I mean, no nice young men even got their front bottoms out on stage for me to ruthlessly and inappropriately compare to each other, honestly, give me something to work with, London Theatre in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Five! Maybe this is just what I'm like now I'm in my fifties, sorry regular readers, this might be what you're both stuck with from now on.
Or maybe I'm just down on 2025 because it was the year I got hit by a bus. Did I mention I got hit by a bus? I got hit by a bus.
All that being said...
A.I. SLOPBOT, PLEASE SUGGEST A WITTY HEADING FOR A SECTION ON NEW PLAYS
...some highly anticipated new shows can actually live up to expectations, and in the latter months of 2024 I re-watched the entire 9 seasons of Inside No.9 in anticipation of the concluding live stage show. And when Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's Stage/Fright arrived in the West End in January, it actually rewarded that time with a show that was more than just a cash-in. The only real disappointing thing about it was that I spotted a huge clue to the main twist in the opening minutes, then forgot all about it.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR MOST DESERVED HYPE OF THE YEAR:
Inside No.9 - Stage/Fright at Wyndham's Theatre
With fears about new technology being on everyone's mind again (honestly, what kind of hack would do a running joke about A.I. in their headlines?) riffs on Frankenstein were popular again, and the Royal Court's More Life was an early attempt at that. A much more analogue recent trend is the return of Dungeons and Dragons - perhaps inspired by Stranger Things, perhaps by being taken up in lockdown then brought back into real life, it's back and means a lot to many people, as The Habits charmingly celebrated.
A trend theatres have mostly firmly bucked is the media's anti-trans narrative, with shows like Otherland continuing to show love and support to all the letters in LGBTQ+; Lynette Linton started her time running the Bush promising stories about "queer women of colour" but actually her seasons have felt more widely embracing of everyone across the sexuality spectrum, with the best of these in her final year probably being Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew; Miss Myrtle's Garden would also later cover a queer story through gardening. In much more traditionally straight interests, World War II gave Howard Brenton's history plays a return to form in Churchill in Moscow, while true crime came to the stage in James Graham's Punch.
This started as a busy production that didn't quite grab me, then took a turn for something quieter and more emotionally devastating, and it got a return run as well as a Broadway production. Robert Icke also got in on the act, writing and directing Manhunt, a Raoul Moat story that took a famous true story into surreal territories, but for me another true crime thriller, also currently getting a second run, was even more spectacular than either, as Jack Holden's latest one-man (ish) show KENREX managed to overshadow even his brilliant earlier work Cruise, with Holden playing an entire American town.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR BEST ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE:
Jack Holden in KENREX at Southwark Playhouse Borough
I enjoyed Speed, The Fifth Step, Marriage Material and 1536, which was an Anne Boleyn play without Anne Boleyn in it. As well as the starry cast that was the big West End draw, what I enjoyed about Unicorn was the way the narrative was put together, and although the set design was simple it's stuck with me for how well it fit into that way of telling a story through structure.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR BEST SET DESIGN:
Miriam Buether for Unicorn at the Garrick Theatre
Design elements, especially sound and lighting, are the sort of thing I can easily overlook because if they do their job right you don't necessarily notice them, but the rather lovely queer story Clarkston got a big boost from the way the lighting bleached all the colour from the story, turning it into a sepia photo.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR BEST LIGHTING DESIGN:
Stacey Derosier for Clarkston at Trafalgar Theatre
Whether for their stars or how well they'd been previously received, a number of plays around the summer and autumn came with a lot of hype: The Estate, Till The Stars Come Down, Inter Alia, Good Night, Oscar, Mary Page Marlowe, Fat Ham, Romans, a Novel and The Unbelievers lived up to it to varying degrees, while End was a satisfying, well, end to David Eldridge's very mixed Bros Trilogy, but there's definitely something to be said for not having any idea at all what you're in for when you set foot in the theatre, and the Orange Tree provided one of the most enjoyably bonkers surprises of the year, when Poor Clare told a Mediaeval religious parable in the style of Clueless.
A.I. SLOPBOT, PLEASE SUGGEST SOME REVIVALS AND ADAPTATIONS THAT... WHAT? NO I DON'T THINK A STAGE ADAPTATION OF BIRTH OF A NATION IS OVERDUE
That ever-popular motherfucker Oedipus was back in the year's first big starry revival at the Old Vic, in a dance-heavy version that I liked more than most critics seemed to. The Swanamaker has been experimenting with more recent classics than the Jacobeans lately with some success, and a traditional-looking but fresh-feeling Three Sisters added to that.
It was soon followed by a starry Seagull, but this year Ibsen seemed to be more on trend for reinvention than Chekhov: I saw four productions, but let's just say only The Lady from the Sea and Hedda made it into this, the section on shows I more positively responded to. The former also used the Bridge Theatre's resources to take the play's watery theme to a surprising extreme.
THE MATT SMITH PISSING HIMSELF AWARD 2025
FOR ASTONISHING COUP DE THÉÂTRETM:
The stage first flooding with rain, then turning into a swimming pool
in The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge Theatre
Strong takes on 20th century classics included Dealer's Choice, The Deep Blue Sea, The Pitchfork Disney, Cyrano de Bergerac and All My Sons, and while I haven't caught many of the Finborough's rediscoveries in recent years, I did enjoy The Truth About Blayds' take on where an Uncle Vanya-style premise could lead. Of course one of the biggest theatrical stories of the year was the start of Indhu Rubasingham's tenure leading the National Theatre, one I had a personal interest in as she'd been my pick for the job for some years. The Ancient Greek revival she opened with came in for inevitable attention and criticism, but while imperfect I did find a lot of fun to be had in Bacchae.
A.I. SLOPBOT, DO YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW WHY EVERY TIME I SEARCH FOR THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE YOU KEEP OFFERING ME MEIN KAMPF?
Decades down the line Shakespeare productions can still surprise me, in good ways and bad, and setting Hamlet on the Titanic was certainly a surprise. I actually ended up disappointed with how Rupert Goold's production overthought its high concept and tangled itself up in more plot holes than it needed to, but still, it was Hamlet. On the Titanic.
The Globe's Romeo and Juliet on the other hand disappointed when it didn't engage with its Western high concept enough; it did though offer up an excellent, lovable central pairing, particularly impressive when Romeo was a last-minute casting replacement.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR BEST RELATIONSHIP:
Rawaed Asde and Lola Shalam in Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare's Globe
Elsewhere the Globe played around with the tone of familiar plays; well, maybe not Troilus and Cressida, because who knows what the hell the tone of that is meant to be at the best of times. But you can get easy praise from certain critics if you look at "the dark side" of the comedies, as they did with The Merry Wives of Windsor, and completely overdid in a repurposed Midsummer Night's Dream, but given that the melancholy side of Twelfth Night is an overdone trope in itself, I thought they deserved some credit for flipping that on its head for something lighter as well.
The second big Hamlet of the year saw the National build a production around Hiran Abeysekera, an actor I don't always warm to, but which was well-tailored around his particular performance style and had a showstopping Ophelia in Francesca Mills. Star casting in Shakespeare came with Simon Russell Beale correctly identifying Titus Andronicus as one of his dream roles, Sam Heughan going full gangster for the year's superior Macbeth, and Nicholas Hytner used his past working relationship with Jonathan Bailey to get 2025's Sexiest Man Alive to play Richard II.
Not everyone got Shakespeare right though, and one person got Shakespeare wrong more than most: If Jamie Lloyd's terminally self-satisfied Much Ado About Nothing got a comparatively easy ride from me that's only because it wasn't as bad as his preceding Tempest, in which he woefully miscast Sigourney Weaver then left her floundering. His Drury Lane season, seemingly borne out of Andrew Lloyd Webber's bizarre grudge against a dead man for a throwaway comment he once made, could have been the year's nadir, if there hadn't been a Macbeth that made a lot of creative choices. All of them the wrong ones.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR WORST SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTION:
Macbeth at the Lyric Hammersmith
But if I started this section with one high-concept Shakespeare that engaged with its premise too much and another not enough, there was one that hit the perfect Goldilocks spot: I'll come back to some other reasons Michael Longhurst's Much Ado About Nothing was easy on the eye, but as far as the production itself goes, its top-flight football setting was integrated astonishingly well, and a production that hit all the right comic notes was anchored by one of the best Beatrice and Benedick pairings I've ever seen in Freema Agyeman and Nick Blood.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR BEST SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTION:
Much Ado About Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre
A.I. SLOPBOT, I ASKED FOR THOUGHTS ON MUSICAL THEATRE. I THINK WE BOTH KNOW WHY YOU KEEP COMING BACK TO ME WITH WAGNER OPERAS
Musicals really came up with the extremes this year, with some of my my favourite and least favourite shows of 2025 being set to music. My first show of the year was Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 - I had certain preconceptions about the musicals of Dave Malloy going in and it didn't change my mind. On the plus side, I also had certain preconceptions about Jamie Muscato in an unbuttoned shirt, and it didn't disabuse me of those either.
One day, someone woke up and thought "hey, what if John Waters' Cry-Baby was a musical?" So, ignoring the fact that John Waters' Cry-Baby already was a musical, they created a completely different Cry-Baby, The Musical. Still fun mind, just a weird thing to do.
Stephen Sondheim was represented by his final, unfinished work Here We Are, which was a lot of things but "unfinished" definitely covers most of them; his obscure The Frogs proved once again why it's obscure; and it was left to Into the Woods, while still not among my favourites, to provide the best revival of his work this year. Hoping to be the next Sondheim was Todrick Hall, who on the evidence of Burlesque still has a bit of a way to go. To be fair he did appear to have joined the cast at the last minute only to find he actually also needed to choreograph the show. And direct it. And write it. Look, some of the cast didn't fall off the stage at all so let's call it a win.
RUBBERNECKER AWARD 2025
FOR SLOWING DOWN TO LOOK AT THE CAR CRASH:
Burlesque at the Savoy Theatre
On the other end of the scale, my expecations for beloved film musical Sing Street's move to the stage were high, and they were met.
Hercules managed to be even less coherent that the film but still good fun, while a Steps jukebox musical hit the right camp notes by completely eschewing the usual Mediterranean island settings and taking us down the Pound Shop for Here and Now. Meanwhile my visits to pure dance shows are rare, but a punt on a ballet version of Quadrophenia turned out to be one of my best ideas, for what I found to be one of the most emotionally affecting shows of the year.
Undoubtedly one of the shows to cause as much dread as excitement was Paddington: I mean, what if they got it wrong? In the end they got it very much right, with a good musical but an even better bear - the puppet operated by two perfomers instantly becoming London's most beloved resident.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR THEATRICAL EVENT OF THE YEAR:
Paddington at the Savoy Theatre
I was thoroughly underwhelmed by a few shows that had looked promising - Play On!, Scissorhandz, Coven and Ride the Cyclone - at least the latter provided a few moments of inspired weirdness to liven up the ones that didn't quite work.
THE PIPPIN MEMORIAL AWARD 2025 FOR ENDEARING WHATTHEFUCKERY:
The sexy cat aliens and the Ukrainian breakdance moment
in Ride the Cyclone at Southwark Playhouse Elephant
Southwark Playhouse Elephant was the place to avoid in the Spring and early summer, and I really had to deliberate between Midnight Cowboy and This Is My Family for worst musical of the year. In the end though, only one of them made me physically shudder at the thought of having to listen to its title being sung at me for the four hundredth time:
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR WORST MUSICAL:
This Is My Family at Southwark Playhouse Elephant
The venue did get a chance to redeem itself though, as what could have been quite a heavy-handed allegory was raised by great tunes and great chemistry from the cast of Hot Mess.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR BEST MUSICAL:
Hot Mess at Southwark Playhouse Elephant
OK A.I. SLOPBOT, I THINK I'VE FIGURED OUT HOW TO TURN OFF RACIST MODE. NO, I'D STILL RATHER YOU DIDN'T TELL ME A JOKE
I've been saying for a while that with things being quite so bleak in the news, surely art is meant to lean towards the silly side to cheer us all up? Well this year the stage finally got the memo, to the point that I felt it was worth doing a short subsection on some of the gloriously stupid comedy that's been a feature this year. And yes, despite its appearance on Strictly looking so bad it made me question my own memory, New York import Titaníque was the first to really get this right.
Menier prices may have put a bit of pressure on just how good another US import had to be, but Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors was fun, while completing the trifecta was Shucked, which told a story about cornfields with a very particular emphasis on the "corn" part.
Then it was back to the Brits to have their go, with Mischief Theatre returning to the West End not once but twice, with The Comedy About Spies and Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. Meanwhile one of their original members broke off to star in a historical piece... but Charlie Russell couldn't quite keep her Fanny serious.
I KNOW THIS SECTION USUALLY GOES ON ABOUT NIPPLES A LOT A.I. SLOPBOT, BUT I DON'T THINK ONE MAN IS MEANT TO HAVE QUITE SO MANY OF THEM
And so we move on to the "any other business" part, which heavily involves me telling you who I fancied this year. Of course, this has never included Tom Hiddleston, which was a bit of a problem in a Much Ado About Nothing whose entire premise was "everyone fancies Tom Hiddleston." At least the Jamie Lloyd season did offer up something up a bit more to my liking.
THE CAPTAIN TIGHTPANTS AWARD 2025:
James Phoon for The Tempest and
Much Ado About Nothing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane
Yes, you can generally rely on the gays to get stuff done, starting with Firebird, a very underpowered adaptation but at least not so in Robert Eades making a play for Best Nipples.
We also saw the RSC go "Edward II isn't quite gay enough, let's set it in a sauna," Alexander Lincoln and Omari Douglas heating things up in This Bitter Earth, an all-queer cast putting it about in Four Play, and an altogether gentler brand of sexiness in Clarkston. When Born With Teeth came along as one of the big events of the autumn I was unimpressed by the play itself. But the whole show was basically sold on Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel humping each other's legs for an hour and a half, and in fairness it did deliver that.
In much straighter pursuits, it was probably wrong of Samuel Edward-Cook to make Raoul Moat a bit sexy in Manhunt, but he did it anyway.
Romans, a Novel was a play about, among other things, Kyle Soller, Oliver Johnstone and Stuart Thompson's shirts falling off a lot, Entertaining Mr Sloane was played bafflingly heterosexual but out of the Sloanes I've seen on stage Jordan Stephens was the most convincing that everyone would fall so hard for him, Ukweli Roach was a seductive Dionysus in Bacchae, Tobias Turley got the sexy geek mix just right in Hot Mess and while I didn't enjoy the way A Midsummer Night's Dream tied itself in knots sucking the joy out of the play, it did give us Michael Marcus in ballet tights, so.
I haven't so far mentioned one of the big event shows of the year, at least as far as The GaysTM are concerned - The Line of Beauty was a critical and commercial hit which I also really enjoyed, but it did demonstrate the fact that even for The GaysTM you can go too far overboard with the muscles - as Leo Suter discovered when his speedo reveal got the biggest laugh of the night. Paranormal Activity also got more gasps of shock than arousal when Patrick Heusinger got his tits out, so maybe people should calm things down with the, er, supplements eh?
Footballers' bodies, that's where it was for me this year, and while Michael Longhurst's Much Ado About Nothing absolutely got everything else right as well, setting it in a premiership changing room complete with jacuzzi? Didn't hurt.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR BEST NIPPLES:
Nick Blood for Much Ado About Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Horniness aside (well, maybe not, given the genre I'm leading up to,) the year's running themes included Conor McPherson apparently trying to pay off some big bills by writing and/or directing umpteen shows, culminating in a stage adaptation of The Hunger Games. But for the meme of the year I'm going for one that preempted Cynthia Erivo's upcoming West End bloodbath with Dracula, another Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors, and Apex Predator, which kept its premise as a surprise in its publicity until it presumably turned out it wasn't selling, and went all-out telling everyone to come and see it because there's vampires.
PARTIALLY OBSTRUCTED AWARD 2025 FOR MEME OF THE YEAR:
Vampires
A.I. SLOPBOT, DID YOU... WRITE THE SCRIPTS OF THESE SHOWS?
Looking back on this year's reviews it feels like it was a vaguely disappointing one - actually there were very few out-and-out terrible shows, but a disproportionate amount that didn't live up to expectation, or that I just didn't find at all memorable, but not worth singling out for criticism. But I'm afraid that does leave a handful of shows deserving of that harshest of all critiques: The hard stare.
First up is one I found more annoying the more I thought about it: I know compromise is anathema to most creatives, but if you're casting a movie star in a stage role and hoping to bring new people to the theatre I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to try and make sure you don't put them off for life. I know what was going on in Elektra, but only because I'm very familiar with the story. Someone who wasn't would have been lost. And whether you knew it in advance or not, this was still 80 minutes of Celebrity Dairy Product Brie Larson throwing a toddler tantrum.
THE SELF-ADMINISTERED PROCTOLOGY EXAM AWARD 2025
FOR SELF-INDULGENCE:
Elektra at the Duke of York's Theatre
I said a couple of Ibsen reinventions were successful: Here's the other ones, as Gary Owen decided what Ghosts needed was even more focus on incest and a plot that tripped over itself, and Lila Raicek's My Master Builder concluded that the problem with Ibsen was the fact that there was anything at all going on beneath the surface. I did toy with coming down on This Is My Family as the year's most interminable show, but I've already made that Worst Musical so instead I'm going to go for the discovery that Eugene O'Neill somehow thought Long Day's Journey Into Night wasn't quite a long or dark enough journey, and came up with a sequel. Superman was a couple of rows ahead of us in the audience. That was the best thing about it.
FRAM OF THE YEAR 2025 FOR MOST AGGRESSIVE COMMITMENT
TO CAUSING AUDIENCE TEDIUM:
A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Almeida
Elsewhere a high-profile West End Othello proved that Toby Jones can't quite play any part you throw at him, and that a production could really do with having some opinions on the play as a whole.
THE SHIT LIST 2025:NICK'S BOTTOM 5 SHOWS OF THE YEAR
5 - Midnight Cowboy at Southwark Playhouse Elephant
4 - Macbeth at the Lyric Hammersmith
3 - A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Almeida
2 - This Is My Family at Southwark Playhouse Elephant
A lot of my awards this year seem to be going out based on just *vibes*. Whether poorly written, directed, acted, all of the above, or none of the above just... too much of whatever they were offering, I wouldn't want to sit through any of the four preceding shows again. So for the nadir of 2025 I'm going to go for the show that just irritates me the most to even think about.
STINKER OF THE YEAR 2025:
My Master Builder at Wyndhams Theatre
Oh, I know how you're feeling, I had to watch it
OK, that's out of the way, this is the fun bit.
THE HIT LIST 2025:NICK'S TOP TEN SHOWS OF THE YEAR
10 - Clarkston at Trafalgar Theatre
9 - Titaníque at the Criterion
8 - Poor Clare at the Orange Tree Theatre
7 - Sing Street at the Lyric Hammersmith
6 - Hot Mess at Southwark Playhouse Elephant
5 - Inside No.9 - Stage/Fright at Wyndhams Theatre
4 - Paddington at the Savoy Theatre
3 - Quadrophenia at Sadler's Wells
2 - Much Ado About Nothing at the RST
A musical-heavy Top Ten this year, and while #1 technically isn't a musical, original songs played a major part in its success. 2021 is the only time I've ever chosen two Shows of the Year, as the tail end of Lockdown meant it was more or less evenly split between online and live shows, and the original version of Cruise took the online crown. Which means the combination of writer/performer Jack Holden and musician John Patrick Elliott now gets to join the select club of creatives I've given the honours to twice:
SHOW OF THE YEAR 2025:
KENREX at Southwark Playhouse Borough
By December 31st you can't always still catch my Show of the Year live, but at time of writing KENREX is getting another run at the Other Palace (yes I'm planning a return visit,) so if you're in London why not start off your theatrical 2026 right? Thanks for staying with me another year, hope you get what you wish for in the next one. For my part, I'd quite like to not get hit by a bus, but I can be demanding like that.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner, Genevieve Girling, Manuel Harlan, Ellie Kurttz, Johan Persson, Ikin Yum, Tristram Kenton, Charlie Flint, Pamela Raith, Helen Murray, David Monteith-Hodge, Geraint Lewis, Matt Crockett.
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