Theatre review: Ride The Cyclone

When you turn up to a musical you hadn't heard of before to find the audience already made up largely of people in cosplay and merch, it's a sure sign the words "cult hit" are going to feature; apparently in the case of Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell's (book, music and lyrics) 2009 musical Ride The Cyclone, "viral TikTok sensation" are in there somewhere as well. Front of House at Southwark Playhouse Elephant has been decked out with distorting mirrors, a ring toss and other fairground attractions to reflect the setting of a weird little show that opens with a group of teenagers from Uranium City, Saskatchewan, dying when the titular rollercoaster derails. Five members of a school band end up in a kind of afterlife holding pen, competing for the chance to return to life and be reincarnated, while the others move on.

Theatre review: All My Sons

Outside of Belgium and the Netherlands, it was A View From The Bridge that really announced Ivo van Hove as a big-name director, and more than a decade later he returns to Arthur Miller in a production that mirrors a lot of what made that show distinctive, without feeling like an outright copy. In fact visually this seems, if not a complete change of aesthetic, definitely freed from the very strict house style that has sometimes felt like a straitjacket in recent years. So An D'Huys' costumes are timeless rather than aggressively, anachronistically modern, and Jan Versweyveld's set, though still minimalist, has an almost Japanese spareness dominated by a large sun-like window, and a stage scattered with petals that could be cherry blossom: All My Sons opens with a tree crashing to the ground during a storm.

Theatre review: End

In the spirit of The Cornetto Trilogy being so named because of a non plot-significant ice cream being consumed in each film, I'm going to have to refer to David Eldridge's sequence of relationship plays as The Bros Trilogy from now on, given the briefly all-conquering pop trio get a completely random little dig from each of the three couples in the stories. After Beginning and Middle it's not particularly surprising if the end is called, well, End, but the title does also serve as an apt one for the last show to be programmed at the National by RuNo (the Dorfman having ended up lagging behind the other two theatres because of emergency repair work.) Having had wildly different reactions to the first two instalments I was strangely cheered up by the blurb suggesting the end in question was death not divorce, and after the sourness of the last chapter I was glad to find something more bittersweet.

Theatre review: The Hunger Games

My second in-the-round show of the week, but instead of an intimate vag Miriam Buether has given us a huge arena in a purpose-built new theatre that hosts an epic quest. But enough about trying to find your way from Canary Wharf tube to the Troubadour - there are some signs but as far as we could tell they only started once you were practically there - Conor McPherson's biggest show in his year of paying off his mortgage is the first stage adaptation of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. Matthew Dunster directs the story of a future America called Panem, a Roman Empire-inspired dictatorship where the Capitol lives in decadent luxury while the 12 Districts work to keep them in it. To suppress rebellion and remind everyone who's boss, President Snow (a pre-recorded John Malkovich, phoning in his performance in more ways than one) holds the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death between teenagers from each District, shown live on TV as entertainment for the Capitol.

Theatre review: Prawn Play

Why yes, I am renaming this play so that Google doesn't send an AI bot to delete my blog.

Closing out the year at the Royal Court Upstairs is Sophia Chetin-Leuner's play that courts controversy - but also predictably early sell-outs - with its title: Prawn Play. Ani (Transphobia Ltd. Employee Ambika Mod) is a Milton scholar whose career's recently been boosted by a prestigious award, but whose private life is falling apart. Her relationship with Liam (Will Close) at first appears to be having trouble because he's jealous of her success, but that's just her deflecting attention from something he's genuinely concerned about: Her addiction to hardcore prawn, of a particularly violent and misogynistic type. She can't be sexually satisfied without it, and keeps him up at night with her addiction on her phone. Also, Walkers Crisps to release a spicy prawn cocktail flavour crisp called Hardcore Prawn, when?

Theatre review: After Sunday

Sophia Griffin's debut play After Sunday takes place in the kitchen of a secure hospital, where men with a violent past are held: Some are there directly from prison, like Ty (Corey Weekes,) who just wants to pass his psychiatric evaluation and return to finish his sentence. Others spend much longer there, like Leroy (David Webber,) who seems to have been there for years, and is hoping to finally have made enough progress to be let out to a halfway house. They're among four "service users" who've taken up occupational therapist Naomi's (Aimée Powell) offer of a weekly session - not a class, as they all seem to know what they're doing - of cooking for men from an Afro-Caribbean background. It aims to help their progress by reconnecting them with smells, flavours and routines from their childhoods.

Theatre review: Coven

A new musical at the Kiln that seems to have had a lot of hype before it even opened - selling out some performances and already extending - Rebecca Brewer (book, music and lyrics) and Daisy Chute's (music and lyrics) Coven plays like a darker version of SIX, but without quite hitting that show's energy and conciseness. Based on the Pendle Witch Trials, it sees Jenet Device (Gabrielle Brooks) arrested on a charge of witchcraft that nobody's particularly bothered to explain to her, and thrown into a cell full of women who prove nobody is safe from accusation: Maggie (Jacinta Whyte) is a "cunning woman" whose knowledge of herbal medicine can easily be twisted against her as evidence of potion-making, and Nell (Allyson Ava-Brown) a midwife whose inability to save every single baby has left her with enemies in the village. But Frances (Shiloh Coke) is the powerful wife of a local landowner; unpopular for seizing common land, but unsuspecting that it could come to this.

Theatre review:The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn Heights

The long-running annual Papatango playwrighting prize has been particularly peripatetic in the last couple of years, and I've pretty much continued to follow the winners around London's theatres, even as I still feel it tends, more often than not, to reward plays filled with abject misery. It can still prove worth keeping up with though, and while Hannah Doran's The Meat Kings Exclamation Mark Open Brackets Inc Full Stop Close Brackets of Brooklyn Heights goes to some very dark places, it does so with the energy and urgency of a thriller. Paula (Retired Lesbian Jackie Clune) runs the New York butcher's shop established by her Italian-American family a century earlier, but is facing financial difficulties they've never faced before thanks to a Whole Foods down the road cutting into her upscale clientèle. But she's still determined to provide the high quality service the family have always delivered.

Theatre review: Here & Now

The latest group to get the jukebox musical treatment is one that feels inevitable, given the general sense of camp ridiculousness that Pete Waterman's surprisingly enduring manufactured pop quartet plus Lee have always had: Steps are a good match for a genre that's at its best when it doesn't take itself seriously, and Shaun Kitchener's (book) Here & Now gets the tone (mostly) right from the start: Will it, like Viva Forever!, try to emulate Mamma Mia! with a Mediterranean island setting? Nah, we're going down the Pound Shop. Better Best Bargains, a totally unrealistic discount store that has more than two members of staff on duty at any given time, is where Caz (Lara Denning) has worked for 25 years without a promotion or pay raise, but she's still pretty chipper about the place because she's friends with her co-workers, and they all introduce the week's new special offers by dressing up as condiments and singing "Five, Six, Seven, Eight."

Theatre review: Othello (Theatre Royal Haymarket)

Othello's a part that can be played as quite a young and dynamic soldier who's risen, through skill, quickly through the ranks to become a decorated general. There's also a couple of throwaway lines about him being older than his wife, that have helped foster a different tradition of him being a much older man. So among Shakespearean leading roles it's perhaps the one that's least likely to raise eyebrows when David Harewood revisits, at 59, a part he first played 28 years ago at the National, famously becoming the first black actor to do so there. This time he's in the West End, paired with an equally popular star, Toby Jones, as his Iago. The latter is his long-standing friend and brother in arms, or at least so he thinks; Othello's overlooking him for promotion has brought to the surface long-held resentments, and he now plans to take a convoluted revenge involving the general's new wife.

Theatre review: The Producers

The last show I was able to reschedule from my most recent bout of Covid is the Menier Chocolate Factory's revival of The Producers, now settling into a West End run. I was a fan of Mel Brooks' film long before Brooks (book, music and lyrics) and Thomas Meehan (book) adapted it into a musical, saw the original West End production and have listened to the songs many times over the years, so this was one of those cases where I was looking to see if Patrick Marber's production would do something new with a show I was already very familiar with. In the end Marber doesn't attempt any kind of reinvention but offers up a solid version that hits all the classic comic notes. Max Bialystock (Andy Nyman) is a Broadway producer who was once, he insists, a success, but in recent years his career has consisted entirely of him acting as an unlikely gigolo to wealthy old ladies, who fund his invariably disastrous shows.

Theatre review: Macbeth (RSC / The Other Place)

Macbeth is one of the Shakespearean big hitters that can generally be relied upon to sell well in the RSC's biggest auditorium, so it's interesting to see a comparatively starry production get consigned to the studio space. Maybe it's a tribute to the famous McKellen/Dench production that also played The Other Place in the 1970s; more likely it's that Daniel Raggett's production didn't want to sacrifice the intimacy that becomes a major feature of its single setting. That setting is a Scottish pub run by Sam Heughan's Macbeth and Lia Williams' Lady Macbeth, the base of operations for a violent '80s criminal gang run by Duncan (Gilly Gilchrist,) who makes his intentions clear about who should eventually replace him: Early on his son Malcolm (Calum Ross) is made, possibly as a sort of initiation, to slit the throat of the treacherous Cawdor with a box cutter. But a supernatural trio has other ideas.

Theatre review: The Line of Beauty

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

Oh no wait, it says Beauty.

  

Actor Jack Holden's second career as a playwright is really picking up steam this year, and after his breakthrough Cruise you can see why the Almeida might go to him to adapt Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 Booker-winner The Line of Beauty, another story of hedonistic gay life in the early '80s beginning to be haunted by the spectre of AIDS. But here the way the politics of Thatcherism tied into and affected that pandemic is even more explicit: In 1983, middle class Oxford graduate Nick Guest (Jasper Talbot) is transferring to London for a PhD, where he moves in with the family of his best friend Toby (Leo Suter.) His father Gerald (Charles Edwards) is a newly-elected Tory MP, tipped to rise quickly in Thatcher's government. The lodger is welcomed into the family, although there's a tacit understanding that he's expected to repay this by acting as a babysitter for Toby's sister Cat (Ellie Bamber,) who's bipolar and self-harms.

Theatre review: The Unbelievers

It's a bit too vague for me to put my finger on as a meme of the year, but I definitely feel like there have been a lot of shows recently where the overall tone has been at odds with the subject matter, but in a deliberate way that works surprisingly well. Nick Payne's return to the stage is one of the clearest examples of this: We can use the word "hysterical" to mean two very different things, and the way The Unbelievers applies it to the story of a traumatised mother is unexpected and unpredictable. FD Nicola Walker plays Miriam, whose 15-year-old son Oscar didn't show up at school one day, and was never seen again. Payne's story jumps backwards and forwards seven years, from the days shortly after the disappearance when the police are mobilising a task force, to the point where the rest of the family are trying to persuade her that holding a memorial for Oscar might be a good idea, and various moments in between.

Theatre review: Hedda

Tanika Gupta throws Ibsen's proto-sociopath Hedda Gabler into a blender with the real-life story of silent screen star Merle Oberon, an Anglo-Indian woman who passed for white to make it in Hollywood, not being found out until after her death. In Hedda the title character is the daughter of a British General during the Raj and his Indian servant, who's bought her way out of a studio contract at great expense after becoming fed up with their control over her. In 1948 the War is over and India has been partitioned and given independence, and Hedda (Pearl Chanda) has just married her third (or possibly fourth) husband George Tesman (Joe Bannister,) a minor film director who's had to go into significant debt to keep his glamorous new wife in the style she's become accustomed to. This includes employing Rina Fatania's Shona, the maid who's been with Hedda all her life because she is, of course, actually her mother.

Theatre review: Hot Mess

Keeping things short and, for a while at least, sweet at Southwark Playhouse's main house is Jack Godfrey (music and lyrics) and Ellie Coote's (book) two-hander musical imagining the relationship between the Earth and Humanity as a rom-com: Inevitably, it's a Hot Mess. Earth (Danielle Steers) is on the lookout for a new dominant species after things got a bit dull with the amoebas, and the hot and heavy relationship with Tyrannosaurus Rex ended in meteor-related tragedy (he was never much good at hugs anyway.) Hu (Tobias Turley) is interested in her, but with his obsession with growing wheat he seems a bit nerdier than the apex predators she's used to. He manages to charm her though and they begin a millennia-long romance in which she helps him become all that he can be - largely by offering him access to her many resources.

Theatre review: Fanny

Felix Mendelssohn is the 19th century German composer best-known for the Wedding March, but he's just the most famous talent in his family, not the only one. Calum Finlay's Fanny sets out to correct that, putting his older sister centre stage. Fanny Mendelssohn (Charlie Russell) is at the very least an equally talented composer, perhaps the secret behind her brother's success as they often consult each other when stuck on a composition. But his erasure of her contribution may go beyond not acknowledging their collaborations, as he's also published some of her work under his own name, including a piece Queen Victoria famously pronounced her favourite. For now, though, the family's concerns are more domestic, as an old flame of Fanny's has returned to Berlin.

Theatre review: Ragdoll

Following the surprise success of her debut Farm Hall, Katherine Moar returns to Jermyn Street Theatre for her follow-up. This time she doesn't have real-life recordings to use verbatim, but if her story is technically fiction it's no secret that it also has a real-life inspiration: If the blurb didn't already mention it, Ragdoll is full of overt clues that the character of Holly is based on Patty Hearst. In 1978 the Heiress (Katie Matsell) is on trial for her role in a string of robberies, and her lawyer (Ben Lamb) is convinced he can make the extenuating circumstances catch the jury's sympathy: Kidnapped by a cult-like criminal gang, she was sexually assaulted and brainwashed until given the option of joining in the crime spree in return for being released. But his confidence is misplaced, and the best result he can get her is that she only serves two years of a prison term.

Theatre review: Cyrano de Bergerac

My last encounter with Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac was Jamie Lloyd's rap battle reinvention, a version that won't be forgotten in a hurry. But while Simon Evans' production for the RSC is more traditional - nose and all - it proves striking and emotional in its own way. Adrian Lester plays Cyrano, who leads a troop of 17th century French army reserves, and is a curious mix of extremes. He's confident to the point of arrogance in his abilities both with a sword and with words, and with good reason: He can fight off a hundred men at a time, or take a man down in verbal combat instead. He's as likely to do either to any man who dares mention his unusual appearance, the reason for the contrasting, wildly insecure side of his personality: Since childhood he has been bullied for his unusually large nose.

Theatre review: Hamlet (National Theatre / Lyttelton)

The new Artistic Director has launched the season by reminding us of the National Theatre's close connection with Ancient Greek Tragedy, now her new deputy gets to do the same for Shakespeare: Robert Hastie's take on Hamlet stays on dry land, but if it's not overtly high concept it's still full of ideas, and little nods to past productions. Hiran Abeysekera's Hamlet is a stroppy prince, performatively wearing black clothes and nail polish at his mother's wedding in protest at how soon it's come after her first husband, Hamlet's father's, death. But if there's something of the attention-seeking, overgrown teenager to him, the front becomes reality when his father's ghost starts haunting the palace: The dead king's spirit (Ryan Ellsworth) tells him he was murdered by his brother Claudius (Alistair Petrie.)