Theatre review: Reunion

Transferring to the Kiln after a hit run at the Galway International Arts Festival, writer-director Mark O'Rowe's Reunion is a look at a family that appears close but don't actually all end up in the same place together all that often - and why that's probably a good thing. Elaine (Aislín McGuckin) hasn't had her whole family in the same room since her husband's funeral a couple of years earlier, but now her son and two daughters have come back to her home on a small, remote island off Ireland for a meal and a few drinks to remember him. In fact Janice (Venetia Bowe) and her husband Stuart (Stephen Hagan) weren't expected, but they've come as a surprise, and brought with them Elaine's sister Gina (Catherine Walker,) whose long-term partner has just dumped her in the middle of a midlife crisis.

Theatre review: Romans, a Novel

I have to say that after some of Alice Birch's previous work, Romans, a Novel was a show I considered skipping; Kyle Soller's return to the stage was the reason I gave it a go, and the weird but thought-provoking epic proves to be worth the gamble. Soller plays Jack Roman, eldest of the three titular brothers, who we first meet as a ten-year-old on what turns out to be the night his mother will die, giving birth to his youngest brother. But first he will meet a blood-soaked soldier, apparently an uncle long since thought lost, who will instil in him a desire to live a certain kind of man's life, full of adventure and exploration. The subtitle "a Novel" is an unusual one to see attached to an original play but Birch's story and Sam Pritchard's production justify it in a sweeping family saga that feels very much like it's immersing the audience into a detailed, intricate story.

Theatre review: The Lady from the Sea

Simon Stone is known for his versions of classic plays, that are sometimes not so much loose adaptations as tangentially connected to the originals at best, and I've found the results very mixed in the past. For The Lady from the Sea he strikes a better balance though, in something with very distinct and current themes but a structure and basis that still feels recognisably by Henrik Ibsen. Five years ago celebrated neuroscientist Edward (Andrew Lincoln) lost his first wife to suicide, and is still dealing with the fallout with their two daughters Asa (Gracie Oddie-James,) a gay postgraduate student who's secretly saving up for a PhD at Yale by opening an OnlyFans, and blunt, brooding teenager Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike.) Egg has managed to move on and find some stability in his life though, with his second marriage to the younger Ellida (Alicia Vikander.)

Theatre review: Dracula (Lyric Hammersmith)

We've already had a camp comedy version this year, a starry monologue version is coming to the West End in 2026, and in between the two we get the feminist version of Bram Stoker's Dracula courtesy of Morgan Lloyd Malcolm at the Lyric Hammersmith. Lloyd Malcolm's premise is that the original novel's story hinges on a couple of memorable women, but does tend to sideline what they actually think or say about the gothic horror story they've found themselves in, in favour of the men presenting themselves as heroes who save the day. Mina (Umi Myers) here becomes the narrator in a framing device that keeps breaking wide open: She tells us she's the sole survivor of the original story, touring the world with this cautionary stage show in which her troupe of actors play all the other roles.

Theatre review: Cow | Deer

Katie Mitchell has been noticing that Foley art is a thing that exists, and building shows around it, on and off for years now. To be honest I probably wouldn't have booked Cow Vertical Bar Deer, which Mitchell co-creates with Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson, if it hadn't been a co-production with the National Theatre of Greece and I'd not felt like being supportive. In the end it's not quite my cup of tea but didn't feel like a waste of my time either. The show is entirely wordless, with the cast of four responding to Wilson's pre-recorded soundtrack of animal and machine noises by using Foley techniques to create the rest of the sounds heard by the titular animals: A heavily pregnant cow in a field, and in a nearby wood a deer, whose levels of fecundity the informational postcard we're given at the start doesn't disclose.

Theatre review: The Truth About Blayds

The Finborough's rediscoveries of once-popular, now forgotten works by famous authors have previously included the first time I saw J.M. Barrie's Quality Street, and now many years later another writer whose early plays were overlooked once he became better known as a children's author takes to the same stage: A. A. Milne is now remembered for creating Winnie-the-Pooh, but in 1921 his play The Truth About Blayds was getting compliments from the likes of Dorothy Parker. It's not been seen on the London stage since, but David Gilmore's production reveals it as, if not quite a lost classic, at least worth a look more than once a century. Oliver Blayds (William Gaunt) is the last of the great Victorian poets, crossing paths with Tennyson and Browning, and compared favourably to Wordsworth.

Theatre review: Deaf Republic

Deaf Republic takes its cue from poetry, in a variety of forms: The source material is Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky's book of the same name, while the play itself is co-written by its directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, aka Dead Centre, and BSL poet Zoë McWhinney. In a fictional Eastern European town occupied by enemy soldiers, a child is watching a puppet show when a soldier commands the crowd to disperse. But the child is Deaf and when he fails to obey the order he's shot dead. The next morning the entire town has also become profoundly Deaf in protest, communicating in their own mix of British and Ukrainian sign language designed in part to add an extra level of inscrutability for their enemies. The soldiers brutally try to break the protest and prove the people are only pretending, but meet with a wall of silence.

Theatre review: Born With Teeth

After a quiet start to his time as half the Artistic Director of the RSC Daniel Evans is having a busier second year, following up his role as a Christopher Marlowe lead by directing a play about the man himself. Liz Duffy Adams' Born With Teeth takes as its premise an academic theory that Marlowe might have contributed to Shakespeare's early Henry VI plays, as well as from the persistent rumours that he was murdered for his work as a spy. In a private back room in a pub we see the two playwrights - aware of each other but not yet acquainted - meet for the first time after being asked to complete an unfinished draft of the play that is now known as Part I. Kit Marlowe (Ncuti Gatwa) is the established, bad-boy superstar of Elizabethan theatre, and plays up to this image to the somewhat star-struck Will Shakespeare (Edward Bluemel,) dominating the conversation and making sure he reserves all the best scenes from the outline for himself.

Theatre review: The Pitchfork Disney

Max Harrison, the latest of the select group of directors who seem to specialise in Philip Ridley's twisted fantasies, now takes on the writer's first, and one of his most famous works for the stage: The Pitchfork Disney sets for tone for Ridley's worlds that live somewhere at the intersection of a very recognisable East London and a surreal apocalyptic wasteland. Presley Stray (Ned Costello) has just returned from a daily trip to the shops, to bring back supplies of chocolate for himself and his twin sister Haley (Elizabeth Connick,) seemingly the only time that either of them ever leaves the run-down flat where they grew up. Ten years previously when they were eighteen, their parents both died in mysterious, suspicious circumstances, and since then they've cocooned themselves, finding a twisted kind of comfort in telling each other tales of an apocalypse that only they survived.

Theatre review: Fat Ham

After Hamlet on the Titanic and a musical version set to Radiohead* the RSC has its third go at the story this year: I've not got the best history with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, having found a number of past winners underwhelming at best, but in general it still seems to be a respected award, so James Ijames' 2022 winner must have made for one of the few times actors have actively wanted to be called Fat Ham. Fat Ham, I hear it and I know, Fat Ham, Fat Ham, I know you wanna take me home, Fat Ham, and get to know me close, Fat Ham, Fat Ham, when your heart goes Fat Ham is a self-aware, modern-day adaptation of Hamlet that takes the "ham" part of the title (and, I guess, the Danish part of the story) and turns the royal family into one that's made a living out of pork products, raising pigs, butchering them and cooking them in their restaurant.

Theatre review: Juniper Blood

Mike Bartlett's latest play sees him return to a Chekhovian setting and theme of a rural location consumed by possible ecological disaster, although without quite the formal use of Chekhov's structure of Albion: Juniper Blood features a much smaller cast and three acts rather than four, but it does still feel in many ways a successor to his earlier work. It starts almost as a comedy of disparate groups of farmers and urbanites forming an awkward blended family: Lip (Sam Troughton) is the monosyllabic heir to a farm that's been in his family for generations; quite how he ended up in a relationship with the well-off, earnest Ruth (Hattie Morahan) isn't entirely clear, but shortly before his father's death he agreed to take over the business, with his partner buying into it and investing in repairs and changes to turn it into a more sustainable, organic concern.

Theatre review: Twelfth Night or What You Will

Despite its wintery title the season Twelfth Night is most commonly associated with is Autumn, usually accompanied by some variation of the dreaded phrase "Shakespeare's melancholy farewell to comedy" in the blurb. Well there's certainly something autumnal about Robin Belfield's production at the Globe, but it's more pagan harvest festival than sad falling leaves. Under a gold wooden sun and featuring a wicker man, Jean Chan's design is all brashly colourful carnival outfits. It's a mood that's infected almost everyone in Illyria, including its Duke who's often seen opening the play lounging moodily on cushions. Instead Solomon Israel's Orsino is definitely up for the party, and is just a bit annoyed that the girl he fancies isn't joining in, or returning his interest - and all because she's still in mourning for all the men in her family dropping dead over the course of a couple of months, honestly some people, such drama queens.

Theatre review: Brigadoon

Brigadoon! Aha! Take it now or leave it, now is all we get, nothing promised no regrets!

About 18 months after Drew McOnie was announced as Artistic Director of the Regents Park Open Air Theatre we get his first directing gig in the post, the sort of thing that gets seen as a statement of intent for his tenure. And what we get is Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe's (music) Brigadoon, which is certainly... a statement. On the 1st of May 1944, American airmen Tommy (Louis Gaunt) and Jeff (Cavan Clarke) crash in a part of Scotland so remote there's nothing on the map. But on this one day the place is far from desolate, as they encounter the bustling, suspiciously old-fashioned town of Brigadoon, where the people are mainly occupied with moving milk, beer and tartan cloth backwards and forwards, while preparing for a wedding that night. While Jeff gets pursued by the local maneater Meg (Nic Myers,) Tommy finds a more serious romantic interest.

Theatre review: A Man for All Seasons

Robert Bolt's 1960 play A Man for All Seasons is considered something of a modern classic, and one that seems to attract actors to revisit its lead over the years - Martin Shaw previously played Thomas More in 2006, and returns nearly two decades later for this touring production finishing its run at the Pinter. Covering the familiar ground of Henry VIII's spilt both from his first wife and the Catholic Church, it does so from the point of view of More, the Lord Chancellor whose refusal to undermine the Pope's authority and subsequent fall from grace saw him posthumously considered a martyr and saint by the Church. When we first meet him he's managing to hold on to his power and influence, but as soon as it becomes impossible to accept Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon without also endorsing the idea that the Church ruled wrongly on the issue, he quietly resigns his position.

Theatre review: Good Night, Oscar

Documenting perhaps the first, definitely not the last, nervous breakdown on live TV, Doug Wright's Good Night, Oscar goes behind the scenes of an episode of The Tonight Show from 1958. Moving from its usual New York home to Hollywood for a week, the show is hoping for a ratings smash, and host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport) wants to open with one of his own favourite regular guests, who always gets a big audience reaction: Actor and musician Oscar Levant (Sean Hayes,) who's become as well known for his near-the-knuckle witticisms and acerbic comments as he has for his virtuoso piano-playing, where he specialises in the works of his old friend George Gershwin. Oscar is often fashionably late, but with this episode coming from the headquarters Jack has the network head himself, Bob Sarnoff (Richard Katz) pressuring him to find a last-minute replacement.

Theatre review: Saving Mozart

The Other Palace's latest attempt to come up with the next big historical pop musical to rival SIX takes us to 18th century Austria for Charli Eglinton's (book, music and lyrics) Saving Mozart. Eglinton's idea is that it was the women in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's (Jack Chambers) life who did the saving (of his memory, at least; given he died penniless aged 35 they didn't do the best job of saving Mozart himself.) With their father Leopold (Douglas Hansell) essentially seeing them as a way to money and influence, young Wolfgang (Carla Lopez Corpas, alternating with Izzie Monk) and his older sister Nannerl (Aimie Atkinson) are toured around the Royal courts of Europe as musical prodigies. But Leopold's treatment of Nannerl is even more cynical than it first appears: Once she's served her purpose in pushing Wolfgang to greatness, she's to be ditched from the act and married off.

Theatre review: Inter Alia

Playwright Suzie Miller and director Justin Martin's next collaboration after Prima Facie has a lot to live up to after the earlier play's international success; but in fairness the publicity for Inter Alia has leaned heavily on that connection, and this is another story told by a powerful woman in the legal system, with a Latin legal term as its title, so it's not like the comparisons aren't being enthusiastically invited. This time the narrator is a judge: Jessica (Rosamund Pike) has been in the position for a couple of years now and is settled into a role that, as she often tells us, requires a lot less talking and a lot more listening than her previous job as a barrister. She enjoys the wider perspective she now has as well as the fresh approach she feels she brings to the bench, even if she has to contend with barristers who show her less respect than her male colleagues.

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.