did get annoyed that the two lesbians in the film were just one in the show, but Steph still gets referred to as "my lesbians."

But there are a lot of positives as Pride still delivers a West End-worthy show along with the laughs, tears and heartwarming moments you'd expect from the film. It also somehow resists the temptation to dress one of the actors up as Thatcher for a quick gag, which must be a first for an '80s-set musical. Instead Lumsden gives us a dynamic but flawed firebrand in the lead, Malpass and Darren Lawrence as Cliff give us sympathetic heroes on the miners' side as well.

This is obviously the year that more History Boys want to join Jamie Parker with an Olivier, and after Tovey it's Barnett's turn to be the show-stealer as the group's elder statesman (he's 46 FFS, although I guess that still makes him older than Dominic West was in the film.) His "I Miss Disco" is the highlight of the first act, and he opens the second with the slow-build cabaret number "You Might As Well Live" - the comic performance's throwaway reveal of his HIV diagnosis is more affecting than some of the more po-faced tributes to those lost to the pandemic.

With a chronic case of Multiple Ending Syndrome that seems determined to give a full musical number to everything that would have been a closing credits caption in the film, it's far from a prefect transfer to the stage. It is successful at transferring the uplifting spirit of the original and has a great cast, but when celebrating people who find common ground and fight for each other's rights, it could have been braver in demonstrating what that might actually look like in 2026.

Pride by Stephen Beresford, Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde, based on the film by Stephen Beresford, is booking until the 12th of September at the National Theatre's Dorfman (returns and rush tickets only.)

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Theatre review: Here Comes J. Edgar!

2026-07-15T23:12:00.000+01:00

With music by Peter Matz and the comedy pedigree of Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold on book and lyrics, Here Comes J Full Stop Edgar Exclamation Mark is a broadly comic attempt to satirise one of the most influential figures in shaping 20th century America: J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI for almost 60 years, but remembered as much for his fondness for wearing drag in his private life, as for the draconian policies he enforced in his public one. In an opening that fully embraces what a hokey cliché it is, Hoover (Bryan Batt) is visited on his deathbed by his younger self (Jess Pratley,) who'll take him through his life story in the form of a 1940s/'50s-style musical. As a child he's the editor of a school newspaper that publishes gossip about the staff and students, and it's an instinct that carries through to his adult life and the way he runs the country's most powerful law enforcement agency.

With the help of gossip columnist Walter Winchell (Marc Elliott) he's able to blackmail successive Presidents including FDR (Alfie Parker,) Eisenhower (Ryan Heenan,) JFK (Reuben Khan) and Johnson (Simon Anthony) into keeping him in his position of power.

Meanwhile his personal life goes against a lot of the conservative values he's publicly fighting for, not least of all his relationship with his Lifetime Assistant Clyde Tolson (Hugo Bolton.) Matz, Shearer and Leopold go for a very arch pastiche of golden age musicals, and Josh Seymour's production leans into it particularly through Bill Deamer's energetic, campy choreography. Also aiming firmly for camp is the comedy, with Edgar and Clyde's relationship quickly settling into the dynamic of a bickering, long-married couple, while Edgar's secretary Helen (Laura Medforth) spends decades obliviously pining over him while he strings her along.

It's an added touch of cruelty for the sake of self-preservation and the show increasingly tries to reflect on what a monster Hoover ultimately is as his actions get more and more extreme: Enthusiastically supporting Senator McCarthy's witch hunts for as long as they increase his own power then ditching him when the tide of opinion turns; even trying to blackmail Martin Luther King into suicide. And all along there's the hypocrisy of his enjoying kickbacks from gangsters while making a name for himself as the scourge of crime; and of course making life harder for queer Americans so he can live his own life in peace.

There's a much darker, more serious play to be made about this side of Hoover but this is resolutely not it, and the little nods at the very real harm he did feel like the show wanting to have its cake and eat it as it cheerfully coasts along on the, admittedly relentless, charm of Batt's central performance: He's giving us lovable rogue, and it's down to the odd supporting character to remind us he's ruining lives as a matter of course.

It’s also one of those musicals that could definitely have done with a few songs being pruned, especially in the second act. Although this does lead to one of the evening’s best gags (“Can you finish your song outside please? I’m busy.”) And every so often there does come along a joke that’s pure laugh-out-loud genius. But a bit too much of it is riding on pure camp, and while it’s always entertaining and well-performed by a surprisingly large cast for a fringe venue, it doesn’t quite have the consistency to elevate it from a worth-a-look to a must-see.

Here Comes J. Edgar! by Peter Matz, Harry Shearer and Tom Leopold is booking until the16th of August at the King’s Head Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Douet.

Theatre review: Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare's Globe)

2026-07-10T22:53:00.000+01:00

If A Midsummer Night's Dream is the Open Air Theatre's signature Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing feels like it occupies a very similar place at the Globe. I could definitely do with longer gaps between new productions - they do start to blend into each other in my memory and I sometimes wish for a bit more distance from the last one to let the next fresh take make its mark - but while some have been better than others the venue has never served up a completely duff one as long as I've been going there. Chelsea Walker's production doesn't buck that trend either: Not a particularly high-concept one apart from Sami Fendall's designs taking a lot of inspiration from the weddings the plot revolves around - a lot of white, floral displays and the musicians decked out as a wedding band, playing old standards that punctuate the comedy and sometimes troll the characters.

You don't particularly get the sense that most of the male characters have come straight from a war - they're celebrating a victory at the villa of the wealthy Leonato (Jonathan McGuiness,) whose daughter Hero (Assa Kanouté) catches the eye of one of the soldiers.

But while Hero and Claudio (Joshua John) go through various plots and misunderstandings to get together, a misanthropic villain is devising his own counter-plots to break them up, and when he makes allegations about the young woman's chastity, most of the men in the story are all too quick to take them at face value and slut-shame her.

Joseph Potter's Don John is less aloof villain, more coked-up psychopath, so Marlowe Chan-Reeves' Borachio and Matilda Bailes' Margaret may be working with him more out of fear than anything else; Walker addresses head-on one of my pet peeves, where Margaret tends to be onstage during the foiled wedding, saying nothing about a plan she was inadvertently part of. Here she's visibly traumatised by her part in her lady's downfall, but I didn't think it was ultimately pulled off as it's still unclear what's stopping her from speaking up.

With theatres always looking for interesting ways to get more female roles into Shakespeare, I thought it was a clever move to turn the Friar into a Sister; one of the few characters to trust and defend Hero despite barely knowing her, Geraldine Alexander's no-nonsense nun makes sense in the role, and may be in part empowering the more forthright Hero we see at the end.

In the most broadly comic subplot, we're in safe hands as Richard Katz' Dogberry avoids the pitfalls actors inexplicably throw themselves into with this role: No overplaying of the malapropisms and a couple of his own thrown in (Gazpacho for Borachio,) he's a bit of a Cockney wide-boy who wants to do the job properly but doesn't mind if it makes him a bit of extra cash on the side, all the whole wrangling Os Leanse's neurodiverse-coded Verges.

The play will always be most famous for its archetypal battling rom-com characters: Pippa Nixon's Beatrice and Ken Nwosu's Benedick really take pleasure in their constant digs at each other, and aren't afraid to call attention to some of Shakespeare's more laboured puns (I'm looking at you, Civil Orange.) They're characters who set the tone for the production, which here includes a very quick, snappy but clear delivery of the lines that propels the evening; they're also suitably lovable when they start to thaw towards each other.

Overall this isn't a very high-concept Much Ado but it's a consistently funny one. It doesn't get bogged down in the toxic elements but doesn't ignore them either - if they're not quite recognisably soldiers the young men are laddish with the slight hint of danger that implies, typified by Adam Long's Don Pedro and his affability which always has the undertone of his own superiority. The lads lads lads approach extends to us seeing Claudio on his stag night, and I don't suppose too many people will be complaining about his outfit for that either.

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 24th of October at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review: The Guilty

2026-07-08T21:50:00.000+01:00

The big price hikes to the cheapest seats since Timothy Sheader took over the Donald and Margot Warehouse mean I don't go as often, and when I do I'm usually alone as not everyone wants to spend £32 to look at the back of an actor's head. When that actor is Russell Tovey though it's a pretty safe bet that both I and my usual theatre companions will be interested, actually, especially with the promise of him being the only actor on stage: Tovey plays Joe, a 999 operator who's not exactly a natural fit for the job; frequently tetchy and impatient with the callers, many of whom are wasting his time and police resources, but some of whom could do with a more sympathetic ear. As it turns out this isn't what he wants to be doing - a police officer suspended from his usual duties, this is his last night on the phone lines before he has to attend a hearing about the event that left his and his colleagues' jobs on the line.

Chloë Moss' play gives us little insights into Joe's life and personality as he deals with the various uncredited voices of the callers, as well as his estranged wife and 6-year-old daughter, but 20 minutes in things take a distinct turn.

This is when he gets a call from Emily, a young mother who can't speak freely, but who Joe starts to piece together has been abducted by her ex-husband and thrown into the back of a van; as well as the immediate danger to her, there's the fact that her two young children have been left alone in their home. While he dispatches teams both to track down the van and look after the children, Joe does some investigating of his own to try and speed things up, cutting corners and using his own phone to try and make sure Emily and her daughter know someone's looking out for them.

There are things about the setup that don't really make a lot of sense - not least of all why an officer under investigation has been given such an important job, and why he's doing it in an otherwise empty office with nobody else there either to support him or to ensure that he doesn't go off script - as in fact he frequently does. Maybe this, and the precise nature of Joe's crime when we finally find it out, makes more sense in Denmark - the play is an adaptation of the film Den Skyldige.

Moss' script, Felix Barrett's production and Tovey's performance are all intense enough to make these logical holes go away once the main plot kicks in though. A lot of shows advertise themselves as thrillers but The Guilty really lives up to the billing, and you can feel yourself physically tightening up with nerves as the story's twists get darker. Anna Watson's lighting and Gareth Fry's sound ramp up the claustrophobic feel as Joe gets dragged into the call, jumping between extremes as he remains callously disconnected from most of the calls, but gets far too personally involved in this one.

About ten minutes from the end there's a nasty little twist that pulls the rug out from both Joe and the audience, before an even bigger one in the closing seconds. It's pulled off via an Astonishing Coup de Théâtre^TM so elaborate the TV screens in the theatre bar show how it was achieved after the show ends; it might have been more effective for me if I'd actually been able to see it properly* and, like the setup, the final reveal requires a certain amount of logic be left at the door. What can't be denied though is that Tovey is taking us on a wild and disturbing enough ride to make most of the plot niggles secondary to the very real thrills and chills.

The Guilty by Chloë Moss, based on the screenplay Den Skyldige by Gustav Möller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen, is booking until the 15th of August at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

*across three decades and five artistic directors, one constant of my visits to the Donmar remains the insistence on blocking shows with crucial elements only visible if you're watching the show straight on, as if more than half the audience aren't on the sides

Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream(Regent's Park Open Air Theatre)

2026-07-03T23:56:00.000+01:00

I doubt too many people would be surprised to know that A Midsummer Night's Dream ranks as the most frequently-produced play in the Open Air Theatre's history, although in my personal experience (this is now my third) they've not yet managed a production that's lived up to the perfect summer setting. Atri Banerjee's won't buck that trend, though at least in a year that's not served the play particularly well it's streets ahead of the Globe's current infantile attempt. The big idea behind Banerjee's version is to build up the role of music in the play, with the fairies becoming a folk band, playing songs Maimuna Memon has composed out of the lyrics Shakespeare has provided, as well as out of a lot of the poetry usually spoken. It's an idea that provides a lot of charm, lifting the scenes that the band underscores, but it does come at the expense of the comedy.

The story begins with preparations for the wedding of Theseus (Olivier Huband) and Hippolyta (Jenny Rainsford,) and it's a strong start for me as I'll always appreciate a production that refuses to be defined entirely by that line about wooing with the sword: Here they're an athletic couple in the middle of a fencing match, and they share the stern lines that initially reinforce Athens' brutal laws rather than being divided by them.

Their legal advice has been sought because Hermia (Hiftu Quasem) is refusing to marry her father's choice, Demetrius (Terique Jarrett.) Instead she's fallen in love with Lysander (Misia Butler,) and they run away to the forest to elope. They're followed by Demetrius and his smitten ex, Helena (Mary Malone,) setting the scene for the mischievous fairies who live there to confuse them with a magic flower that acts as a love potion.

The quartet of lovers can be the play's comic highlight, even if their story takes a while to warm up. Here they never quite get to that point, although Malone does manage to get the most laughs out of the best of the four roles, the increasingly exasperated Helena. But where I thought Naomi Dawson's set might give them options for physical comedy in their big setpiece scene, if anything the stage being a large staircase only seems to hamper what they can do.

The even broader comic subplot of the rude mechanicals also raises more smiles than actual laughs - Nadeem Islam's Bottom is very much a childlike take on the character, who needs to be flattered to stop him throwing a temper tantrum, and responds to Titania's sexual onslaught by helplessly giggling.

The production has also put some thought into how to make a deaf actor playing the main clown an integral part of the evening: Islam isn't completely nonverbal so the show uses a mix of modes of communication; mostly he speaks the lines while signing but occasionally he signs while another actor translates, and in the play-within-a-play he sometimes gets the comedy across through sign alone. There's also some jokes at the expense of his fellow actors forgetting that however loud they call for him when he's lost in the forest, he can't hear them.

There are a couple of relationships that are really nicely built up: Huband's Oberon and Georgia Bruce's Puck have a real playful chemistry that extends to them straying from the text just enough to keep it fun; and the awkwardness between Bottom and Flute (Issam Al Ghussain) on being cast as lovers quickly turns into a tangible fondness for each other.

So it's hard to dislike Banerjee's Dream, and Memon's music does always lift the spirits when it kicks in. But it's not easy to love it either when it misses so many of the comic opportunities the play provides.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare is booking until the 18th of July at the Open Air Theatre, Regents Park.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Theatre review: Sting

2026-07-02T22:54:00.000+01:00

Sophie Swithinbank's Sting draws parallels between the modern-day collusion of men and institutions against women experiencing abuse, and the historical persecution of women accused of witchcraft, through a pair of women conducting an academic study on just that subject: Lily (Phoebe Ladenburg) is a university lecturer specialising in the history of witch hunts, attempting to digitise a unique archive of cases and evidence. She hires a part-time assistant to help speed up the process, but doesn't get quite what she bargained for. Ash (Adelle Leonce) is qualified, educated and well-versed in the subject, but she hides it all a bit too well under hectic first impressions: She arrives for her first shift still drunk and exhausted from the night before's clubbing session, and just as she starts to settle in has a miscarriage.

After a shaky start her new boss quickly warms to her though, and starts to worry about the young woman. Her behaviour's erratic and she frequently comes in with bruises, and Lily suspects her policeman boyfriend Dom (Nick Blood.)

Nancy Medina's production doesn't lack for energy and a sense of unease - as well as the increasing suspicion that Ash is being abused at home, there's a subplot about a potential serial killer case, which Lily has been called in to consult on because of the possible ritual element she's an expert on. There's also the undertone of witchcraft, and little hints - like the omnipresent buzzing of bees, or a radio in the archive that keeps turning itself on to news stories connected to their research - that the story could take on a more literal connection to the supernatural.

Additionally, as Lily starts to worry about Ash being controlled by an obsessive boyfriend, there's the suggestion that her own interest in her assistant may be getting a bit unhealthy. Where Sting is most successful is in the portrayal of Ash herself, with Leonce really impressively selling the mix of obvious damage, and panicked energy that the woman uses to try and get herself through life.

Where it falters though is in pulling all of these potential threads together. Don't get me wrong, as a straightforward story of a woman caught up in a cycle of abuse this is truly affecting and brutal, and the reveal of how Ash and Dom met is something of a minor twist that gives an added layer of depth to the characterisation of both. But the regular hints that this might not be quite the story it appears to be leaves you waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it doesn't it leaves you hanging.

(Slight disclaimer, my being underwhelmed by the ending might be partly down to the performance being interrupted with half an hour to go by a very lengthy technical error, when the aircon failed to clear the dry ice properly, it set off an alarm and in turn made the house lights malfunction. After 15 minutes of being told there was no need to get up because it'd only be a minute, half the audience decided we should probably go to the loo in case we were there all night. Maybe next time instead of a trigger warning for haze just use... a bit less haze.)

(Also, for this show the entrance to the Maria is outdoors on The Cut, but not the door marked Door 8 where everyone was queuing up; no, the completely unmarked door just behind the bar.)

Sting by Sophie Swithinbank is booking until the 18th of July at the Young Vic's Maria.

Running time: Advertised as 1 hour 30 minutes straight through; tonight ran 1 hour 55 minutes.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

Theatre review: Archduke

2026-06-29T22:26:00.000+01:00

I've had varied responses to American playwright Rajiv Joseph's work so far, a writer fond of surreal history plays focusing on people at the sidelines of great events. Though not quite as tight and memorable as Guards at the Taj, the latest of his plays to get a UK premiere (it does seem to take them a few years to make it over here) certainly didn't try my patience in the way Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo did. Archduke is named after the most famous person ever to hold that title, although Franz Ferdinand probably wouldn't have been pleased to find out why he got remembered for so long. The play doesn't, though, actually introduce us to the Archduke himself or stage his assassination, remembered as the inciting incident of the First World War. Instead the opening scene feels like Waiting for Godot but bearable, as two down-on-their-luck young men meet in an abandoned train tunnel and exchange gently confused conversation.

Gavrilo (Stanley Morgan) and Nedeljko (Chris Walley) are eventually joined by Trifco (Abraham Popoola,) a bit more well-informed on exactly what it is they're doing there, but ultimately as much of a pawn in a bigger scheme as the other two.

All three have been offered free medical treatment for their Period Drama Cough by a doctor who promptly diagnosed them with TB and gave them weeks to live. They can't be saved but they can go out with a literal bang and become martyrs for Serbia: The Archduke and his wife will be visiting Sarajevo in a few days' time, and the trio need to assassinate them both to strike a blow for Serbian independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Lyndsey Turner's production is notable for Es Devlin's dramatic set, the murky underground tunnel that curves off into the distance to make the Royal Court's stage look much bigger than it is. Neil Austin's lighting not only fills it with ominous shadows but also facilitates the scene changes, including a final coup de théâtre as the location becomes literal and we join the assassins on an actual train carriage.

But the play itself still makes its mark - Morgan, Walley and Popoola are a volatile but likeable trio, not very bright but smart enough to understand how the world's inequalities have conspired to lead them to their current situation. It also leaves them vulnerable to indoctrination: For much of the time what most attracts them to commit a notorious act is the prospect of a comfortable overnight train ride with free sandwiches, but the tightly wound Gavrilo is ripe to become a true believer.

There's obvious modern-day parallels to be found in this radicalisation using platitudes of religion and misogyny (Janice Connolly's grandmotherly Sladjana is the only woman on stage, good to cook treats for the boys but easily dismissed as a witch when she tries to suggest a different way forward.) This does bracket it with many other recent works about toxic masculinity and the overall point is sometimes vague - one danger of a writer's work regularly taking a decade to cross the Atlantic is that other people might have already written sharper jabs at the subject since then.

It's pretty consistently funny though, and a final scene in which the men imagine what might happen to them when they reach Sarajevo - a catalogue of disaster and coincidence that's all based on what actually did happen - is a reminder that this comedy retelling isn't entirely fanciful, and huge world events can result from farcical circumstances.

Archduke by Rajiv Joseph is booking until the 25th of July at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.

Theatre review: Relics

2026-06-26T23:04:00.000+01:00

It's not quite Paddington but Ben Ockrent's Relics also begins with a bear going on a journey: As the safety curtain goes up on Joanna Scotcher's set a teddy bear gets caught in it, before being dropped into a packing box. It's a metaphor for much of what happens in the next couple of hours, as cherished memories of childhood and family get unceremoniously turned upside down when four siblings meet at their family home, a week or so after their mother's funeral. They're dividing up the possessions they most want to keep before selling the house off, and quickly resolve themselves into the dynamic they've always shared: Eldest Olivia (Sally Phillips) has always been the one to take on most of the responsibility, but with that has come bossiness, and she's decided the way they're going to divvy everything up.

Always the prodigal first son, Jonny (JJ Feild) has a borderline-sociopathic selfishness, and the fact that he's even turned up is a surprise to his two younger siblings. Rob (Sam Swainsbury) has been the peacemaker to the point of becoming a pushover, and youngest Michelle (Charly Clive) has a rebellious streak but is sick of being treated as the baby.

Ockrent's family comedy-drama gets a very funny production from Michael Longhurst, the first act largely consisting of us getting to know the siblings through their bickering, anecdotes and family updates. But the script is also cleverly seeding plot points as well, and when the creepy old painting that hung in their mother's bedroom turns out to have an unexpected provenance, the story takes a turn into a whole new, morally murky area.

I don't want to go into too much detail because the way the plot's twists take the play into new territory every so often is part of what's both fun and challenging about it: Ockrent and Longhurst manage to balance both serious discussions about Second World War atrocities and an extended lip-sync to "Total Eclipse of the Heart" without it feeling like either is out of place.

A lot of this comes from the cast pitching their performances at just the right level of mild hysteria for both physical comedy and an unexpected, huge moral quandary. Relics really works in both the comic and dramatic sides of its setup, and it's also always satisfying to see so many throwaway gags turn out to be important later on. (Plus the plot strand involving Camille Pissarro in Norwood makes this the second play I've seen this year to hang on a 19th century European painter having spent time in South East London.)

Relics by Ben Ockrent is booking until the 18th of July at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review: The Misanthrope

2026-06-25T22:10:00.000+01:00

So far Indhu Rubasingham's first year running the National has provided a run of hit shows for other directors, but the ones she's chosen for herself have met with a more muted response. I personally enjoyed a lot of what Bacchae was doing but a similarly loose reinvention of a classic in the Lyttelton hit bum notes for me. Martin Crimp adapts Molière's The Misanthrope as a vehicle for Sandra Oh and the kind of exhausted stubbornness common to many of her screen characters: Oh's Alice is a highly respected and successful literary novelist, but her pronouncements outside of her books don't make her many friends. She's outspoken about inequality, feminism and race, and has recently been attacked in the press for refusing to renege on comments supporting a particular cause (it's unnamed but strongly implied to be Palestine.)

In fact much of what she says seems to me perfectly justified in causing her anger and frustration, but it's the way she expresses it that's the problem: As her best (possibly only) friend, the people-pleasing gay playwright John (Paul Chahidi) reminds her, her lack of tact is resulting in death threats.

On the other hand she seems to have infinite patience for her boyfriend, the actor and recovering addict Stefan (Tom Mison.) Following a messy divorce from Elaine (Jemima Rooper,) he's had a lot of bad publicity and his agent Claire (Abigail Cruttenden) is trying to avoid any more from his new association with Alice.

Rubasingham's production starts, if not entirely promisingly, at least not badly, with Oh and Chahidi as the clashing friends sparkling well off each other. The same can't be said of Oh and Mison, and however much the script acknowledges it (there's a lot of "I know he's hot but...") it's hard to see why he of all people would be the one to break through her cast-iron defences.

Crimp's Molière adaptations stick to the verse of the original plays, and I generally struggle to get on with the awkward plodding deliveries that result, dropping in and out of verse schemes and never quite leaving the actors looking comfortable in what they're saying (Mison was constantly losing his place tonight but everyone gets rendered fairly wooden.)

But for me the biggest issue was how unfocused Crimp's play is. I usually find these French farces hard to summarise, but the skill in them is that all the convoluted plots make sense when you watch them. No longer really a farce, this version doesn't have that kind of tightness - technically the crux of the plot should be Alice ruthlessly critiquing young writer Esmée (Imogen Elliott,) who proceeds to try and get Alice cancelled online (she's also the daughter of Alice's publisher but the possible consequences of this are quickly forgotten.)

But this too gets lost in the long list of Crimp's broad - often deserving, but still scattershot - list of satirical targets. Everything from one of Stefan's publicity team (Freddie MacBruce) constantly using methods ranging from the unethical to the downright illegal to clear his client's digital footprint, to a playwright who writes devised versions of the classics then stages them in a glass box - ironically these digs come from Chahidi, who might find the description suspiciously familiar. It's all a waste of comic talents like Chahidi, Rooper and Rina Fatania, and while Robert Jones' set and costumes give us a memorable final coup de théâtre that takes us back to the story's Baroque origins, the chandeliers can't make up for the spark missing from the evening.

The Misanthrope by Martin Crimp after Molière is booking until the 1st of August at the National Theatre's Lyttelton.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review: Slaughterhouse-Five

2026-06-22T21:58:00.000+01:00

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books considered unfilmable and unstageable, which inevitably means people have attempted both. The latest to try a stage version are a company named after the novel's recurring phrase every time anyone mentions death: So It Goes. It's a refrain that comes from the Tralfamadorians, aliens who abduct Billy Pilgrim (Patrick McAndrew) in the late 1960s on the day of his daughter's wedding, and take him to their own planet to be exhibited at a zoo. The aliens experience the world four-dimensionally, meaning time isn't linear to them, so death or even the destruction of the universe - which they know they'll be accidentally responsible for but can't or won't change - aren't notable events since every other moment still exists simultaneously. He's eventually returned to Earth after a long time, but also to the exact moment he left it.

As a human he can't experience time in the same way as his captors but he does inherit a version of it, jumping backwards and forwards within his own life, ~~hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home~~.

It's a conceit that sets up the non-linear storytelling device that takes us back to various events in Billy's life, particularly the biggest source of his trauma during the Second World War. Not so much his time in a prisoner-of-war camp, but what happened next when the Americans were taken to Dresden to be put to work. They're staying in the titular slaughterhouse when the infamous and controversial Allied bombing raid flattens the city and its largely civilian population. As one of the few survivors, Billy is also left responsible for dealing with what comes next.

Billy's experiences cleaning up the bodies and the knowledge that his own side had done this under the guise of being the good guys will haunt him for the rest of his life, and adopting the Tralfamadorians’ zen-like approach is his way of coping. Eric Simonson’s adaptation initially uses a lot of narration to get around the tricksy storytelling style, and Alex Crook, Ethan Reid and Sofia Engstrand, playing all the supporting characters, also take turns as Vonnegut himself blurring the lines between his own experiences in Dresden and the fiction he’s built around them.

Increasingly director Douglas Baker, also the production’s video designer, uses the latter to expand the story’s world, and the four-strong cast spend a lot of time interacting with projections and animations. Just as the actors’ performance style jumps between the naturalistic and the cartoonishly grotesque, so Baker’s video and Calum Perrin’s audio takes in everything from pre-recorded material to toy soldiers being projected onto the screen to represent the German captors.

Leaning into the absurdity and confusion is probably the wisest approach rather than trying to make something linear out of the shifting storylines, and where it’s most successful is in the way moments of strange twisted wisdom come out of the chaos, often in the sci-fi books of an obscure author (Crook,) beloved by Billy’s mental hospital roommate (Reid.) The most notable of these is probably the story of another alien race that comes to Earth to correct the way the Bible tells its message, to stop the ease with which people can twist its meaning.

I didn’t think I’d read Slaughterhouse-Five but not long into Simonson’s version it started to feel so familiar I think I must have done, decades ago. Not recently enough for it to be an easy show to get a handle on: Its frenetic energy and leaping from storytelling style to storytelling style is impressive but also exhausting to watch (or maybe the weather didn’t help, although at least The Little is now air-conditioned.) It also feels like it dips its toe into the horrors that inspired the story rather than really confronting them, but then maybe that’s the point of the central character’s coping strategy.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Eric Simonson, based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, is booking until the 4th of July at Southwark Playhouse Borough’s Little Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Henry Hu.

Theatre review: Beetlejuice

2026-06-18T23:31:00.000+01:00

An on-and-off hit in New York - it's opened and closed there multiple times since its original Broadway run was scuppered by Covid - Eddie Perfect (music and lyrics,) Scott Brown and Anthony King's (book) Beetlejuice now arrives in the West End for a run that seems to predict a similar mixed level of enthusiasm: It's at the huge Prince Edward Theatre, but has been advertised as a limited year-long run. Following the broad strokes of the Tim Burton film but deviating from the plot when it suits it, the story sees Lydia Deetz (Hannah Nordberg) move into a haunted house with her father Charles (Alasdair Harvey) and his new girlfriend (officially Lydia's life coach,) Delia (Aimie Atkinson.) Still mourning her recently deceased mother and very much stuck in the "denial" stage of grief, when Lydia discovers that the previous owners are still haunting the house, it convinces her there must be a way to see her mother again.

Adam (David Hunter) and Barbara (Chelsea Halfpenny) are a mild-mannered young couple who died in a freak accident, and were prevented from moving on to the afterlife by the meddling spirit Beetlejuice (David Fynn.)

Unlike most of the living Lydia can see the ghosts, and hatches a plan with them to haunt the others and scare them away from badly redecorating the beloved home. When that doesn't work she says Beetlejuice's name three times, releasing him to become visible to the living, cause much more tangible havoc, and put into motion his own nefarious plan.

Beetlejuice is an agent of chaos and the show makes sure to stress that from the start: Fynn's version appears much earlier in the musical than in the film, essentially serving as narrator and letting the audience know in no uncertain terms that this will not be following the original script and, like him, the show itself will do as it pleases. To start with I thought this could backfire - sometimes a hugely popular character has his stage time restricted with good reason, and after about half an hour of him being almost constantly present it's getting to be too much of a good thing.

Fortunately Fynn starts to get a few more breaks after this and the rest of the cast get a chance: Nordberg is a strong and likeable young lead, Hunter and Halfpenny entertainingly inept ghosts, Atkinson brings her own brand of chaotic scattiness to contrast with Fynn's anarchy, and among the supporting cast Chasity Crisp has a small but memorable role as a guest at the famous dinner party where all the guests get possessed to a soundtrack of Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song."

As for Perfect's actual original songs they all do the job of entertaining and moving the story along - lots of funny lyrics although the tunes are fairly samey and forgettable. The decision to avoid copying the film directly has mixed results: Most importantly it avoids the aggressively "Will? This? Do?!" results of The Devil Wears Prada, coming closer to the refreshed feel of Mean Girls.

It also means that even if it's not quite a genuinely edgy and dangerous show - it's still a huge-budget Broadway musical after all and Fynn has palpably less genuine sense of malice than Michael Keaton did in the original - it can at least tap into that sense of anarchy. This comes in Fynn's constant fourth wall-breaking, trolling anyone in the audience who might have mistaken this for a suitable show to bring kids to, embracing the grisly comedy of the premise and even getting in some pointed topical and political jokes about paedophilia and book-burning (although the utterly perfunctory Keir Starmer gag could do with some work.) There's also a second-act opening number from a girl scout with a heart condition (Rachel MacDougall) which takes great glee in the prospect of a little girl being literally scared to death.

On the other hand the writers' freedom to play around with the story does eventually translate into freedom to tie it up in knots, and the second act starts to get overlong and convoluted. But Alex Timbers' production doesn't skimp on the spectacle, from Connor Gallagher's choreography in William Ivey Long's costumes, to Kenneth Posner's lighting and Jeremy Chernick's special effects enabling huge quick-changes to David Korins' vast set. There's a suitably epic scale to the whole endeavour, but apart from the times when it gets a bit too tangled up in itself it's also got the substance to back up the flash.

Beetlejuice by Eddie Perfect, Scott Brown and Anthony King, based on the film by Tim Burton, from a screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren, and a story by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson, is booking until the 17th of April at the Prince Edward Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

Theatre review: Dark of the Moon

2026-06-16T23:17:00.000+01:00

Look, none of us are perfect, I never said I always choose which shows to see for the purest of reasons, and whomst amongst us can say they've never slowed down to look at a car crash? When I saw Stranger Things: The First Shadow a couple of years ago I assumed that the subplot about the high school kids putting on an unbelievably cheesy school play featured a deliberate parody of Twilight, all angsty teenage love between human and supernatural characters. When Dark of the Moon turned out to be a real Broadway show from 1945, which genuinely did become a school drama staple in the next couple of decades, I predicted it wouldn't be long before someone revived the real thing as a curiosity. I was expecting Howard D Richardson and William Berney's actual original play to resurface in some small scale, but instead we get a full-blown new musical.

Jonathan Prince (book,) Lindy Robbins, Dave Bassett & Steve Robson's (music and lyrics) show takes us to an Appalachian mining town where the humans wear denim and sing bluegrass, while in the mountains invisible witches wear laddered tights and fur bikinis and sing rock.

They are led by Josie Benson's Conjure Woman and Gary Turner's Conjure Man - essentially Ursula the Sea Witch and the Count from What We Do In The Shadows, respectively. When John the Witch Boy (Glenn Adamson) falls for a human girl, he asks to be turned human so he can be with her. The Conjure Woman is the only one who can turn him human. The Conjure Woman really does not want him to become human. At no point does it occur to the Conjure Woman that she could just... not turn him human, so she does, but with Terms and Conditions of the mwahahahaha variety.

So John becomes visible to humans and takes on the persona of a guitar douchebag student who carries a guitar with him everywhere so he can never play it. This inevitably makes Barbara Allen (Lauren Jones) fall for him, but the bargain he's struck says he'll gradually turn human over a year unless one of them cheats on the other in that time. If that happens John will turn into a Witch Boy again while Barbara Allen (everyone always calls Barbara Allen by her full name, including to Barbara Allen's face, like Tracy Jordan to Liz Lemon) will die.

Georgie Rankcom's production could definitely have played this tongue-in-cheek, and I could almost admire it for trying to take the thing seriously, if the end result wasn't just us laughing at the show instead of with it. In part this is because at every turn the story chooses the most hilariously banal option available to it, not least of all the fact that the mystical Witch Boy is called... John. He proposes to Barbara Allen over potato salad, and The Conjure Woman decides to stop the marriage because when humans marry they invariably stay faithful forever.

She hatches a plan to sabotage the couple by doing... absolutely nothing as far as I can tell.

What the chorus of witches does do is regularly turn up on the roofs of Libby Todd's set to sneer at Witch Boy, crawling out of the windows to cackle at him then awkwardly trying to crawl backwards into them again. They taunt him by calling him "Witch Boy" which (a) yes he is a Witch Boy, this is the main thing that's been established about him, (b) they are all also witches and (c) everyone they know is also a witch so they really shouldn't find this so hilarious, it'd be like the humans taking the piss out of Barbara Allen for being human.

What the humans actually take the piss out of Barbara Allen for is being a slut. No, no, there will be no need for any backstory to this. The most subversive thing she seems to have ever done sexually is not wanting to have sex with Marvin (Samuel Murray,) to whom she's been promised since birth like a mediaeval princess. John attacking Marvin with a bolt of lightning is what finally alerts the town to his otherness, the fact that he's been constantly openly using his residual witch magic in front of them not having tipped them off before.

Not all the jokes are unintended, but the unintended ones are the only ones that land - if you ever want to know true silence, check out the audience after the Preacher (Martin Callaghan) does one of the running gags where he slightly paraphrases a bible verse. The cast properly throw themselves into all this, with Jones the one who truly transcends the material, giving a vocal and emotional performance that really stands out. But if I went into this with the slightly cynical idea that it might be the right kind of bad (and who knows, maybe the hope it might actually be good,) I did get the car crash I was there for.

In the end John the Witch Boy learns the moral that while the witches have always claimed to understand love, actually they don't. Which is weird, because all through the show the witches have been bragging that they don't understand love because human emotions are beneath them, but actually it turns out John isn't the first and they keep falling for mortals. So technically the moral is the complete opposite of that.

Dark of the Moon by Jonathan Prince, Lindy Robbins, Dave Bassett & Steve Robson, based on a play by Howard D Richardson and William Berney, is booking until the 8th of August at the Charing Cross Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Tom Bowles.

Theatre review: Equus

2026-06-13T23:13:00.000+01:00

30 years after graduating I still feel compelled to see the four plays I worked on in my directing module at university, whenever I hear of one being revived somewhere I can get to. Now on the fourth production of it I've seen, Equus easily has the top spot of most regularly revived. I'd originally planned to make a Peter Shaffer-themed weekend of it last week, but when the Sunday performance at the Menier was cancelled I had to reschedule - I guess two Saturdays in a row is still a themed season of a kind. Last week Black Comedy was very much a throwback to the 1960s, and Equus is very much rooted in the 1970s both in its references and in the countercultural R.D. Laing psychiatric theories that inspired it, so why does it seem to hold up better? Lindsay Posner's production certainly keeps the original setting, from the otherwise long-forgotten advertising jingles to the child psychiatrist smoking in sessions with his patient.

Toby Stephens plays Dr Martin Dysart, who takes on the case of 17-year-old Alan Strang (Noah Valentine,) a previously unpreposessing boy who, seemingly out of nowhere, blinded six horses at the stables where he worked. As Dysart uses various techniques to get to the truth, he starts to wonder if "curing" the boy is to actually deprive him of a primal connection the psychiatrist himself wishes he could access.

I try to approach each version of a familiar play afresh, but I was very aware that I'd left Ned Bennett's 2019 production feeling as if I'd seen the play with new eyes, and that this one would have a lot to do to match that. It doesn't - in many ways it feels like a pretty standard retelling of the story, although it definitely does have an angle that it focuses on. It doesn't quite resurrect the onstage seating from the original production that Shaffer was so enamoured by, but with Paul Farnsworth's thrust stage with benches as the only furniture, and most of the cast spending their offstage time sitting among the audience, there's certainly more than a nod to the conceit.

Where it does feel like there's been a specific focus is the homoeroticism in the story. I heard one audience member during the interval complaining that the overt homoeroticism had been tacked on, which I definitely don't agree with: Even on the page, it's a gay writer telling a story about a young man who can't perform sexually with a woman because he's being watched by the object of his worship, played by a group of half-naked male ballet dancers, clearly nothing queer about that.

Still, it has been heightened here. For better or worse, one of the things Equus is best known for is its extendedFULL FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!at the climax, but Posner goes against the text and has Valentine strip off not once but twice. (Shaffer specified that at the end of the first act Alan doesn't get fully naked but does at the end of the second, to show that the latter time is when he fully commits to "abreacting" his experience.) As he's riding the shoulders of the actor playing the horse Nugget, there may have been the practical issue there as well of the actors having to make so much intimate contact - something that only really occured to me watching this version where Valentine spends the scene with his genitals resting on the back of Ed Mitchell's neck, Intimacy Coordinator Clare Foster really earning her paycheck here.

By contrast in the final violent scene Alan and Jill (Bella Aubin) stay clothed for their unsuccessful sexual encounter, Valentine only getting naked again when he confronts the men playing the horses he worships. Mitchell and the other five dancers (Luke Hodkinson, Aristide Lyons, Zach Parkin, Tommi Sutton and Moses Ward) are a strong physical presence throughout the play, often joining together to form one giant horse-god, and again James Cousins' movement direction doesn't hold back on the skin-on-skin contact.

The other thing that I found notable about the production was that Colin Mace and Emma Cunniffe as Frank and Dora Strang really do seem like the much older parents that they're described as, which I don't remember coming across as strongly before. They're out of their depth dealing with a teenager but this also explains at least some part of why Alan grew up quite so otherworldly and detached from his peers.

The downside of focusing so strongly on the homoeroticism and physicality of the story is that the part where it bleeds into a twisted sense of religion isn't as much under the spotlight, and Stephens' Dysart isn't distinct enough in his own mental breakdown to make us see how this is important. It means that, where I always read the psychiatrist as being the central character on the page, this production takes us back to Alan at the heart of the story, and Valentine does give us nuance as the teenager starts to reveal himself psychologically as well as physically.

Equus by Peter Shaffer is booking until the 4th of July at the Menier Chocolate Factory, then from the 14th to the 25of of July at the Theatre Royal Bath.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.

Theatre review: Police Cops - The Original and BADASS Be Thy Name

2026-06-12T23:12:00.000+01:00

Although there's no sign of The Musical making a return any time soon, the three original, lo-fi comedy shows from Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe aka Police Cops continue to resurface every so often. I've previously caught Police Cops in Space, and now marking their 10th anniversary as a comedy troupe, the three shows have all been playing in rotation. This includes a London residency at Soho Theatre (the one that's actually in Soho,) where I caught the two I hadn't seen before. First up The Original, which was the story they later adapted into The Musical: A 1980s-set American cop show parody in which Hunt's rookie Jimmy Johnson teams up with Roe's grizzled old cop Harrison to take down Parkinson's Fernandez, a Mexican criminal who's sometimes Police Chief Molloy. And also sometimes a cat.

Then their 2019 show BADASS Be Thy Name, a tribute to the 1990s Madchester dance scene, in which Roe's Tommy wants to ditch his dead-end job to put on a bucket hat and take drugs at the Hacienda, but instead ends up becoming a trainee vampire slayer to Parkinson's Father Badass (His drink of choice? Bourbon. His biscuit of choice? Bourbon.) They have to foil a plan by the vampires to bring the actual Devil (Hunt) to Earth at the turn of the Millenium, when he intends to eat all the sweets.

As usual there's little point trying to actually nail down what works about the team's chaotic mix of scripted and improvised comedy - The Original was tonight plagued by mishaps, most but not all caused by Roe's faulty microphone, but since so much of it involves ad-libs and the cast trying to make each other corpse the mistakes hardly detracted from anything. As for BADASS, highlights include the cast's constant references to incredibly specific '90s TV moments, the Devil's big musical number about sweets, the way Roe and Parkinson make Hunt's head explode, and an action figure-based chase sequence. There's not quite the partial nudity from Roe that I would normally expect, but there is the character of Mr Bum-Bum Man, who speaks out of Hunt's arse cheeks, and which in an intimate space is the kind of view people normally charge extra for on Onlyfans. Obviously this is recommended wherever they pop up next; I've now completed the set but given how much of it is constantly rejigged or outright made up on the spot I wouldn't rule out return visits to any of their shows when they inevitably come back to London.

Police Cops - The Original and BADASS Be Thy Name by Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe continue to tour and are available to stream.

Running time: 50 mins straight through / 1 hour straight through.

Theatre review: Under the Shadow

2026-06-11T23:21:00.000+01:00

While I'm generally happy to trust in Rupert Goold's judgement and have been booking every show in his final Almeida season, the announcement that the latest was an adaptation of an Iranian film about the 1980s Iran-Iraq War seemed like it might be a hard sell to get any of my friends to join me, so I only bought a ticket for myself. Maybe if I'd realised it was based on a horror film I might have got an extra seat, as there's a couple of people that Under the Shadow would have appealed to. Set in 1988 Tehran, Carmen Nasr's adaptation of Babak Anvari's film could of course be using supernatural horrors as a metaphor for war and carnage in general, but in fact the story being told here is much more specific to the time, the place, and particularly the experience of women whose rights have recently been curtailed, perhaps more than some yet realise.

Shideh (Leila Farzad) is married to a doctor, and was planning to become one herself, but paused her studies when she had her daughter Dorsa (Esma Akar, Atlanta Chaniac Golding or Erin Jemmotte.)

By the time she tries to return to medical school she finds out that, thanks to some left-leaning political activity during the revolution (the details of exactly what she did that offended the regime even she isn't privy to) she's been placed on a blacklist. We join the story as she gets news that she's highly unlikely ever to be allowed to return to medical school and become a doctor. Shideh can't accept her husband Iraj's (Nicholas Karimi) opinion that she should lean into her new future as a housewife and mother, let alone that they should move from Tehran back to his family to escape the bombing.

The air raids are the play's method of slowly introducing the other residents of the apartment block, with whom they have to share the basement when the sirens go off: The drily sardonic Mrs Fakur (Souad Faress) is a highlight and frequent visitor to their flat, while upstairs Pargol (Transphobia Ltd Employee Nadia Albina) cares for her ailing father Mr Bijari (Bijan Daneshmand.)

Meanwhile the landlords (Mona Goodwin and Rachid Sabitri) have recently taken in their orphaned nephew Mehdi (Jago Agrawal, Rohan Berry or Adi Gimziunas,) who provides the first seeds of something creepier: Seemingly mute since his parents' death in front of him, he's apparently been whispering in Dorsa's ear with stories and warnings about evil djinn that are coming for her from above. After Iraj is called to the front and a missile hits the building, killing Mr Bijari, these shadows appear to have started literally haunting the flat.

This is definitely a slow build that doesn't even get its first jump-scare in until just before the interval, but the work Nadia Latif's production has put into building the scene and the characters pays off, keeping us interested in the story and invested in them getting out of danger - both the human and supernatural kind. Once the djinn do start to appear Khadija Raza's costumes give them a suitably eerie look, Ben Stones' set gives them plenty of nooks and crannies to appear out of, and Scott Penrose's illusions help complete the creepy effect.

It still won't end up ranking as the scariest in the recent batch of stage frighteners, a psychological horror that definitely leans more on the psychological side of that description than the horror. It's effective at what it does though, holding the attention in its gradually encroaching dread, and making clear the connection in the heart of the story with a woman feeling like she's losing everything, and having trouble holding onto what she has left.

Under the Shadow by Carmen Nasr, based on the film by Babak Anvari, is booking until the 4th of July at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Theatre review: Are You Watching?

2026-06-09T22:09:00.000+01:00

The Royal Court Upstairs seems to be making a new specialist subject out of hardcore prawn of the most disturbing and misogynistic kind, as six months after Prawn Play the venue takes another - different, angrier and more scattergun but no less memorable - stab at the genre in Georgie Dettmer's debut play Are You Watching Question Mark. Jess Edwards' production takes place on a tiled traverse set by Georgia Wilmot, at one end of which are bunk beds with colourful bedding. The childlike setting is at odds with the actual, unnamed teenage girls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) we meet there, whose sleepover chat revolves around one-upping each other in the most disturbing thing they've seen online. Inevitably this involves a lot of violent prawn, and the particular focus becomes a series of videos Ali's character has seen.

These are based on the notorious recent real-life case of a French woman drugged and assaulted by her husband and multiple strangers, but along with the horror the girl mixes in some glee at the grisly story this provides her to entertain her friend with.

We will eventually get to a twist in quite why she's so keen to share these videos with her friend, but in between these conversations the girls also serve as audience for the fragments performed by the rest of the cast: These include a Journalist (Maimuna Memon) taking part in a clinical trial about women's reactions to extreme prawn, that she will find to be more invasive than she expected, in more senses than one.

Memon also plays a woman who's convinced her boyfriend (Billy Bolt) to film them acting out an intruder fantasy that includes a real hammer; he seems to have put more thought into keeping the role-play safe than she has. Lucy McCormick plays the mother of a missing teenager whose police handlers (Memon and Bolt) seem more concerned with how to sell her daughter's image to the public than actually finding her; as well as a Hollywood star whose nudes have leaked and been used to create increasingly disturbing deepfake videos, and who can't seem to convince her agent (Nicholas Rowe) of quite how violated she feels by them.

And finally deepfakes appear in an even more disturbing context when a son (Bolt) finds out about the AI images his father (Rowe) has been creating on his laptop. With the exception of the story about the missing girl - which takes a turn into a very different area which I really thought could have been a play in its own right and I'd have liked to have seen explored more - these fragments work well on their own and as a loosely connected tapestry. If there's a running theme beyond sheer rage and frustration it's in how having this imagery so accessible can desensitise us not only to the violence itself, but also to the fact that those close to us might be much more deeply emotionally scarred than we first realise.

All the screens the characters look at are mercifully blank, although XANA's sound design is disturbing enough that the production's trigger warnings feel the need to assure us the soundtrack isn't real. As an exploration of the place violent fantasy has in the modern world and particularly for women Are You Watching? has a broad sweep - not all of it critical, as the thread of the young couple with the hammer, which is hinted to be connected to one of the horrific videos the journalist sees, actually ends up with a lovely time had by all, suggesting that there is a place for exploring this in a healthy way. It's certainly a blunt instrument of a first play but an often effective one.

Are You Watching? by Georgie Dettmer is booking until the 4th of July at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs (returns and day tickets only.)

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Madeleine Penfold.

Theatre review: Black Comedy

2026-06-06T17:34:00.000+01:00

1960s British farces rarely get revived these days, generally because they're built on attitudes and situations that haven't exactly aged well (with the exception of What The Butler Saw, which gets away with it because how horrible those attitudes and situations are is basically the whole point.) But back when I was in school our drama club did a scene from Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy so - about as long after that performance as it was from the play's 1965 debut - I gave the Orange Tree's revival a chance in what I had originally planned to be a weekend of Shaffer, pairing it with his more famous Equus. This is a much less violent affair, other than in the slapstick sense: The high concept is that the play begins in what the audience sees as complete darkness, but in which the characters can see perfectly well.

Impoverished sculptor Brindsley (Joe Bannister) and his fiancée Carol (Leah Haile) are preparing for a visit from millionaire art collector Georg Bamberger (Javier Marzan,) who might become his patron if he likes the work. To impress him they've "borrowed" neighbour Harold's antique furniture without his knowledge.

But just as they're preparing there's a blackout in the story, which in the play's conceit means the lights go up and the audience can see everything while the characters stumble blindly. With Harold (Simon Manyonda) returning unexpectedly early, the young couple have to sneak all his furniture into the neighbouring flat in the dark. Complicating matters are Carol's demanding father Colonel Melkett (Jason Barnett,) nervous, teetotal neighbour Miss Furnival (Julia Hills,) who keeps "accidentally" downing alcoholic drinks in the dark, and electrician Schuppanzigh (Chris Chilton,) whose voice is indistinguishable from Bamberger's.

The play doesn't suffer as badly as it might from the cultural changes of the last 61 years, although this seems to be largely because Caroline Steinbeis' production has smoothed out the more offensive stuff - certainly Manyonda's performance doesn't give away the fact that Harold is written as a big old camp gay stereotype (why yes this is the part I played at school, why do you ask?)

Unfortunately little else seems to have travelled into the 21st century either, particularly the jokes, which struggle to raise much of a smile. Granted, a lot of the laughs here come from the absurd physical comedy of characters flailing in the dark, but as Simon Daw's set has put a scaffolding tower leading to the upstairs bedroom in front of what is usually an unobstructed view, I didn't always catch what the cast were doing until a few seconds after everyone else, and had to rely on other audience members' laughter to figure out that anything had happened at all.

Patricia Allison is a reliably entertaining addition when she arrives, late on in the play, as Brindsley's ex-girlfriend (although he doesn't seem to have told her that) Clea, and with the target now being the philandering young man we get some fun moments as she casually announces a whole list of bedroom kinks to the unseen assembled party. It's mercifully short at least, but as I suspected it hasn't aged well - just not in quite the ways I was expecting.

Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer is booking until the 11th of July at the Orange Tree Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Sam Taylor.