Theatre review: Spirited Away

All of a sudden London theatre seems to have cottoned on to the popularity of East Asian culture, so in the coming months we've got the return of Totoro, new musicals with Korean and Manga roots, and first up another adaptation of a beloved Studio Ghibli film. Spirited Away comes to the Coliseum in John Caird's original Tokyo production, in Japanese with surtitles. Like many a Hayao Miyazaki story it begins with a child nervous about moving to a new home: Chihiro's (Momoko Fukuchi, alternating with Kanna Hashimoto, Mone Kamishiraishi and Rina Kawaei) family are driving to a new town when they stop off to check out an ancient building. Once inside they find a market full of food stalls but nobody manning them, so Chihiro's parents help themselves, promising to pay once somebody arrives. But as night falls the market will transform into a place for 8 million gods to congregate in, and as fairytale logic applies the parents will be transformed into pigs for their gluttony.

Theatre review: Boys from the Blackstuff

Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff has become the stuff of legend, so even though I've never seen it - even if I'd been living in the UK at the time, I'd have been seven when the original TV series aired in 1982 - there's many iconic images and catchphrases from the show I'm familiar with. An early and influential critique of Thatcher's Britain, I won't go into the reasons a story about the unemployed being both left without a safety net and blamed for their predicament seems ripe to revisit today - we'd be here all night. I guess if you want to tell a story about men who just want to work there's some logic to getting an officially diagnosed workaholic to do it, so James Graham is on adaptation duties for Kate Wasserberg's production, which debuted at Liverpool's Royal Court before this brief run at the National, with a West End run coming next due to high demand.

Theatre review: Hamlet (Riverside Studios)

Following last year's solo Great Expectations, Eddie Izzard returns to the stage, once again with her older brother Mark adapting a famous work into a monologue. This time, though, instead of a novel with a fair amount of first-person narration to keep the story going, it's Shakespeare's most lauded tragedy Hamlet, a story that's already written for the stage. So the source material is all dialogue, leaving it entirely down to the performer to make sure the audience knows who's saying what to whom. Eddie Izzard does of course have a lot of acting credits but remains best known as a comedian, and if she's previously performed Shakespeare professionally I can't find any reference to it, so this endeavour has to fall somewhere between ambitious and foolhardy, with the distinct possibility of coming across as pure vanity project. What we get in the end is a little bit of all of the above.

Theatre review: Twelfth Night, or What You Will(Regent's Park Open Air Theatre)

Well it's a good job I'm already more than familiar with the plot of this one, because any show featuring Nicholas Karimi as a sugar daddy in a low-cut top is going to be a tricky one to remember anything else about. Drew McOnie's first season of programming at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre starts with Twelfth Night, but it does share a thematic connection with his predecessor's final production, La Cage Aux Folles: Owen Horsley sets his production in a faded cabaret club, and even gives us a drag queen version of Sir Toby Belch. If the club's not heaving with customers it's probably because the owner, Olivia (Anna Francolini) has imposed a lengthy period of mourning for her dead brother, whose ashes she carries around with her everywhere, addressing her soliloquies to the urn. One regular patron is Orsino (Raphael Bushay,) who's performatively in love with Olivia, and keeps hoping despite all signs to the contrary that he might be able to woo her.

Theatre review: Richard III (Shakespeare's Globe)

I'm starting 2024's summer Globe season with the venue's now-traditional, annual raging controversy: For a change this involves protests about the casting not being inclusive enough, rather than the usual protests about it being too inclusive. Artistic Director Michelle Terry's contract requires her to take a role in at least one show per season, and this year that was the title role in Richard III, a role written as disabled, traditionally played by able-bodied actors (often as grotesques) and in recent years reclaimed as a plum role for actors with disabilities. It's a tricky one, and with many disabled actors speaking out against Terry you've got to take that into consideration, but at the same time it seems like making an example of an easy target, and someone who's spent years putting disabled actors, among other minority groups, into other iconic roles that aren't explicitly written for them.

Theatre review: Sappho

Not much is known about Sappho, the ancient Greek poet from Lesbos, except for the fact that what little survives of her work often consists of romantic verse about other women - hence her inspiring both the terms "sapphic" and "lesbian." So Wendy Beckett has carte blanche to create her for her play Sappho, which imagines her falling for a woman while trying to get out of an arranged marriage to a young boy. Why, then, she's chosen to make her such a wet blanket who barely seems to register in her own play until the end is a mystery. Sappho (Georgie Fellows) has an adoring coterie of young women who love her poetry, but she's only interested in Adore (Eleanor Kane.)

Theatre review: Love's Labour's Lost (RSC/RST)

I would rather see a show relatively early in its run, especially since I review them online and people could read my recommendations and decide what to see based on them (stop laughing at the back, I've been assured it happened once.) But sometimes between rail strikes and me being busy the rest of the run I end up in Stratford-upon-Avon for the final matinée, so you're reading this after the run's ended, sorry if you fancied it. And yes, speaking of fancying, the star name here is Luke Thompson, who for the last eleven years I've been watching on stage have his clothes fall off on the slightest pretext with such regularity it can't all just be down to thirsty directors, he's got to be initiating some of it himself. In an unrelated matter, the show that's now given him above-the-title star status is Bridgerton. In any case, it's also always interesting to see what a new regime at one of the major theatres has chosen as its opening production.

Theatre review: Between Riverside and Crazy

Most actors take a bit of a break after playing King Lear; Danny Sapani barely seems to have taken a breath between his run at the Almeida and another intense, deeply damaged leading man at Hampstead, in Stephen Adly Guirgis' 2014 play Between Riverside and Crazy. Eight years ago Walter "Pops" Washington (Sapani) had to retire from the NYPD after being shot six times by a rookie cop - not actually in the line of duty, although his former employers have more or less treated him as if he was. But Pops has turned down every compensation offer they've ever made, preferring to continue being a thorn in their side and an embarrassment to them, who's still convinced he can get a settlement worth millions. Now Pops' wife has died after a long illness, and he's filled his large rent-controlled apartment with a collection of ex-cons he's trying to help reform.

Theatre review: Captain Amazing

Captain Amazing dates from ten years ago, so it's just before playwright Alistair McDowell was a big enough name to get the budget for eldritch abominations, deep space mysteries and time-travelling mythical figures. But while it's a monologue dealing with very down-to-earth causes for joy and despair, it's still couched in terms of an SF world - in this case that of comic-book superheroes. Mark Weinman appears in jeans and a T-shirt, along with a long red cape as he takes us through a decade or so of the life of a man, also called Mark, who's been drunkenly pestering people in a club, insisting he's the titular hero. What led him to this point begins at his job in B&Q, helping a customer who will eventually become his wife. Sooner than they might have expected they become parents, and Mark is a devoted dad although not necessarily one who feels he knows what he's doing - especially once the marriage starts to break down.

Theatre review: Dugsi Dayz

Acting as a soft launch for his first season in charge of the Royal Court, David Byrne (not that one) offers up a short run for a show that had previously played at his former venue, the New Diorama: Dugsi Dayz is Sabrina Ali's twist on The Breakfast Club, replacing a group of 20th century American High School archetypes with four 21st century teenage Somali-British girls who've been made to do an hour's Saturday detention at their mosque, as punishment for haram acts they're not actually obliged to tell each other about, thank you very much. The characters don't have exact parallels with the John Hughes film, so it would be labouring the point a bit to make them. But let's do that anyway. Munira (Ali) and Yasmin (Faduma Issa) are the Emilio Estevez / Molly Ringwald cool kids, friends who can't seem to do anything without the other filming it for TikTok.

Theatre review: Player Kings

A few years ago in his one-man show, Ian McKellen answered a question about Falstaff by saying that he'd always wanted to play the character until he saw Roger Allam play him at the Globe. Like many people he considered the performance definitive, and decided there was no point him tackling the role because there was nothing he could add to it. I wonder if the fact that he spent much of last year performing with Allam has anything to do with him changing his mind and, after years of turning it down, accepting Robert Icke's offer to join Player Kings, Icke's compressed version of both of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays. Falstaff is, at least as far as he's presented at the start of the show, something of an East End gangster, comparatively affable as far as crime bosses go but still involved with planning and, despite his advanced years and increasing waistline, carrying out robberies that can easily turn violent.

Theatre review: The Cherry Orchard

The Donald and Margot Warehouse is back in its occasional in-the-round configuration for Benedict Andrews' version of The Cherry Orchard, with Magda Willi covering the stage and walls in heavily-patterned orange carpet, signalling from the start a different aesthetic for Chekhov's final play, and the one widely interpreted as anticipating the Russian Revolution. The formerly wealthy family hurtling towards a doom they refuse to see coming have owned a large estate for generations, but are now seriously in debt: Gaev (Michael Gould) has been in charge of managing the estate, which he's done good-naturedly but ineptly; his sister Ranevskaya (Nina Hoss) on the other hand seems to actively haemorrhage money, whether through her attraction to dodgy men who invariably rip her off, or through genuinely seeming not to understand the value of the cash she spends or gives away.

Theatre review: Moby Dick

After a few years away, simple8 are returning with a new play later this year, but first they're reviving a former hit with a touring production of Moby Dick. I last saw Sebastian Armesto's adaptation of the book that set the template for the Great American Novel 11 years ago at the Arcola, but for the London leg this time it relocates to Wilton's Music Hall, a venue whose long history does include a connection to sailors and sea shanties, so seems a good match for a demented revenge drama that takes place mostly at sea. Ahab (Guy Rhys) captains a 19th century whaling ship, on a mission to hunt down sperm whales and use their blubber to power the world's lamps. But for him the mission he's actually being paid for is secondary, as on a past voyage he encountered a notoriously aggressive, unusually white whale nicknamed Moby Dick, that's been known to turn the tables on whalers and sink the ships.

Theatre review: The Ballad of Hattie and James

Leaving aside the fact that I've been unable to think of this as anything other than The Ballad of Hattie Jacques (and pretty much the first thing Jan said when he arrived at the theatre was that he's been exactly the same,) Samuel Adamson's The Ballad of Hattie and James comes with a good pedigree: The author returns to the Kiln having previously provided the venue with a mixed success in Wife, and the titular characters are played by Sophie Thompson and Charles Edwards. It's a moody, occasionally funny story of a friendship that goes very wrong but remains incredibly important throughout two people's lives, with all the makings of a really moving 90-minute play. The fact that it runs at an hour longer than that explains much about why the evening falls short of its potential.