Theatre review: Into the Woods

When Stephen Sondheim died in 2021 I thought we'd see theatres falling over each other to revive some of his greatest hits, but fair play they've largely taken their time, staging about as much of his work as usual (including his not-quite-finished final work.) Of course maybe all the falling over each other was going on behind the scenes as people fought over the rights. If the Bridge's production of Sondheim's (music and lyrics) and James Lapine's (book) Into the Woods is anything to go by, what they were waiting for was the chance to really go big, both in terms of spectacle and of recognisable performers to take on what is an almighty ensemble piece. The Baker (Jamie Parker, who I think we can all agree is the first History Boy ever to take on the role) and his wife (Katie Brayben) can't have children, which it turns out is down to a curse placed on his family.

Theatre review: Christmas Carol Goes Wrong

London's latest version of Charles Dickens' (Chickens to his friends) A Christmas Carol comes with a disclaimer that a number of Christmas Carols, from Channing to Vorderman, will not be appearing at the performance: Yes, Mischief Theatre are back revisiting their Cornley Amateur Dramatic Society alter egos for Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. A version of the story was also their first TV special, but this departs not only from that, but also from the format's usual conceit of only showing us the catastrophic production itself, but with the amateur actors' personalities coming across from the varied brand of chaos each of them brings. Here we get the characters - a couple recast, but an impressive amount of the original actors returning well into the company's second decade in the West End - appearing as themselves in a framing device.

Theatre review: The Playboy of the Western World

The Lyttelton goes festive, but instead of Christmas 2025 in London we're going to early 20th Century County Mayo and what looks like a harvest festival for Irish classic The Playboy of the Western World. Director Caitríona McLaughlin frames John Millington Synge's tragicomedy with pagan figures playing the fiddle as Christy Mahon (Éanna Hardwicke) arrives in a remote building that doubles as pub and general store for a farming community desperate, it turns out, for some excitement. Christy says he murdered his father, and has spent the last eleven days walking, hoping to escape the law. The store's owner Michael (Lorcan Cranitch) and his daughter Pegeen (Nicola Coughlan) let him stay the night, then give him the job of pot-boy so he can stay longer, and be safe as it appears news of his crime hasn't reached this part of the world.

Theatre review: The BFG

As regular readers will both know, Roald Dahl's children's fiction was never part of my childhood (I mainly knew him for Tales of the Unexpected and as Britain's second favourite comedy bigot after Alf Garnett,) so going to Stratford-upon-Avon for The RSC BFG at the RST wasn't particularly on my to-do list until it turned out Tom Wells was on writing duty. And while he doesn't give the Big Friendly Giant quite the level of double entendre filth he used to bring to the Lyric Hammersmith pantos, there's still a trademark wit - I did like a small girl wearily accepting her fate as a giant's dinner with "well, I'm eight, I've had a good innings." Sophie (Martha Bailey Vine, Elsie Laslett or Ellemie Shivers) and Kimberley (Maisy Lee, Charlotte Jones or Uma Patel) live together in an orphanage until the former is abducted by a giant.

Theatre review: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

Back to @sohoplace, the theatre with a name so current it would like to tell you its theories about Scully's abduction, and a play full of a few conspiracies of its own: In what is apparently the first time anyone has ever adapted the work of spy novelist John le Carré for the stage, David Eldridge takes us to 1961's divided Germany for The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Alec Leamas (Rory Keenan) runs the Berlin branch of intelligence agency The Circus, but his East Berlin opposite and hated nemesis Mundt (Gunnar Cauthery) is far too efficient at exposing and eliminating his spies. When his last and best agent is killed, Leamas retires from the agency, disillusioned and disheartened: He starts drinking more, finds it hard to hold down a job, and eventually spends some time in prison after assaulting a shopkeeper for refusing him credit.

Theatre review: The Rivals

Tom Littler's theme for Christmas shows at the Orange Tree seems to be Jazz Age relocations for classic comedies, and this year he goes back to Restoration Comedy to move Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals from 1775 to 1927. Lydia Languish (Zoe Brough) is a fan of torrid romantic novels and wouldn't consider a romance of her own that wasn't suitably anguished, so her aristocratic suitor Captain Jack Absolute (Kit Young) is wooing her in disguise as a lowly sergeant: He knows she would never be interested in him if he had her family's approval. In fact Jack's father Sir Anthony (Robert Bathurst) has been busy arranging a marriage between his son and Lydia, so when the latter finds out she determines to reject Jack Absolute in favour of the fictional Beverley, and Jack finds himself his own biggest rival.

Theatre review: Paddington

To say that Michael Bond's Paddington Bear has had a resurgence since the 2014 film would be an understatement, as would be to say a musical adaptation could be a huge risk: The slightest hint of a shameless cash-in on such a beloved character could have gone very badly. Fortunately Paddington the Musical is in very safe hands with Tom Fletcher (music and lyrics,) Jessica Swale (book) and director Luke Sheppard. When an elderly bear, Aunt Lucy (voiced by Brenda Edwards) can no longer look after her orphaned nephew, she sends him from Darkest Peru to London, where she hopes he'll find the explorer who was kind to her years before. Instead he finds Mrs Brown (Amy Ellen Richardson) and her son Jonathan (Jasper Rowse, alternating with Joseph Bramley, Leo Collon and Stevie Hare.) Against the wishes of Mr Brown (Adrian Der Gregorian) and permanently embarrassed teenager Judy (Delilah Bennett-Cardy) they invite him home.

Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

A couple of years ago Holly Race Roughan directed a Henry V in the Swanamaker that impressively reinvented the bombastic history play as a chilling tragedy, so I was willing to give her return to the venue a chance, despite it being advertised as the hoariest of all Shakespearean clichés - and the one every director who's ever tackled the play seems convinced they're the first ever to spot: The dark underside of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Co-directed by Naeem Hayat, this is the story of an Athens ruled by Michael Marcus' drunken bully Theseus, who's forcing the defeated Amazon queen to marry him; at the start, he and Hippolyta (Hedydd Dylan) are still trying to kill each other as they plan their wedding. When a young woman, Hermia (Tiwa Lade) petitions Theseus to be allowed to marry the man she loves, she's instead given an ultimatum to accept her father's choice, or be executed.

Theatre review: Ride The Cyclone

When you turn up to a musical you hadn't heard of before to find the audience already made up largely of people in cosplay and merch, it's a sure sign the words "cult hit" are going to feature; apparently in the case of Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell's (book, music and lyrics) 2009 musical Ride The Cyclone, "viral TikTok sensation" are in there somewhere as well. Front of House at Southwark Playhouse Elephant has been decked out with distorting mirrors, a ring toss and other fairground attractions to reflect the setting of a weird little show that opens with a group of teenagers from Uranium City, Saskatchewan, dying when the titular rollercoaster derails. Five members of a school band end up in a kind of afterlife holding pen, competing for the chance to return to life and be reincarnated, while the others move on.

Theatre review: All My Sons

Outside of Belgium and the Netherlands, it was A View From The Bridge that really announced Ivo van Hove as a big-name director, and more than a decade later he returns to Arthur Miller in a production that mirrors a lot of what made that show distinctive, without feeling like an outright copy. In fact visually this seems, if not a complete change of aesthetic, definitely freed from the very strict house style that has sometimes felt like a straitjacket in recent years. So An D'Huys' costumes are timeless rather than aggressively, anachronistically modern, and Jan Versweyveld's set, though still minimalist, has an almost Japanese spareness dominated by a large sun-like window, and a stage scattered with petals that could be cherry blossom: All My Sons opens with a tree crashing to the ground during a storm.

Theatre review: End

In the spirit of The Cornetto Trilogy being so named because of a non plot-significant ice cream being consumed in each film, I'm going to have to refer to David Eldridge's sequence of relationship plays as The Bros Trilogy from now on, given the briefly all-conquering pop trio get a completely random little dig from each of the three couples in the stories. After Beginning and Middle it's not particularly surprising if the end is called, well, End, but the title does also serve as an apt one for the last show to be programmed at the National by RuNo (the Dorfman having ended up lagging behind the other two theatres because of emergency repair work.) Having had wildly different reactions to the first two instalments I was strangely cheered up by the blurb suggesting the end in question was death not divorce, and after the sourness of the last chapter I was glad to find something more bittersweet.

Theatre review: The Hunger Games

My second in-the-round show of the week, but instead of an intimate vag Miriam Buether has given us a huge arena in a purpose-built new theatre that hosts an epic quest. But enough about trying to find your way from Canary Wharf tube to the Troubadour - there are some signs but as far as we could tell they only started once you were practically there - Conor McPherson's biggest show in his year of paying off his mortgage is the first stage adaptation of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. Matthew Dunster directs the story of a future America called Panem, a Roman Empire-inspired dictatorship where the Capitol lives in decadent luxury while the 12 Districts work to keep them in it. To suppress rebellion and remind everyone who's boss, President Snow (a pre-recorded John Malkovich, phoning in his performance in more ways than one) holds the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death between teenagers from each District, shown live on TV as entertainment for the Capitol.

Theatre review: Prawn Play

Why yes, I am renaming this play so that Google doesn't send an AI bot to delete my blog.

Closing out the year at the Royal Court Upstairs is Sophia Chetin-Leuner's play that courts controversy - but also predictably early sell-outs - with its title: Prawn Play. Ani (Transphobia Ltd. Employee Ambika Mod) is a Milton scholar whose career's recently been boosted by a prestigious award, but whose private life is falling apart. Her relationship with Liam (Will Close) at first appears to be having trouble because he's jealous of her success, but that's just her deflecting attention from something he's genuinely concerned about: Her addiction to hardcore prawn, of a particularly violent and misogynistic type. She can't be sexually satisfied without it, and keeps him up at night with her addiction on her phone. Also, Walkers Crisps to release a spicy prawn cocktail flavour crisp called Hardcore Prawn, when?

Theatre review: After Sunday

Sophia Griffin's debut play After Sunday takes place in the kitchen of a secure hospital, where men with a violent past are held: Some are there directly from prison, like Ty (Corey Weekes,) who just wants to pass his psychiatric evaluation and return to finish his sentence. Others spend much longer there, like Leroy (David Webber,) who seems to have been there for years, and is hoping to finally have made enough progress to be let out to a halfway house. They're among four "service users" who've taken up occupational therapist Naomi's (Aimée Powell) offer of a weekly session - not a class, as they all seem to know what they're doing - of cooking for men from an Afro-Caribbean background. It aims to help their progress by reconnecting them with smells, flavours and routines from their childhoods.

Theatre review: Coven

A new musical at the Kiln that seems to have had a lot of hype before it even opened - selling out some performances and already extending - Rebecca Brewer (book, music and lyrics) and Daisy Chute's (music and lyrics) Coven plays like a darker version of SIX, but without quite hitting that show's energy and conciseness. Based on the Pendle Witch Trials, it sees Jenet Device (Gabrielle Brooks) arrested on a charge of witchcraft that nobody's particularly bothered to explain to her, and thrown into a cell full of women who prove nobody is safe from accusation: Maggie (Jacinta Whyte) is a "cunning woman" whose knowledge of herbal medicine can easily be twisted against her as evidence of potion-making, and Nell (Allyson Ava-Brown) a midwife whose inability to save every single baby has left her with enemies in the village. But Frances (Shiloh Coke) is the powerful wife of a local landowner; unpopular for seizing common land, but unsuspecting that it could come to this.

Theatre review:The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn Heights

The long-running annual Papatango playwrighting prize has been particularly peripatetic in the last couple of years, and I've pretty much continued to follow the winners around London's theatres, even as I still feel it tends, more often than not, to reward plays filled with abject misery. It can still prove worth keeping up with though, and while Hannah Doran's The Meat Kings Exclamation Mark Open Brackets Inc Full Stop Close Brackets of Brooklyn Heights goes to some very dark places, it does so with the energy and urgency of a thriller. Paula (Retired Lesbian Jackie Clune) runs the New York butcher's shop established by her Italian-American family a century earlier, but is facing financial difficulties they've never faced before thanks to a Whole Foods down the road cutting into her upscale clientèle. But she's still determined to provide the high quality service the family have always delivered.

Theatre review: Here & Now

The latest group to get the jukebox musical treatment is one that feels inevitable, given the general sense of camp ridiculousness that Pete Waterman's surprisingly enduring manufactured pop quartet plus Lee have always had: Steps are a good match for a genre that's at its best when it doesn't take itself seriously, and Shaun Kitchener's (book) Here & Now gets the tone (mostly) right from the start: Will it, like Viva Forever!, try to emulate Mamma Mia! with a Mediterranean island setting? Nah, we're going down the Pound Shop. Better Best Bargains, a totally unrealistic discount store that has more than two members of staff on duty at any given time, is where Caz (Lara Denning) has worked for 25 years without a promotion or pay raise, but she's still pretty chipper about the place because she's friends with her co-workers, and they all introduce the week's new special offers by dressing up as condiments and singing "Five, Six, Seven, Eight."

Theatre review: Othello (Theatre Royal Haymarket)

Othello's a part that can be played as quite a young and dynamic soldier who's risen, through skill, quickly through the ranks to become a decorated general. There's also a couple of throwaway lines about him being older than his wife, that have helped foster a different tradition of him being a much older man. So among Shakespearean leading roles it's perhaps the one that's least likely to raise eyebrows when David Harewood revisits, at 59, a part he first played 28 years ago at the National, famously becoming the first black actor to do so there. This time he's in the West End, paired with an equally popular star, Toby Jones, as his Iago. The latter is his long-standing friend and brother in arms, or at least so he thinks; Othello's overlooking him for promotion has brought to the surface long-held resentments, and he now plans to take a convoluted revenge involving the general's new wife.

Theatre review: The Producers

The last show I was able to reschedule from my most recent bout of Covid is the Menier Chocolate Factory's revival of The Producers, now settling into a West End run. I was a fan of Mel Brooks' film long before Brooks (book, music and lyrics) and Thomas Meehan (book) adapted it into a musical, saw the original West End production and have listened to the songs many times over the years, so this was one of those cases where I was looking to see if Patrick Marber's production would do something new with a show I was already very familiar with. In the end Marber doesn't attempt any kind of reinvention but offers up a solid version that hits all the classic comic notes. Max Bialystock (Andy Nyman) is a Broadway producer who was once, he insists, a success, but in recent years his career has consisted entirely of him acting as an unlikely gigolo to wealthy old ladies, who fund his invariably disastrous shows.

Theatre review: Macbeth (RSC / The Other Place)

Macbeth is one of the Shakespearean big hitters that can generally be relied upon to sell well in the RSC's biggest auditorium, so it's interesting to see a comparatively starry production get consigned to the studio space. Maybe it's a tribute to the famous McKellen/Dench production that also played The Other Place in the 1970s; more likely it's that Daniel Raggett's production didn't want to sacrifice the intimacy that becomes a major feature of its single setting. That setting is a Scottish pub run by Sam Heughan's Macbeth and Lia Williams' Lady Macbeth, the base of operations for a violent '80s criminal gang run by Duncan (Gilly Gilchrist,) who makes his intentions clear about who should eventually replace him: Early on his son Malcolm (Calum Ross) is made, possibly as a sort of initiation, to slit the throat of the treacherous Cawdor with a box cutter. But a supernatural trio has other ideas.