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INDIAN INK – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – sensuality, intellect and nostalgia collide to enchanting effect in this rare Stoppard revival

Felicity Kendal and Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, photograph by Johan Persson

INDIAN INK

by Tom Stoppard

directed by Jonathan Kent

Hampstead Theatre, London – until 31 January 2026

running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2025/indian-ink/

Arriving less than a month after his death, this rare revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1995 drama Indian Ink could hardly have been timed more appropriately or poignantly. Stoppard is generally regarded as one of the most intellectual and literate of modern playwrights, but pieces like this, along with The Real Thing, Arcadia (often perceived as his masterpiece and receiving a new production at the Old Vic in early 2026) and his final, emotionally charged Leopoldstadt, make a great case for the beating heart beneath the crackerjack brilliance and verbosity.

Indian Ink was originally a radio play entitled In The Native State, and the multiple changes of location and time period continue to strongly suggest that. Jonathan Kent’s visually arresting production is great at pointing Stoppard’s pithy dialogue, which is sharp and witty then suddenly surprisingly heartfelt, and just occasionally winningly crude. The bluey-black hues of the visual aesthetic are attractive and appropriate: Leslie Travers’ rising and falling flower-bedecked sets and Peter Mumford’s lighting evoke both ink and the skin colour depicted by traditional Indian painters when portraying the supreme Hindu deity Krishna, whose loric presence runs throughout the text.

This version also excels at exploring the complexities of the central characters: plucky, forward-thinking 1930s poet Flora Crewe (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) travelling through late Colonial India for her failing health and, in the 1980s, her younger sister Eleanor (Felicity Kendal, who originated Flora in 1995), now in her dotage and reflecting back on her sister’s adventurous life. Then there’s Nirad Das (Gavi Singh Chera), the sensitive Indian artist painting Flora and whose attitude to her is complicated and ambiguous, and, fifty years later, his son Anish (Aaron Gill), also an artist, helping Eleanor to piece together their joint family histories.

The production is less successful when dealing with the duality of time frames, too often submerging half of the stage in twilight while the action of the moment unfolds on the other side of the playing area, which gets a little samey. Peter Wood’s original West End staging had a gorgeous, impressionistic sweep but Kent’s production is more prosaic, and inadvertently points up how Stoppard’s text, while mostly engrossing, tends to meander. A strong case is made for cutting some of the extraneous characters who extend the show’s playing time while adding little to the overall story.

There’s so much here to savour though. Ashbourne Serkis, reminiscent of a young Helen McCrory, is unshowy yet entirely riveting as Flora, capturing unerringly her kindness, intelligence and unconventional spirit. She’s sensual, vulnerable yet powerful, the kind of young woman you’d immediately want as a friend but with whom you wouldn’t want to mess.

Kendal is a wonder as Eleanor, spiky, charming, vain but with a rare emotional availability that genuinely touches. She’s a fascinating mix of eccentricity and laser sharp focus, dropping names like Modigliani from her sibling’s storied past to the avid excitement of Donald Sage Mackay’s loquacious American biographer. She is also entirely plausible as the surviving younger sister of the marvellous, long deceased Flora. Margaret Tyzack was also terrific in this role back in the first production but didn’t have the same sense of connection to Kendal’s original Flora as we get here. Kendal and Stoppard have long been a winning theatrical combination, and it is tremendously moving to be reminded of that with this Indian Ink.

Singh Chera beautifully delineates Das senior’s quicksilver mood changes, and Gill delivers convincing, intelligent work as his more grounded son. Tom Durant Pritchard steers a winning path between ex-pat David’s stiff-upper-lip solicitude and romantic fixation with Flora. Irvine Iqbal has a delicious cameo as a wealthy, cosmopolitan Rajah, smitten with our heroine but with a troubling hint of coercive control.

Stoppard in the last decade of the twentieth century had a penchant for juxtaposing different timelines as he considered romantic loss and the nature of nostalgia, as evidenced in Arcadia and The Invention Of Love. Indian Ink is part of the same thematic pattern, but is also about the legacy of art and the contrast in approach between Western and Indian artists. It’s also an exploration of colonialism, both sociopolitical and artistic: “you’re trying to paint me from my point of view instead of yours” observes Flora to Nirad, frustrated at his subsuming of his own culture to an all-pervasive European one.

The uneasy post-British Raj relationship between the United Kingdom and the Indian subcontinent makes for interesting subject matter: “we made you a proper country, and when we left you fell straight to pieces like Humpty Dumpty!” cries Eleanor, from a decidedly partisan viewpoint. If it isn’t presented here in a particularly dramatic way (Stoppard himself observed that Indian Ink is a play devoid of villains), it’s still absorbing enough to be worth our time, especially with such fine writing and the performances at the heart of Kent’s handsome staging.

This isn’t perhaps top-tier Stoppard, but even at less than his best, the late, great playwright is still more stimulating and impressive than many other dramatists. Although a tad overlong, and at times unfocused, Indian Ink remains a fragrant, thought-provoking pleasure, skilfully balancing poignancy and intellectual buoyancy. With its scenic challenges and large cast, it doesn’t get done often, so even if this Hampstead production wasn’t as good as it unquestionably is, it would still be worth seeing. Ruby Ashbourne Serkis is a star, and another opportunity to see Felicity Kendal drive Stoppard’s dialogue with such wit and elegant potency, makes it pretty much unmissable.

December 20, 2025
WHEN WE ARE MARRIED – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – a glorious festive gift from the Donmar

Sophie Thompson, Siobhan Finneran and Samantha Spiro, photograph by Johan Persson

WHEN WE ARE MARRIED

by J B Priestley

directed by Tim Sheader

Donmar Warehouse, London – until 7 February 2026

running time: 2 hours including interval

https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/whats-on/when-we-are-married-rg17

Although the only reference to Christmas is as an oft-used expletive in lieu of something much more blasphemous, there is still something cosily festive about J B Priestley’s When We Are Married, written in 1934 but set three decades earlier, especially as presented in this glowing Donmar revival. Under director Tim Sheader, a vintage play comes up fresh, funny and engaging, punctuated by blasts of contemporary pop, at odds with the period frocks and suits but wittily commentating on the action.

A trio of wealthy Northern couples, the dignitaries and do-gooders of their Yorkshire town, get together to celebrate their joint twenty fifth wedding anniversary, only to discover that the clergyman who married them wasn’t fully qualified so they’ve effectively been living ‘in sin’ for quarter of a century. It’s a dated premise but the vitality of the performances and Sheader’s sparky approach ensure that this Priestley seldom creaks.

Instead of treating the play like a museum piece, Sheader plays fast and loose with it, while keeping in tune with the essence of what Priestley wrote. A beloved character (the wry maid Ruby Birthday) is cut, anachronistic pop divides scenes (watching the three crestfallen wives enter to Beyoncé’s ‘All The Single Ladies’ is as hilarious as almost anything in the script) and each act begins with a Music Hall favourite from the period that the play is set in.

Visually, it’s in period but heightened and stylised, from the crazed mustard yellows and deep purple of Peter McKintosh’s drawing room set, dominated by a cartoonishly huge aspidistra, to Anna Fleischle’s elaborate costumes which are on the garish side of pretty. If it’s not as thorough refresh of an antiquated play as Nancy Carroll’s version of the Pinero Cabinet Minister at the Menier last year, one suspects that the Priestley doesn’t need as much help. This is a definite treat, and one of those clever revivals that satisfies traditionalists as well as audience members wanting something a bit more daring.

The production’s most effervescent success is in the casting. Each couple (Siobhan Finneran and John Hodgkinson as the grander Helliwells, Samantha Spiro and Jim Howick as the unequal Soppitts – she’s a spitfire, he’s a sweetie, and Sophie Thompson and Marc Wootton as the wildly mismatched Parkers) is wonderfully discrete from the others, and the longstanding friendships ring entirely true. The women are particularly strong: Spiro is a hilarious, fiery ball of indignation as snobbish Clara, and few actresses do baleful disapproval with a naughty edge as irresistibly as Thompson. Finneran’s performance just makes you wish she did more stage work; her descent from stentorian confidence to insecure disillusionment is brilliantly managed: when she tremulously asks Hodgkinson’s gimlet-eyed Alderman if he still loves her, it knocks at the heart a little.

Ron Cook delivers some of the greatest ‘drunk acting’ I’ve ever seen as the permanently soused photographer arrived to capture the celebrations. Tori Allen- Martin is just gorgeous as a vivacious gold-digger and Janice Connolly’s righteous livewire of a domestic servant, thrilled at having one over on her pompous employers, is a glorious creation. Leo Wringer as a Caribbean accented priest, and Rowan Robinson and Reuben Joseph as a pair of ardent but illicit lovers, all produce bright, witty work. It’s a smashing company overall and one suspects they’ll gel even more as the run progresses.

This is a thoroughly lovely romp, sumptuously produced and acted. The Donmar has given theatregoers a life-enhancing Christmas gift.

December 19, 2025
OH, MARY! – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – oh, Mason! what a star you are

Dino Fetscher and Mason Alexander Park, photograph by Manuel Harlan

OH, MARY!

by Cole Escola

directed by Sam Pinkleton

Trafalgar Theatre, London – until 25 April 2026

running time: 80 minutes no interval

https://ohmaryplay.co.uk/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22983789061&gbraid=0AAAABBK72OfzT3Uw1NDWmwxJGvPKpzmIH

When a multidisciplinary artist writes a piece of work for themselves to perform, there is often a sense that watching anybody else play it is somehow settling for second best. That appears not to be the case with Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! though. The cultish New York smash about Abraham Lincoln’s troubled wife has seen a succession of big names succeed Escola as the titular Mary in the perpetually sold out Broadway production, including Jinkx Monsoon and Titus Burgess. The role’s present occupant over there, Jane Krakowski, delivers a weirdly endearing First Lady not that far removed from her Jenna Mulroney role in TV’s 30 Rock.

London’s Mary Todd Lincoln is Mason Alexander Park, one of the current Cabaret’s most acclaimed Emcees and whose outlandish Ariel stole the Jamie Lloyd Tempest right out from under Sigourney Weaver’s nose. Park is firing on all cylinders here, and is the principal, but not the only, reason why Sam Pinkleton’s anarchic, confident production is an unmitigated West End triumph, and every bit the equal of the New York version.

Oh, Mary! remains utterly, joyfully ridiculous as it gleefully takes a queer hatchet to conventional straight sensibilities and themes, and casually rewrites American history. The Civil War is frequently referenced but pales into insignificance compared to the Uncivil War being waged between the Lincolns. Giles Terera invests upright, repressed gay Abraham with a furtive intensity and sad-eyed gravitas, forever leering at the male domestic staff when he thinks nobody’s looking and desperate to keep his wife in check. Mary is an easily triggered, vicious alcoholic with a victim complex and a longing to return to the cabaret stage which her marriage forced her to abandon, that’s outdone only by her loathing for her husband and determination to get herself around the nearest bottle. This Mary is more than quite contrary, she’s absolutely unhinged but, as embodied by a mercurial, riveting Park, a multi-layered figure, as sympathetic as she’s screamingly funny.

Clad in the funereal hoop dress and jet black ringleted wig (created by Holly Pierson and Leah J Loukas respectively) that have already become icons in queer theatre, Park’s Mrs Lincoln has a wildfire energy supercharged by malice and fury. There’s also a pleading wistfulness and palpable desolation that throws the comic brilliance into stunning relief: when she says she wishes she was dead we actually believe her, and her speech about her impossibly handsome acting coach (Dino Fetscher, irresistible) being a force of unattainable positivity is genuinely moving. Escola crafted Mary in their own image and as an extension of Cole’s persona, and delivered an unforgettable turn. Park is perhaps more nuanced; for all the absurdity and scenery-chewing wildness, this is an acting performance with truth and some danger at its core and elevates what can sometimes come across as a superior Saturday Night Live sketch on steroids into a full-blooded play. Two parts depressed princess to one part thug, they are utterly sensational: Park is incontrovertibly confirmed as an authentic theatre star, and a very fine actor.

That Terera’s grandstanding, lecherous Lincoln and Fetscher as the wired hottie who ends up playing a bigger part in the unfolding history than one might imagine, more than hold their own against such a whirlwind is remarkable. I also loved Kate O’Donnell’s as a perky chaperone with an ice cream based shame that’s never to be spoken of (which means basically that Mary can barely shut up about it) and, later, a whiskery benign barkeep. Oliver Stockley is the fifth member of this merry team as the assistant that President Lincoln can’t seem to get enough of.

Pinkleton’s staging never misses a comic beat and, if its brief running time of eighty minutes leaves you wanting more, you’re unlikely to feel shortchanged, when you account for your sides and face aching from laughing. All in all, it’s a potty-mouthed, acid-and-honey mash-up of vaudeville, high camp, and twisted history lesson. The glitzy final section, where the set by dots and Cha See’s lighting design undergo a total transformation to match Mary’s mood, needs to be seen to be believed and if you’re not in love with Mason Alexander Park by that point then you probably need a hospital bed and an oxygen mask. An absolute blast.

December 19, 2025
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – stage distillation of the film franchise is a horribly good time

Melissa James and Patrick Heusinger, photograph by Johan Persson

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

by Levi Holloway

based on the films written and directed by Oren Peli

directed by Felix Barrett

Ambassadors Theatre, London – until 28 March 2026

running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval

https://paranormalonstage.com/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23197313702&gbraid=0AAAABBk00Ej02iVJ-L_2YzRothXQiLRSD

Abject terror isn’t the easiest thing to convey in the theatre. There’s something about the artificiality of the medium that tends to keep audiences at arms length, as opposed to the screen where close-ups and jump cuts can draw viewers into the heart of an unfolding nightmare. First seen in Leeds last year and now on a major USA tour, Paranormal Activity, this creepy-as-hell stage cousin to the seven popular horror movies, is the genuine article though. Forget 2:22 A Ghost Story, and even, to a lesser extent, The Woman in Black, this really is frightening.

Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett, directing Levi Holloway’s terse, tense script, transcends traditional play-making to create a bone-chilling piece of ‘total theatre’ where the sections sat in total darkness listening to Gareth Fry’s deeply unsettling sound scape are just as important as the onstage scenes. There are similarities to Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s frequently revived Ghost Stories in that it’s the build-up of tension to all hell breaking loose that really gets the audience on edge, but whereas in that earlier show the pay-off was sometimes a let down, here the action just gets nastier and more imaginative. Yes, it’s essentially preposterous but good luck with telling yourself that when you’re sitting there in the gloom with your sphincter clenched and listening to the rest of the audience cry out in panic and fear.

The basics of the plot will be familiar to fans of the films. Young American couple James (Patrick Heusinger) and Lou (Melissa James) have relocated from Chicago to London partly because of his career but also because she was having issues back home that were attributed to her mental health, although any horror aficionado will know full well that there’s gonna be more to it than that. They’re living in a house (grungy, impressive split level set by Fly Davis) that on first impression appears charmingly ramshackle but which becomes less and less cosy and appealing with every (frequent) blackout.

Heusinger’s disintegration from masculine self assurance to terrified self-abasement is superbly managed. The writing for Lou isn’t as nuanced but James has genuine presence and an ambiguous, aching intensity that is tremendously effective. Although the characters are essentially created to further the plot, Jackie Morrison as a benignly efficient psychic and Pippa Winslow as James’ God-fearing mom make potent contributions.

Technically, the show is, to put it inelegantly, stonkingly good. Chris Fisher’s illusions and Luke Halls’ video designs make you doubt the evidence of your own eyes, and Anna Watson’s lighting transforms and tantalises. If Holloway’s script is more efficient than inspired as writing and drags a bit in act one, it does an excellent job of planting the seeds of demonic mayhem and using repeated motifs that seem innocuous at first but end up loaded with chilling significance. It’s not always clear what should be funny and what is intended to be deadly serious, but that duality is part of the fun in a show where an overstimulated audience occasionally make more noise than anybody on stage.

Overall, this is a huge success in terms of achieving exactly what it sets out to do, and is likely to be a major West End hit. I can’t remember the last time a piece of theatre made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up through sheer fear, but this one did. Twisted good fun.

December 16, 2025
DRACAPELLA – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – this crazed Dracula musical comedy is literally a scream, and the cast is spectacular

Photograph by Craig Sugden

DRACAPELLA

written by Jez Bond and Dan Patterson

directed by Jez Bond

Park Theatre, London – until 17 January 2026

running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval

https://parktheatre.co.uk/events/dracapella/

World class clowning, exhilarating beatboxing, killer vocals, cheesy but beloved rock and pop standards, groan worthy jokes….and vampirism: welcome to Dracapella, probably one of the most unusual festive theatrical offerings in the capital this Christmas, and certainly one of the most fun. Imagine, if you dare, a benignly deranged mash-up of nutty comedy that revels in its own preposterousness (think Mischief on stage, the Naked Gun and Airplane movie franchises on screen, with a dash of improvisation à la TV’s Whose Line Is It Anyway thrown in), swoonworthy vocals and gothic horror, and you’ll have some idea of what’s sending Park Theatre audiences home on a mirth-induced high, their faces aching from laughter.

If the slapstick comedy and heinous puns of Jez Bond and Dan Patterson’s script, which still manages to do a decent job of retelling the Dracula legend, are the calling card of Bond’s whip-smart production, the singing is the secret weapon. Ian Oakley’s vocal arrangements are exquisite and matched by septet of world class vocal talents including Olivier award winners Stephen Ashfield and Lorna Want, and stage and screen star Keala Settle. There’s no band, just ABH Beatbox (full name: Alexander Bulgarian Hackett), a one man treasure trove of beats, foley effects and sheer charm, but the sound threatens to blow the roof off the theatre. Standards like Queen’s ‘Find Me Somebody To Love’ and Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ come over with breathtaking vitality and assurance.

The whole thing is infused with a sort of lunatic magic that keeps the audience on side, even when you can see the jokes coming from a mile off, and it surely helps every member of the supremely talented cast seems to be on the exact same page. Ashfield displays a fabulous gift for physical comedy as a squeamish, neurotic Jonathan Harker, prone to frequent debilitating injuries, alongside a wonderfully rangy, versatile voice. Opposite him, Lorna Want is a sparkling delight as a knowing heroine Mina, whose resemblance to Dracula’s deceased lover drives the plot, tinged with a smattering of modern day feminist awareness.

Ako Mitchell’s all-American Dracula strikes exactly the right balance between sinister and suave, and is particularly hilarious when his dignity is abandoned. Settle has a stupendous voice but also an unexpected skill at deadpan comedy as Mina’s best friend, the surprisingly voracious Lucy. Philip Pope excels in a variety of roles, and Monique Ashe-Palmer and Ciarán Dowd are gloriously gross as Dracula’s tormented domestic servants doomed to mutual celibacy until their master is set free. Dowd all but walks off with the second half as a vowel-mangling, Dutch accented Van Helsing, whose ineptitude is matched only by his penchant for coming out with impenetrable aphorisms and adages that apparently lose everything in translation to English. He’s terrific, but then, they all are.

This is exhilarating, laugh-out-loud stuff, performed and presented with imagination and technical brilliance. It is a little too long, and the interval saps some of the energy briefly, but these are minor quibbles. The low comedy works because it’s put over with so much skill and if you don’t find one moment funny, there’ll be another one along in a moment which will slay you, and there’s always the next thrilling musical interlude to look forward to. Everything gets hurled at the wall and the vast majority of it actually sticks, silliness is raised to an art form. Literally bloody marvellous.

December 14, 2025
ALL MY SONS – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – Ivo van Hove’s searing production of Arthur Miller’s great American tragedy is a must-see

Bryan Cranston, Paapa Essiedu and Hayley Squires, photograph by Jan Versweyveld

ALL MY SONS

by Arthur Miller

directed by Ivo van Hove

Wyndhams Theatre, London – until 7 March 2026

running time: 2 hours 15 minutes, no interval

https://allmysonsplay.com

So, it turns out lightning really can strike twice. I’m not just talking about the meteorological kind, symbolically hitting then tearing down the tree in the Keller family’s yard before the main action of Arthur Miller’s 1947 masterpiece (a term that gets bandied about too freely, but truly applies to All My Sons). I’m also referring to the fact that Belgian auteur director Ivo van Hove, who exploded onto the British stage in 2014 with a shattering, stark, mould-breaking A View From The Bridge, another Miller study of flawed protagonist railing at fate as the American Dream collapses in on him, has done it again. This All My Sons has its own flavour, but the sense of a classic being looked at through entirely fresh eyes, fully in tune with every nuance and beat of it but untrammelled by tradition and rich in imagination, is similarly palpable.

That earlier production transferred to Broadway, and it’s inconceivable that this coruscating revival won’t follow its sibling across the Atlantic, especially given the presence of Bryan Cranston, one of the greatest American actors of his generation. He’s delivering here the kind of work that should be required viewing for anyone studying the craft of acting but there’s not a weak link in this cast. Miller’s creation is brought roaring back to spellbinding, searing life.

With its themes of hubris, disgrace and the sins of the fathers being visited on their offspring, All My Sons is essentially Greek classical tragedy reimagined in mid twentieth century American terms. van Hove and his long-time design collaborator Jan Versweyveld seem to embrace that with a timeless aesthetic (a giant tree in front of a monumental back wall with one door and a circular aperture like a portal through which characters watch or appear like so many deux ex machina) that could equally serve a Medea or an Electra.

An D’Huys’ costumes are contemporary but not distractingly so. Versweyveld’s lighting sets out with a golden naturalistic glow as Cranston’s Joe Keller and Zach Wyatt’s affable neighbour Frank assess the damage to the fallen tree the morning after the storm, then stark and unforgiving at moments of high drama, before giving way to roiling greens, pinks and unsettling darkness as the play grinds inexorably toward its devastating climax. Music and sound (superb work by Tom Gibbons) thrums over, under and through the dialogue, at times soothing, at others like a dull ache and occasionally as a jarring shock. It sets mood and amplifies tension but, crucially, never undermines the urgency and muscularity of Miller’s text or the subtle brilliance of the performances. There’s real magic in the silences, when you can feel the audience breathe as one, totally wrapped up in the play: it also makes you realise how seldom that happens in the theatre these days.

If you’re unfamiliar with All My Sons, it plays out like a thriller, but if you’ve previously seen or read it, this remarkable rendering has moments bordering on the revelatory. As patriarch Joe, Cranston’s descent from measured bonhomie to snivelling wreck is charted with such precision and psychological truth that it barely feels like acting. You watch a man crumble before your very eyes: it’s painful to witness but the sheer bloody artistry is exhilarating.

Paapa Essiedu is every bit his equal as the son whose idealism is ripped out of him as his father’s wartime misdemeanours are uncovered, in many ways his trajectory more tragic than Keller Sr.’s as he has little idea of what’s coming to him. Essiedu invests Chris with an appealing awkwardness suggestive of a sensitivity that I’ve never seen in the character before, and when his world is shattered, his rawness takes the breath away. Observe how he stares, stricken, at his father as though he has never even seen him before.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Kate Keller, the mother holding it all together in a state of ongoing denial, is initially less fragile than some of her predecessors (Julie Walters’ stunning, award-winning portrayal in Howard Davies’ 2000 version at the National seemed permanently on the verge of a breakdown) but is tremendously effective. She’s savage in her aggression towards Ann (a sublime Hayley Squires, projecting a beacon of kindness and dogged determination), the daughter of Joe’s discredited business partner and girlfriend of the son Larry lost in the war, her smile stopping short of her eyes, and the look of desolation on her face as she realises what’s unfolding is utterly haunting. When she warns Joe to be smart or attempts to reassure him that he won’t be punished if he confesses to past misdemeanours, one gets the distinct impression that she doesn’t believe the words coming out of her own mouth. I’ve seen more moving Kate’s than Jean-Baptiste but few as powerful.

It’s indicative of the sheer quality of the production that every supporting performance is well nigh perfect. Tom Glynn-Carney delivers a finely tuned account of neurosis mixed with fury as Ann’s brother George, arriving from the back of the theatre like a heat-seeking missile in a hoodie, hellbent on destroying the Kellers but disarmed by his lingering affection for Kate. His brief reunion with Aliyah Odoffin’s lovely, slightly eccentric neighbour Lydia, with whom he has romantic history but who is now married to eternally nice guy Frank (a spot-on Wyatt) with young children, is heartbreaking. Odoffin has little stage time but creates a remarkably detailed picture of a sunny young woman more complicated than she initially looks. Cath Whitefield is impressive and similarly multi-layered as pragmatic, increasingly embittered nurse Sue, frustrated that Chris’ unattainable, innate goodness is having a deleterious effect on her doctor husband (Richard Hansell, also excellent).

Intense then cathartic, and shot through with unexpected but welcome laughs, All My Sons retains its ability to rouse and to provoke thought; it raises uncomfortable questions about culpability and how far to go for people one loves. Under Ivo van Hove’s guidance, it grips like a vice then explodes like a thunderclap. There’s little else on the London stage right now that achieves this level of tension or that demonstrates so potently the magic of ensemble acting. This is an All My Sons that looks nothing like its predecessors but is one for the ages.

December 5, 2025
PADDINGTON – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – prepare to fall in love

Photograph by Johan Persson

PADDINGTON – The Musical

Music and lyrics by Tom Fletcher

Book by Jessica Swale

based on ‘A Bear Called Paddington’ by Michael Bond and the film ‘Paddington’

directed by Luke Sheppard

Savoy Theatre, London – open-ended run

running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval

https://paddingtonthemusical.com

Entertainment juggernauts seldom come as cuddly and adorable as this. With Paddington, Jessica Swale (book) and Tom Fletcher (songs), in bringing Michael Bond’s most beloved Peruvian bear to the stage, have created the musical we probably all need right now. That’s not just because the diminutive ursine charmer is a fur-covered emblem of kindness and tenacity, or even that Luke Sheppard’s barnstorming production feels like a love letter to the polyglot vitality of London at a time when tolerance and diversity are increasingly coming under fire. Not since the criminally underrated Madness tuner Our House has a new musical trumpeted so persuasively the capital’s unique combination of tradition, freedom of expression and joyful strangeness, and celebrated its visual iconography (there’s glimpses of various landmarks from St Paul’s and Buckingham Palace to the Shard and the London Eye).

It’s also because 2025 has been a pretty ropey year for new West End musicals (Evita, thrilling as it was, counts as a revival): Clueless was a lot of fun but The Great Gatsby, Hercules and Burlesque were mediocre at best, Shucked lost something in its transatlantic crossing and the final Sondheim, the incomplete Here We Are, was a triumph at the National but was too esoteric for some. My favourite musicals of the last twelve months – Lovestuck, Sing Street and the current Southwark Playhouse smash Ride The Cyclone – were/are all off-West End, but now finally commercial mainstream London theatre has an outright winner…and Paddington is the absolute bear’s whiskers.

Following more or less the plot of the 2014 movie, where an evil taxidermist (Nicole Kidman on film, here on stage a gloriously scenery-chewing Victoria Hamilton-Barritt) entices Paddington away from his adopted London family in order to do the unspeakable, the musical works exquisitely on multiple levels. Sheppard’s production is grand enough to feel like the big, lavish extravaganza West End ticket prices demand. But it’s also intimate enough that the delicious eccentricities, quirks and running jokes register, as do the finesses in expression of Paddington himself, as split between an offstage voice and an onstage actor in a gorgeous bear costume (brilliant work by Tahra Zafar, also responsible for puppet design), played respectively by James Hameed and, on the night I attended, Abbie Purvis (alternate to Arti Shah). You will fall in love with this bear, and it’s impossible to overstate just how right the team here have got the onstage representation of this most adored of anthropomorphic characters.

There is generally a lot here to love though. Ellen Kane’s choreography is sharp and propulsive, unerringly successful in building numbers to their fizzy showbiz climaxes. Tom Pye’s magical scenic creations, Gabrielle Slade’s vivid costumes, Neil Austin’s lighting and Ash J Woodward’s entrancing video designs all combine to create a world at once comfortingly familiar yet exciting. It’s a fabulous eyeful and, thanks to Gareth Owen’s full-on sound design and Fletcher’s ear-worm tunes, a satisfyingly loud earful.

Then there’s the uniformly fine casting. Amy Ellen Richardson’s Mrs Brown, as sensitive and artistic as she’s kookie, and Paddington’s most prominent advocate, is the gorgeous beating heart of the piece apart from the bear himself. Adrian der Gregorian convincingly charts Mr Brown’s journey from self-protective scepticism to full on embrace of Paddington’s uncynical world view. The writing and acting of their tricky relationship has beautiful, convincing detail where a lesser adaptation would make them more generalised malcontents. Bonnie Langford is a show-stopping delight as the housekeeper with a backstory as rich as any encyclopaedia, and West End veteran Teddy Kempner scores a joyful bullseye as shopkeeper Mr Gruber.

Tom Edden and Amy Booth-Steel come close to stealing every scene they’re in as, respectively, an uptight cab driver impervious to Paddington’s cuteness, at least initially, and a hysterically plummy aristocrat who jealously guards an elite society for geographers. Seasoned musical goers may feel they’ve seen Hamilton-Barritt’s uber-camp, statuesque ‘baddie’ performance before, and they wouldn’t be wrong, but previous iterations of this flamboyant characterisation were generally in infinitely inferior shows, and she is terrific here. So too is Tarinn Callender as her reluctant henchman.

Sheppard’s staging and Swale’s writing feel wonderfully fresh, balancing the cute, the sinister and the flat-out hilarious with wonderfully sure hands. For all the showbiz brio on display, there’s something unmistakably British in the nods to panto and old time music hall. If there’s a tiny flaw, it’s that it occasionally feels a little over-stuffed with themes and ideas all pulling focus at once: a tentative romance between eldest Brown daughter and the son of Brenda Edwards’ life-embracing next door neighbour is well played by Delilah Bennett-Cardy and Timi Akinyosade but doesn’t add much to a slightly overlong show. Neither does a second act full kick-line number for a tribe of geographers, despite being brilliantly staged and led with hilarious verve by Booth-Steel.

Fletcher’s songs sound a bit generic modern musical theatre from time to time, but at its best the score is rousing and fiendishly catchy. The Calypso-tinged anthem ‘The Rhythm of London’ is a bona fide classic, and Hamilton-Barritt’s swaggeringly nasty ‘Pretty Little Dead Things’ brings the house down and will be stuck in your head for weeks.

Crucially, Paddington deftly achieves the almost impossible in that it entrances the children while also winking knowingly over their head at the adults, generally giving everyone a fabulous night or afternoon out. Apart from the ingenuity of how Paddington himself is created, this is a pretty traditional musical, but one crafted with huge love and care by people who really know what they’re doing. If the Savoy Theatre is looking for a new tenant within at least the next five years, I’ll be astonished.

December 2, 2025
LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock deliver an acting masterclass in quietly powerful, beautifully crafted new play

Photograph by Julieta Cervantes

LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD

by Samuel D Hunter

directed by Joe Mantello

Booth Theatre, New York City – until 21 December 2025

running time: 90 minutes no interval

https://littlebearridgeroad.com

Do we choose to engage with an increasingly difficult world or do we hide away from it? What is the cost of being there for other people even in extremely tricky circumstances, even when they claim not to need help, and at what point does one close the door to protect one’s own interests? These are some of the questions running through Samuel D Hunter’s deceptively simple but altogether engrossing new play, Little Bear Ridge Road, now on Broadway in a Joe Mantello-helmed production that originated at Chicago’s powerhouse of stage excellence, Steppenwolf Theatre.

This is Hunter’s Broadway debut (his Clarkston, a tenderly written but inferior work, is just completing a West End run) and it’s an unqualified triumph. This is one of those plays that American writers seem to excel at: terse, pared down, spiky but complex, a beating, bruised heart under a harsh, unadorned exterior, the only thing maximalist about Mantello’s exquisite staging is the craft and talent on display.

Set in rural Idaho in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, the play sees thirty-something Ethan (Micah Stock, raising gruff awkwardness to an art form) arriving in the remote farmhouse of his tough, bemused aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalf, re-staking her claim as America’s greatest living stage actress), ostensibly to sell the nearby house of his newly deceased drug addict father. It becomes clear pretty quickly that there’s more to Ethan’s intentions than that, and also that Sarah is less invulnerable than she first appears.

Two stones rubbed together can create fire, and so it proves when Stock’s mercurial dreamer clashes with Metcalf’s flinty Sarah. Ethan is a mass of contradictions and resentments while Sarah, who is being callously managed out of her job in a local hospital, just wants to be left alone. She’s perhaps naive about how dreadful life for her nephew had been as a kid, and he never forgave her for not responding the way he expected when his ten year old self reached out, and their uneasy co-existence, full of barely expressed feelings and fuelled by shared critiques of trash television, is realised with a rare truth and economy.

It’s grimly funny too: after a fruitless phone conversation with a medical insurance company, Ethan moans “I hate this country!” and Sarah comes right back with “trust me, it hates you more”. Ethan looks like having a real chance of happiness with good-hearted rich kid James (Steppenwolf regular John Drea, in a sublime Broadway bow) who he met online, and the first meeting between James and Sarah – he has stayed the night which she is unaware of – is a little masterpiece of comic social awkwardness and blind panic.

It’s the sadder, darker territories that the play enters which really linger in the mind though. Metcalf charts Sarah’s physical decline due to cancer with a detail and honesty that’s simultaneously riveting and hard to watch. Stock never overplays Ethan’s essential unhappiness and past trauma but when it all boils up in a howl of despair (“I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE A PERSON IN THIS TERRIBLE FUCKING NIGHTMARISH WORLD”) he is utterly devastating. Not a single line, gesture or movement is wasted, everything counts.

Metcalf is thrilling, an artist at the very top of her game, entirely without vanity or artifice. She conveys every layer of this difficult but not unkind woman, and disappears so completely into her it’s almost hard to fathom that one is watching acting. The queen of the withering stare, Metcalf also invests Sarah with some choice comic physical touches: note the way she wryly genuflects when taking leave of the two boyfriends. Hunter has written Sarah to possess a defensive dry wit which Metcalf attacks with laconic aplomb; the whole performance really is the most flawless marriage between actor and material.

A lesser talent might pale into insignificance next to Metcalf’s brilliance but Stock matches her. He makes no attempt to ingratiate Ethan to us but allows his tricky nature and hypersensitivity to speak for themselves, creating a figure that is at once sympathetic and frustrating; it’s a quirky but endlessly interesting interpretation, rooted in truth and real human frailties, and there are strong indications that Ethan’s writing talent is a genuine one. Drea is an understated wonder, and it’s a sign of the quality of the production that even Meghan Gerachis, another Steppenwolf alumna, who only has one brief scene as a nurse, is utter perfection.

Scott Pask’s solitary sofa atop a slate-grey disc with a fan whirling overhead is the only set but, as lit by Heather Gilbert against a black backdrop that occasionally softens into a wall of pale stone, it gives a striking sense of lonely figures adrift in an endless nightscape. Jessica Pabst’s naturalistic costumes are spot-on as is the sound design by Mikhaïl Fiksel which is so unobtrusive as to be unnoticeable, except that we hear every mutter and throwaway retort.

This is surely one of the finest American plays in decades. Tiny in stature but massive in emotional impact, it sears and haunts. I left the theatre in a state of drained rapture, fighting back tears. Little Bear Ridge Road received one of the most heartfelt standing ovations I’ve ever seen in a Broadway theatre: it absolutely deserved it.

November 22, 2025
END – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – David Eldridge’s remarkable trilogy of relationship plays reaches its shattering, slightly surprising, conclusion

Photograph by Marc Brenner

END

by David Eldridge

directed by Rachel O’Riordan

National Theatre/Dorfman, London – until 17 January 2026

running time: 90 minutes no interval

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/end/

This isn’t the ending I was expecting, but then I guess that’s life, or indeed death. I’d naively supposed that End, the concluding part of David Eldridge’s masterful trilogy of standalone but connected plays about stages of relationships, comprising Beginning (2017) and Middle (2022), would just be about a marriage or long-standing partnership breaking down. But Essex’s answer to Ibsen is actually on about something even deeper and darker here – the end of actual life – and the result is pretty harrowing, albeit leavened with moments of genuine joy.

Like its predecessors, End is a two hander centred on a straight couple (but neither of the pairings featured in the first two plays), as each faces moving forward without the other. Alfie (Clive Owen) has a terminal cancer that means he won’t see his sixtieth birthday and floors Julie (Saskia Reeves) his partner of twenty plus years – they’ve never married – by announcing that once he is moved into a hospice for his very final stages he wants to be completely alone. This quietly shocking premise plays out in their pleasantly cluttered North London kitchen (beautifully detailed set design by Gary McCann) filled with the detritus of full, settled lives, a variety of objects giving essential clues to who these people are: there’s a framed football shirt, a giant clock the face of which is the round yellow smile emblematic of the Acid House movement, rows upon row of vinyl records and CDs, shelves of books (Alfie is a club DJ, Julie is a writer).

Also, it’s the eve of the Brexit vote in 2016, which for many of us was another catastrophic ‘end’ of sorts. Eldridge’s deftness at weaving together multiple thematic threads in a domestic setting and in real time is a marvel, as is his unerring instinct for capturing how real people speak to each other. As in the earlier plays, the minutiae of ordinary lives are elevated to something charged and riveting, and there is magic in the silences as much as in the salty, sometimes very funny dialogue.

Rachel O’Riordan’s understated but perfectly modulated staging is saturated with dance music, and one is reminded of the Noël Coward Private Lives line “extraordinary how potent cheap music is”. The euphoria of the beats and synths are a conduit and focus for the emotions and memories of this couple who met in the clubbing heyday of the late 80s and early 90s and clearly enjoyed the hedonistic aspects of it, Alfie even making an apparently notorious career on the rave scene. Watching these late middle age figures swaying to the music, remembering a shared past and trying to beat back the oncoming darkness, is profoundly affecting, nowhere more so than when Owen’s Alfie’s smile gets overtaken and he helplessly yelps “I just feel so young”.

So, End is also a lament for a time now lost, an examination of what happened to the rave generation, and Eldridge distils, generously but not too neatly, a collective experience down into these two figures. There’s a slight clumsiness to the way a former affair is introduced to up the dramatic ante, and a couple of lines are clearly present only to clue the audience in on backstory, but elsewhere the writing is coruscating and true. Eldridge understands crucially that many humans are at their funniest when staring into the abyss.

That’s certainly true of Alfie, who Clive Owen inhabits so fully that it almost doesn’t feel like acting. An all too human combination of brutality, tenderness and massive, kind spirit, he’s entirely convincing as somebody who, for a time, adopted debauchery as a way of life, and who, one suspects, is never as hard on other people as he is on himself. Saskia Reeves matches him with a luminous, clear-eyed portrayal of the rock that is tethering Alfie to this earth; an intelligent woman, pragmatic and massive of heart, trying desperately to accommodate her partners needs and keep him from the brink while tending to herself and their grown-up daughter. Reeves’ Julie screaming silently into a cushion in a brief moment of respite says more about the pressure on carers and loved ones than a page of dialogue and is one of the most moving things on any current London stage.

Not always an easy watch, End is nonetheless an emotionally resonant one, humane, witty and strangely haunting. Yet again Eldridge emerges as the chronicler supreme of ‘ordinary’ people’s lives, while understanding of course that, really, we are all extraordinary. Let the music play.

November 21, 2025
THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES – ⭐️⭐️ – Kristin Chenoweth and Stephen Schwartz reunite on a new musical…and it’s barely adequate

Kristin Chenoweth and Tatum Grace Hopkins, photograph by Julieta Cervantes

THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES

Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Book by Lindsey Ferrentino

directed by Michael Arden

based on Lauren Greenfield’s documentary film and the life stories of Jackie and David Siegel

St James Theatre, New York City – until 21 December 2025

running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval

https://queenofversaillesmusical.com

Aside from the questionable timing of producing a musical about revelling in excess when many ordinary Americans are trying to make do with less and less, this must have looked like such a good idea on paper. The first stage score in decades from Stephen Schwartz, the man who gave us Godspell, Pippin and Wicked, reuniting with one of his leading ladies from the latter show, Tony winner Kristin Chenoweth, supported by Oscar winner F Murray Abraham, with a script by acclaimed playwright Lindsey Ferrentino. On top of all that, director Michael Arden is a double Tony winner for Parade and the still-running Maybe Happy Ending, and his work on the Once On This Island revival of 2018 was little short of visionary.

So, The Queen of Versailles arrives on Broadway following a developmental run in Boston with a pedigree many other shows would envy. The track records of all involved makes it even more unfathomable how it could have arrived in NYC in this wan state, and if this is the improved version then the mind boggles at what it must have been like in Massachusetts last year. One wonders if the participation of the ‘Queen of Versailles’ herself, Jackie Siegel, the subject of the documentary on which this musical is based, has scuppered any chance of any critical thinking about the central figure.

Siegel and her husband David, a timeshare tycoon, were in the midst of building their dream home – the largest private residence in the USA, inspired by the Palace of Versailles which the Siegels visited on their honeymoon, according to Ferrentino’s book – when the stock market crash of 2017 caused them to run out of money….temporarily. We see Jackie (Chenoweth, whose relentless sunniness tends to bely any sense of trauma on the character’s part at least until the last fifteen minutes of the show) ascend from humble working class upbringing via an engineering degree then the sexism of corporate America to an abusive first marriage and single motherhood before she meets her ageing knight in shining leisurewear, the ridiculously minted David.

Improving ones lot in life is surely part of the great American Dream, and Jackie’s ambition and acquisition of riches is presented in flavourless dialogue and scenes that lack any real punch, enlivened only by Chenoweth’s trademark comic chutzpah and general cuteness. The whole show would probably play better in a much smaller house: the St James is a barn, presumably selected only for the reveal of Dane Laffrey’s soullessly opulent ballroom set (complete with sweeping staircase) very late in act two. The venue dwarfs the figures on stage and renders borderline unsympathetic characters even more remote and inaccessible than they initially appear.

If we root for Jackie, it’s because it’s Kristin, but her cheeky charm and ear-splitting vocals only take her so far, and her chirpy unwillingness to be bound by financial and social constraints starts to look less and less credible or appealing as a very long evening draws on. Although the role was built around her, Chenoweth’s shortcomings as an actress are exposed: when her teenage daughter (Nina West, who gets the best song with the rock-lite ‘Pretty Wins’ decrying the shallowness of the lifestyle) dies and the Siegels launch a charity in her name, she registers vague regret but little real pain, and a sudden outburst seems like a flash in the pan required by the script rather than anything organic.

The wearisome framing device of the French court of Versailles featuring Marie Antoinette herself (Cassondra James) is more ponderous than inspired, although the frocks (by Christian Cowan) are gorgeous. To be fair, the whole show looks as though it has had cash thrown at it (Kristin-Jackie’s garish wardrobe brings to mind Dolly Parton’s comment about it costing a lot of money to look this cheap), but without any clear point-of-view or anything distinguished in terms of book and score, it just doesn’t matter.

Almost as overused as the historical French stuff is the use of cameras and live footage (none of which is as technically slick as it could be, especially when compared with the work in Sunset Blvd, the last tenant at this theatre) as we are constantly reminded that they’re making a documentary. These people are just not that interesting or sympathetic, with the exception of Melody Butiu’s rather lovely Sofia, the faithful family retainer whose assimilation into the Siegel clan doesn’t erase her anguish at being separated from her own family overseas. Butiu is wrenching in her pain but the subject gets dropped pretty quickly, maybe because it casts Jackie in an insensitive light.

Schwartz’s score is surprisingly undistinguished, often sounding like snippets of his earlier work, while unfortunately reminding one of how much better they were. ‘Caviar Dreams’, Jackie’s first “I want” song, bears a disconcerting initial resemblance to the opening of Shrek The Musical and frankly I know which misunderstood monster I would rather spend an evening with. A bizarre duet about a dead pet lizard for the stoner daughter and her cousin, and a bewildering Country and Western production number for an at-sea F Murray Abraham, both seem the kind of things that should have been cut out-of-town but nope, here they are. The audience looks on, incredulous and/or indifferent. It’s hard to work out if the lyrics are any good because the sound is appalling, rendering at least sixty per cent of the show unintelligible.

The final section – the house is almost complete and Jackie tries to throw a celebration party that nobody wants to attend – reminds us, heavy handedly, that this is a cautionary tale. But cautioning who and about what? By this stage, Kristin-Jackie is giving it the full Norma Desmond (the original, not the Scherzinger/Lloyd version) going bonkers on a massive staircase with only a light ring for company. She’s working her tush off up there for so little payoff. I was just glad to get out of the theatre.

November 20, 2025