Theatre review: Till The Stars Come Down

Beth Steel's Till The Stars Come Down has been compared to Chekhov, and though it owes as much to Coronation Street it does centre on three sisters: In a Northern former coalmining town Hazel (Lucy Black) and Maggie (Aisling Loftus) are helping youngest sister Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) get ready for her wedding. While Hazel lives down the road with her husband John (Adrian Bower) and teenage daughters Leanne (Ruby Thompson) and Sarah (Cadence Williams, alternating with Lillie Babb and Elodie Blomfield,) and Maggie rather abruptly moved away for work some months earlier, Sylvia has stayed at home ever since their mother's death, keeping their father Tony (Alan Williams) company. So her wedding represents both moving on from the past, and a day where she can be the focus of attention rather than the supportive one, but she's got a bad feeling something's going to go wrong.

Theatre review: The Winter's Tale (RSC/RST)

Having clawed her way off my list of creatives I avoid like the plague with a decent Macbeth and a very good King Lear, Yaël Farber now makes her RSC debut by continuing her successful recent strategy of tackling Shakespeare plays where not having a sense of humour is not really an obstacle. Yes, I know The Winter's Tale is officially classed as a comedy, but you know as well as I do that having one scene where a con-man (Trevor Fox) pickpockets a hot young shepherd (Ryan Duval) doesn't make it a laugh riot, any more than having a scene where a porter does a dozen puns about equivocation doesn't make Macbeth a knockabout farce. The story of two kings who violently turn on members of their own family, Sicilia's Leontes (Transphobia Inc Employee Bertie Carvel) has been best friends with his Bohemian counterpart Polixenes (John Light) since childhood.

Theatre review: The Estate

As a result of having to close the Dorfman for the best part of a year for maintenance works, the final season of RuNo shows at the National Theatre's smallest space is launching just as the ones in the two larger venues are coming to a close. The opener for this three-play season comes from a first-time playwright, Shaan Sahota, and mixes lively political comedy with a much bleaker look at generational trauma in a patriarchal society. Angad Singh (Adeel Akhtar) is a minor member of the Shadow Cabinet, but when the leader of his party has to resign because of a scandal, he becomes a surprise favourite to replace him. This big upheaval in his career coincides with one in his personal life, as his father dies unexpectedly, leaving him his entire property portfolio. Though his sisters Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and Malicka (Shelley Conn) are used to being overlooked, not even being mentioned in the will still comes as a slap in the face.

Theatre review: Burlesque

I haven't really been following all the gossip about the troubled production of Burlesque, but I did suspect everything might not be going swimmingly early on when Todrick Hall was initially announced as one of the stars, then as the director and choreographer, and finally as one of the co-writers. Given that those things would ideally be worked out in the reverse order, it did give the impression of a temp getting hired to help out on a project for a couple of weeks, then ending up running it a few months later when everyone who actually knows what they're doing quits, why yes I do speak from experience. Also Hall has publicly stated that the show got rushed into the Savoy when it suddenly became available and nobody was prepared for it, so that was a clue as well. Anyway the finished product only really shows signs of its troubled origins when the lights are on and there's people on stage.

Theatre review: Four Play

The King's Head's new venue may be so deep down in the ground that you occasionally spot Peter Cushing down there telling a prehistoric bird it can't mesmerise him because he's British, but it seems to be able to attract decent casts to make the trek regardless, including a number of recent West End musical stars for its revival of Jake Brunger's Four Play. Rafe (Lewis Cornay) and Pete (Zheng Xi Yong) have been together for seven and a half years, and have only ever slept with each other. They're outwardly the picture of domestic bliss, but lately Pete in particular has been wondering if they're missing something. They hatch a plan to approach a mutual acquaintance they both fancy, not for a threesome but to each arrange a night with him, catering to the different fantasies they harbour about him.

Theatre review: Sing Street

John Carney's 2016 sleeper hit Sing Street tried out a stage adaptation in New York and Boston in 2019, and presumably Covid was part of the reason things went quiet for it after that. Now the full-blown musical by Enda Walsh (book,) Carney and Gary Clark (music and lyrics) gets its London premiere in Rebecca Taichman's production at the Lyric Hammersmith, and as I loved the film and quickly added its original songs to my playlist it had a lot to live up to. Set in 1980s Dublin, a time of hardship when even middle class families are struggling to make ends meet, teenager Conor (Sheridan Townsley) is taken out of his private school and sent to one run by the notoriously abusive Christian Brothers, where he quickly makes a nemesis out of the sadistic principal Brother Baxter (Lloyd Hutchinson.)

Theatre review: The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare's Globe)

George Fouracres seems to be absolutely speeding his way through the big Shakespearean comic roles at the Globe, and has already got to Sir John Falstaff - the slightly alternate Merry Wives of Windsor version who tends to be portrayed as a bit fluffier than the manipulative old thief of the Henriad. Although maybe not so different in Sean Holmes' new take, which leans into the fact that, like many a later farce, this one also builds its embarrassments and misunderstandings on some pretty dark motivations. So Fouracres' Falstaff has to win the audience's sympathy through the humiliations he's put through - he's a bombastic bully who makes jokes about drowning puppies, and plots to seduce two married women less out of lust than malice: He'll enjoy humiliating their husbands by cuckolding them, and maybe burgle their houses as well while he's there.

Theatre review: Poor Clare

13th century noblewoman Chiara Offreduccio was an early disciple of Francis of Assisi, the monk who advocated renouncing all earthly goods and helping the poor. Becoming convinced by his sermons that her wealthy family's attempts at charity were performative at worst, a drop in the ocean at best, she left her wealth behind, embraced his asceticism and founded her own order of nuns, becoming known as Clare of Assisi, Patron Saint of diseased eyes. And if that story doesn't say "Californian high school rom-com" to you, you're clearly not her namesake, American playwright Chiara Atik. We meet Clare (Arsema Thomas) as she's getting her hair styled by her lady's maids Alma and Peppa (Jacoba Williams and Liz Kettle,) holding forth with them on how going on Crusade sounds like a worthwhile thing to do but quite a pain actually.

Theatre review: Hercules

After a diversion where His Exalted Britannic Excellency, Master of all he Surveys, The Right Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB got Jamie Lloyd to settle a baffling grudge with John Gielgud for him, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane goes back to being the home of Disney musical blockbusters, and following Frozen is something of a less obvious choice: 1997's Hercules doesn't seem to top too many people's favourites list, but it does contain its fair share of memorable bangers from Alan Menken (music) and David Zippel (lyrics.) I remember when the film originally came out there was some grumbling in the Greek press about how the story didn't so much play fast and loose with the original Herakles myth as ignore it completely; but to be fair it did have to appeal to family audiences, and once you've taken the sexual assault out of Greek Mythology you've got what, 5% of the original story left to play with?

Theatre review: The Constant Wife

Based on a W. Somerset Maugham play that's one year shy of celebrating its centenary, Laura Wade's The Constant Wife gives us a fun but complicated twist on the new, liberated women of the 1920s. Constance (understudy Jess Nesling*) has been married for 15 years, and remains perfectly happy with her husband. But John (Luke Norris) has been having an affair with her best friend Marie-Louise (Emma McDonald) for some time, something everyone but her seems to know about. Her mother Mrs Culver (Kate Burton) and sister Martha (Amy Morgan) disagree over whether to tell her, but things come to a head when Marie-Louise's husband Mortimer (Daniel Millar) finds out about the affair and confronts them. At which point Constance bends over backwards to disprove the truth, not because she doesn't believe it but because she knows all about it and wants to keep the lie going.

Theatre review: Intimate Apparel

The ongoing collaboration between playwright Lynn Nottage and director Lynette Linton at the Donald and Margot Warehouse continues into a third artistic director's tenure, this time with a historical piece that trades overt anger for something simmering under a quiet heartbreak. Intimate Apparel takes place in 1905 New York where, however formidable and accomplished she might be on her own terms, a woman who's reached a certain age without getting married will still be in what seems like a hopeless situation. So Esther (Samira Wiley,) a seamstress who specialises in fashionably scandalous corsets, has sought-after skills and has spent the last eighteen years saving up the cash to open her own beauty parlour. But while dozens of single girls have passed through Mrs Dickson's (Nicola Hughes) boarding house in that time and left married, at 35 Esther remains single.

Theatre review: A Moon for the Misbegotten

We're not even into the final year of Rupert Goold's programming yet but the Almeida stage already looks like the movers are in: Tom Scutt's design for A Moon for the Misbegotten piles up planks, pillars, old props and broken doorframes to create the multilevel set for Eugene O'Neill's final play, a spin-off from Long Day's Journey Into Night. The alcoholic older son from that play, James Tyrone Jr (Michael Shannon) left a failing Broadway career for life as a landlord in rural Connecticut, where he rents out a worthless piece of farmland to Phil Hogan (David Threlfall.) The old farmer's manipulative ways and use of them as free labour has seen all his children leave him except for sole daughter Josie (Ruth Wilson,) and he's also made an enemy of his wealthy neighbour (Akie Kotabe.) Now a rumour has reached him that the millionaire has a plan to get rid of him once and for all: Offer James well over the odds to buy the land from him, so he can turf out the tenants.

Dance review: Quadrophenia

It's not often I go to see a purely dance-based show - very much not my area of expertise but sometimes a welcome change. There's always been some unusual inspirations for ballet but it seems like there's more than ever at the moment, and while I'm sure Peaky Blinders and Black Sabbath will be... experiences, I'm glad I went for Quadrophenia, based on The Who's album and the subsequent film. Pete Townshend's wife Rachel Fuller is a classical musician, and it's hers and Martin Batchelar's orchestral adaptation of Townshend's songs that provides the musical backdrop to the 1960s Brighton-set story of Jimmy (Paris Fitzpatrick,) a factory worker who finds release from the drudgery in girls, drugs and violence as part of a group of local mods.

Theatre review: Mrs Warren's Profession

I don't know that I need to consign Bernard Shaw to the same bin I keep Samuel Beckett in, and just avoid his plays entirely, but I do think I should at least be a lot more selective about what revivals of his I book: I can't particularly argue with the general opinion that his themes have stood the test of time, but for the most part the dry style of the plays he expressed them in keep me at best at a distance, at worst bored. The attraction for Dominic Cooke's production of Mrs Warren's Profession was Imelda Staunton taking on the titular businesswoman, Kitty Warren, whose work has kept her moving around Europe most of her life. As a result she has never spent a great deal of time with her daughter Vivie, who got sent to various private schools in England and has just graduated from Cambridge.

Theatre review: This Bitter Earth

Harrison David Rivers' two-hander This Bitter Earth follows an interracial American gay couple whose relationship is punctuated by significant events in the country's ongoing violent race relations - mostly the high-profile killings of unarmed black people by the police. They meet at a protest when Neil (Alexander Lincoln,) who is white and from a wealthy family, recites a poem by the little-known black, queer poet Essex Hemphill. It just so happens that Hemphill is a specialist subject for Jesse (Omari Douglas,) a black writer from a less privileged background, who's writing a thesis about him at the time and can mouth the poem along by heart. The coincidence makes him seek out the other man and they begin a relationship that lasts several years and sees them move in together before eventually leaving New York for Minnesota, where Jesse has got a teaching job.

Theatre review: Miss Myrtle's Garden

Next Bush Artistic Director Taio Lawson directs the first in his predecessor's final season of shows, and Miss Myrtle's Garden suggests we might get a continuation of some of the themes Lynette Linton's established: Not just stories that foreground queer people of colour, but also ones that take quite a literal approach to the theatre's horticultural name. Danny James King's play takes place entirely in the titular South East London garden, the pride and joy of Jamaican-born Myrtle (Diveen Henry,) but one she can't look after on her own as she gets older, with husband Melrose (Mensah Bediako) and old friend Eddie (Gary Lilburn) tending to the plants under her watchful, and generally judgmental eye. When her grandson Rudy (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay) visits and mentions that his rent is being raised again, she invites him to move into the top floor she no longer uses.

Theatre review: In Praise of Love

1973's In Praise of Love is one of Terence Rattigan's last plays, a time when his star was in the descendant, and at times it does feel like we're going to be in for the work of a playwright whose best days are behind him. But like its characters, it's got hidden depths to take you by surprise. Sebastian Cruttwell (Dominic Rowan) is a literary critic for a Sunday paper, a vocal Marxist with undisguised contempt for anyone who doesn't share his belief in the theory, but not particularly keen on discussing how the USSR worked out in practice. After the end of WWII he met Estonian refugee Lydia (Claire Price) in Berlin's British quarter, and married her so she could come back to England, with the intention of divorcing once she got her citizenship. Decades on they're still married, and have a 20-year-old son, Joey (Joe Edgar,) who to his father's disgust campaigns for the Liberal Party.

Theatre review: The Frogs

Director Georgie Rankcom seems to have established a very specific niche: Revivals of Stephen Sondheim obscurities that I'd previously seen at Jermyn Street Theatre, given bigger, better productions at Southwark Playhouse that still aren't enough to rehabilitate them. After Anyone Can Whistle it's the turn of The Frogs, Sondheim (music and lyrics) and Burt Shevelove's (book) short 1974 adaptation of the Aristophanes satire, expanded to a full Broadway musical by the composer and Nathan Lane in 2004. In a setting that's simultaneously Ancient Greece and the present day, the god of wine and theatre Dionysos (Dan Buckley) enlists his slave Xanthias (Kevin McHale) to help him travel to the underworld to bring back the deceased playwright Bernard Shaw: He believes Shaw's no-nonsense brand of wisdom is the solution to a modern world he despairs at.

Theatre review: This Is My Family

First seen in Sheffield in 2013, Tim Firth's (book and music) This Is My Family has taken twelve years to make it to London, and after seeing Vicky Featherstone's production at Southwark Playhouse I have to wonder: Why the rush? Nicky (Nancy Allsop) is a 13-year-old girl who's entered a competition to explain why her family is perfect, and has told the truth, but left out a few salient details: Parents Steve (Michael Jibson) and Yvonne (Gemma Whelan) have been together since they were 16, but they're drifting apart and Steve is considering taking a job in Abu Dhabi. Older brother Matt (Luke Lambert) used to be very close to her but now he's having a teenage druid phase and obsessing over his girlfriend. And grandmother May (Gay Soper) has the mischievous side she describes, but she's now also got fast-encroaching dementia.

Theatre review: After the Act

Anti-LGBTQ+ legislation whose phrasing is so vague it seems to have been drafted by people who don't understand any of the words in it may be recent news in the UK, but unfortunately it's hardly without precedent: That sense of déjà vu comes from Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which passed on a wave of "won't somebody think of the children?" moral panic and ended up, in practice, banning teachers from acknowledging to their students that gay people existed, even when those students were clearly dealing with a crisis of their own sexuality. The latest of David Byrne's (not that one) transfers from the New Diorama to the Royal Court deals with Section 28's toxic legacy, but while it's a subject I think is always worth revisiting and educating people on, for me Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens' After the Act, a play with music composed and performed (with Calie Hough) onstage by Frew, feels the strain of expanding to a bigger stage.