Theatre review: Beetlejuice

An on-and-off hit in New York - it's opened and closed there multiple times since its original Broadway run was scuppered by Covid - Eddie Perfect (music and lyrics,) Scott Brown and Anthony King's (book) Beetlejuice now arrives in the West End for a run that seems to predict a similar mixed level of enthusiasm: It's at the huge Prince Edward Theatre, but has been advertised as a limited year-long run. Following the broad strokes of the Tim Burton film but deviating from the plot when it suits it, the story sees Lydia Deetz (Hannah Nordberg) move into a haunted house with her father Charles (Alasdair Harvey) and his new girlfriend (officially Lydia's life coach,) Delia (Aimie Atkinson.) Still mourning her recently deceased mother and very much stuck in the "denial" stage of grief, when Lydia discovers that the previous owners are still haunting the house, it convinces her there must be a way to see her mother again.

Theatre review: Dark of the Moon

Look, none of us are perfect, I never said I always choose which shows to see for the purest of reasons, and whomst amongst us can say they've never slowed down to look at a car crash? When I saw Stranger Things: The First Shadow a couple of years ago I assumed that the subplot about the high school kids putting on an unbelievably cheesy school play featured a deliberate parody of Twilight, all angsty teenage love between human and supernatural characters. When Dark of the Moon turned out to be a real Broadway show from 1945, which genuinely did become a school drama staple in the next couple of decades, I predicted it wouldn't be long before someone revived the real thing as a curiosity. I was expecting Howard D Richardson and William Berney's actual original play to resurface in some small scale, but instead we get a full-blown new musical.

Theatre review: Equus

30 years after graduating I still feel compelled to see the four plays I worked on in my directing module at university, whenever I hear of one being revived somewhere I can get to. Now on the fourth production of it I've seen, Equus easily has the top spot of most regularly revived. I'd originally planned to make a Peter Shaffer-themed weekend of it last week, but when the Sunday performance at the Menier was cancelled I had to reschedule - I guess two Saturdays in a row is still a themed season of a kind. Last week Black Comedy was very much a throwback to the 1960s, and Equus is very much rooted in the 1970s both in its references and in the countercultural R.D. Laing psychiatric theories that inspired it, so why does it seem to hold up better? Lindsay Posner's production certainly keeps the original setting, from the otherwise long-forgotten advertising jingles to the child psychiatrist smoking in sessions with his patient.

Theatre review: Police Cops - The Original and BADASS Be Thy Name

Although there's no sign of The Musical making a return any time soon, the three original, lo-fi comedy shows from Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson and Tom Roe aka Police Cops continue to resurface every so often. I've previously caught Police Cops in Space, and now marking their 10th anniversary as a comedy troupe, the three shows have all been playing in rotation. This includes a London residency at Soho Theatre (the one that's actually in Soho,) where I caught the two I hadn't seen before. First up The Original, which was the story they later adapted into The Musical: A 1980s-set American cop show parody in which Hunt's rookie Jimmy Johnson teams up with Roe's grizzled old cop Harrison to take down Parkinson's Fernandez, a Mexican criminal who's sometimes Police Chief Molloy. And also sometimes a cat.

Theatre review: Under the Shadow

While I'm generally happy to trust in Rupert Goold's judgement and have been booking every show in his final Almeida season, the announcement that the latest was an adaptation of an Iranian film about the 1980s Iran-Iraq War seemed like it might be a hard sell to get any of my friends to join me, so I only bought a ticket for myself. Maybe if I'd realised it was based on a horror film I might have got an extra seat, as there's a couple of people that Under the Shadow would have appealed to. Set in 1988 Tehran, Carmen Nasr's adaptation of Babak Anvari's film could of course be using supernatural horrors as a metaphor for war and carnage in general, but in fact the story being told here is much more specific to the time, the place, and particularly the experience of women whose rights have recently been curtailed, perhaps more than some yet realise.

Theatre review: Are You Watching?

The Royal Court Upstairs seems to be making a new specialist subject out of hardcore prawn of the most disturbing and misogynistic kind, as six months after Prawn Play the venue takes another - different, angrier and more scattergun but no less memorable - stab at the genre in Georgie Dettmer's debut play Are You Watching Question Mark. Jess Edwards' production takes place on a tiled traverse set by Georgia Wilmot, at one end of which are bunk beds with colourful bedding. The childlike setting is at odds with the actual, unnamed teenage girls (Kosar Ali and Abby McCann) we meet there, whose sleepover chat revolves around one-upping each other in the most disturbing thing they've seen online. Inevitably this involves a lot of violent prawn, and the particular focus becomes a series of videos Ali's character has seen.

Theatre review: Black Comedy

1960s British farces rarely get revived these days, generally because they're built on attitudes and situations that haven't exactly aged well (with the exception of What The Butler Saw, which gets away with it because how horrible those attitudes and situations are is basically the whole point.) But back when I was in school our drama club did a scene from Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy so - about as long after that performance as it was from the play's 1965 debut - I gave the Orange Tree's revival a chance in what I had originally planned to be a weekend of Shaffer, pairing it with his more famous Equus. This is a much less violent affair, other than in the slapstick sense: The high concept is that the play begins in what the audience sees as complete darkness, but in which the characters can see perfectly well.

Theatre review: Redcliffe

Musical theatre performers sometimes turn their hand to writing for the genre, and this is not the first time I've seen one of the resulting shows staged, but it's got to be the most accomplished debut I've caught. Jordan Luke Gage has been lucky enough to perform in a few outstanding musicals and Redcliffe, which he's written book, music and lyrics for as well as starring in, proves he's been paying close attention. Set across 1752-1753 in the titular area of Bristol, William Critchard (Gage) returns home for Christmas from his job as a footman at a rural mansion. He hasn't yet told his family that the return is more permanent than a seasonal holiday, as he's been let go on vague grounds of "not being quite right." Inevitably this boils down to him being quite an effete, bookish young man who's never really fit in, and whose mother (Rebecca Lock) is still hoping might meet the right girl soon.

Theatre review: Mother Courage and Her Children

Although the run of popular Shakespeares that make up most of the 2026 Globe season are clearly going to be the big sellers, for me the show I was most looking forward to this year was the one that was most obviously the passion project for the Artistic Director, as she took on the lead in the first Brecht play ever staged at the venue. So it's unfortunate timing that Michelle Terry was indisposed for the performance of Mother Courage and Her Children that I caught. All things considered Ayla Wheatley did a pretty heroic job of performing script-in-hand, covering the role of Mother Courage or, as she's often called in Anna Jordan's new version, MC. Though young for the role Wheatley managed to inject some of the character's exhausted gruffness, and the blunt, smutty humour that's a feature of Jordan's script. Being thrown in at the deep end means she had a lot of audience goodwill behind her, so technically I guess the playwright himself would have disapproved*.