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.