Theatre review: Flyby

Oh to be a fly on a rehearsal room wall:

"OK Stuart, so we're going for the big finale now and you're giving us some of your most emotionally-charged vocals and Ian Charleson-nominated acting, really belting the song out, tears streaming down your face, the works. But GET THIS! Nobody will notice any of it, because they'll all be looking at the bloke dressed as a giant space turtle flailing around on the floor trying to get off the stage before the bows. Yes, I thought you'd like it."

Theo Jamieson (book, music and lyrics) and Adam Lenson's (co-creator and director) musical Flyby has, it's fair to say, quite a lot going on. Astronaut Daniel Defoe (Stuart Thompson) disappears from a space station during a mission, hijacking an escape pod in what appears to be an act premeditated and planned for years in advance.

Theatre review: Copenhagen

When Copenhagen was scheduled for a revival at Hampstead Theatre it probably felt like a timely choice because of the recent success of Farm Hall and the film Oppenheimer, but as invariably and depressingly seems to happen, current affairs have delivered another reason for Michael Frayn's play about nuclear physicists to feel topical. In the first six years of me writing this blog I could reliably catch Big Favourite Round These Parts Damien Molony on stage once a year, but he's been absent for nearly a decade before returning to play Werner Heisenberg, the leading nuclear physicist who led the German team attempting to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War. His other most famous accomplishment is the Uncertainty Principle, and the play centres on a historical mystery that even the participants seemed uncertain about, with both central figures giving conflicting accounts later in life.

Theatre review: Henry V (RSC/RST)

A Henry V that doesn't feel horribly topical when a foreign war is launched to distract from a domestic crisis must be as rare as one that doesn't co-opt something from the Henry IV plays to build its world. Both themes are present together as 50% of the RSC's Artistic Director reunites with Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch: Tamara Harvey's production opens with Enoch's Hal mistaking his sleeping father for dead and prematurely taking the crown. It feels notable that he shoos away a servant as the old king (Valentine Hanson) admits his claim to the throne was tenuous, and then goes on to advise his son to solidify his own position by invading France. This becomes pretty much the whole plot of the play that follows, but Hal's statement that the weight of responsibility led Henry IV to his early grave turns out not to be as relevant to him.

Theatre review: Teeth'N'Smiles

The ultimate accolade shouldn't be a gold record, it should be a golden hypodermic. Parklife!

David Hare's play with songs Teeth Apostrophe N Apostrophe Smiles, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1975, is set six years earlier in 1969, when disillusionment with rock music and the counterculture it spearheaded was starting to set in. Maggie Frisby and The Skins are a once-popular group on its last legs, doing tours around UK universities that barely cover their expenses - Rebecca Lucy Taylor Also Known As Self Esteem plays vocalist Maggie, with Michael Abubakar, Bill Caple, Samuel Jordan, Jojo Macari and Noah Weatherby as a band at various levels of frustration at the way their careers have turned out. Maggie is a former heroin addict, but while we're given no reason to doubt that she's given that up, she's still unapologetically and indisputably an alcoholic who may or may not perform on any given night - it's the shows she's really looking forward to that the band know to be most worried about.

Theatre review: Lifeline

At last, the musical about antimicrobial resistance that someone, somewhere has presumably been clamouring for! Alexander Fleming (Alan Vicary,) Phlegm to his friends if Lifeline is to be believed, won a Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of Penicillin, but by 1950 was already warning that the overuse of antibiotics could lead to bacteria developing a resistance, leaving patients as helpless as they were before their introduction. In the present day, Scottish-American musician Aaron (Nathan Salstone) survives a radical operation to cure his colon cancer, only to succumb to sepsis in the Edinburgh hospital where his childhood sweetheart Jess (Maz McGinlay) now works as a paediatrician. The will-they/won't-they of whether they'll get back together has to take second place to the question of whether Aaron will survive at all.

Theatre review: Romeo & Juliet(Empire Street Productions / Harold Pinter Theatre)

What if, instead of giving a written instruction to a servant who can't read, you gave it to one who can? If Capulet (Clark Gregg) had handed the invitations to his ball to the Nurse (Clare Perkins,) she could have found the guests herself. Instead the illiterate Peter (Jamie Ankrah) needs help from a stranger in the street, who invites himself along to the party to stalk a girl he fancies. Once there Romeo (Noah Jupe) falls for Capulet's daughter Juliet (Sadie Sink,) who enthusiastically returns his interest. This teenage infatuation is given an entirely unnecessary sense of peril and urgency by the fact that the pair's families have an unexplained, deadly rivalry, leading them into an elopement within hours of their first meeting. A number of other avoidable accidents and violent acts interfere over the next couple of days, and trying to navigate them while keeping their big secret sees the affair end in tragedy.

Theatre review: Jaja's African Hair Braiding

Like a female version of Inua Ellams' Barber Shop Chronicles, Jocelyn Bioh's 2024 play Jaja's African Hair Braiding spans a working day in the titular Harlem salon where four African immigrant women compete for customers, tell stories and bicker: Miriam (Jadesola Odunjo) is the quiet one on the surface, cheerfully getting lumbered with a complicated job that'll take her all day, but able to open up and show a nuanced inner life when she connects with someone. Aminata (babirye bukilwa) is outwardly confident but her determination not to let her deadbeat husband James push her around is easily dented. Ndidi (Bola Akeju) is temporarily occupying a chair as the salon where she usually works, having clawed her way up to a full-time position, burned down. And Bea (Dolapo Oni) would be the group's mother figure, if she hadn't managed to piss all of them off at some point or other.

Theatre review: John Proctor is the Villain

Set at the height of #MeToo in 2018, Kimberly Belflower's John Proctor is the Villain asks how 16-year-old girls would respond to that movement coinciding with them starting to understand their own sexuality and their relationships with men - through the prism of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. That's the text being studied by the English Literature class in a tiny Georgia town's high school when Beth (Holly Howden Gilchrist) decides to set up a feminist society - although how it'll look on her college applications might be more of a motivator than how much it'll actually engage with the discourse. She's joined by Nell (Lauryn Ajufo,) a new arrival to town who's found more friends here than she ever did in Atlanta, and Raelynn (Miya James,) still smarting from her boyfriend Lee (Charlie Borg) cheating on her with her best friend Shelby.

Theatre review: Welcome to Pemfort

Sarah Power's Welcome to Pemfort had kind of gone under my radar - as anything buried somewhere in the clutter of Soho Theatre's schedule is apt to do - until its cast was announced, and offered the chance to see Sean Delaney back on stage for the first time since the Oh My God They Killed Kenny incident. Whatever my motivations I'm glad to have caught it, as the strong cast is matched by an impressive play that balances light and dark to offer something genuinely thought-provoking and heartbreaking. Pemfort is a small Mediaeval castle (despite the name nobody can quite confirm if it's technically a fort) on the outskirts of a village of the same name, and for all that the locals consider a Civil War battle on its grounds to be a major historical event, the world at large doesn't agree and the site barely gets any visitors, even during the summer season.

Theatre review: Vincent in Brixton

Nicholas Wright's 2002 play Vincent in Brixton is a work of fiction, but it does have its basis in a few interesting facts, for example that before becoming an artist himself, Vincent van Gogh worked as an art dealer - an ironic job for someone whose own paintings would fail to sell during his lifetime, before becoming among the most valuable in the world after his death. In 1873 he was briefly transfered to the London office, and the play begins with him walking all the way from Greenwich, where he was staying, to Brixton, where he'd found a church close enough to the strict and stark Dutch Reform tradition he'd been raised in. Vincent (Jeroen Frank Kales) then takes a room at a local house, officially to live closer to his church of choice - but he's really picked it because he's spotted the landlady's daughter Eugenie (Ayesha Ostler) and decided he's fallen in love at first sight.

Theatre review: Summerfolk

Maxim Gorky's Summerfolk was written in 1904, the year Anton Chekhov died; Nina Raine and Moses Raine's new version for the National moves the action to one year later, possibly so that the characters can make reference to his death, and the obvious comparisons to Gorky's playwrighting contemporary aren't left to be the elephant in the room. Because this all feels very familiar: A large group of well-off Russians (in this case explicitly said to be self-made, nouveau-riche) are on their annual extended summer holiday at a dacha. Some are related: The house belongs to Varvara (Sophie Rundle) and her laywer husband Sergei Bassov (Paul Ready,) while her brother Vlass (Alex Lawther) is nominally Sergei's clerk, but in practice seems to be there mainly to moon over an older woman, the doctor Maria Lvovna (Justine Mitchell.)

Theatre review: It Walks Around The House At Night

Joe (George Naylor) is an out-of-work actor with a thing for posh boys, who's working in a bar when one of the regulars offers him a well-paid acting job - of sorts. David's nieces will be visiting the family's country pile for a week, and he's promised them an appearance from a resident ghost with a regular routine: It Walks Around The House At Night. One of the things about Tim Foley's ghost story that lets you know you're in (un)safe hands is the way he immediately wrong-foots the audience's mental image of what that title means - never setting foot inside the building, the ghost literally walks around the house, circling it in the surrounding dark woods. Joe is put up at a nearby lodge, asked to leave it only when dark falls and it's time to follow his assigned route through the trees.

Theatre review: Broken Glass

After a wobbly start to the Young Vic's new regime - a Mr Sloane that bafflingly ironed the gay out of Joe Orton, and a Bengal Tiger that was just baffling in general - it settles into a stronger groove with Jordan Fein's take on Arthur Miller. The Broken Glass in his 1994 play is Kristallnacht, the 1938 attacks on Jewish businesses that became the first major sign of the extent to which Nazi Germany was willing to turn its antisemitic rhetoric into action. As stories and photos appear in the newspapers worldwide, New Yorker Sylvia Gellburg (Pearl Chanda) suddenly loses the ability to walk. Referred to Dr Hyman (Alex Waldmann,) he and the experts he consults with are unable to find a physical cause for her disability, and he starts to lean towards theories of something psychosomatic: Confronted with both these brutal images and everyone around her's seemingly blasé responses to them, part of Sylvia has shut down.

Theatre review: Bird Grove

Alexi Kaye Campbell throws a little dig at himself in Bird Grove, as a male writer telling the story of how women's voices needed to be heard, and how one woman made sure hers was one of them. She did do it under the male pseudonym of George Elliot, but in 1841 she's still Mary Ann Evans (Elizabeth Dulau,) a woman whose family is starting to worry might be getting too old to attract a husband. Her father Robert (Owen Teale) has recently retired after a lifetime of hard work which has, however, left him financially very comfortable: He's bought Bird Grove House in Coventry for him and his daughter to live in; the idea is that they'll settle into a new area as a respectable family who'll attract eligible young men to propose to Mary Ann. This isn't getting off to the best start though, as her brother Isaac (Jolyon Coy) has brought along a very bad match in Horace (Jonnie Broadbent.)

Theatre review: The Tempest(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Shakespeare's Globe's winter season is one they can't really make a profit out of due to the Swanamaker's size, so traditionally it's been the one where less obviously commercial choices are made. In the past this has tended to mean expanding the repertoire to less famous Jacobean playwrights and beyond, but for the 2025/26 season it involves two of the more popular Shakespeare plays getting eccentric reinventions. And unlike Holly Race Roughan's Midsummer Night's Dream, which simply took the common trope of finding the play's dark side to its natural extreme, Tim Crouch's look at The Tempest is grounded in ideas I've seen applied to the play a lot less frequently. It is very recognisably Crouch's work, even without the fact that he also appears in it, because in a theme that runs through a number of his plays it takes place in a theatre - specifically this one.

Theatre review: Shadowlands

Star of Bonekickers, Hugh Bonneville makes a rare venture to the stage in Shadowlands, William Nicholson's play about Narnia author C.S. "Jack" Lewis, his late-blooming love life and the way it put to the test his Christian treatises on why god lets humans suffer. Lewis opens the play delivering a lecture on this theme, before returning to his fellow Oxford dons (Tony Jayawardena, Fode Simbo, Giles Taylor and Timothy Watson,) who see him as a poetry lecturer with a funny little sideline in children's books. He's also known for his arrested development as far as sex is concerned, a pious bachelor who lives with his brother W.H. (Jeff Rawle) and barely speaks to any women unless he's addressing the WI. He does, however, have a female pen-pal in Joy Davidman (Maggie Siff,) a married New York poet who heard of Lewis through her son's love of Narnia but started corresponding with him because of his religious writing.

Theatre review: Dracula (Noël Coward Theatre)

After an incredibly high-profile couple of years on the Wicked promotional tour that blurred the lines between press junket and mental breakdown, Cynthia Erivo returns to the West End to hold space with the undead. Kip Williams adapts Bram Stoker's Dracula into a one-woman show although in reality, apart from a couple of added fucks near the end, this text is more abridgement than adaptation: Keeping the epistolary form of the novel, Erivo narrates the story of an ancient Romanian vampire who moves to the UK to build up his real estate portfolio and/or army of the damned. On stage she predominantly plays the three rather dull narrators, Jonathan Harker, the lawyer who first visits Dracula's castle and nearly dies there, Jonathan's fiancée Mina, whose best friend Lucy becomes the vampire's victim, and Dr Seward, who's also there.

Theatre review: American Psycho

The Almeida will continue to have shows programmed in the Rupert Goold era running for the rest of this year, but for his final show there as director he does what Rufus Norris did when exiting the National, and revisits a hit musical he directed there just before taking on the Artistic Director job: Here that means American Psycho, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (book) and Duncan Sheik's (music and lyrics) adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' twisted satire of capitalism. Patrick Bateman (Arty Froushan) is the archetypal young Wall Street broker working in Murders and Executions (or is it Mergers and Acquisitions?) flashing the latest tech, fashions and products to show how well he's doing for himself. But for all that he's the go-to man at his firm for questions of 1980s etiquette, he always feels sure someone else is doing just that little bit better than him.

Theatre review: The Shitheads

Humans have a number of evolutionary ancestors, with some of the subspecies having co-existed in prehistoric times and fought for dominance. Jack Nicholls' debut play at the Royal Court Upstairs imagines one such time of uneasy meeting between the two, but doesn't call them by names like Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal: Clare's (Jacoba Williams) family of cave-dwellers call themselves the Magic people, as their superior ability to communicate, hunt and survive seems miraculous; they call their nomadic neighbours The Shitheads. They've been known to kill and eat their rivals, particularly their brains as they believe this will pass on all their victim's knowledge, thoughts and dreams to them, but when Clare goes on an elk hunt with Shithead Greg (Jonny Khan,) not only can he speak but he tells her a story, opening her up to the idea that there might be other ways of dealing with the other species.

Theatre review: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry seemed like one of those shows I have an extreme reaction to: The sort of heartstring-tugging story that'll either have me sobbing uncontrollably or cringing halfway out of my skin. Neither really ended up happening in the end - certainly in the first half-hour I found it pretty unbearable, but Rachel Joyce (book) and Passenger's (music and lyrics) adaptation of Joyce's novel does end up more or less bearable. Recently-retired Harold (Transphobia Ltd Employee Mark Addy) lives a joyless life in Devon with funsponge wife Maureen (Jenna Russell,) until one morning he receives a letter informing him that old friend Queenie (Maggie Service) is in a hospice with terminal cancer. He writes a perfunctory response but when he tries to post it finds himself constantly putting it off and walking to the next postbox.