Theatre review: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Former Deputy Artistic Director of the National Theatre Clint Dyer moves down the road to the Old Vic to direct a somewhat reimagined look at One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dale Wasserman's play based on Ken Kesey's novel about order versus anarchy - where order comes across very much as the bad guy. In a 1960s New Orleans mental asylum, the patients appear to be steadily and quietly getting on with their treatment under Dr Spivey (Matthew Steer) and Nurse Ratched (Future Dame Olivia Williams.) But when R.P. McMurphy (Aaron Pierre) arrives on the ward, having accepted a diagnosis of psychopathy and committal instead of a five-month prison sentence, his rebellious attitude quickly reveals the real power dynamic in the asylum. He makes it his mission to bring some fun and unpredictability to the inmates, but has no idea the lengths Ratched is willing to go to to stop him.

Theatre review: "Oh, Mary!"

Americans have a tendency to overestimate how much other countries share their national preoccupations, and you can't say that's not the case in whoever decided that London probably cares enough about Mary Todd Lincoln to sustain two different shows about her, a couple of streets apart. For me personally this seemed a bit too much of Abraham Lincoln's first lady to invest in both, so despite Keala Settle playing her in a dramatic version down the road, I went instead for the much more deranged show that's been an award-winning cult hit in New York, Cole Escola's Quote Oh Comma Mary Exclamation Mark End Quote. Mason Alexander Park plays Mary, the drunken First Lady who took to whiskey once she realised being married to the President during a Civil War meant she probably wouldn't be able to realise her dreams of cabaret stardom.

Theatre review: Dr. Strangelove

Welp, October's been a busy theatrical month for me and certainly one with a certain prevailing tone - the odd dud among a very high rate of great shows, but good or bad there's definitely been a pretty dark side to everything I've seen. Even the funnier shows have had a touch of bleakness to them, so it's fitting that I end on the play with easily the biggest hit rate of laughs this month; but it gets them from the total annihilation of all life on earth. A long-awaited West End event - tickets went on sale over a year in advance - Armando Iannuci and Sean Foley adapt Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, with Steve Coogan one-upping Peter Sellers in the film by playing all four roles Sellers had originally been slated to play: Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, Major Kong and the titular character, a German scientist who's definitely glad to have changed sides after the War - the fact that his bionic right arm keeps trying to do a Nazi salute is neither here nor there.

Theatre review: Passing Strange

Ben Stones' white wedge of a set, with four musicians stationed around the stage along with the odd prop and piece of furniture, clues the audience in from the start to the fact that we're in for a night of gig theatre. The fact that it opens with a quartet of backing singers arriving on stage to find the star turn hasn't shown up yet, and it takes a few blackouts and resets for the Narrator (Giles Terera) to kick proceedings off, correctly lets us know that there's also a chaotic element in store: Stew Stewart (book, music & lyrics) and Heidi Rodewald's (music) 1970s-'80s-set coming-of-age musical Passing Strange pretty much plays by no other rules than its own. The Narrator introduces himself as Stew so from the start it's implied this piece will be autobiographical, and that he himself is an older version of our young protagonist.

Theatre review: Clyde's

Lynn Nottage is having a fairly high-profile year in London - we've had The Secret Life of Bees, and hot on the heels of Mlima's Tale at the Kiln, it's back to the Donald and Margot Warehouse where Sweat was staged in 2019. Clyde's takes place in a shared universe with the latter play, as well as sharing a director in Lynette Linton, and while it shows the American playwright to have lost none of her enthusiasm for tackling a heavy subject, it also displays much more of a light touch. The titular establishment is a truck stop diner run by ex-con Clyde (Gbemisola Ikumelo,) who exclusively hires other former inmates who can't find work anywhere else. Although to what extent this is her attempting to help them is a different story, as her managerial style is full supervillain - she likes to keep them terrified of her and remind them that if they don't toe the line and she fires them, nobody else will give them a job.

Theatre review: Othello (National Theatre / Lyttelton)

Othello must be one of the most-frequently performed Shakespeare plays at the National Theatre, and the latest production by Deputy Artistic Director Clint Dyer - the first at the venue by a black director - is in part inspired by how long the version with Laurence Olivier in blackface continued to hold pride of place in the archive. That's one of the photos that adorn the back wall of the stage as the audience enters the Lyttelton, among an ever-changing projection display of past production posters that suggests the different approaches to the play taken over the years. As the display ticks past the years since it was written, we get the idea that we've reached a very 2022 reading, which strips the play back to show its racial conflicts as the primary motivator. Here, only Giles Terrera's General Othello isn't white; almost everyone in the rest of the cast doubles as a member of a sinister, black-shirted chorus Dyer has christened the System.

Theatre review: Blues for an Alabama Sky

I know theatre always uses the past to illustrate and comment on the present, but the National staging a play set during the Great Depression right now feels a bit on the nose. Specifically, Pearl Cleage's Blues for an Alabama Sky takes place at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, where the creative explosion and progressive attitudes that came with it are still strongly felt, but the financial realities are starting to kick in as well, and the residents of the ground floor of a New York apartment block are balancing dreams with realistic expectations. Angel (understudy Helena Pipe) has just been dumped by the gangster who turned out, to nobody's real surprise, to have a wife; he's turfed her out of the apartment he was keeping her in just as she lost her job in a cabaret. Her friend, dressmaker and notorious homosexual Guy (Giles Terera) has taken her in, to stay on his couch in a living room dominated by a photo of Josephine Baker.

Stage-to-screen review: Death of England - Face to Face

You could certainly call what the National Theatre's been on with Death of England a rollercoaster ride, as there have been sharp ups and downs ever since Clint Dyer and Roy Williams premiered what was then a standalone monologue: Michael's side of the story, about a man both mourning his father and confronting his racist legacy, was one of the venue's hits of the year. The fact that the year in question was 2020 is a clue to where the downs came from: The same team came up with Delroy, a sequel from the point of view of Michael's black best friend, which culminated in him having a baby with Michael's sister Carly - while also crtically well-received, this installment suffered first from appendicitis taking out its star, and then from a story set during the first Covid lockdown being cut short by the second. Having managed to catch Delroy on stage I guessed that Dyer and Williams might now have an eye to a trilogy, with Carly perhaps the final piece of the puzzle: I was half right.

Radio review: Lights Up - The Meaning of Zong

Another BBC Lights Up instalment to make it to radio rather than TV, actor Giles Terera's playwrighting debut has an epic scope and emotional intimacy that would, between them, have made trying to film it using social distancing difficult. Helped by Jon Nicholls' sound design, The Meaning of Zong finds a natural home as an audio drama that can conjure up some of the bleakest crimes of British history along with triumphs (am I saying that radio is closer to theatre than film or TV are in how much of the work the audience's imagination has to do? Maybe I am.) It's a topical story, especially given that Tom Morris' production was commissioned for Bristol Old Vic, a city at the centre of the ongoing argument about Imperial Britain's racist and oppressive heart, and the loud voices that insist any attempt to reveal the truth about history is the same as erasing it. This is alluded to in a present-day framing device in which Rachel (Moronke Akinola) has an argument with a bookshop manager over a book about the slave trade being displayed in the African, rather than British, history section.

Theatre review: Rosmersholm

Rosmersholm seems to get variously described as Ibsen’s masterpiece, or one his most obscure and difficult works. I would lean towards the latter description – it’s certainly not as frequently performed as the likes of Hedda Gabler or A Doll’s House, and although Ian Rickson’s production makes a stronger case for it than the last time I saw the play, it’s still a dense and wordy evening. Rae Smith takes advantage of having a West End stage (and even pushes it out a bit past the proscenium arch) to create the set, a huge hall in the titular house in rural Norway. The house is a character in the play inasmuch as it represents the legacy of generations of Rosmers, the family who own the adjacent mill and have been the town’s main source of work for centuries. The portraits may still look down imperiously from the walls but it’s onto a crumbling room – Smith’s set takes particular inspiration from the fact that room’s had water-damage.

Theatre review: Hamilton

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Although tonight's performance wasn't due to be a preview when I booked it, the repair works on the Victoria Palace overrunning meant the press night was put back*.

If there was any doubt that the people I work with aren't really theatre fans, Exhibit A: When they asked me what I was doing for my birthday and I said I was going to Hamilton they said "what, in Scotland?" Outside of my office, though, excitement over Lin-Manuel Miranda's latest musical seems to be at fever pitch. Quite apart from all the awards it's been the hottest ticket on Broadway since it opened, and its (slightly delayed) London opening more or less sold out instantly. I'd deliberately avoided listening to any of the songs so it could stand on its own, but it was clear that even on its third public performance the theatre was full of people familiar with the score and enthusiastic for Miranda's high-speed history lesson about America's founding fathers and particularly Alexander Hamilton (Jamael Westman,) who appears on the $10 note but is otherwise comparatively obscure.

Theatre review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

In one of the complete restructurings of the Donald and Margot Warehouse auditorium that have been an occasional theme during Josie Rourke's tenure, Peter McKintosh has added an extra row of seats to make the circle in-the-round, and removed all the stalls seating, to be replaced by tables and chairs all around the stage. It transforms the venue into a Prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy for Simon Evans' production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about a man seen as a joke, rising to great power and bringing destruction in his wake. Arturo Ui (Lenny Henry) is a lumbering, awkward gangster who chances upon some dirt on the powerful Dogsborough (Michael Pennington,) and blackmails his way into the city's cauliflower trade. With the success of his protection racket over the vegetable market, Ui takes acting lessons to disguise his awkwardness and make him a better public speaker, and his new mix of threats and rhetoric starts to build a following.

Theatre review: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Dominic Cooke directs the 1920s installment of August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle - actually the only one of the plays not to be set in Pittsburgh, taking place entirely inside a Chicago recording studio - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. In this decade of Wilson's look at the black experience in 20th century America, the experience is still one of being second-class citizens, but real-life blues singer Ma Rainey (Sharon D Clarke) isn't going to let that stop her doing exactly what she wants: As the highest-earning artist on Sturdyvant's (Stuart McQuarrie) record label, she can get away with diva behaviour like flaunting her young girlfriend Dussie Mae (Tamara Lawrance,) refusing to sing until she's had her three bottles of Coke brought to her, and demanding the spoken-word intro to the titular song be performed by her nephew Sylvester (Tunji Lucas) - despite his stutter.

Theatre review: King John (Shakespeare's Globe & tour)

Following runs at Temple Church and in Northampton one of only two standalone Shakespeare histories, King John, finally makes it to Shakespeare's Globe. It's part of the Magna Carta-themed Justice & Mercy season, and James Dacre's production does drop in a reference to that most famous - and unwanted - legacy of the king, even if Shakespeare himself famously didn't. Instead we follow King John (Jo Stone-Fewings) from his (first) coronation to his death, a reign whose every battle, treaty or political machination seems to instantly flop when chance throws a spanner in the works - usually in the form of a smug Papal Envoy (Joseph Marcell,) who likes to pop up occasionally to remind the various princes that the Vatican trumps their authority. With candles, incense and chanting hooded figures dominating Jonathan Fensom's design from the start, it's clear this is a world where the Church is a presence that's not to be messed with.

Theatre review: The Book of Mormon

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The Book of Mormon invites London critics in next week.

The Book of Mormon has had a lot to live up to. Avenue Q is one of my all-time favourite shows, so its co-creator Robert Lopez teaming up with South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker for a new musical was an exciting prospect even before the rave reviews and Tony awards started flooding in. Add to that the fact that when I went to New York in 2011 I tried a number of times, unsuccessfully, to get a ticket to the Broadway production via its daily lottery (which is being replicated for the West End run) and this has been a long time coming. I went along with much of the same group of people I made several trips to Avenue Q with (bar Vanessa, who realised she'd get disowned if she saw it before her daughter) and the good news is it wasn't long before Evil Alex's loud, rather hysterical laugh started up.