Following a sell-out run at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre last year, Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson’s adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s classical romance Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Adrian Lester as the eponymous libertine and Susannah Fielding and Levi Brown as Roxane, the love of his life, and Christian, his rival for her love, transfers to the Noël Coward Theatre. Told, retold, adapted, readapted, parodied, translated, relocated and modernised so often that it’s difficult to imagine what, if anything, any production could do to make this material feel fresh, Cyrano de Bergerac is a tale that will be familiar to anyone with even the most tangential interest in culture. Yet Evans and Stevenson’s take on the story, though quite firmly rooted in its classical sensibilities, is stylish and contemporary, playfully tinkering with the dialogue and the narrative while still steadfastly capturing the profundity of Rostand’s explorations of the consequences of love, conflict and death.

Threaded through the original text are ideas of longing and mortality, and how the relentless passage of time makes dust of them both. Cyrano’s desperate yearning to be loved by Roxane goes unspoken because beneath all of his wit, intelligence and bravado lies a deep embarrassment and fear of rejection. Likewise, Roxane’s insistence on language and poetry as the most potent embodiments of romance disguises just how uncomfortable she is with simple, honest emotions. Words pass between them in the form of letters and poems, with Christian in the middle as the feint through which Cyrano expresses himself, yet neither speaks truthfully. All around them the world burns. Men return home from war in coffins and urns, and women and children are widowed and orphaned, yet what terrifies them most, albeit in different ways, is love, a word they both dismiss as inadequate.

It’s a tragic tale, yet one that bristles with whimsy and humanity, and it is this that director Simon Evans captures so beautifully. The staging and direction of his production are vivacious and visually profound - indeed, there is almost as much poetry in the choreography and design of the piece as there is in the dialogue - and the tone and aesthetic of it have a sublime quality that is well contrasted with the levity of much of the humour, particularly in the first half. The theatre space extends into the auditorium as the actors and musicians make use of the main floor, the boxes and the balcony to invite the audience to participate and properly invest in the story, heightening the strength of the emotions that come to the fore in the final act, while musically is cleverly woven into the narrative in the form of a chorus whose melodies uplift and wound in equal measure.

Evans and Stevenson’s adaptation of the text blends Rostand’s verse with modern dialogue but the collocation of the two is thoughtful, creating a flow and a rhythm that feels natural. It’s romantic, of course, but also brutal about the realities of war, death and rejection, and though the jokes are plentiful they are written into the romance so casually and organically that they never detract from the overwhelming yearning that defines so much of the story. The first half is riotous and full of silliness, yet the jokes are warm and inviting and feel very much like an authentic facet of how these characters interact, yet there is also a stoicism and seriousness to it so that the intensity of the romantic feelings is never underplayed or dismissed. Occasionally, the drama lags - both the theatre sequence at the start and the Romeo & Juliet-esque balcony scene are a tad overlong - but the dialogue is so rich and humorous and captivating that this is but a minor concern.

At the heart of the piece are a pair of magnificent performances by Lester and Fielding, both of whom imbue their characters with all the rage, uncertainty, desperation, anxiety and awe requried to make them dazzle. Lester’s Cyrano is utterly captivating, operating as though he is holding court and unveiling his very soul to an audience transfixed by his movements and his eloquence, while Fielding’s Roxane is at once sharp and flighty, marauding the stage like a dancer and engaging in verbal jousts with her wannabe lovers and admirers. The two of them have the most exquisite chemistry - it really does feel as though they have known each other all of their lives - which heightens the lilting romanticism of it all and exacerbates all of its cruel, hopeless tragedy.

Given my familiarity with the narrative, I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed this production, which is by far and away the best adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac I’ve seen… well, with the possible exception of the highwayman episode of Blackadder the Third, naturally. It’s invigorating, consistently funny and heartbreaking, and the performances, not just from the two leads but from the entire ensemble, are superb. Evans and Stevenson have breathed a new lease of life into a familiar story, riffing on Rostand’s humour and poetry while bringing an inventiveness and sense of adventure to the how it is staged. Delightful stuff.

Tickets for Cyrano de Bergerac are available here.

Another week, another stage adaptation of a feature film. Whilst we’re not quite at the level of Before I Go To Sleep or The Housemaid just yet - though both of these are alas very firmly on the horizon - the decision to adapt Babak Anvari’s Persian-language horror film Under the Shadow, which was released to great critical acclaim a decade ago, is one that feels both unnecessary and entirely arbitrary, even when one considers the parallels between the source material and the various wars, conflicts and genocides currently tearing through vast swathes of the Middle East. The further decision to take a text that is rooted in both cultural and geographical specificity and translate it into English for an audience of predominantly white liberals at the Almeida in Islington is all the more bizarre still.

Set in Tehran in the mid-to-late 80s, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, Under the Shadow unfolds almost entirely within one apartment block in the city. Shideh, a former leftist activist and medical student who has been barred from completing her studies as a result of her politics, lives with her husband, Iraj, and their young daughter, Dorsa. As the war wages and the danger of Saddam’s onslaught on the country draws ever closer, Iraj pleads for Shideh to agree to leave the city. Dorsa, meanwhile, becomes increasingly convinced that their apartment is being haunted by the Djinn, mythological creatures in Arabian and Islamic folklore who possess people’s spirits and steal from them.

The allegory of the Djinn as representative of the new Iranian regime, with its omnipresent parasitism that coerces and terrorises women and children into submission and robs them of their independence and their livelihoods, is obvious, though Anvari’s text and Nasr’s translation-cum-adaptation is nonetheless full of interesting dichotomies. Shideh’s liberated personality is at odds with the strict, prudish nature of her surroundings; her belief in reason and logic jars with the supernatural happenings consuming her family; her feelings of isolation and loneliness are in conflict with her role as a mother and wife. However, the text unfortunately lags because it only skims the surface of these ideas, alluding to and acknowledging but never examining or analysing them.

As director, Nadia Latif’s primary concern is one of atmosphere and suspense and she is somewhat successful in this endeavour. The first act builds slowly as a quiet, low-level dread begins to take root in the apartment. The influence of the regime lingers over Shideh like a guillotine while the threat of being annihilated by a missile is constant, yet there's seemingly something much more sinister hidden in the corners and shadows of what appears to a place of relative peace and domesticity. Shideh and Dorsa’s relationship strains as stories and myths percolate, and we get the sense that devastation, whether in the form of chauvinistic authoritarianism, senseless warfare or supernatural wickedness, is about to befall them both, resulting in a delicious jump scare that startles the audience as the curtain falls on the first act.

Alas, what follows in act two is anticlimactic and rushed. At barely 40 minutes (compared to 75 minutes in act one), act two beats along lifelessly, as though the story has run out of road. What scares exist are neutered by sloppy pacing and a void of energy, while the metaphors become increasingly strained. Leila Farzad, to her credit, tries to maintain the sense of unease with a performance that is consistently committed and thoughtful but the rest of the cast are creaky and there's little she can do to generate an emotional hook in the final scenes, which are over before they've even begun. Accordingly, the play ends on a note of indifference, with a resolution that feels lazy and incomplete.

Tickets for Under the Shadow are available here.

The Barbican seems to have developed something of a quasi-tradition of staging a summer Cole Porter musical. Since the pandemic, they’ve given us productions of Anything Goes and Kiss Me, Kate, and now it’s the turn of High Society, an adaptation of Charles Walters’ 1956 film of the same name, itself a musical adaptation of George Cukor’s 1939 film The Philadelphia Story which, in turn, was an adaptation of a stage play from the same year written by Philip Barry… I hope you're following this. Initially premiering in 1998, the stage version of High Society adopts songs from a number of Porter’s works, such as “I Love Paris”, first used in the 1953 show Can-Can, and “Ridin’ High”, which featured in 1936’s Red, Hot and Blue, which perhaps speaks to the relative dearth of hits in the original film.

The manner in which Kopit embeds and manouevres these other songs into the book does sometimes feel a little clunky, as though what he really wanted to do was write a tribute to Porter’s life and work and has instead become stuck trying to navigate a path through a light, airy but ultimately flimsy story about the shenanigans of the filthy rich. Nonetheless, there is a fuzzy charm and self-aware sense of humour to the book, and very specifically to director Rachel Kavanaugh’s production of it here, that makes it work, albeit sometimes in spite of itself. The songs, almost all of which are recognisable and catchy, contribute to the overall warmth of the piece, and there’s an infectious breezy quality to it, as though Kavanaugh knows that the source material isn’t great and has thus decided to just have some fun with it instead.

This is also apparent in the plot, which is simple and frivolous in ways both good and bad. Set at an opulent wedding party on the East Coast, where socialite Tracy Lord, once divorced, is marrying dull accountant George Kittredge, it follows the characters, including Tracy’s frightfully posh mother, her younger sister Dinah and her Uncle Willy, who is described as having discovered a “fondness for gin” (same), as they try to contend with the presence of two reporters and the arrival of both Tracy’s ex-husband, who still has feelings for her, and her father, who is being blackmailed by the press over an affair he had with a dancer. Silliness and chaos soon ensue as all of the various pieces are thrown around the arena of play until all of the predictable happy endings and resolutions hone into view.

The ensemble is solid and everybody on stage is adept at traversing the fine line between camp and pantomime. Felicity Kendal operates on a hitherto unseen plane of kitsch, stumbling around and shrieking like some demented old harridan and bringing the laughs with every line she delivers, while Freddie Fox, who hasn’t done much musical work before, does a stellar job with the vocals. Helen George, who became indisposed during the performance I saw and was replaced by an understudy at the interval, is cheerily entertaining, while Nigel Lindsay and Carly Mercedes Dyer are likeable and consistently on form. It is Ovenden who steals the show, however, with his gorgeous voice and effortless charisma. He imbues the character of Dexter, Tracy’s ex-husband, with an irresistible allure that makes the (admittedly rushed) ending feel well-earned.

On a stage as large as the Barbican’s, however, High Society still feels undernourished. There’s a strange lack of vivacity to some of the musical numbers, in part because the choreography occasionally thuds and stumbles but more pertinently because the ensemble isn’t big enough. There is so much empty space on the stage, which means that party scenes and big dance sequences don’t quite convince or captivate the way they should. Kavanaugh, as director, does what she can to breathe life and energy into the piece, and the stage design is impressive, but it sometimes sags, which stalls the momentum and highlights the hollowness of the book.

Nevertheless, this is a fun production of a silly story, and it is elevated by the main players, particularly Ovenden, Fox and Kendal. Maybe it isn’t possible to stage a masterful adaptation of this musical because there isn’t much to it beneath the surface but everyone involved does what they can to entertain the audience and sweep us up in the ridiculousness of these characters and their tribulations for a couple of hours. Enjoy it with a cocktail or six and let the fun wash over you and this is a perfectly decent production of an otherwise mediocre musical.

Tickets for High Society are available here.

This year marks the centenary of Peter Shaffer’s birth - indeed, Black Comedy opened the day after what would’ve been his 100th birthday - and he’s quite rightly being celebrated. Though he wrote relatively few plays in his 90 years, he nonetheless had a profound and lasting impact on British theatre, writing not one but two of the greatest dramas of the 20th century: Equus, which is currently halfway through a staggering revival run at the Menier Chocolate Factory, and Amadeus, which is due to be adapted by Jeremy Herrin with Michael Sheen and Callum Scott Howells as Salieri and Mozart next year. However, before either of these were even a scribbled idea in the corner of a page of a scrapbook, there was Black Comedy, a 1965 farce so far removed from the style and tone of his two great dramas that it’s hard to believe they were all written by the same man.

And yet all of Shaffer’s ingenuity and experimentation, not to mention his desire to subvert theatrical conventions, are as apparent here as they are in his other works, and you can see the seeds of the writer he would soon become. The title itself is a pun on the play’s use of light and its absence as Shaffer constructs a scenario in which the characters spend much of their time in total darkness - initially accidentally and then, as the farce becomes ever more chaotic, by design - with the actors forced to behave as though they cannot see each other or their surroundings for much of the runtime. To achieve this, Shaffer instructs the director to stage the start of the play, when the characters can see each other, in actual darkness, so that light becomes its absence and vice versa. When the lights are up, we can see the characters but they are blind; when they are down, the reverse is true.

It’s a nifty concept that allows for a meticulously choreographed style of slapstick that nonetheless feels organic and improvised. Characters flail about, grabbing each other, bumping into things, falling down, mistaking each other for someone else and a whole host of other shenanigans and mischief, but Shaffer makes it work because there is always a logical reason for the characters to remain in the dark. When light is introduced in the form of lighters, matches and torches, the protagonist must snuff it out in order to maintain all of the illusions and lies that must not have light shone upon them, lest the facade crumbles. It’s dramatic irony turned up to eleven; we can see it all, we can anticipate calamities before they happen, and it makes it all the funnier.

In the intimate space of the Orange Tree, director Caroline Steinbeis does excellent work keeping all of the plates spinning as the pace of the narrative becomes ever quicker and more frenzied. The Rube Goldberg-esque nature of it all doesn’t leave her with much room for manouevre, yet she handles it with a remarkable level of control that is also evident in the performances. Bannister is all gangly limbs and exaggerated expressions, yet he doesn’t put a foot wrong; or rather, he puts many feet wrong, exactly as planned. Though his character is the sculptor (literally, for that is his job) of his own pandemonium and is revealed at various points to be a thief, a cheat and a liar, Bannister is able to make us sympathise with the ludicrous situation in which he has become embroiled.

The rest of the cast are excellent too, and though Bannister is the lead it is very much an ensemble piece that requires everyone to be operating on the same ridiculous level. The humour wouldn’t be half as effective as it is were the actors not at the top of their game, and they all embrace the madness of Shaffer’s text with an infectious playfulness. The result is a production that is consistently laugh-out-funny with no pretentions about what it is. That the dialogue still has a richness and poetic lightness to it is mere adornment on what is a fabulous production.

Tickets for Black Comedy are available here.

In 1753, William Critchard, a footman, and Richard Arnold, a seaman, were hanged in the district of Redcliffe, Bristol, for "the detestable crime of sodomy”1, an act which carried a death sentence in England until as late as 1861. According to contemporary records, the two refused to repent on the gallows and, in an act of defiance against their persecution, Arnold is reported to have kissed Critchard's hand before both men were, in the euphemistic parlance of the time, "launched into eternity". Though theirs is just one of many tales of men who fell victim to the violent religiosity and oppression of the time, Critchard and Arnold's courage in their final moments is tinged with a gorgeous theatricality, and so it's easy to see what drew debut writer Jordan Luke Gage to their story.

Queer theatre harks to the past like few other genres, doing so not as a comfort but as a caution. Liberation was and still is a battlefield strewn with the broken bodies of those who came before us, and as the UK backslides ever more rapidly on LGBTQ+ rights, we would do well to remember this. Running through queer theatre there is however also a perverse and irresistible nostalgia for the surreptitious otherness that has since been sacrificed on the altars of acceptance and assimilation. The story of Critchard and Arnold - two men whose romance was swift and ultimately deadly - reminds us that yes, we’ve always been here, but also that our love used to be braver, and perhaps needs to become so again.

Alas, to tell a tale of courageous love well requires a courageous writer but, though he is very much an amiable stage presence whose intentions are surely worthy, Gage, who also stars as Critchard, plays it far too safe. The book is often sentimental and pandering, with some limp humour and clunky didaciticism woven through it, while the lyrics are overly earnest and riddled with clichés. Some of the songs - primarily, the solo numbers - are effective, and the vocals are decent if unremarkable, but it all feels like it’s still being workshopped, with no real sense of what the tone or the aesthetic is quite meant to be.

Likewise, Gage struggles with debut writer syndrome and, in trying to say so much, he ultimately ends up saying very little. Pare Redcliffe right back and strip out most of the superfluous characters - heck, take a big swing and turn it into a two-man show - and you have the makings of a half-decent one-act musical about queer love in the face of intolerance and injustice. The show (mostly) succeeds when Gage cuts out the noise and the distractions and focuses on the love between Critchard and Arnold, everyone else be damned, and so much of what doesn’t work here happens on the periphery of their story, which is why the show frustrates as much as it does.

But Gage does have promise as a writer. He can generate meaningful emotion and there’s a sweet naturalism to the interactions between the two lovers but he lacks the formal control to keep the piece from straining and buckling around him. The musicality, similarly, is ill-defined, with a number of forms and genres hurled into the pot in the hope that something palatable can be formed from the ingredients. And yet, there are a couple of songs that really do capture something interesting, even if an ironic but disastrously misjudged jaunty number about a hangman threatens to permanently derail the whole enterprise in the second act.

Gage himself is perfectly fine as Critchard and he has a pleasant enough voice, albeit one that is occasionally drowned out beneath the wave of breathy harmonies that the play resorts to whenever it strives for sincerity. His chemistry with Daniel Krikler, who was excellent in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at the Donmar Warehouse last year, is warm and affecting, though Krikler does a lot of the heavy lifting in the scenes when they're alone, and his vocals are tighter. Nonetheless, the two of them do have a likeable spark and it is a shame that Redcliffe dedicates a relatively small amount of time to the two of them.

Rebecca Lock, who plays Critchard's mother, is perhaps the best advertisement for what this show could have been and, with some further work, could yet be. More than anyone else on the stage, she understands how to navigate the shift from broad comedy to tragic melodrama, and her solo ballad in act two is a real triumph. She has the pipes, the comic timing and the ability to get to the emotional heart of the story in a way that everyone else struggles with.

At the end, we are reminded that, though this is a tragic tale from a bygone era, same sex love is still punishable by death in twelve countries across the globe, and it's that sense of injustice and urgency that the rest of the production lacks. Nonetheless, I found myself surrounded by people weeping loudly and had a Principal Skinner moment as I wondered whether I was so out of touch (no: it's the public who are wrong). I do think Gage has good intentions and there are flickers of promise here but this just doesn't work holistically, and that's largely down to a lack of rigour and control in the writing.

Critchard's slutty little glasses are great though.

Tickets for Redcliffe are available here.

Has any American playwright better captured how the male descendants of the Great Depression lashed themselves so wholly and uncompromisingly to their own poisonous pride that it ultimately devoured them? Miller’s most famous tragic heroes - Eddie Carbone, Joe Keller and Willy Loman - are, above all else, felled by their own stubborn insistence that their honour is sacrosanct. As the survivors of a decade of penury, when working men like their own fathers were rendered jobless and penniless and left to wallow in the shame of their failure to provide for their families, they saw how men of honour and dignity were hurled upon and buried beneath the scrapheap. Honour thus became the only currency on which they knew they could rely, for it was the one thing that couldn't be stolen from them without a fight.

Though the dramatic structure and tone of The Price differs from those of All My Sons, Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge, the two brothers whose conflict forms the heart of the narrative could easily fit into any of those plays, for they too value honour at the expense of everything else, including their relationship with one another. Like the best of Miller's protagonists, both men are righteous to a fault and haunted by the spectre of a father who seemed to lose everything, including his self-respect, in the 30s. Accordingly, they are determined to never let such a fate befall them, yet it is in their very obstinacy that said fate appears inevitable.

The title alludes to the moral and ethical dilemmas that drive the narrative; in effect, what price do we pay for the decisions we make and the values we hold? Set entirely in an attic full of old family memorabilia and sentimental junk, it’s a work about how the young men of the thirties have become stuck in time, beholden to ghosts of the past whose memories they have purposely distorted in order to make their lives all the more bearable. Vic, a police officer who resents his lot and blames his older brother, Walter, whom he hasn’t seen in well over a decade, for, as he perceives things, abandoning him and his father at the height of the Depression, meets with Gregory Solomon, an 89-year-old antique dealer, so that he can finally be rid of all of his father’s things. After a lot of back and forth between Solomon and Vic, Walter arrives and all of the wounds of the past are ripped open once again.

This is a strange text for Miller in that the first act is curiously light on substance, albeit intentionally so. There’s an element of farce to the proceedings as Solomon and Vic barter and haggle, often ineptly, while reminiscing about their lives through the hazy allure of nostalgia. Once Walter arrives however, the text becomes much more febrile and Miller finds himself very much in his comfort zone of angry, bitter men struggling to deal with all of the rage and regret that has been festering within them for decades. As the two brothers castigate each other for the slights they feel have been done to them, it becomes increasingly apparent that both men have created their own narratives of the past to justify to themselves how they exist in the present. Or, as Walter puts it: “we invent ourselves, Vic, to wipe out what we know.”

As with much of Miller’s work, the strength of The Price is in the dialogue which, though less poetic and rigorous than in his masterpieces, still bristles and rails against injustice and the poverty of a society that by 1968, with war waging in Vietnam and Nixon on the cusp of power, had become increasingly fractured by money. The parallels Miller draws between the misery of the 30s and the apparent recovery of the 60s imbue the text with a rage and a despondency that is well juxtaposed with the lightheartedness of the first act, and the claustrophobic setting, with the past towering over the characters and around an empty chair that could easily be filled with the ghost of the brothers’ father, creates a sense of real discord.

Extended for two weeks due to popular demand, The Price is the second of Miller’s lesser known texts to get a revival this year, following Jordan Fein’s production of Broken Glass at the Young Vic, which finished its run just over a month ago. Though Broken Glass was also a solid play, The Price feels closer to Miller at his most potent and profound. The performances are uniformly excellent and the messy set design creates a sense of disquiet that erupts into chaotic recriminations in second act, while Jonathan Munby’s direction leaves the actors ample room to properly become these broken characters.

Use the extra fortnight to see this if you can.

Tickets for The Price are available here.

How the fuck did we get here? This isn’t a rhetorical question. Sure, we all know vicious austerity and the decades-long evisceration of the state have wreaked untold damage to social care services in this country, but how have we, as citizens, children and grandchildren, allowed this to happen? How have we become so blinkered, so utterly disconnected from one another that we accept - and we do accept it, because we’d be stringing the people responsible from lampposts if we didn’t - the parlous state of care in this country? Even if we cannot empathise, how does the terror of growing old and finding ourselves abandoned to a system that is unable to support us not spur us into action?

Set in a care home that appears not to have been decorated since the mid-90s and is bedevilled by rolling blackouts and staff shortages, Zeldin’s Care examines the loneliness and isolation experienced by those abandoned to a system that is barely held together by overworked and underpaid nurses. The core focus is on Joan, a new resident who is moved into the home by her struggling family following a fall, and her feelings of despondency as she tries to acclimatise to her new surroundings. Meanwhile, Joan’s daughter and her two young sons try to navigate their guilt at leaving Joan in the throes of a system that cannot sustain itself.

The show’s title refers not just to the profession of social care but also to the act of caring, and the play is a rallying cry to encourage more of the latter. Zeldin wants to engender change within, or at least force a conversation about, the care industry, itself a loaded term that evokes spreadsheets, profit margins and the callous impulses of the market, by compelling us, as passive audience members, to care about the dismal state of things. What it means to care is explored through the nurses, who do their best with what scant resources they have, the family, whose unconditional love for Joan is at odds with their decision to abandon her to a social care system that they can see is crumbling around them, and the residents, for whom care has become a luxury.

The ensemble of characters, most of whom are in the final stages of their lives, are nicely fleshed out, and Zeldin’s writing is deeply humanistic, though most of them slot a little too neatly into recognisable archetypes, with the home becoming a microcosm. As such, some of the grimy realism of the piece gets lost, and Zeldin is torn between focusing on the family, which is when the text is at its most potent, and what happens in their absence, when people are forgotten, fade away and are quickly replaced like the sheets on the beds in which they died.

The reason this works is that the performances are uniformly excellent. Linda Bassett is remarkable as Joan. Her performance is vulnerable and anguished, and she is the beating heart of the piece. Hayley Carmichael, as a fellow resident and Joan’s friend, likewise delivers a barnstorming performance that is jittery and full of longing, while Llewella Gideon does stellar work as the nurse trying to hold everything together. Credit must also go to William Lawlor, who elevates a somewhat generic teenage miscreant character into something altogether richer and more developed, and his final scene is one of the most impactful in the whole production.

Care is affecting and justifiably excoriating but it’s also oversentimental and manipulative when it doesn’t really need to be. The emotions speak for themselves but Zeldin lays things on a bit too thick at times. As such, it is more a series of powerful vignettes than a tightly woven narrative. Nonetheless, Bassett and Carmichael in particular are superb, and though there are some missteps, it absolutely earns its heartbreaking climax, which is handled expertly by Lawlor.

Tickets for Care are available here.

aka. Jinkx and Her Twinkx

Two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon plays Judy Garland in a revival of Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow, which premiered in Sydney in 2005 and focuses on the final months before Garland’s untimely death at the age of just 47. Adapted by Almeida artistic director Rupert Goold into a feature film, Judy, in 2019, for which Renée Zellweger won the Oscar for Best Actress, End of the Rainbow serves as both a celebration of Garland’s remarkable life and legacy and also as an elegy to a woman who, like so many Hollywood starlets of her era, was a force of quite spectacular self-annihilation.

Jinkx Monsoon, who has previously played Garland to great acclaim as part of the ‘Snatch Game’ segment of RuPaul’s Drag Race, doesn't just impersonate the iconic star but becomes her, body and soul. Her performance is like a sort of spiritual possession, in which she inhabits Garland’s very being and then vainly attempts to rescue her from her fate, as though she is locked in some Greek tragedy. Though she leans a little too heavily into some of the tics and traits of her Absolutely Fabulous namesake at times, there is a nuance to her portrayal of Garland’s vulnerability that is absolutely compelling and which exacerbates the heartache pulsing through the narrative’s veins.

There is a risk inherent to stories such as these that the protagonist is made a laughing stock, but Quilter’s writing and Monsoon’s performance are accomplished and intelligent enough to avoid reducing Garland to a mere caricature. Make no mistake, End of the Rainbow is wickedly funny - when Garland is hurling herself all over her hotel suite, which she complains is much too small for a star like her, and demanding a cocktail of alcohol and drugs, it’s impossible not to laugh - but we never lose sight of the fact that we are watching somebody destructing in real time. For an audience of queer men for whom this might feel more than a little familiar, it is both uncomfortable and oddly reassuring.

Vocally, Monsoon also does excellent work capturing Garland’s style, and she enthralls with renditions of some of her most iconic hits. More impressive still is her ability to sing badly in those moments when Garland has overindulged and fallen apart on stage in front of an audience. It’s a skill to sing well; it’s even more of a skill to pretend that you can’t sing, and Monsoon hits both of these notes perfectly. She and the show then crescendo with a gorgeous rendition of ‘Over the Rainbow’, which serves as an emotional and powerful moment of catharsis for a character who has come full circle and ultimately succumbed to her fate.

Given Monsoon’s sheer force of presence, it is difficult for anyone else to make much of a mark. Jacob Dudman is fine (and also fiiiiiine) as Garland’s fiancée Mickey Deans, and is at his best when his character’s vicious, exploitative streak emerges, but Adam Filipe struggles to imbue Garland’s pianist and close friend Anthony with much character. The interactions between Garland and Anthony are sweet enough, particularly towards the end, but Monsoon does the heavy lifting, with Filipe left scrambling to try and make a mark of his own. It is Monsoon’s show though - as it should be - and she dominates the proceedings with her magnificent charisma.

This is a well written piece that is sassy and camp but also has ample emotional depth. Jinkx Monsoon’s performance is excellent, even if it’s a little too heightened at times, and the show is very ably directed by Rupert Hands, who makes superb use of the space to capture Garland’s spiralling mood and behaviour. It’s also a show that understands its audience intimately, giving them what they want - who doesn’t love a drunk queen stumbling around and cackling - while also never downplaying the seriousness of the tragedy befalling Garland.

Tickets for End of the Rainbow are available here.

Two years ago, Kip Williams' one-woman production of The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, in which Sarah Snook played all 26 roles, felt revolutionary. At a time when cameras and video technology were encroaching into theatre in ways that were really beginning to erode the soul of the form, Williams demonstrated how these could instead be used to shift narratives and conversations forwards without sacrificing live theatre's unique essence and energy. Though his production was by its very nature meticulously crafted, it nonetheless still boasted a remarkable fluidity and vibrancy that made it feel as though Snook's interactions and movements around the stage were natural, even spontaneous. The result was a fresh, invigorating take on Wilde’s play that was absolutely rooted in the text but was also playful and risky in a manner befitting both its subject and author.

Enter Dracula, this time starring Cynthia Erivo in all of the roles. Here, Williams' apparent ingenuity seems to have been exposed as mere gimmickry. The same techniques are deployed again - pre-recorded footage of other characters that the one on stage talks to; camerapeople following Erivo around and projecting her face onto a large screen; sets that stagehands construct and dismantle in the background as the star talks to herself - but all of the seamlessness and creativity has been lost. Far from using technology to propel the story forward, Williams now uses the screen as a crutch, reverting to the comfort and reassurance of it whenever an opportunity to experiment or take a risk arises, so that we are left with nothing but tacky transitions and clunky silences to move us from scene to scene.

As a technical feat it is still impressive, of course, and lots of clever audiovisual trickery is used to create various effects that would otherwise be impossible. Alas, it's all mechanical and thudding. The single screen dominates everything, overwhelming Erivo and stripping away all of the emotion and the drama. The technology isn't in the service of the production but vice versa; what few flickers of genuine tension and peril exist are quickly snuffed out by the need for the screen to once again drain our attention like the eponymous ghoul drains the life force of his victims, and it often feels as though what’s happening on stage is an afterthought, with lumpen choreography and a performance from Erivo that is tetchy and overwrought.

Partly as a consequence of the epistolary nature of the novel, much of Dracula unfolds in a series of monologues, with Erivo’s role reduced to a mere narration of events. She does this at a breakneck pace, speaking and emoting erratically as though she too wants the whole thing to be over and done with. She stumbles over her words and is regularly a few seconds out of sync with the pre-recorded dialogue on the screen, resulting in some truly awkward silences as we wait for the production to catch up with her. Accordingly, every interaction feels stilted. There’s little dramatic urgency to any of it because the conversations and the dialogue all feel like the separate, isolated monologues that they are, rather than as part of a tapestry of interconnected ideas and discussions.

Were the show still in previews issues such as these could be forgiven but Dracula has been running for over three months now and so there is no excuse for a show that has been intricately directed and planned down to the exact second to still be so full of gaffes. Likewise, were Erivo able to imbue any of these characters with personality through her performance one might be able to overlook the issues with timing but she is entirely one-note throughout, signalling changes in character solely through the use of a series of increasingly unconvincing European accents (her Irish accent surely constitutes a hate crime) and poorly designed wigs. As such, it becomes impossible to invest in any of it.

Given we know what Williams can do with the right star and vision, Dracula is a honking disappointment. With barely a few weeks left in its run, the show still feels unfinished, and Erivo’s performance is sloppy, even though it’s hard not to be mildly impressed by her stamina. In part, I suspect that the issue is the source material itself - the text doesn’t translate well to the stage, and certainly not in this format - but regardless, there is no excuse for how unimaginative and drab Williams’ production is, nor how wooden Erivo is.

Tickets for Dracula are available here.

Note: This review contains some minor spoilers about what ‘Equus’ is in the context of the play

The reputation of Equus, Peter Shaffer’s controversial 1973 play about child psychiatrist Dr. Martin Dysart and his attempts to treat 17-year-old (un)stable boy Alan Strang who, in an act of apparently inexplicable and random violence, has blinded six horses with a hoof pick, precedes it. Perhaps best known for the physical vulnerability and emotional intensity required by the young man playing Alan, the text’s most famous London revival in recent years was at the almost thousand seater Gielgud Theatre and starred Daniel Radcliffe in his first major non-Harry Potter role. Now, almost twenty years later, the play returns for a limited run at the much smaller and more intimate Menier Chocolate Factory, starring Toby Stephens as Dysart and relative unknown Noah Valentine as Alan.

The central focus of Shaffer’s text is on the relationship between Dysart, who is disillusioned with the nature of his work, and Alan, who appears resistant, at least initially, to Dysart’s attempts to psychoanalyse him. As the narrative progresses it becomes clear that Alan is fettered in some bizarre master-servant relationship with horses, whom he appears to worship as gods. Instructed to alleviate Alan’s “pain”, Dysart attempts to uncover the cause of Alan’s delusion and the catalyst for his subsequent actions in order to cure him, only to conclude that in removing said pain he will also render him hollow because his pain is inextricably linked to the passion and desire to worship that caused him to behave as he did. In effect, one cannot exist without the other. As Dysart rages:

“He’ll be delivered from madness. What then? He’ll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply reattached like plasters? Stuck onto other objects we select? Look at him! My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband, a caring citizen, a worshipper of an abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost.”

The morals and ethics of “curing” Alan form the emotional and thematic thrust of the text, though this debate constitutes just one part of its rich tapestry of complex and conflicting ideas. In many ways, the play is reminiscent of one of Shaffer’s other great masterpieces, Amadeus, in that it wrestles with religion, guilt, sexual repression and desire, shame and inadequacy, all of which are manifested in the concept of the titular ‘Equus’, the perverse deity to whom Alan is so subservient. All of these ideas and feelings, alongside the sense that in order to be healthy and worthy of society’s tolerance we must suppress our emotions and needs, also represent the conformity and normality anathema to Alan’s passion, which Dysart finds so compelling and attractive.

The value of the intimate space in exploring and navigating such an intricate text cannot be overstated. The play’s intensity, which tightens around the audience like a noose about the neck of the damned, is exacerbated by the claustrophobia of the space. Norms abrade right before our eyes, as though we are complicit and involved in the drama. Indeed, with the notable and obvious exceptions of Alan and Dysart, all of the characters sit in the front row on all three sides of the thrust stage when not interacting with the two leads, emphasising how both we and they bear at least some of the blame and responsibility for what has occurred.

Likewise, the sparseness of the set, which appears to merge with the back wall and, in turn, the ceiling, is used to exquisite effect and draws all of our attention to the characters. Paul Pyant’s lighting and Adam Cork’s sound design are atmospheric and deeply unsettling, heightening the play’s already ferocious emotions and creating a sense that something truly subversive and unnatural is unfolding in front of and around us. This is true also of the six ensemble members who perform as the horses and whose physicality and choreography is contorted and twisted, as though they comprise some Eldritch nightmare that recalls the sequence in Macbeth when Duncan’s horses become frenzied and start devouring each other.

Posner’s direction is majestic and he punctuates this production with some truly remarkable sequences. The conclusion to the first act, in which Alan’s relationship with the horses and the sheer monstrousness of his delusions become apparent, is breathtaking (literally, I felt my breath stall) while the moment of violence when Alan blinds the horses unfurls like a deviant ballet that inflames the senses and leaves the audience in a state of mania. Yet these sequences wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective were Posner’s command of the production in its quieter moments not also as thorough and intelligent as it is. He is often restrained and allows his stars to immerse themselves in these characters of their own accord, which further amplifies the emotional forcefulness of their interactions.

And it’s the stars who make this such a miraculous revival. Valentine, in what is only his second appearance on stage after starring in Noughts and Crosses at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre last year, is courageous, vulnerable and captivating, and he embraces this role like a man possessed, while Stephens expertly captures all of Dysart’s spiralling desperation and dissatisfaction. Between them, they enhance and elicit all of the layers and complexities of their relationship. As it becomes clear that Dysart can ultimately only help Alan by extinguishing his very essence - as he tells his broken patient, “when Equus leaves, if he leaves at all, it will be with your intestines in his teeth” - the two of them do phenomenal work in enhancing how tragic this fate will ultimately prove to be.

This is one of the best productions of the year so far. It’s febrile and incendiary and riveting, unfolding like an exorcism of something primal. Posner’s direction, the performances of Stephens and Valentine, and the design of the set, the lighting and the sound all contribute to a revival that is potent and robust and has a sophisticated understanding of how to disentangle Shaffer’s rigorous text. Do whatever it takes to get a ticket.

Tickets for Equus are available here. The show is also transferring to the Theatre Royal Bath for a two-week run in July.

The theatre of simplicity isn’t a lost art, but it sometimes feels like it’s been neutered by an obsession with minimalism. Mass, Fran Kranz’s stage adaptation of his 2021 film of the same name about a meeting between two sets of parents - one whose son committed a school shooting, the other whose son was one of the victims - works so well because it is simple. It’s words on a page brought to life by four actors who don’t just portray their characters but embody them. It’s a text of raw sentiment directed inwards and outwards that is anchored firmly in no-frills realism, with a specificity of location and universality of emotion.

In the five years since Fran Kranz brought this story to the big screen, nothing has changed. Indeed, if anything, things have regressed. After all the thoughts and prayers, all the calls to action, the protests, the petitions, the congressional hearings and the endless handwringing and promises from politicians that things will be different, so far this year, as of May 14th 2026, there have been 73 school shootings across the States, resulting in 148 injuries or deaths, and 1,231 (yes, that is one thousand, two hundred and thirty one) school shootings in the years since the film was released1. What a damning record.

The more it happens - the more American schoolchildren are slaughtered by their friends and classmates, encouraged and pardoned by the blood-soaked gun lobby, who can get a fantastic bargain on most politicians and lawmakers these days - the less anyone seems to care. Maybe everyone’s jaded, or maybe they’ve just given up. But every time it happens, and every time meaningful, preventative action fades ever further into the distance, there is a wave that tears through the walls within which the latest senseless murder took place; a wave that obliterates the families and communities for whom this is so much more than numbers on a chart. Because, for them, this is the sons and daughters and neighbours and friends that they will never see again.

For Kranz, who has adapted his 2021 screenplay and moved the action to the present day, the political is personal and so too is the personal political. They’re inescapably intertwined. A discussion about gun rights isn’t theoretical or ideological, it’s about whose child needs to die next. Mental health isn’t just labels, it’s people. It’s the perpetrators and the survivors, and what could’ve been prevented and what still isn’t being prevented. And then there’s guilt, neglect, shame, blame culture, social media, “broken” families, the internet, video games and our culture’s obsession with might and displays of violence. These aren’t just concepts but rather they permeate every aspect of people’s lives, tainting and damaging us all.

The sense not just of families but an entire country wracked with inertia pulses through the play’s veins. Posters about mental health awareness litter the noticeboards in the background of the set, but nothing changes. Characters meet and argue and rage and forgive, but nothing changes. The action is moved from 2021 to 2026 and nothing changes. Yet Kranz isn’t despairing or cynical. He’s honest, sure, but this isn’t a work that is resigned to tragedy or accepting of how things are but one that recognises the sheer scale of the challenge we must confront.

The set - wide and deep, particularly for the Donmar - is symbolic of this scale. The vast majority of the action occurs in the centre, around a small table, where the characters sit and talk, yet the stage is sprawling, as though they are surrounded by emptiness. Occasional interruptions hint at the endless march of life, even in the face of overwhelming tragedy, while the centre of the stage rotates, slowly and almost imperceptibly, mirroring the glacial pace of progress while simultaneously allowing the audience to look each character in the eye and see the discussion unfold from their different perspectives.

The four central performances are all magnificent, and each deserves plaudits for how well they capture the pain and the turmoil of their respective characters. Dolan and Marshal are the emotional heart of it, and their characters’ journeys towards acceptance and forgiveness is powerfully realised. Hilton, meanwhile, plays things a little more coolly; his character is complicated and difficult to warm to, but Hilton manages to find something in him with which we can properly sympathise. For all of the rage and the hysterics that define how these characters interact, there is a real subtlety to their tics, mannerisms and expressions, that allows us to fully invest in them and believe in the heartache they have endured.

Adeel Akhtar operates on another level entirely, however. Dolan, Marshal and Hilton are very good; Akhtar is exemplary. He plays Jay, the victim’s father, as a grenade just waiting to explode and destroy everything. He is fidgety and defined by anger, yet there is such nuance to how he captures all of his emotions that when he finally erupts, it feels all the more devastating. As he describes what was done to his son and the ripple effect on the family, he exudes such guttural pain, discussing something so unimaginable and inexplicable and yet so horrifically common.

This is just excellent theatre. It’s thoughtful, precise and anguished, yet it’s never overdone or manipulative. It suits the Donmar, which is an intimate space, well, and Cracknell’s direction never overwhelms or distracts from the text. There are many issues with the pacing - it almost feels a little too short, interestingly - and the minor characters are a little clumsily written but for the most part, this is powerful, provocative stuff that dazzles in the hands of the four excellent leads.

Tickets for Mass are available here.

Though written a full five decades apart, there are remarkable similarities between David Hare’s Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, currently running at the Duke of York’s Theatre, and his most recent work, Grace Pervades, which transfers to London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket following a sold-out run at the Theatre Royal Bath (no relation) last year. Both texts are prickly in their portrayal of rebels and changemakers, celebrating them while also attempting to navigate an uneasy clash between radicalism and tradition, and both place women artists at the centre of their narratives. Both texts are also a little chauvinistic - Grace Pervades less so than Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, but Hare’s pompous masculinity and paternalism are apparent here too - and there’s a clunky patriotism running through them both that simultaneously reveres and is cautious of Englishness and English culture.

Set over almost a century, from 1878 to 1966, Grace Pervades tells the story of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, two of the most famous and influential theatre actors of the Victorian age, and Terry’s two children, Edith and Edward Gordon Craig, both of whom also worked in theatre for most of their lives. Told in a non-chronological format, with Edith and Edward’s reflections on their mother’s life framing the drama, the text explores how theatre changed and evolved over the century, focusing in particular on Irving and Terry’s work at the Lyceum Theatre and the conflict between his meticulous, managerial approach and her more innate, naturalistic style of acting. The relationship between the two forms the emotional core of the story, with the Craig siblings’ work fading into the backdrop.

Fiennes and Raison both do solid work as Irving and Terry, and the play is at its best when the two of them are alone on stage. Fiennes has a tendency to ham it up but it works at capturing Irving’s seemingly congenital exasperation with life and himself, and he has a pleasant chemistry with Raison, who brings to life a character who, as she did in reality, often plays the supporting role to Irving’s overbearing lead. The two of them extract light humour from Hare’s script, which is often much too sardonic and knowing, and they are both adept at toning things down and wading through the sludge of some pretty overwritten drama to find something heartfelt and emotionally affecting in it when needed.

However, the primary problem is that Hare’s script is hagiographic. He is reluctant to treat Irving and Terry as real people with real, human flaws. Their relationship and interactions lack emotional weight because he never commits to unpicking them beyond the confines of their impact on British theatre and their different approaches to their craft. When tragedy befalls either or both of them, there’s no sense that it matters because Hare doesn’t do enough of the groundwork to make us care, in part because the framing device and the constant leaping around in time results in staccato pacing that regularly undermines the various moods he’s trying to create throughout the piece.

Unfortunate, too, is how stuffy and uninspired much of the staging and direction are. Herrin’s approach is very traditional and “period”, and though the clash between this and the celebrated radicalism and ingenuity of Terry is interesting, it never feels as though the juxtaposition is intentional because it isn’t explored in any real depth. There’s a slow, soporific quality to both the drab design of the production and the performances which, outside of Fiennes and Raison, are strained and underwhelming. Given it’s a play about theatre and about how theatre, for all of its limitations, matters so much, it’s particularly disappointing just how devoid of energy and spark so much of this is.

Grace Pervades isn’t terrible but in a sense it’s almost worse because it’s tedious. Despite a few moments of humour and two perfectly solid turns by the leads, it’s a play in which Hare takes two undoubtedly fascinating people and reduces their story to one that is uninteresting and pedestrian. At no point does the clunky, exposition-laden dialogue ever capture the sense that these people are as significant or consequential as Hare believes that they are, and so we are instead left to wander through a perfunctory and uninspiring drama about a few people trying to produce successful and exciting theatre. How ironic.

Tickets for Grace Pervades are available here.

Less a show than an “experience”, Punchdrunk’s latest effort is billed as a “live action video game”, though it most resembles a more thrilling and less irritating spin on laser tag. In the “game”, the audience - if one can call them that - are participants in a space mission, the goal of which is to gather a substance known as “Radiance”, the purpose of which is to… do… something? I don't know, it's all quite hazily defined. Separated into two distinct roles - “fielders” and “drivers” - the audience either attempts to gather the Radiance in a large maze of rooms, tents and winding corridors, or to guide the fielders from the relative safety of a control room, before swapping halfway through to experience both aspects of the game.

Compared to some of Punchdrunk’s previous efforts, Lander 23 feels a little basic and rudderless both in narrative and construction, though the intricate technical work required to make the game work as it does is quite impressive. The atmosphere in both the arena and the control room is heightened, especially as the audience must contend with mysterious “entities” (amateur actors with torches) roaming around the arena trying to kill the fielders, and the game requires a nice mix of teamwork, communication and stealth.

Impressive too is the efficiency of the experience. Though anywhere up to 96 players could potentially be involved in the game at any time, the administration and operation of the experience is smooth and the instructions, delivered via an exposition dump from an unseen character over a headset that all players must wear, are clear and uncomplicated. Any anxiety or concern audience members might have about the game is alleviated by the support staff, who are on hand to guide people to where they need to go, and the best way to experience the chaos is to just throw yourself into it and hope for the best.

This is fun. The plot is gossamer thin and it's difficult to really describe it as “immersive theatre”, but it's an enjoyable workout all the same. And hey, the thrill of being chased around by a bunch of jobbing actors in a smoky, dimly lit warehouse in Woolwich is undeniable.

Tickets for Punchdrunk’s Lander 23 are available here (though the show closes tomorrow…)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s dual critique of psychiatry and institutionalisation and searing celebration of the rebel, is known best thanks to Miloš Forman’s 1975 film of the same name, though it was actually adapted for the stage by Dave Wasserman some twelve years prior. While undoubtedly dated in both their language and their portrayal of mental illness, Kesey’s novel, Wasserman’s stage play and Forman’s film all share an easy affinity with the story’s antihero, Randle McMurphy, an in-patient who feigns insanity to avoid prison. Conversely, they also all share a disdain for the authoritarianism represented by Nurse Ratched, the woman who runs the ward on which McMurphy is incarcerated and whose name has since become a byword for medical malpractice and institutional cruelty as inflicted by a woman.

Woven into the DNA of the novel, play and film is a thesis on power. There is the institutional and judicial power of course, which allows people to be interned, experimented on and branded with the various labels of mental illness because they do not conform to arbitrary norms imposed upon them by a society rigidly organised into social hierarchies. Then, there is the power of these hierarchies themselves - of sex, gender, physical strength, mental resilience, and so on - and how these become distorted on the ward, precisely because the characters have been removed from the society within which these hierarchies function. Ratched, a woman, is able to assert absolute dominance and authority over a ward of men, some of whom are there voluntarily, thus willingly sacrificing their place in the hierarchy, because the traditional power dynamics do not apply.

Clint Dyer, whose Death of England trilogy stands out as one of theatre’s better post-Brexit (absolute) state-of-the-nation offerings, a directs a revival that considers an additional power dynamic that further complicates the relationship between the characters: that of race. Ratched’s whiteness stands in contrast with her patients, all of whom are BIPOC men, and her actions and demeanour towards McMurphy in particular become tinged with racial prejudice. Except, alas, Dyer doesn’t do much with this dynamic. The text is mostly unchanged, and though there are hints in the production of the parallels between institutionalisation and slavery and while he embeds some visual references to what freedom looks like specifically for BIPOC men into the piece, it feels like a missed opportunity to explore this story through a unique lens.

Somewhat diminished too is the suffocating sense of containment and claustrophobia integral to a story like this. For what appear to be economic reasons - the show only runs for seven weeks - the in-the-round staging of Arcadia has been maintained (and will also be for the upcoming Glengarry Glen Ross, I suspect), with characters free to enter and exit the stage as required. Were they kettled on stage and thus trapped beneath the glare of the audience Panopticon, this might have been effective but the characters have far too much freedom to move about, which undermines the idea that they have been deprived of agency. The use of staircases and balconies on either side of the stage does effectively mirror the amorphous hierarchies on the ward, however, and the use - or rather misuse - of the floor in the final scene enhances what is already a moment of quite intense catharsis.

The ensemble, led by a captivating Aaron Pierre, who brings a flirtatious, calculating menace to McMurphy, is very strong, with Kedar Williams-Stirling proving especially impressive as young inmate Billy. Olivia Williams, stepping in at short notice to replace Michelle Gomez, who had to leave the show during rehearsals, doesn’t quite have the forcefulness or presence to capture Ratched’s deviousness, playing her as a little too flustered, but she is competent enough. She never matches Pierre’s frenzied energy, however, so the key moments of conflict between the two characters aren’t as impactful as they should be. Nonetheless, the performances across the board and decent and each actor manages the balance of dark humour and harsh drama with considerable skill.

All in all, this is a functional and entertaining production of a well-known story that lands most of its emotional beats and is punchily directed by Dyer. It does feel like an opportunity to dig deeper into the story’s interplay of race, sex and mental illness has been squandered but, thanks to Pierre’s effortless stage presence and some tightly choreographed sequences of rage, it’s also an often cogent watch. It’s a shame Gomez wasn’t able to do it, as I suspect her Nurse Ratched would have been exemplary, but this is still worth seeing, if only for Aaron Pierre’s delicious take on McMurphy.

Tickets for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are available here.

It hasn’t even been two years since Jamie Lloyd’s calamitous adaptation of literature’s most famous love story concluded its run at the Duke of York’s Theatre and yet, just five minutes away from the scene of that monstrous crime, a new take on the material has already rolled into town. However, given the quite urgent need to scrub Lloyd’s production from the nation’s collective consciousness, I’m inclined to think the eponymous lovers deserve this shot at redemption, not least because theirs is an unfairly maligned story (in no small part thanks to its presence on the GCSE English Literature curriculum) and one that deserves to be retold by somebody who actually understands it.

Enter director Robert Icke, who boasts an enviable track record with regards to successful twists on classic texts. In recent years he has reimagined Arthur Schnitzler’s tale of medical ethics and mob mentality, Professor Bernhardi (rechristened as The Doctor), for the era of social media show trials, toyed with perspective and interpretation in a production of Mary Stuart that left the casting of the two lead roles to chance each night, and offered a modern spin on Oedipus in which the titular tragic hero is a populist politican on the cusp of a great election victory. In all of these cases and more, Icke has adapted, contemporised and played with place, time and even narrative, but he has always done so with a real cognisance for the emotional and thematic core of the stories he’s telling, thus ensuring their hearts never stopped beating.

The same is true of his spin on Romeo & Juliet, and impressively with barely a syllable changed or excised from the text. With a rigour that awards him the chance to be playful when he wants to be and sombre when he needs to be, he blends the lyrical pace of Shakespeare’s poetry, which propels the protagonists towards disaster over the course of just a few days, with a sharp, focused directorial vision that is singularly his own. Scenes in which he takes a more interpretive approach to the text - a nightmare sequence in which Juliet foresees the bloodshed that will befall them all, for example, or moments in which snippets of scenes are repeated or interleaved with one another to create a sense of cascading inexorability - do not detract from Shakespeare’s words but instead enrich them as Icke laments the star-crossed lovers cruel destiny.

A production rich with stark visual motifs of the implacable nature of finiteness and finality, Icke’s Romeo & Juliet feels like a distillation of all of the fate and inevitability that is so central to the tragic impetus and impulse of the text. The set, so cleverly designed by Icke’s regular collaborator Hildegard Bechtler, ominously looms over the protagonists. A digital clock emblazons the walls behind them, emphasising the haste of their romance while simultaneously counting down to their deaths, while there is a fluidity to the set, with its constantly shifting parts, that quickens the momentum and drags us ever closer to their final kiss. All the while, Icke ponders the text’s ‘sliding doors moments’, desperately willing the characters to make different choices but ultimately unable to prevent or even delay the play’s violent ends.

It is in these almost insignificant moments - in the what-ifs and the what-could’ve-beens - that the tragedy becomes all the harsher and more galling. What if Capulet had given the nurse, rather than Peter, the guest list for his feast? What if Juliet had been wooed by Paris at said feast as planned? What if Romeo had received Friar Lawrence’s letter in time? What if all of this could have been avoided somehow? Minor changes to events that are as much the consequences of simple misfortune as of fate are briefly considered before a blinding flash of light “corrects” the narrative and sets the characters back on the path of their misadventured, piteous overthrows, compelling them back into each other’s arms and each other’s death beds. It’s a clever notion that Icke never overuses or luxuriates in, and one that plays with the structure of the text without ever sacrificing its emotional essence.

Yet Icke also understands the bones of Romeo & Juliet, which is, at least until the moment of peripeteia when Mercutio and Tybalt are slain and the tone shifts drastically, a bawdy comedy about two lovestruck, awkward teenagers who make foolish choices and are unable to see further than each other’s bodies. This is a play of horny innuendo and ribaldry; it’s all incessant penis jokes and gags about sex; it’s two libidinous adolescents who disregard a multigenerational family rivalry to fuck each other, consequences be damned. Sure, it’s a tragedy but without all of the humour and the frivolity, the foreshadowed deaths land with a thud, and Icke recognises that, far from being overly dour and solemn, the first three acts are hilarious and goofy and full of lust and yearning.

Under his direction, the performances are also superb. Noah Jupe does the impossible and makes a character as naive and narcissistic as Romeo not just likeable but charismatic, albeit in a delightfully ungainly way. Romeo lacks finesse, clumsily brigading Juliet with earnest poetry and kissing her “by the book”, and Jupe plays him as what he is: an overexcitable and rash young man driven by instinct and rarely in control of emotions that he never once takes a moment to process or understand. Sink, likewise, plays Juliet as frenzied, perhaps even neurotic, but not without cause. She’s a character trying to take ownership of a narrative that is almost entirely happening around her. When the two of them are together on stage, their chemistry is electrifying, not because they are mature, confident lovers but rather because they exude all the giddiness and ineptitude of first-time sweethearts overcome by hormones.

Though there are some missteps in the wider ensemble - Aruna Jalloh’s Tybalt has little presence and Eden Epstein’s Lady Capulet feels undernourished - the production also boasts a barnstorming turn by Kasper Hilton-Hille as Mercutio, who is portrayed as an insufferable but unerringly loyal architect of his own senseless demise. Hilton-Hille dominates but does not overwhelm his scenes; he is lewd and lively, which juxtaposes nicely with the sensitive demeanour of Jupe’s Romeo and makes Romeo’s sudden descent into a violent rage against Tybalt all the more shocking. The ever-reliable Clare Perkins, similarly, has exquisite comic timing as Juliet’s nurse and brings a low-level cynicism borne of experience to the role that exacerbates just how integral she is to the events that unfold before us.

This isn’t a perfect production: acts four and five are unevenly paced (Shakespeare’s fault mostly, though Icke struggles to navigate the issue) and some of Icke’s choices, while always interesting, feel a tad underdeveloped. Nonetheless, it’s still a very good production that captures not just the miserable lows but also the impossible highs of the titular lovers’ story. Noah Jupe and Sadie Sink are both excellent - far better, I must admit, than I expected them to be - and Icke’s direction is confident and compelling, taking a text we all know and offering a fresh perspective on it without seeking to undermine it.

See what’s possible when a director does something radical like reading a play before directing it?

Tickets for Romeo & Juliet are available here.

Rebecca Lucy Taylor, better known as musician and songwriter Self Esteem, is something of a revelation in Daniel Raggett’s revival of David Hare’s Teeth ‘n’ Smiles. As Maggie Frisby, the nihilistic, alcoholic frontwoman of a rock band that is in the process of spectacularly imploding over a single night in the dying embers of the late-sixties, she is pugnacious and pitiable, and she tears through the play’s numerous songs with all of the ferocity and raw talent one might expect. It is in the quieter moments, however, when the music fades and all that’s left are the recriminations and regrets of the various characters on stage, that she properly shines.

Set during a gig at end-of-year May Ball at Jesus College, Cambridge, Teeth ‘n’ Smiles follows the band as they try to navigate Maggie's increasingly chaotic and harmful behaviour, while also conspiring, albeit reluctantly, with their manager, Sarrafian (a superlative Phil Daniels, who is clearly having the time of his life on stage) to have her sacked. As events spiral out of control and the relationships within the band become ever more fractured, the play explores how the great promise of the post-war consensus and the cultural revolution of the 1960s began to buckle and how disillusion leads so easily to ennui and, eventually, surrender.

There’s a rueful nostalgia and gruelling dissatisfaction with the present pulsing through Teeth ‘n’ Smiles that pierces and stings. Though written in ‘75 and set in ‘69, the notion of the promised land collapsing beneath the feet of the zealots who no longer believe feels as pertinent now as it ever has. Remember when we were teenagers? We were going to change the world and fix the mistakes of the previous generation, right? A better future was ours for the taking. We just had to make it matter, make it count. The music we listened to, the artists we admired, they were going to start a fucking revolution - the inevitable, long-awaited revolution, after all those years - and things would be so much different. Except… they weren’t, or at least not in the way we hoped. And nor will they be. Indeed, as the play so solemnly concludes, “the ship is sinking but the music remains the same.” Or, as the great philosopher of our time, Edina Monsoon, once said:

Though the more intimate and personal drama between Maggie, the band and Saraffian does pack some emotional weight, it’s in this cruel but depressingly honest idea of a better future ripped from the hands of yet another generation that Teeth ‘n’ Smiles is at its most affecting. The lyrics of the songs, including a song specially written by Taylor for this production, don’t just capture a band in freefall but a world crumbling and spiralling far beyond our understanding, and the way Taylor and the ensemble perform them - passionate, erratic and desperate - heightens the sense of hopelessness that the characters feel beneath all of their facades and their egos.

It's also a text rooted in class. Hare takes aim at both the Cambridge elites who have hired the band and the band members themselves, who have long surrendered any pretence at authenticity, instead acquiescing entirely to a comfortable, easy hedonism. In this respect, it's somewhat less successful. Whether a flaw in Hare’s script or merely in this particular production, outside of Maggie and Sarrafian, the band morphs into a homogenous blob with the individual members never really anchored in anything real. They tend to merge and collapse into one another and though this might be by design, the effect is to alienate them from the audience in a manner counterintuitive to the play’s universal ideas of shared national decline.

Furthermore, whenever Taylor and/or Daniels aren’t at the centre of the drama, the play’s archaicisms become quite distracting and its momentum stalls. Hare’s script is, for all of its melancholic insight, a little too chauvinistic and cynical, even by the standards of the seventies, and the comedy is somewhat hit and miss, despite the best efforts of the rest of the ensemble to embrace the text’s more anarchic, slapstick streak. Nonetheless, it remains an entertaining and emotional production that, thanks to Daniel Raggett’s stylish direction and Chloe Lamford’s superb set design, both of which effectively portray the punky mileiu of the late sixties, when the revolution was collapsing, the future was fucked and the acid dream was well and truly over.

This is a good production with flickers of greatness, and Rebecca Lucy Taylor is magnetic as Maggie. It's a little dated in its portrayal of “troubled” women but Hare still awards Maggie the agency to make and own her mistakes, and her despondent view of the world and her role in it is worryingly relatable. When she stumbles around the stage, damning everybody and clutching a bottle of Johnnie Walker like a child clings to its favourite teddy, it's hard to escape the thought that maybe she's right - maybe none of it matters - and this is largely a result of how convincingly Taylor plays her.

The similarities between Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production of A Doll’s House and Ibsen’s classic text essentially begin and end with the title. Sure, the characters have the same names and the plot generally treads the same, well-worn path but it is, for all intents and purposes, an entirely different play. Though not quite at the level of ChatGPT slop, it does feel as though writer Anya Reiss sat at a computer and thought to herself “do you know what Ibsen needs? Instagram” and then proceeded to forge a tiresome path through TikTok songs and c-bombs, cocaine and finance bros, threesomes and WhatsApp messages and reflections on the follies and evils of Western military interventionism, all while never really concerning herself too much with passé things like dramatic realism or complex characters.

Without wishing to sound like some unreconstructed traditionalist who thinks works of literature are sacrosanct and untouchable or that theatre peaked in the late 19th century, I do think that if contemporary retellings of classic texts are to be worth anything at all, they should be radical. Not superficially radical, in the sense of throwing in a few “fucks” or “cunts” here and there, or setting a dance sequence to a viral tune, but narratively and thematically radical. They should massacre sacred cows, upend and subvert the consensus, and challenge the audience to think in ways that threaten and undermine their cozy middle-class comfort. And, if they do nothing else, they should at the very least draw meaningful parallels between the zeitgeists of then and now.

This production - this “revival”, if we must - does none of that. It’s tame, perfunctory and lacking in emotional heft. It denudes the text of all of its nuance and poetry and, in doing so, reduces these characters to crass, exaggerated stereotypes whose decisions are dictated by an adherence to Ibsen’s essential plot beats rather than by any logic or impulse that constitutes an essential part of who they are. Ibsen’s text is timeless because his characters are complicated. He does not hold them to his own moral standards or judge their actions because he crafts them as real people with real feelings, desires and layers. They do not act in accordance with the story but rather the story is guided by them and all of their contradictions.

By contrast, Reiss’ versions of these same characters are simplistic, bordering on caricaturish. Their behaviour never feels true to who they are because she does not define them much beyond how they compare with Ibsen’s creations. Nora’s decision to leave in the final act - a decision so provocative and revolutionary in 1879, but one that always felt inevitable and true to her character - here feels like some trite afterthought, as though Reiss has been forced to push the character down this path because that’s what the narrative demands. There is no sense of a real woman making a real choice but rather of a writer trying to finagle her way to the conclusion the audience expects. Again, where’s the radicalism? Where’s the sense of newness or subversion? What is the point of this?

There are some pockets of decent work, of course. Romola Garai does all that she can to try to capture what little essence there is to this take on Nora, and her anxious, jittery performance is effective at capturing a woman whose control of her own life is rapidly slipping away from her. The width and breadth of the stage, which is nicely decorated with the shallow symbols of an obscenely capitalist Christmas, well mirrors the chasms that develop between the central characters as the plot progresses, and the final confrontation between Nora and Thorvald, though sloppily written, is well performed by Garai and Tom Mothersdale, both of whom are consistently more convincing than the rest of the ensemble, who struggle to get any real grip at all on their characters or their motivations. Unfortunately, none of this is enough to make the production work.

It is perfectly possible to recontextualise and relocate classic texts without butchering the dialogue or sacrificing who the characters are; just ask anyone who’s ever directed a modern take on Shakespeare. It’s also possible to rewrite and update a classic text without losing its essence. A Doll’s House at the Almeida, alas, fails to do this. Reiss’ script is juvenile and facile and the direction lacks originality. It’s Netflix does Ibsen via the Jamie Lloyd School of Missing the Point, and though it’s sometimes funny and very (very) occasionally thought-provoking, it has nothing to say that Ibsen didn’t say with much more insight and courage almost 150 years ago.

A real shame, this.

Though best known for screen roles like Jackie Robinson in 42, James Brown in Get On Up and Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Chadwick Boseman began his career in the creative industries as a stage actor, theatre director and playwright. Like many who try to pursue these lines of work, particularly off-Broadway, Boseman’s successes were, with one notable exception, relatively unknown and minor. That one exception is Deep Azure, an avant-garde play written in lyrical verse that premiered in Chicago in 2005, earning a nomination for Best New Work at the Jeff Awards (or Joseph Jefferson Awards, which celebrate excellence in Chicago theatre), and which is now in its final week at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, having been extended by a fortnight due to high demand.

The Globe is an apposite venue for this revival of Deep Azure because for all of his script’s vernacular and modern cultural references, Boseman was a real classicist at heart. The form and structure of the piece comes straight from the annals of Greek tragedy, with its chorus, its fallen heroes and heroines and its recurrent themes of fate, vengeance and the conflict between justice and injustice. The script fizzes with an eagerness and a desire to experiment with the form that is sometimes messy but never boring; even when things don’t quite work, they’re always compelling.

With so much happening on stage and in the script, Deep Azure sometimes loses focus but Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s gorgeous direction and the performances do a stellar job of honing things back in on the emotional core of the story, which keeps it rooted in an often gruelling and heartbreaking authenticity. Boseman’s approach to the two central themes of the play - police brutality and disordered eating - is sensitive and intelligent, and his ability to weave all of these ideas into a text written and performed entirely in verse is impressive, not least because it imbues it with a sort of ceaseless momentum as the narrative careers towards tragic inevitability.

It’s a shame that Boseman didn’t write more because this is full of promise. It’s a little overwhelming and needs a bit of a trim but it’s also an emotive and sincere work brimming with all the rage and passion that these subjects deserve. It’s like a sermon, not in that it lectures or hectors the audience but in that it is as much about indescribable feelings and the search for truth and meaning as it is about the story of another black man murdered in cold blood by somebody sworn to “protect and serve”. I just hope more people get to see it because it’s a work of real rigour and intensity.

John Proctor is the Villain’s reputation precedes it and then some. Its exponential growth in popularity and acclaim over the past four years has been remarkable: from humble beginnings at the Studio Theatre in Washington D.C., it soon transferred to Boston and then Broadway, where it featured Sadie Sink (presently starring in Robert Icke’s adaptation of Romeo & Juliet) and received seven Tony Award nominations. It is currently in its final week at the Royal Court in London, where it forms part of the theatre’s impressive 70th anniversary season. A 12-week transfer to the West End has already been announced for 2027 too, so it’s showing no sign of slowing down just yet.

Now, the name John Proctor will be familiar to anyone who knows, or even has a tangential awareness of, Arthur Miller’s seminal and divine indictment of McCarthyism, The Crucible. For decades, students right across the globe have read and analysed and reanalysed and overanalysed the play, and it is generally considered (rightly, in my view) to be one of the greatest dramas of the 20th century. In the text itself, Proctor, who is very much an avatar for Miller, refuses to succumb to the madness of the witch trials around which the plot unfolds or to sign a false confession, instead opting to be hanged; in other words, he is the undisputed hero - albeit a tragic one, as most of Miller’s are - of the piece… right?

Wrong!

Well, at least according to Kimberly Belflower’s electrifying and riveting interpretation of the text anyway. Told through the lens of high schoolers no older than Abigail Williams is in Miller’s text, John Proctor is the Villain uses a discussion about Proctor’s character flaws as a catalyst to explore sisterhood, feminism, sexual politics, assault, the justice system, grooming, education and so much more. Throughout, Belflower remains conscious of the parallels between her work and Miller’s, both stylistically and in terms of content, but is never beholden to them, instead crafting a text that is uproarious and uplifting with a real richness and complexity of its own.

Plays about plays - though as already stated, John Proctor is the Villain is so much more than that - are a little like movies about movies in that there’s often a tendency towards pretention, in-jokes and self-satisfaction. John Proctor is the Villain avoids almost all of these pitfalls because it is really no more about The Crucible than The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials. Both texts are allegories about something much more urgent and contemporary; John Proctor is the Villain is just the next link in this allegorical chain, and there’s an inherent pressure in being so - after all, Belflower is essentially slaughtering a sacred cow on stage - but it’s a pressure that the text relishes.

However, this isn’t a literature essay, it’s a play, and so what matters most is the extent to which Belflower and director Danya Taymor (who also directed the show on Broadway) are able to use the form to create drama, tension and humour. In this respect, their play is a triumph; the writing is perceptive and intelligent, with some remarkable character work that captures all of the contradictory anxiety and confusion of girlhood while also being delightfully funny. The script has a thrilling bouyancy to it that allows it to traverse that finest of lines between comedy and tragedy, and it never surrenders to oversimplification or eschews a challenge.

It’s also subtle, not necessarily as an allegory - John Proctor’s name is in the title, it’s not meant to be a subtle allegory - but in how all the quiet moments of unease, rage, fear, hope, friendship, betrayal and disbelief are handled, and so much of this is down to the note-perfect performances and Taymor’s clever but unobtrusive direction. The representation and portrayal of these teenage girls isn’t just authentic, it’s also empowering in a way that feels true to who these characters are. The development of each character feels genuine because Belflower respects them as people and Taymor and her cast do such excellent work in getting to the heart of them.

Towards the end of the play, I was reminded of a quote often attributed to Emma Goldman:

John Proctor is the Villain feels like a revolution with dancing, and one that must be had. It’s a guttural scream against the abuse of young women, sure, but it’s also a joyous tale of female friendship and solidarity that is wickedly entertaining and brimming with a depth and insight that crescendoes in one of the most spectacular final scenes I have seen in some time. Believe the hype. This is a superb play and you must rush to see it when it transfers next year.

There was a minor shitstorm recently when Lesley Manville asserted that the use of phones and cameras during curtain calls is “insulting”. Though of course I would never deign to disagree with one of our greatest stage and screen actors (though she is wrong, and profoundly so), having now seen this revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, in which Manville is currently starring, I’m much more sympathetic to her desire for there to be as little photographic evidence of the event as possible…

Premiering in 1985, Christopher Hampton’s play is an adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel of the same name about two nobles, Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who take great pleasure in inflicting cruelty on others through the use of sexual games and manipulation. If this sounds familiar, it might be because you’ve seen the 1988 film of the same name, also written by Hampton, or Cruel Intentions, Roger Kumble’s deliciously silly and modern take on the story. Most recently staged in London at the Donmar Warehouse a decade ago, with Dominic West and Janet McTeer as the leads, the play now resides at the Lyttelton Theatre in a mediocre and listless revival, directed by Marianne Elliott.

Little works here. The staging and design of the show distract from, and in fact often undermine, Hampton’s script. Drab period costuming is blended with a bizarre attempt at minimalism that strips away much of the interior and replaces it with large mirrors that line the back wall like a dance studio. Every design decision is dichotomous with another, which creates a sense that Elliott, whose work in the last decade on shows like Angels in America and Company has been spectacular, has no real grip on what this particular show is meant to be and what she wants this take on the material to say.

It all feels shapeless and unfinished, which is also evident in the performances. Manville is prickly and uneven, with a take on Madame de Murteuil that is neither devious nor camp enough. There are flickers of magic when she and Aidan Turner are alone together on stage, and the two of them have a disappointingly underutilised chemistry, but she, much like the production itself, often appears lost and aimless. Turner is fine but, alas, “fine” isn't enough to sell his character's exploitative wickedness, and so he too is left floundering, grasping at nothing on a stage that is much too large and open for a text as intimate and interpersonal as this. Barbarro, who was excellent in A Complete Unknown, is likewise unable to capture anything concrete or tangible in her character, again because she hasn’t been directed effectively.

It’s rare that a show boasting such talent both on and off stage flubs things quite like this but Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a major disappointment. Were it shorter or kitschier it might have at least been more entertaining but there’s a dull seriousness to it all that just exacerbates how sterile it is. Given how sexually charged so much of the narrative is, and given how charismatic and, let’s be real, hot the cast is, it’s extraordinary how little energy and vitality this production has, with everyone trundling around a vast, barren stage desperately trying, and only rarely succeeding, to inject some passion into it.

Save yourself the decision as to whether to take a photo at the end by skipping this entirely.

Score: ⭐⭐