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.

Theatre review: The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde's famous comedy about an imaginary friend who seems to have a busier social life than any of the "real" characters is one I do think is very funny, but it's produced so often and the aphorisms are so famous that it's hard to be surprised by it. So I need a good excuse to see any particular production. Max Webster's new revival of The Importance of Being Earnest has a big selling point in that it's always a big deal when the current Doctor takes to the stage, but what sold it for me was that Ncuti Gatwa was just part of a cast heavy on openly LGBTQ+ stars. The rather dubious "fact" that keeps getting rolled out for this play's title is that "Earnest" was a private Victorian code for gay people to identify each other, like an early version of Polari. The fact that I've never seen this referenced in any other context makes me suspect the only real pun in the title is the one that's right there in the last line of the play, but I did think we might be in for a version that focuses on the campness of the characters, and the metaphor in their double lives.