Theatre review: The Guilty

The big price hikes to the cheapest seats since Timothy Sheader took over the Donald and Margot Warehouse mean I don't go as often, and when I do I'm usually alone as not everyone wants to spend £32 to look at the back of an actor's head. When that actor is Russell Tovey though it's a pretty safe bet that both I and my usual theatre companions will be interested, actually, especially with the promise of him being the only actor on stage: Tovey plays Joe, a 999 operator who's not exactly a natural fit for the job; frequently tetchy and impatient with the callers, many of whom are wasting his time and police resources, but some of whom could do with a more sympathetic ear. As it turns out this isn't what he wants to be doing - a police officer suspended from his usual duties, this is his last night on the phone lines before he has to attend a hearing about the event that left his and his colleagues' jobs on the line.

Theatre review: Paranormal Activity

It's technically not a seasonal show, but you could argue my last live theatre trip of 2025 is very much a traditional one, since ghost stories have long been associated with Christmas (and there is a Christmas tree on stage as the story is set in December.) Writer Levi Holloway and director Felix Barrett bring the Paranormal Activity horror movie franchise to the stage with an original story about a recently-married couple moving into a new home, but it soon becomes apparent this isn't going to be a story about a haunted house, but a haunting they've brought to it: Jimmy (Patrick Heusinger) has accepted a high-paying job in London, in part because it's a long way from Chicago, where his wife Lou (Melissa James) experienced blackouts, sleepwalking and depression, which she attributed to a "shadow" that's followed her since a traumatic childhood event.

Theatre review: Othello (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Interesting times to be visiting the Globe, the venue that can do everything except draft a press release that doesn't dig them into a deeper hole. Ola Ince is looking like one of those directors who can reinvent a Shakespeare play to fit a very specific modern-day issue, and actually follow through with the idea. After her 2021 Romeo & Juliet was filtered through the way Tory cuts would have caused every beat of the story, her Othello in the Swanamaker becomes about racism in the Metropolitan Police, and some of the language is modified to match this setting: Othello is no longer referred to as the General but the Guvnor, Desdemona is usually called Desi, one of the story's inciting incidents now involves Othello choosing an Eton old boy as his new Inspector rather than a more experienced cop, and instead of a military action from Venice to Cyprus, the characters from Scotland Yard are going on an undercover cartel bust in Docklands.

Theatre review: Hope has a Happy Meal

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: I saw the show a couple of nights before Press Night.

When she became a teen mother Hope (Laura Checkley) abandoned her family and baby son, leaving him with her sister to raise, and went travelling around the world. She cut off all contact but 24 years later she's returned home unannounced, to try and reconnect with what family she has left. But home is the People's Republic of Koka Kola, a cross between North Korea and M&M's World, where everything from the trains to the forests is owned and run by multinational corporations. Tom Fowler's Hope has a Happy Meal is a similarly jarring mix of styles and themes, which opens with Hope telling a rambling but clever joke, before turning into, variously, a fairytale road trip, a thriller, and a kitchen sink drama, all with a touch of surreal comedy and a sense that if the concept of hope returned after a long absence, its journey would be as rocky and weird as that of the character of the same name.

Theatre review: Appropriate

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has been an up-and-coming name in American playwriting in the last couple of years – I personally liked An Octoroon, if not as much as everyone else seemed to, while being less convinced by Gloria, but it was hard to deny the obvious potential. For my money this is the one where that potential is realised (albeit in a play written five years ago,) as the Donmar Warehouse stages the UK premiere of Appropriate. On the surface this is the playwright’s most conventional play to date, being his take on That American Play Where An Extended Family Gets Together After A Long Time, Preferably At Thanksgiving But That’s Optional. Six months after the death of their reclusive father, the Lafayette siblings and their families go to his plantation house in Arkansas; he was a hoarder who left half a million dollars in debt, so they have a lot of work to do clearing the place up so that his belongings can be sold in an estate sale, and the house and land sold at auction.

Theatre review: Plaques and Tangles

Plaques and Tangles are two kinds of formations in the brain that are thought to be responsible for Alzheimer's Disease; tangles are also a good description of how Nicola Wilson's play is structured, and not always in the way the playwright, and director Lucy Morrison intended. Megan (Monica Dola) is in her forties, and fast approaching the age at which her mother (Bríd Brennan) died, driving a car the wrong way down a motorway. She had a hereditary form of early-onset Alzheimer's, and as she starts to forget words and get her memories mixed up, it becomes increasingly obvious that Megan has inherited it. In fact, concerned about whether she had the gene, she took a test decades ago, but never told her husband Jez (Ferdy Roberts.)