Theatre review: Play On!

The onslaught of multiple Twelfth Nights continues with a twist, as Shakespeare's mid-career comedy provides the basic plot inspiration for Talawa's Duke Ellington jukebox musical, Play On Exclamation Mark. Set in Harlem's Cotton Club in the 1920s, Sheldon Epps (concept) and Cheryl L.West (book) bring Viola (Tsemaye Bob-Egbe) to the club to try her luck as a songwriter. But her uncle Jester (Llewellyn Jamal) informs her that she won't convince anyone to listen to her music because women are famously incapable of writing songs. To get the legendary Duke (Earl Gregory) to consider her, Viola dresses as a man with the hastily-acquired pseudonym of Vyman, and her songs impress the Duke so much he employs "him" to serenade a disinterested lover on his behalf: Lady Liv (KoKo Alexandra,) the club's resident diva.

Theatre review: Summer 1954

The Browning Version is widely considered one of Terence Rattigan's masterpieces, but as a one-act play it seems to cause a lot of trouble for producers trying to pair it with something else as a double bill (Rattigan's own original choice of companion piece, Harlequinade, seems to be generally ruled out for being both too inferior and too big a shift in mood to work.) James Dacre's touring production Summer 1954 has mixed and matched it with a short from another of the playwright's double bills, Separate Tables, and so the new pairing opens at a Bournemouth hotel where most of the rooms are taken by semi-permanent residents. In Table Number Seven Siân Phillips plays the imperious Mrs Railton-Bell, who learns from the local paper that another resident, Major Pollock (Nathaniel Parker) isn't quite who he says he is.

Theatre review: Inside No.9 - Stage/Fright

"Janette Krankie wouldn't look us in the eye."

"That's 'cause she's only 4ft."

Last year Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's comedy/horror anthology Inside No.9 ended after, somewhat inevitably, 9 series, but as a final farewell to the show the writer/stars have reunited for a stage version, Stage/Fright. This is a mix of greatest hits of the series itself, and new material that could only work on stage, and although the TV show did experiment with various genres outside of its original Tales of the Unexpected roots, this new stage extension to the canon focuses on the queasy mix of sometimes cheesy comedy and jump-scare horror that feels like the series' purest form (so in the unlikely event that anyone was hoping for the utter bleakness of something like "The Last Weekend" or "The Trolley Problem" drawn out to two-and-a-half hours, I guess they'll be disappointed.)

Stage-to-screen review: Death of England: Closing Time

The show I was due to see tonight got cancelled at the last minute, so I replaced it with another show that I'd missed the first time, and that I'd been keeping in my back pocket for just such an occasion: I had a ticket to Death of England: Closing Time's premiere at the Dorfman in 2023, but my performance got cancelled when Jo Martin fell ill. I wasn't too worried about missing the latest part of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams' increasingly epic project as I knew it would turn up on NTatHome sooner or later, which it now has: It played in rep as part of a trilogy (the made-for-TV Face to Face seems to have been quietly forgotten) that played in rep last year at @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it's working on a gag about what "Zig-A-Zig-Ah" means that it'll find a punchline for any day now.

Theatre review: Cymbeline(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

If Love's Labour's Lost can feel like the young Shakespeare workshopping setpieces he would perfect later in his career, Cymbeline could be the older playwright collecting every mad idea he couldn't fit into an earlier play, then throwing them all together to see what happens. The story of Roman Britain sees Princess Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks) separated from her exiled spouse, to be reunited only after a deranged fairytale quest that includes a man hiding in a trunk, a health tonic that's actually a deadly poison that's actually just a sleeping draught, meeting a pair of siblings she never knew existed, and a headless corpse largely played for laughs. The Swanamaker's latest take on the play gender-flips a lot of characters including the titular king; I understand the desire for a powerful female leader figure, but it feels a bit of a pyrrhic victory for that leader to struggle to make an impression because she spends the whole play on more sedatives than a 1980s soap opera housewife.

Theatre review: A Good House

If the Royal Court Upstairs has a history of making you feel very nervous about any play featuring a baby, the main Downstairs theatre can give you déjà vu with a satire on race relations set firmly in the suburbs, whose communities appear happily integrated on a surface that's easily scratched away. If Clybourne Park had over fifty years of history to play with, Amy Jephta's A Good House deals with a place where the very first roots of racial integration are only three decades old: The aptly-named Stillwater is an affluent new-build suburb of Johannesburg, where Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa) and Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko) were early buyers, and two years on remain the only black residents. Meanwhile, yoga instructor Jess (Robyn Rainsford) and her husband Andrew (Kai Luke Brummer) moved in a couple of months ago, paying a much higher price which means all their money is now tied up in the house.

Theatre review: Twelfth Night (RSC / RST)

The RSC's apparent reverse-Globe scheduling policy of rarer Shakespeare plays in the summer and the most famous ones in winter continues with Twelfth Night as the holiday show. Prasanna Puwanarajah's production even embraces the play's seasonal title with a few Christmas songs and decorations - all fairly subtle though, this story does after all feature a high-profile Puritan, and they were famously not big fans of Christmas. In fact I was meant to see this closer to the season itself but with the train service between That London and Stratford-upon-Avon being nonexistent for most of this month I had to reschedule to the final matinée: I'd rather not have to publish a review after the show's closed but needs must when Chiltern Railways exists. Opening not with the big storm but with Gwyneth Keyworth's Viola spluttering out of the water, the sense of understatement extends from the Christmas trimmings to many elements of the play.

Theatre review: An Interrogation

Cameron (Jamie Ballard) is the founder and CEO of a successful consultancy firm with government contacts; he's got a ruthless reputation tempered with charity work, and he spends most weekends looking after his aging mother. But police officer Ruth (Rosie Sheehy) is pretty convinced his mild image is distracting from more than just the large swathes of redundancies his company has been responsible for: She also believes that he kidnapped and murdered one of his employees a few months back. Now another young woman is missing, and if it's the work of the same person she might have been kept alive for up to 72 hours. The Reading police are under pressure to find the second victim while she's still alive, and with hours to go Ruth has been given the chance to try out her hunch: With her boss watching from a nearby room, she'll interview Cameron alone.

Theatre review: Titaníque

Docking at the Criterion after a successful run off-Broadway, Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue's Titaníque couldn't call itself Titanic: The Musical because there already is one of them. But where that show tried to tell the story from the perspective of pretty much everyone on the iconic but doomed liner, this is what most people would probably expect from a Titanic musical: A stage adaptation of James Cameron's 1997 film juggernaut about how Kate Winslet liked Leonardo DiCaprio, but not quite enough to give him space on a fairly large door. With added Céline Dion, whose back catalogue makes this a jukebox musical, but who also gives it its deranged framing device: At a Titanic-themed museum, Dion (Lauren Drew) bursts in to announce they've got everything wrong and she should know, because she was there. Ignoring the fact that this would make her at least 150 years old, she proceeds to tell the story.

Theatre review: Firebird

After a couple of years away from the venue I return to the original pub theatre for the first time since it moved out of the actual pub: The King's Head is now located in a larger purpose-built theatre a few feet away from its old home - horizontally at least, vertically the new sub-sub-sub basement is a bit more of a trek. The show bringing me back is Firebird, the queer love story of Cold War Russia from Sergey Fetisov's memoir, probably best known here for the recent film version. In fact Richard Hough's stage adaptation is credited as being based as much on Peeter Rebane & Tom Prior's screenplay as it is the book: I've not read the book or seen the film yet, so approached the story of a lieutenant in trouble for touching his privates fresh; but soon got the feeling that Hough is relying on a certain amount of preexisting familiarity with the characters.

Theatre review: Oliver!

After a 2024 full of shows with punctuation in the title, the West End gets the OG musical hit in 2025 with the transferring Chichester Festival Theatre production of Lionel Bart's Oliver Exclamation Mark. Charles Dickens' (Chickens to his friends) story of child trafficking, wifebeating, murder, grooming gangs, antisemitism, alcoholism and a quadruple revolve sees Oliver Twist's (Cian Eagle-Service, alternating with Raphael Korniets, Jack Philpott and Odo Rowntree-Bailly) mother die in a Victorian London workhouse giving birth to him. The child is raised there until the age of eleven, at which point he annoys Mr Bumble (Oscar Conlon-Morrey) by politely asking for a second helping of gruel and has to be got rid of. It being a century too early to sell him to a 1970s DJ, Bumble sells him to an undertaker, but soon the boy is back out on the streets.

Theatre review: The Tempest(Jamie Lloyd Company / Theatre Royal Drury Lane)

Apparently when John Gielgud ended his run as Prospero at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1957, he foretold that Shakespeare would never again be performed at the venue, which would become a home for big musicals only. No doubt any suggestion of snobbery was fully intended, but it's also probably fair to say that a vast stage and 2000+ seat auditorium might be easier to fill with a big spectacle than with a production of a play that comes around every couple of years in London alone. But the theatre is now owned by His Exalted Brittanic Excellency, The Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB, who has enlisted Jamie Lloyd to end the 67-year Shakespeare drought at the venue with a starry mini-season inspired by the noblest of all intentions: Proving that a man who died a quarter of a century ago was wrong about that thing he said that one time.

Theatre review:Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812

The year's theatre starts for me, as it often seems to, at the Donald and Margot Warehouse, where Tim Sheader's first production as Artistic Director follows on from the tradition of big musicals he established in his time at the Open Air Theatre. I approached this one with a certain amount of trepidation as I've only intermittently got on with the work of off-Broadway royalty Dave Malloy's jarring musical style in the past, but Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 has been the composer's big breakout hit, and it receives its UK premiere here with an impressive cast. Based on a subplot from War and Peace, it sees wide-eyed young aristocrat Natasha (Chumisa Dornford-May) arrive in Moscow (or MscoW, as Leslie Travers' industrial set styles it,) where the family of her fiancé Andrey lives.

2024: Nick's Theatre Review of the Year

Halfway into the decade that started with the Covid pandemic, and I can't be the only one whose perception of time continues to be pretty screwed by that extended pause, can I? I've definitely had a mental block that divides everything into "the before times" and "last week." AD2024 might be the year that I started to get a grip on that again, ish - maybe 2025 I'll actually get my concept of time back, but for now I'm still relying on this blog to help me remember when stuff happened: When I'd been writing it for a year and decided that, for 2013, I'd come up with a new annual theme for my thumbnail images, it was mainly so that I felt like I was giving the thing the occasional spruce-up without actually having to bother properly redesigning anything. Now, whatever crop or filter I've started a review with is a handy little clue to my brain on whether it was as recent as I thought, or if the adorable child cast are now drawing their pensions. I'm old, is what I'm saying, and you probably are too. Both of you.

Theatre review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Rebecca Frecknall returns to the major Tennessee Williams plays at the Almeida and, with The Glass Menagerie having been done to death in recent years, the next obvious candidate would be Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which hasn't had a major London production since the genitals-forward one of 2017. Still, that one having such a distinctive, er, visual identity means Frecknall still has to put a strong stamp on her version to make it stand out, and unsurprisingly she does. A wealthy, plantation-owning Southern family get together to celebrate the 65th birthday of Big Daddy (Lennie James,) who's recently got the all-clear from cancer. Except he hasn't: In a play about secrets, the one most of the family share is that the doctor's letter actually revealed his condition was inoperable, terminal, and about to enter its final stages. But in what is being considered a kindness, he and Big Mama (Clare Burt) are being kept in the dark.

Theatre review: The Invention of Love

Crazy to think Tom Stoppard has spent an entire career writing plays about human beings, despite all the evidence suggesting he's never met one. In fact despite having enjoyed some of his work it may be time to add him to my very short list of creatives I've given enough chances to for one lifetime, as The Invention of Love is based around a premise that should be effortlessly moving, but ends up far too interested in deconstructing Catullus to get round to deconstructing emotions: Simon Russell Beale plays A E Housman, the Victorian poet and classicist who, by the time of his death, seems to have decided that the two pursuits don't really go together, as one requires rules, facts and logic to be set aside in favour of emotional truth, while the other involves picking apart every comma in the name of strict accuracy.

Theatre review: A Very Naughty Christmas

Look, I don't book everything expecting it to be high art, and sometimes I'll book things with the express hope that it won't be, but you can go in with fairly low expectations and still come out disappointed. For this year's most overtly seasonal theatre visit I kept it local at Southwark Playhouse, who've imported Alex Woodward & Daniel Venz' A Very Naughty Christmas from Australia. Matthew Semple, Stephen Hirst, Emily Kristopher, Dom Woodhead, Tom Collins, Aurélie Roque and Alister Smith also have various writing, composing and creative credits on the show, and the nine of them have put their heads together to notice that a number of popular Christmas songs have some reference to Santa coming. The result is a cabaret show that mainly consists of pointing this fact out to us for a little under two hours.

Theatre review: The Lightning Thief

In among the Greek mythology that's been more present than ever on London stages lately is a more family-friendly version than the usual, um, complex mother-son relationships we get to dissect. Then again on this evidence Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series of YA novels are based on the idea of the Olympian gods knocking up dozens of random humans and then forgetting the kids ever existed. Add some "issues" regarding consent and you'd have 90% of the Greek myths right there. Joe Tracz (book) and Rob Rokicki's (music & lyrics) The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical is based on the first book in the series, in which Percy (Max Harwood) discovers that in his case the absent father is Poseidon, one of the three brothers who founded the Olympians, and therefore one of the three most powerful gods.

Theatre review: Twelfth Night (Orange Tree Theatre)

This year's Twelfth Night productions have leaned extra heavily on the idea of the play as a melancholy one, and while the cliché about it being Shakespeare's farewell to straightforward comedy tends to be code for "we forgot to make it funny," the Open Air Theatre managed a version of that approach that really worked for me. Sad clowns are clearly the order of the day at the Orange Tree as well, where Tom Littler's production sets the action in the 1940s, presumably very soon after the end of the Second World War given the whole stage becomes a War memorial inscribed with names. Anett Black and Neil Irish's designs are in mournful monochrome apart from the yellow stockings, and at the start of the play Olivia (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) is in mourning for her father and brother, both recently deceased, and judging by the portraits in uniform in her cabinet, both killed in action.

Theatre review: The Little Foxes

In what can reasonably be called an alternative to the cheery festive fare at most other theatres, the Young Vic offers up a winter show so unremittingly grim that Anne-Marie Duff agreed to star in it. Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes premiered in 1939, takes place in 1900 and has, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, been set sometime in the 1950s or '60s for Lyndsey Turner's production. At the centre of the story are three siblings, whose family wealth comes from cotton plantations; while slavery has long since been abolished, brothers Ben (Mark Bonnar) and Oscar (Steffan Rhodri) still control all the wealth in their Alabama town, but are trying to get in on a deal for a new cotton mill they hope will restore them to the even greater power their family used to have.