ajhlovestheatre

1.17AM, OR UNTIL THE WORDS RUN OUT 

by Zoe Hunter Gordon

directed by Sarah Stacey

Finborough Theatre, London – until 7 March 2026

running time: 75 minutes no interval 

https://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/117am-or-until-the-words-run-out

On paper, Zoe Hunter Gordon’s one act, two character, one set tragicomedy looks like a pretty minor work. In performance though, 1.17am, or until the words run out reveals itself as a hugely satisfying watch, more layered than one might expect, packing rich seams of insight, truth and humour into its fleet, relatable seventy five minutes. The writing is terrific: pithy, potty-mouthed, concise and so so true.

It examines the limits of grief and friendship – surely likely to be primary forces in the lives of much of any audience – through the prism of a pair of uneasy best friends, a family bereavement and a couple of revelations that feel as regretfully credible as they are riveting storytelling beats. It’s female focussed (the entire cast and production team are women) but it speaks to everyone.

Early twenty-something Katie (Catherine Ashdown) is packing up the room of her late brother, killed in a car crash, when she’s disturbed by her estranged best mate Roni (Eileen Duffy). Ashdown, nervy and defensive, and Duffy, warm and simultaneously strong but vulnerable, entirely convince as a pair of friends whose mutual affection has corroded, but probably not irreparably, through mistrust and miscommunication. It swiftly emerges that Roni has had a sexual relationship with Katie’s brother, though she’s since moved on to cohabiting with a young man with a similar Eastern European background to her own, while Katie struggles with her grief and bewilderment. Meanwhile, a party merrily rages upstairs as Katie’s brother’s flatmates have a last hurrah before eviction. 

Despite the friends being at loggerheads, Sarah Stacey’s terrific staging is suffused with affection. The audience becomes as invested in these young women reconnecting as the characters themselves are. Neither of the unseen men attached to them are necessarily what they initially seem and the family backgrounds of Katie and Roni are skilfully, naturalistically revealed. Hunter Gordon has an unerring skill for making utterly fascinating the minutiae of apparently ordinary lives, and the performances and production here match her work perfectly.

Watching the balance of power shift between Ashdown and Duffy is thrilling, as the recriminations and revelations fly. Ashdown could perhaps tone down some of the neurotic body language but she makes vivid and credible the waves of grief passing through this tortured young woman, and nails Katie’s neediness and flashes of anger. Duffy delivers a beautiful portrayal of an essentially kind soul with a wild streak, and the sense of loss and dislocation when she finally reaches the end of her tether is superbly done. Both young actors look like stars-in-the-making.

Sharp, touching and refreshingly contemporary, this is a really fine addition to the roster of new writing currently on the London stage. Totally worth the trip to Earls Court, and another example of why fringe theatre is so important. 

CASH ON DELIVERY

by Michael Cooney

directed by Ron Aldridge 

The Mill at Sonning, Sonning Eye near Reading – until 4 April 2026

running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval 

https://millatsonning.com/Events/cash-on-delivery/

It would be all too easy to over-analyse Michael Cooney’s benefit fraud farce Cash On Delivery, given a spirited revival by farce expert Ron Aldridge for the delightful Mill at Sonning. It’s essentially a cheeky romp with one foot in TV sitcom and the other in the frenetic comic crowdpleasers which Cooney’s much-missed Dad Ray specialised in for decades: Cooney Sr even directed the star-studded West End premiere of this play in 1996, and the Mill’s auditorium is named after him.

But this thirty year old comedy, while undemanding, interestingly comes from a point in history where society, and accordingly the world of entertainment, was changing. The lingerie-clad young women and marital infidelities that characterised earlier examples of the farce genre, and so brilliantly satirised by Michael Frayn in Noises Off, were starting to look outdated and glaringly sexist, so Michael Cooney instead spins an elaborate yarn about Eric Swan, a Home Counties landlord who makes a living via numerous fraudulent state welfare claims pertaining to fictional tenants and lodgers. The proverbial chickens come home to roost when a DSS inspector turns up, followed by his overbearing boss, a grief counsellor, an undertaker and the fiancée of the one genuine lodger Swan has.

Cash On Delivery doesn’t entirely break the antiquated mould though: a smack in the face with a door renders an elderly character incapacitated for most of the play, and the audience is expected to find the concept of cross dressing, in and of itself, utterly hilarious. Of the female characters, two are harridans and the other two have little agency. However, Cooney, like his legendary Dad, unerringly understands the mechanics of farce, so that, even if dialogue, verbal jokes and characters are more functional than inspired, it’s impossible not to marvel as the comedy machine gets into gear and the merry mayhem picks up pace. 

At the press performance I saw, Aldridge’s staging still felt like it was running at 80% energy rather than the full 100% needed to really make the show fly, but there’s every indication that the production will reach that level once the actors get a few more performances under their belts. Looking at times uncannily like Bradley Walsh who originated the role in the West End, the hugely likeable Steven Pinder steers a canny path between insouciance and swivel-eyed panic as deceitful Eric. Natasha Gray makes something surprisingly sympathetic out of the underwritten role of his wife Linda, suspicious of, well, almost everything yet with no idea about Eric’s financial shenanigans. James Bradshaw is very funny as their lodger Norman, his hitherto contented life devolving rapidly into an ever-mounting tsunami of disbelief and outrage.

Harry Gostelow delivers note-perfect work as the unexpectedly benign man from the DHSS and is a pleasing foil to Felicity Duncan’s bellowing, fearsome boss. Rachel Fielding’s well meaning but clueless relationship guidance counsellor is another enjoyable creation as is Norman’s naive yet naughty fiancée, delightfully played with an appealing zing of sweetness, heart and camp by Melanie Gutteridge. 

Alex Marker’s door-heavy (this is farce after all) domestic set and Natalie Titchener’s costumes, slightly too garish to be fully realistic, add to the overall sense of the entire show being contained in a time capsule, harking back to decades when things were more straightforward and less PC. This is a classic example of a show that achieves exactly what it sets out to do, there’s not much “there” there, but the Mill at Sonning audience, fuelled by an excellent dinner, roars its approval. 

AMERICAN PSYCHO

Music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik

Book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa 

based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis

directed by Rupert Goold

Almeida Theatre, London – until 21 March 2026

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/american-psycho-2026/

You can’t accuse the Almeida’s outgoing artistic director Rupert Goold (he leaves in the autumn to take up the reins at the Old Vic from Matthew Warchus) of resting on his laurels. His 2013 musical version of Bret Easton Ellis’ gory, controversial novel American Psycho was an absolute smash hit (well ok, not on Broadway where it tanked after less than three months) but it was the hottest ticket in London town during the original run starring a ripped, wittily unreadable Matt Smith. Surely it must have been tempting to repeat the winning formula but this 2026 iteration is no carbon copy of the first version, despite using the same creative team. 

The musical has been streamlined, brought into sharper focus and almost completely restaged. There are new songs (including the belting, haunting opener ‘Selling Out’ created for the New York production), sequences and scenes reordered and characters reconsidered. It’s still defiantly, pleasingly weird though, like a waking nightmare unfolding in a sea of neon, chrome, brick and glass where humanity is in short supply but ego, image and cheap thrills are in abundance.

Is it actually better than before? Not necessarily, but it remains a chilling and thrilling night out, one that captures the unique atmosphere of paranoia, icy cynicism and flamboyant consumerism of the 1980s. Duncan Sheik’s synth-heavy, mordantly melodic songs, more minor than major key, are so irresistibly redolent of the period that somebody unfamiliar with late twentieth century pop might have a hard time working out where the score ends and the actual chart hits of the time begin:  Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’, Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’ and New Order’s ‘True Faith’ are all included.

2026’s Patrick Bateman, the designer label-obsessed, emotionally disconnected Wall Street banker who may or may not be a serial killer, is Arty Froushan in a tremendously accomplished musical theatre debut. He imbues Bateman with an edgy charm, and a wide-eyed, almost child-like watchfulness that troubles far more than his urban playboy swagger. Unlike his predecessors in the role (including Benjamin Walker on Broadway and Christian Bale in the 2000 film), Froushan suggests that Bateman never quite feels ‘enough’, that he is somehow at sea in the world of wealth and privilege his financial position has put him in. When, at the beginning, he describes his well-appointed apartment, he feels less smug and more eager to impress. When his chic downstairs neighbour laughs at him for hanging an expensive painting upside down, his reaction is fear of exposure as much as fury. He makes vivid and all too credible the gulf between Bateman’s slightly withdrawn social stance as a privileged but perpetual outsider, and the simmering mania that periodically boils over with a mixture of glee and total abandon. He looks older than the 27 years that the text repeatedly reminds us he is, but this really is a terrific central turn. 

Between Froushan’s performance and the revised staging, which replaces fake stage blood (the original was awash with it) with scarlet fabrics, lighting and video effects, it seems more clear this time around that Bateman’s graphic murder fantasies are just that, not actual events. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s book is a skilful distillation of the original novel, managing to evoke real horror and revulsion while seldom becoming a hard watch, and it’s often bleakly hilarious.

This time around, the chasm between satirising the snobbish shallowness of extreme wealth (“I will not have an odd number at my dinner table, Patrick! This isn’t Brooklyn!”) and the fratty, misogynistic bants of the corporate financial bros, and the little bits of genuine feeling on display, feels more pronounced. That does lead to a certain unevenness but it also, tellingly, throws the humanity of the victims into sharper relief: it’s impossible not to be moved by Joseph Mydell’s homeless man, sobbing pitifully over the bank note Bateman has tossed down in front of him, or not to feel pity for the sex workers (Hannah Yun Chamberlain and Millie Mayhew, both hugely effective) who are reduced to twitching cadavers. Yep, as ‘dark’ musicals go, this one is right up there with Sweeney Todd.

In theatricalising a story as gory as this one, there is inevitably a degree of artifice required that is perhaps best served by the distance lent by a proscenium arch; the original version had that, but this one doesn’t. Es Devlin’s set is a sleek black runway extended into the Almeida stalls and ending in a forbidding-looking tunnel that suggests a railway arch but also the urban-chic downtown nightclubs where Patrick and his cohorts go on their coke-fuelled binges. It’s very striking, especially as excitingly lit by Jon Clark and enhanced by Finn Ross’ sophisticated video floor, but it paints the staging into a bit of a corner, with actors constantly masking each other, and repetitive scene changes (things rise up through the floor ad infinitum). It’s only possible to really take in Lynne Page’s dynamic, unsettling choreography if you’re front centre in the circle, but equally if you’re up there you miss the immediacy of having performers centimetres away from you in the stalls. Still, it’s a glossily attractive eyeful, and Katrina Lindsay’s elegant (even when ripped to shreds) costumes evoke the 1980s without sending them up.

There are some great voices in the cast but this isn’t a score that requires steel-lunged belting, and it’s the acting choices that really impress here. Emily Barber and Tanisha Spring bring a brittle glamour and surreal humour to, respectively, Bateman’s moneyed girlfriend and her best mate (who he’s also sleeping with, of course). Anastasia Martin, wonderful, and looking uncannily like a young Dianne Wiest, is the steady, decent heart of the piece as the secretary in love with Patrick and possibly the only person capable of helping him. Kim Ismay is a deadpan hoot as his soignée, heavily medicated mother and the incredulous Russian dry cleaner charged with removing bloodstains. There’s superb work from Daniel Bravo, smooth as silk as Bateman’s professional nemesis, and Olly Higginson, splendidly obnoxious as the cockiest of his colleagues, also providing a bang-on impersonation of Patrick’s idol, one Donald J Trump. Zheng Xi Yong is cute and appropriately bonkers as a lost soul in thrall to Bateman.

Thunderous, poisonous, and just occasionally a little ponderous, this is a musical that refuses to play by the rules. There are brief moments, usually involving dance beats and Page’s barnstorming yet macabre choreography (the glam rock-adjacent ‘Killing Spree’ which sees our anti-hero, mic in one hand, knife or shotgun in the other, slaughter the entire company, is a prime example), where it capitulates, almost, to traditional musical theatre exhilaration. For the most part though, American Psycho is a piece that invites us to meet it on its own terms, and, perhaps surprisingly, it works. Something this nasty and cynical has no business being so much damn fun.

BALLAD LINES

Music and lyrics by Finn Anderson

Book by Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo

directed by Tania Azevedo

Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London – until 21 March 2026

running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval 

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/ballad-lines/

The dual legacy of music and stories handed down through centuries, traversing centuries, lifestyles, oceans and continents, is at the heart of Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo’s engrossing, female-centric musical. Ballad Lines feels at once intimate and epic, and equal parts Celtic and American. It’s also possibly the best sung show in town right now.

One certainly can’t accuse songwriter and co-author Anderson and director/co-author Azevedo of lack of ambition. In less than two and a half hours, they examine how traditional songs get passed from person to person, all around the world, and the resulting cross fertilisation of cultures. Equally, the show, previously known as A Mother’s Song in an earlier iteration, considers how women’s bodies are commodified and controlled, across three different time frames but centring on one extended family. 

There’s 17th century Scottish ministers wife Cait (a luminous Kirsty Findlay), unwillingly pregnant and defying social norms, then, a hundred years later, her free-spirited descendent Jean (Yna Tresvalles) unexpectedly pregnant at fifteen and compelled to make the long journey to start a new life in America. In the present day, Sarah (Frances McNamee), the distant offspring of these woman, moving into a new apartment in New York with her girlfriend Alix, is floored when she listens to a series of tapes from her deceased aunt (golden voiced Rebecca Trehearn) recounting family stories and reciting folk songs carried half way across the world by her female forebearers. 

There is a degree of contrivance in the way the three timelines interweave but the sheer potency of the music and the truth of most of the performances ensure that it never devolves into schlocky sentimentality. The score (played gloriously by a four-strong all-female band, and sung by the cast like their lives are depending upon it, which, in the context of the story, is frequently true) is folk made vibrantly theatrical. It’s easy to make comparisons with Once, Come From Away and Benjamin Button, and indeed the music, lyrical yet thrillingly rhythmic, does punch you straight in the heart in a similar way, but Ballad Lines seldom feels derivative. 

The show isn’t perfect: the second half unsatisfactorily resolves a conflict between Sarah and Alix (Sydney Sainté, utterly wonderful) over them having their own child, that blows up too quickly and results in a schism in their relationship that is dealt with too perfunctorily to be fully credible. The sole male in the cast, Ally Kennard, is a capable and likeable triple threat but feels fundamentally miscast. He is a warm, almost cuddly presence but doesn’t feel rough or alpha male enough as to be a physical threat to Findlay’s desperate Cait.

Still, the sense of generations of women’s joys, struggles, traumas and triumphs being channelled through drums, fiddles, guitars and roof-raising vocal harmonies is palpable and powerful. At the centre of it all as the conduit for all the memories, traditions and issues is Sarah, and McNamee is remarkable. She invests this conflicted young woman with a credible, all too human combination of fragility and edge. In all honesty, she’s sometimes better than the script which just occasionally veers into daytime soap territory. As her ancestor, Findlay – heartbreaking – finds a similar balance of softness and steel, while Tresvalles is all passionate determination as fiery but lovable Jean. All of the vocal performances will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

T K Hay’s simple but ingenious set manages to simultaneously suggest Sarah and Alix’s New York apartment, the Appalachian mountains and the ship that carried Sarah’s ancestors across the Atlantic. Tinovimanashe Sibanda’s stomping and keening choreography, although sometimes hemmed in by the limited space, is rousing and hypnotic. The lighting by Simon Wilkinson is suitably atmospheric and helpful in delineating locales and while the sheer wall of sound (design by Andrew Johnson) frequently thrills the blood, there are lengthy sections where the lyrics are indecipherable.

The flaws in Ballad Lines are fairly minor, and as that music and those voices surge through the house, it’s impossible not to get swept up in the raw emotion and melodic brilliance. If the spoken material isn’t quite realising its full potential as yet, this is undeniably a cracking night in the theatre already, and could end up being a real world beater. I’ve already got the studio cast album playing on repeat.

WOMAN IN MIND 

by Alan Ayckbourn

directed by Michael Longhurst

Duke of York’s Theatre, London – until 28th February 2026, then Sunderland Empire 4 to 7 March 2026,  Theatre Royal, Glasgow 10 to 14 March 2026

running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval 

https://womaninmindplay.com/

Sheridan Smith’s acting has an emotional availability and sparky comic aplomb that resonate irresistibly with audiences, and her versatility is admirable. She seems oddly miscast though as Susan, a vicar’s wife desperately losing her grip on reality and her sanity in this revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 tragicomedy Woman In Mind. Smith delivers an endlessly watchable, occasionally moving performance, but her pert wit, doll-like features, tattoos and mop of blonde hair collectively render her too modern, too glossy and rather too young to fully convince as the mother of grown-up children (one real, one imaginary) and the spouse of Tim McMullan’s brilliantly realised, terminally pompous Gerald.

Julia McKenzie won the Evening Standard Best Actress award for her turn in the original London production, and both she and her replacement Pauline Collins had a useful homely quality that cast a melancholy shadow over the scenes depicting Susan’s fantasised idyllic existence with her impossibly glamorous imaginary family. That same perceived ‘ordinariness’ rendered Susan’s descent into erotic and hysterical abandon all the more shocking. By contrast, Smith has a brassy glamour that makes her seem altogether more at home with Sule Rimi’s flamboyantly dressed alternative husband and Safia Oakley-Green’s doting but not-real daughter, at least until things turn nasty, than she does with their infinitely more pallid real life counterparts. 

Smith does however have an extraordinary gift, used potently here, for allowing deep emotions to well up and sit momentarily on her face before being ruthlessly sucked back down into the depths of her being. When finally those feelings overwhelm her, as they do in the play’s unsettling final scene, and all reason is lost, it’s impossible not to be affected. 

Ayckbourn’s script, which begins and ends with dialogue that is total gibberish reflecting Susan’s heightened mental distress, felt daring and profound when it premiered forty years ago, but attitudes towards women’s agency and possibilities and mental wellness, have thankfully come a long way since. It’s not that Woman In Mind is a misogynistic play, despite the depiction of Susan’s utterly weird grieving sister-in-law Muriel (an admirably committed Louise Brealey), Ayckbourn is too compassionate and even-handed for that. But it does feel dated now in a way that even the last West End revival, in 2008 with an incandescent Janie Dee, didn’t.

Romesh Ranganathan makes an energetic, if slightly one-note, West End debut as a gormless GP smitten with Susan. Chris Jenks and Taylor Uttley are very good in roles (Susan’s imagined brother and estranged real life son) that are more improbable sketches than fully realised human beings, although in fairness the former is only a figment of our heroine’s imagination.

Director Michael Longhurst scored a triumph a couple of years ago with another study of a woman in mental freefall – the Broadway musical Next To Normal at the Donmar then in the West End – but that material had an urgency and emotional clarity largely missing here. Set in a realistic garden against a backdrop of trees that warp and distort as a reflection of Susan’s tortured mind (design by Soutra Gilmour with video by Andrzej Goulding), Longhurst’s staging excels at building an atmosphere of comic chaos with an underlying sense of real threat and disquiet.

Smith’s inherent likability does a lot of heavy lifting here but neither that nor Longhurst’s energised staging can disguise that Woman In Mind, for all its ambition and empathetic heart, is a bit of a slog.