ajhlovestheatre

REDCLIFFE

Book, music and lyrics by Jordan Luke Gage

directed by Paul Foster

Southwark Playhouse – Borough, London – until 4 July 2026

running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval 

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/redcliffe/

A solo creative doing the book,  music and lyrics for a musical can result in clarity and cohesion of vision (look at Willy Russell and Blood Brothers or Rupert Holmes with The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Richard O’Brien’s inspirational weirdness for The Rocky Horror Show) or, conversely, a right old mess that suffers because nobody puts the brakes on when necessary (anybody remember Mike Batt’s The Hunting of the Snark or an off-West End abomination by Daniel Abineri entitled Money To Burn which closed between matinee and evening performance during the week of its press night in 2003? No? Good for you….) It’s wonderful to report then that Redcliffe, the new tuner by West End leading man Jordan Luke Gage (& Juliet, Heathers, Bonnie and Clyde, Titanique), belongs most definitely in the former category. This is the most enjoyable, and most emotionally resonant, new British musical since The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and deserves to achieve a similar sort of extended life after this initial Southwark Playhouse season.

What matters about Redcliffe is not that it’s perfect (it isn’t: some of the storytelling needs clarifying, it could lose a song or two and the dialogues between its 18th century setting and the present day would benefit from some finessing) but rather that it has ambition, massive heart, characters we genuinely care about, and some really terrific tunes. It’s also about something real and urgent, being inspired by the true story of Bristolian William Critchard and Londoner Richard Arnold, lovers executed in 1753 for “the detestable crime of buggery”.

It explores, with authentic feeling and some wit, the historical attitudes to homosexuality and the gulf between the cruelty and suspicion gay people were treated with back in the day and the progressive attitudes of the present, while also noting that in some quarters of the world not much has changed. If it’s more of a lament than a celebration, it impressively mixes together a human interest story, pockets of joy, some romance, and a whole lot of heartbreak.

Director Paul Foster has fashioned the material into an entrancing theatrical experience, combining intimacy and epic sweep, the gear changes between raucous pub numbers (de rigeur apparently for any musical with a period working class setting, from The Beggars Opera through Oliver! to Les Mis), church chorales, family recriminations, erotically charged sequences between the two men, and scenes of heartbreaking suffering, are brilliantly managed. The action swirls rhapsodically over Andrew Exeter’s timbered apron stage, an atmospheric space of benches, boxes and endless possibilities, stunningly lit by Matt Hockley, before coming to rest in individual scenes ranging from the euphoric to the harrowing. It’s not always easy to see where Foster’s work ends and Emma Woods’ musical staging begins, and I mean that as the highest compliment. It’s a collaborative process and a whole late-1700s West Country maritime world is created with elegance and economy.

It looks absolutely beautiful, with a timelessness that matches Gage’s frequently gorgeous music which marries together Spring Awakening-style theatrical rock, folk and classical strings (Katy Richardson’s band and the orchestrations of Ben Tomalin and Ben Ferguson are just wonderful). Martin Hanly’s costumes display a similar historical duality, classically cut and contemporary clothing side-by-side, partially faded and with the imprint of other styles, patterns and ages simultaneously visible. It’s a sartorial equivalent of time seeping through and leaving its indelible imprint on individuals across the years; it’s tremendously effective, and another example of the detail which makes this such a staging to savour. 

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s the upbeat and comic numbers that work best, although the choral sections have a surging, haunting quality that thrills the blood. The ballads are memorable and well-crafted but some have a slightly tendency toward the generic. That said, there’s nothing generic about ‘Hurricane’, the epic solo -an aria really- Gage has created for William’s mother. It’s an absolute journey, as Ma Critchard goes from denial to acceptance then defiant allyship, and it requires full throttle vocals and textured, vivid acting; it gets all that and more in a stupendous, white-hot performance by Rebecca Lock that is incontrovertibly the stuff  of which theatregoers indellible memories are made. Even if the rest of the show wasn’t as good as it is, this number would be worth the ticket price alone. Absolutely remarkable. 

Gage plays William with a deeply touching sweetness and sincerity, his performance only becoming showy when he gets to unleash the higher levels of his stratospheric tenor. He’s superb. Opposite him Daniel Krikler makes something truly haunting out of Richard, in a tender, nuanced portrayal that combines gravitas, kindness and sheer unmistakable sex appeal. 

If the male leads impress with their restraint and subtlety, the principal women are more obviously sensational. It takes a special generosity of spirit to write a show which you’re starring in and then give the greatest role to somebody else, but that’s what Gage does here. The Critchley matriarch is a glorious creation, a funny, smart, determined woman with credible quirks, innate intelligence and a complex trajectory in terms of her understanding and personal growth that will likely resonate with any parent with a child outside what is considered the norm. It’s the most demanding and interesting Mother role in a musical since Ragtime and Lock inhabits every note, breath, shade and beat of her: astonishing. Jess Douglas Welsh, in a sympathetic, vivid, altogether wonderful London stage debut, is deeply moving as William’s younger sister Abigail, who also goes on a hell of a journey. Good luck with trying to hold back the tears in the second act when Abigail is trying to sell her hand-stitched kerchiefs for pennies so that she can make up the visiting fee to see her brother in prison; Douglas Welsh will break your heart.

The luxury casting includes golden-voiced Adrian Hansel, superb as the drunken publican who precipitates William and Richard’s tragedy, Melissa Jacques doubling up as a disapproving neighbour and authoritative judge, Steven Serlin’s snarlingly nasty prison guard and Joseph Peacock as the potential suitor Abigail understandably outgrows. The singing throughout is magnificent.

William and Richard’s journey from wariness to declarations of undying love is done a little too swiftly perhaps, but Gage displays an unexpected gift for pithy, humorous dialogue. The shadow of executions of local men accused of homosexuality falling over the initial scenes of cosy domesticity at Christmas is well done though, as is the suggestion from the outset of William’s slight ‘otherness’ even in the context of a family who adores him. There’s a heartstopping moment at the very end when the company drop their Bristolian accents (Redcliffe is an area of that Avon city) and address us with their own voices, to drop some interesting, and shameful, statistics about persecution of gay people in the world we live in right now. It’s an ingenious way of turning a richly enjoyable, rattling good yarn with a strong score into something much more timely and important. Alistair Penman’s refreshingly clear sound design ensures we catch every word.

This is a triumph for Jordan Luke Gage but it’s not a solo achievement; everyone here is working at the top of their game. When Redcliffe soars, it really soars.

DARK OF THE MOON 

Book by Jonathan Prince

Music and lyrics by Lindy Robbins, Dave Bassett and Steve Robson

based on a play by Howard D Richardson and William Berney 

directed by Georgie Rankcom

Charing Cross Theatre, London – until 8 August 2026

running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval

https://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/

It would be nice while watching Dark Of The Moon, jaw dropped in disbelief, to reflect that it’s been a while since we’ve seen an objectively terrible musical on the London stage. But of course we’ve only just had the UK premiere of Korean zombie apocalypse farrago The Last Man over in Southwark. Now, as if to prove that lightning can in fact strike twice, there’s this overwrought yet undernourished effort, blending folklore, portentousness and high camp to frequently hysterical effect. In fairness, this is rather more fun, largely due to the talent involved but also because, like numerous other so-bad-they’re-nearly-good musicals (the original Carrie, Out Of The Blue, Which Witch), quasi-operatic ambition is tethered to a misconceived idea that apparently nobody on the creative team thought to halt, or at least question.

Inspired by a 1940s play and with a score written by a trio of Grammy nominated songwriters (Lindy Robbins, Dave Bassett and Steve Robson), it’s a fanciful tale of rustic Appalachian mountain folk and a coven of witches, aka Conjur people, who exist all around them but are mostly invisible to mortals. In a Little Mermaid-esque twist, one of the Conjur people, John the Wolf Boy (yes really, played by Bat Out Of Hell’s Glenn Adamson, all goof, curls and soaring rock tenor) falls for human Barbara Allen (Lauren Jones, a genuine talent who, after starring in Rebecca, Scissorhandz and now this, really deserves a break) and opts to lose his supernatural powers to spend his life with her. 

It’s a supremely silly concept, but in all fairness no more so than the plot of Golden Age musicals such as Brigadoon or Finian’s Rainbow which were more or less contemporary to the original play this is based on. Where Dark Of The Moon really snaps the tether is in its execution. Rather like the Back To The Future musical which was effectively two scores for the price of one (the 1950s versus the 1980s) so this has the Appalachian villagers singing Blue Grass-inspired numbers (all the voices are superb) juxtaposed with a driving rock sound for the witches, heavy on drums and wailing guitars. Sometimes the two discrete styles fuse together, with cacophonous results. Generally though, this sets up the duality of the two worlds quite successfully even if Georgie Rankcom’s unfocused production – prone to aimlessly shuffling characters on and off to deliver the brief scenes in Jonathan Prince’s tortuous book, rather than maintaining any unity of style – seems unsure of how seriously any of this is supposed to be taken. 

Considering religious fervour, miscarriage and a potential lynching are involved, one would assume it’s not intended to be a barrel of laughs but the tone is all over the place. Josie Benson, whose skyscraping, power-packed vocals are authentically thrilling, looks to be having a huge amount of campy fun as the vengeful witchy queen, or Conjur Woman as she’s titled here, while Gary Turner as her more muted cohort plays it relatively straight. 

Then there’s the trio of witches -Al Knott, Jordan Broatch, Apolilly Szwarc, all done up like sexy vampires and gyrating their socks off- who form a sort-of malevolent Greek chorus. Rankcom and choreographer Jane McMurtrie has them jerking, writhing, slithering and hissing (yes, actually hissing) at each other as though in perpetual audition for some demonic reinterpretation of Cats. Lighting designer Jonathan Chan has had the decent idea of illuminating them in a pallid ghost light, in contrast to the more robust, naturalistic colours washing over the humans, but unfortunately the stage at Charing Cross is so small, especially when crowded with Libby Todd’s obtrusively busy wooded set, that the different light states bleed all over each other, sometimes making it a challenge to work out who’s undead and who’s alive. 

Adamson is no actor, with an emotional range that barely extends beyond overjoyed, bewildered or mildly inconvenienced but does well by the considerable demands of the score, while Jones works hard to bring a bit of depth and fire to the underwritten Barbara (who Wolf Boy repeatedly and irritatingly calls by her full name of Barbara Allen, presumably lest he thinks he’s addressing Babs Windsor…or Streisand). She’s very appealing, with a cracking voice, and one longs to see her getting to grips with stronger material.

The lyrics throughout are at best undistinguished but musically the show is pretty interesting. There are far too many songs (a dozen in each act!) but they are strong on melody and the exhilaration factor, and it would be remiss of me not to tell you that the audience went wild at the end of some of the real bangers. Realistically, I could see several of these songs ending up on my ‘guilty pleasures’ Spotify playlist. Dillon Kondor’s orchestrations, a hybrid of ultra-loud rock’n’roll band and fiddle-led folksiness, are a real treat, bridging the gap between enchanting and face-melting.

It’s just a shame that most of the book scenes are flat as a pancake and, for all the drama inherent with the story (including a subplot similar to that of Oklahoma! whereby a slightly sinister local – in this case Samuel Murray’s overly youthful Marvin – is obsessed with our heroine), little ever seems at stake. By the time the townspeople go full pitchfork wielding mob on the gormless Wolf Boy we are deep into Disneys Beauty And The Beast territory but without the budget, and I was longing to get out of the theatre.

Maybe this will appeal to musical goers who miss the uncomplicated rock bombast of shows like We Will Rock You and Bat Out Of Hell, or fans of line-dancing (these Appalachians are all over that), but honestly it is hard to see this finding an audience, beyond collectors of you-had-to-be-there-to-believe-it theatrical eccentricity. It’s ultimately more exhausting than exhilarating.

BANK OF DAVE 

Book and lyrics by Rob Madge

Music and lyrics by Pippa Cleary

directed by Nikolai Foster 

Curve, Leicester – until 30 March 2026

running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval

https://www.curveonline.co.uk/whats-on/shows/bank-of-dave/

Some stories are so strange they could only be true, and this tale of a Lancashire minibus salesman who opened an independent loans and savings company because major banks weren’t lending to many working class people in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, is one such. Bank Of Dave (his slogan was “Bank On Dave”) has already been the basis for an award-winning TV documentary and a movie, and now it’s a jolly, raucous, big-hearted musical.

Surprisingly though, Dave Fishwick himself (played with a winning combination of brashness and warmth by Sam Lupton) isn’t really the starring role in Pippa Cleary and Rob Madge’s tuner. That honour goes to Hugh, the London lawyer who foregoes the delights of Primrose Hill and the City for the earthier charms of rundown Northern mill town Burnley. Lucca Chadwick-Patel, all ringing tenor, floppy hair and likeable swagger, proves himself an ideal leading man and makes convincing Hugh’s journey from snobbish Southerner to champion of the people.

Madge’s on-the-nose book has a tendency to go for the most obvious humour, and gets a tedious amount of mileage out of the tropes of people from up North being kindly salt-of-the-earth types while Southerners, but especially the bankers naturally, are icy, duplicitous and venal. It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, and the writing, stronger on (literal) knob jokes than finesse, is more efficient than surprising. The script takes liberties with the true story that inspires it, as is pointed out in the shows final moments, one of several where characters refer to the fact that they’re actually in a musical. 

There’s a sense, both in the writing and in Nikolai Foster’s staging, of everything being hurled at the wall to see what sticks, so we get a chorus of bankers dressed as pigs, a SatNav played as a sassy woman, a visual joke involving Coronation Street’s Gail Platt, dancing pensioners, a drag queen modelled on Cher…. It’s kind of messy but it has real charm.

Cleary’s score, pastiching umpteen genres of popular music and reminiscent of her work on the Great British Bake-Off musical a few years back, is similarly scattershot but likeable. Chadwick-Patel gets a roof-raising 11 o’clock power ballad, there’s gospel, a bit of rock, a smidge of Music Hall, some full-throated anthems, and a satirical hip-hop infused number for the blingy London bankers that could have been cut from Operation Mincemeat. If the score doesn’t have a clear identity of its own, it’s at least stirring and moderately tuneful.

Hayley Tamaddon is lovely as Dave’s endlessly supportive and upbeat wife but the show literally doesn’t require her to do anything other than, well, just be supportive and upbeat. Lauryn Redding has more to sink her teeth into as an opinionated local doctor, and brings a cracking voice and formidable comic timing to her role. Claire Moore delivers fine, funny and ultimately very moving work as pub landlady Maureen, as big of heart as she is of mouth, and nails, exquisitely, ‘Nowt To Lose’, a rather wonderful ballad of lost love and grief, one of the few moments where the score doesn’t feel like it’s pushing hard. Joni Ayton-Kent is great fun as Holly’s laconic sidekick, and Samuel Holmes an absolute knockout as a nasty banker pitched half way between panto and Bond villain.

Visually, Foster’s colourful, frequently inventive production strikes a nice balance between working class naturalism and showbiz pizazz. Amy Jane Cook’s set suggests local pub and community centre, but transforms pleasingly into exteriors and more upmarket locations with the help of Ben Cracknell’s malleable lighting and the use of, but not over-reliance on, overhead projections (superb work by Duncan McLean). If Ebony Molina’s choreography is a little over-used, it has some moments of genuine flair.

Bank Of Dave isn’t a great musical but it’s fun; it’s too potty-mouthed to be wholesome exactly, it’s about as subtle as a brick, and some of the singing is more enthusiastic than accurate, but the audience roars its approval. In an increasingly difficult world, there’s a lot to be said for stories about underdogs triumphing, and of good people trying to do the right thing (all profits from Fishwick’s company are ploughed into charity). Like the man himself, its heart is definitely in the right place. 

THE NAME

by Jon Fosse

translated by Gregory Motton

directed by Simon Usher

White Bear Theatre, London – until 6 June 2026

running time: 80 minutes no interval

https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/whatson/the-name

If you like your stage drama strongly driven by propulsive narrative or vividly drawn characterisation enriched with erudite, elegant language, then you may struggle with The Name. Nobel Prize winning Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse’s 1995 drama, only now receiving its UK premiere in a terse, unvarnished translation from the original Nynorsk by Gregory Motton, exerts a certain intriguing spell, but you have to work with it. 

Centred on the unwilling homecoming of a pregnant young woman to her parents’ rural home, her somewhat ineffectual partner in tow, it’s a muted, elliptical study in miscommunication and the resentment that arises when one’s needs aren’t met. The characters -named just Girl, Boy, Mother, Father, Sister- talk in spiky, self-interested half sentences that don’t always seem to logically follow on from each other, as if to underline that these malcontents are barely listening to anybody else.  

It’s a script that steadfastly refuses to ingratiate. These self-absorbed figures and their non sequitur conversations suggest a Scandinavian Pinter, an impression reinforced by the brief flashes of quirky, brittle humour, and overall sense of domestic nihilism that permeates Simon Usher’s stripped back production. The silences, the spaces between the words, are as important as the words themselves.

Refreshingly neither Usher nor his cast seem interested in endearing the characters to us. Jasmin Dúfa Pitt is shrill, unsympathetic and extremely effective as the pregnant Girl. Marie Thorseth Molnes walks an interesting line between jollity and passive aggression as her strange but hearty sister. Daf Thomas is almost completely unreadable as the unhappy father-to-be. Valerie Gogan and Tony Bell provide probably the most engaging performances as the bewildered parents, finding as much humanity as the writing allows. Jan Martin injects some welcome comedy as the freewheeling, eccentric local man with whom Girl seems to have a romantic, or at least sexual, past and some unfinished business.

Fosse won the Norwegian Ibsen award for this strange but engaging play, and it has been produced fairly regularly throughout Europe. The Name’s impenetrability and deliberately low key tone mean that it will likely mystify and frustrate as many people as it pleases, but it’s fascinating to see a piece that refuses to play by the rules. It’s cool, clever and casts a shadow that persists long after its fleet eighty minute run time.

EQUUS 

by Peter Shaffer

directed by Lindsay Posner

Menier Chocolate Factory, London – until 4 July 2026

Theatre Royal Bath – 14 to 25 July 2026

running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval 

https://www.menierchocolatefactory.com/tickets/equus/

https://www.theatreroyal.org.uk/events/equus/

Pitched half way between ritual and psychological thriller, Peter Shaffer’s Equus, which premiered at the National in 1973 before enjoying West End and Broadway transfers, as well as major revivals including the 2007 one which played both sides of the Atlantic and saw Daniel Radcliffe make his adult theatrical debut, plus a film version, has lost surprisingly little of its power to shock and stimulate. Seeing this superb new production by Lindsay Posner for Menier Chocolate Factory and Theatre Royal Bath with searing leading performances from Toby Stephens and Noah Valentine, it’s not difficult to see this astonishing play’s enduring appeal. 

Valentine gives a sensational, star-making performance as deeply disturbed teenager Alan Strang, who blinds a stable full of horses while in the throws of (literally) naked hysteria, opposite Stephens as Dr Dysart, the equally troubled psychologist trying to help him. Although attitudes to mental health and psychological treatment has altered drastically in the 50+ years since the play (which is actually inspired by a horrifying real incident) was written, Shaffer’s literate but potent script still works it’s dark magic. A second act scene set in a porn cinema further dates the play but once you’ve strapped in for the ride, you’ll be too gripped to care. 

Equus mixes up psychological insight, repression, religious fervour (Alan both worships and fetishes horses), and sexual awakening, with classical mythology (Dysart is fascinated by the ancient Greeks and traces a direct line between his own obsessions and the cult-like devotion of Alan to the horses, and by extension the equine pagan god that gives the play its title). Amongst all the blood-letting and soul-searching, there’s a mordant wit to the writing that helps make the horrors a bit more bearable, if not exactly palatable.

Less monumental than Thea Sharrock’s 2007 revival with Radcliffe and the late Richard Griffiths and less flashy than Ned Bennett’s stunning 2019 version at Stratford East, Posner’s take is, initially at least, more conversational, lower key. Actors watch and contribute from the front row of the audience, and the six young men playing the horses don’t have the huge equine masks favoured by earlier productions. Instead they sit, bare-faced, bare-chested and earth-spattered, at the back observing the humans like silent judges. When they move (stunning choreography by James Cousens), their collective strength, grace and gravitas makes you catch your breath.

The homoeroticism is dialled up to 11: the opening image sees Strang, and Ed Mitchell as Nugget, the principal horse, embracing like lovers; outstanding intimacy coordination work by Clare Foster. So to is the fusion of animal and human, more keenly realised than in any other production I’ve seen, with the result that when the story reaches its terrible, inexorable climax, it carries an authentic emotional punch amongst all the furious distress and as the technical elements ramp up to a heart-pounding crescendo.

Stephens is delivering career highlight work as the child psychiatrist whose personal life is far from satisfactory and is haunted by the idea that ‘healing’ can also mean robbing an individual of all their passion. He makes Shaffer’s lengthy, muscular speeches – arias almost – sound spontaneous and natural, and makes vivid Dysart’s agitation and internal conflict; it’s a tremendous performance that captures every note and layer of this complex man. When he leans into a witticism, his slightly nasal, back-of-the-throat delivery sometimes unexpectedly recalls his late mother, but his triumph here is entirely his own.

The role of Alan requires full throttle commitment for the play to really work, and Valentine – vulnerable, fearless, frightened and frightening – fully delivers. In a flawless supporting cast, Emma Cunniffe is heartbreaking as his mother, torn apart by her jaggedly conflicted feelings about her son, and Bella Aubin radiates goodness, mischief and strength as the stable worker who almost helps Alan to a normal-ish life. Amanda Abbington is magnificent as the sensitive, kindly barrister who brings Strang into Dysart’s orbit. 

Some of Shaffer’s writing is a little over-ripe, indeed there are moments where he could almost be daring us to laugh inappropriately, but it is irresistibly theatrical and Posner has such a sure hand with this material that it never tips over into the risible. Paul Pyant’s lighting washing moodily over Paul Farnsworth’s abstract but forbidding set and Adam Cork’s omnipresent compositions and sound design, add to the shattering overall impact of a production that reeks of quality but isn’t afraid to go for some really big swings in a relatively small space.

For all the intermittent flamboyance of the staging and the massive emotions and passions that are given full rein throughout Equus, it’s the final image of not one but two broken humans hoping for healing and forgiveness that finally haunts and hurts here. This is a thrilling piece of theatre and one that gilds the reputation of one of the most original and ambitious plays from the latter half of the twentieth century.

STAGE KISS

by Sarah Ruhl 

directed by Blanche McIntyre

Hampstead Theatre, London – until 13 June 2026

running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval 

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2026/stage-kiss/

Sarah Ruhl’s 2011 comedy, highly theatrical in setting and execution, is a slippery but ultimately rewarding thing. It’s a playfully meta look at the tension between ‘real life’ and the artificiality of the theatre, and what happens when those things get mixed up. 

Stage Kiss begins with an audition where an actress, named in the programme as simply She, performed with a captivating mix of goofiness and vulnerability by Myanna Buring, is auditioning with a director (Rolf Saxon, sublimely pompous) for an upcoming production. She thinks she’s flunked it but in the next scene she’s into rehearsals; a spoke in the wheel is that her co-star is an ex-lover, He (Patrick Kennedy). Ruhl’s text gives only the sketchiest of details of their previous relationship, interspersed with chunks of the truly heinous romantic comedy that they’re trying to rehearse, but it’s clear it did not end well.

The first half is a little mystifying, not helped by an unusually low energy staging by Blanche McIntyre, but it’s watchable. The short scenes swing between tiffs in rehearsal, snatched conversations in breaks then finally the performance itself. It’s fluffy and fun but the problem with sending up awful theatre is that, as an audience member, you’re still sat there being made to watch something that just isn’t very good, so the joke wears a little thin. Having He and She comment amongst themselves on the quality of the show they’re stuck in doesn’t quite let everyone off the hook, and by the interval the overall impression is of watching a sub par American Noises Off with songs, performed by actors who are better than their material.

Stick with it though, as the markedly different second half is where the real meat both of Ruhl’s script and McIntyre’s production is, and it’s pretty terrific. Since seeing Stage Kiss, I’ve been wracking my brains to think of another play since Thornton Wilder that delivers quite such a startling volte face between its two acts. If the first half seems frustratingly light, the second crackles even as it deliciously wrong-foots the audience, and Ruhl’s dialogue is pithy and sharp.

The latter half, simultaneously truthful and slightly surreal, is darkly funny as it explodes the frippery of act one, interrogating the chasm between the romantic and erotic expectations set up by art, and a reality that’s sometimes stark. If the first section could be shorter and sharper, the two acts cannot exist without each other. 

Stage Kiss also blows wide open any assumptions around the supposed glamour of working in the theatre. She and He are jobbing actors, not stars, concerned as much about money and their frequently difficult personal lives as they are about the integrity of their careers. The set by Robert Innes Hopkins undergoes a couple of transformations, from bare rehearsal room to medium-opulent stage design for the play-within-a-play, but is most effective in act two when it represents the bare-brick basics of the grim urban studio apartment where He dwells. 

Ruhl toys with her audience in the second half: when the curtain goes up on the squalid new location, Buring is still in the emerald gown worn ‘on stage’ in act one. She and He have resumed their relationship, despite having other commitments elsewhere, yet are still running their lines from the earlier play. So just how much of this are we supposed to take at face value? Cue the arrival of his girlfriend, a kind, slightly eccentric mid-westerner, and the emotional stakes are suddenly higher. Jill Winternitz delivers a tiny miracle in this role, creating a multi-layered, endearing character out of just a few moments stagetime. She’s followed by the actress’ husband and daughter, both furious, bewildered and played with glorious comic aplomb by Oliver Dimsdale and Toto Bruin respectively.

You know we’re in truly surreal territory when the warring parties are suddenly singing South Pacific’s ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ in beautiful four-part harmonies, before He and She are rehearsing another shocker of a play. This one’s an eye-wateringly pretentious avant garde ‘masterpiece’ written as well as staged by Saxon’s hilariously earnest director. This time though, the humour is surer in its targets: theatre people will get a kick out of observing He and She going through the obligatory fight call rehearsal while matter-of-factly discussing something totally unrelated to the mutual violence they’re perpetrating. Also, there’s a touching truth to the way Buring’s She re-evaluates her whole life while going through the motions of performance.

It could all feel a bit scattershot but amazingly it doesn’t. Kennedy is excellent as the actor capable of desire, empathy and cruelty all within seconds of each other, and he and Buring make a convincing central team. Stage Kiss takes the old adage that “all the world’s a stage” and runs with it; it sets Ruhl up as a sort of American Pirandello, and ultimately it’s a piece that, despite the shaky start, teases and haunts for a considerable time after you’ve left the theatre. A valuable rediscovery.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND 

by Oscar Wilde 

directed by Nicholai La Barrie

Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London – until 6 June 2026

Bristol Old Vic, Bristol – 10 to 20 June 2026

running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval

https://lyric.co.uk/shows/an-ideal-husband/

https://bristololdvic.org.uk/whats-on/an-ideal-husband

First produced in 1895, Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband is marginally less notorious than its better known sister play The Importance of Being Earnest but is still trotted out periodically by theatres nationwide, and has enjoyed regular West End revivals – the last was in 2018 – as well as six film adaptations. It’s tempting to see it as a trusty old theatrical war horse, smart enough to stimulate the intelligentsia and accessible enough to please the masses. However, director Nicholai La Barrie, in this altogether splendid new production for the Lyric Hammersmith and Bristol Old Vic, has refashioned it into something that feels current, sexy and wickedly enjoyable, while still remaining true to the essence and scintillating wit of Wilde’s original text.

You know this isn’t going to be a typical Ideal Husband when, at the outset, the lights come up on society grand dames Lady Markby (Suzette Llewellyn) and Countess of Basildon (Nimmy March) and they’re raucous, fabulous Black women, gloriously bedecked in vibrantly coloured Afro-Caribbean garb, off-their-faces on spliff and whatever’s in the hip flasks they’re carrying. They’re gossiping furiously about the London ‘scene’, one of them in a slurred RP and the other with a broad Jamaican accent. 

It’s as unexpected as it’s irresistibly funny, but La Barrie and team are only getting started. The whole cast, first revealed en masse doing the Electric Slide to the Cameo floorfiller ‘Candy’ at a party in the home of Sir Robert and Lady Gertrude Chiltern, is Black. This contemporary, culturally shifted spin places a different emphasis on Wilde’s text which, although contemporised with references to things like Hello magazine, Soho House and Obama, is still delivered pretty much intact. The accents are a mixture of posh, urban street, Caribbean and, for the blackmailing adventuress Laura Cheveley (Aurora Perrineau), a mid-Atlantic drawl which tracks given that this glamorous schemer has been living in Washington DC.

This new approach inevitably democratises the societal hierarchies in the original text but replaces them with a milieu where image and surface are still important (Tiwa Lade’s delightfully flippant, gorgeously attired Mabel Chiltern just screams influencer culture, while Jamael Westman’s über-camp Goring looks perpetually red carpet ready). Yet the human feelings underneath the witticisms and peacocking still register potently. 

Some of the embellishments are delicious: note the way the Chilterns are constantly chirruping “we appreciate you, Mason” to their flouncing, increasingly stroppy manservant (Emmanuel Akwafo, hilarious) every time they issue an order, or how one of Lord Goring’s middle names is now Mohammed….. Look out for the bottle of hot sauce that appears as Lady Markby empties her handbag while holding forth on some topic or another, or the moment one woman accuses another of looking “ashy”. These are all mere details but collectively they point to a refreshing reappraisal of the play that pulls it into a different dimension while retaining its essence. It also opens up what could be perceived as stuffy, white elitist theatre to a whole new audience, and it does it with great style.

The idea of past misdemeanours impacting on current success and respectability is just as relevant now as it was when Wilde wrote An Ideal Husband, as is the tension between outward image and what goes on behind closed doors (“public and private life are different things. They have different laws, and move on different lines”). For all the rollicking comedy and party vibes, La Barrie gives full measure to the more serious aspects of the text. The breakdown in the Chiltern marriage is conveyed with potent force, and played with truth and emotional clarity by Chiké Okonkwo as a a suave, charming Sir Robert and Tamara Lawrance, who gets exactly right the mixture of warmth and unswerving righteousness of Lady Gertrude (or ‘G-G’ as she’s affectionately rechristened here).

Lord Goring, surely a proxy for Wilde himself, is a gift of a role and Westman, in an absolute treat of a performance, embodies him with a dazzling combination of benign flamboyance and genuine warmth, with intriguing hints of a desolate loneliness beneath all the flighty outrageousness. The only downside of having him so clearly and joyfully queer is that his last act romantic pairing off with Mabel doesn’t quite make sense. A solution might have been to swap the gender of the latter character but then we would have been denied Lade’s sparkling take on the role. 

Jeff Alexander is a total delight as the Earl of Caversham, Goring’s increasingly exasperated father, his Jamaican accent adding wonderful colours and rhythms to the Wildean language, and Llewellyn matches him as the loquacious Lady Markby. In amongst this company of experienced theatre actors, Perrineau, whose credits are all on screen, initially seems a trifle stiff as the glamorous chancer Cheveley, but she has a distinctive, formidable stage presence and looks like a million bucks (which the character probably stole). She also rises dramatically to the occasion when Laura is cornered or angered. I suspect this is a performance that will grow and round out as the run progresses. 

As yet, La Barrie’s staging hasn’t quite figured out how to make the third act lurch into farcical territory, with people concealed in anterooms and notes being exchanged into the wrong hands, all of apiece with the rest of the play. Despite that though, this is a sparky, richly enjoyable reinvention, hilarious yet engrossing and far closer to the spirit and intention of Wilde than was the garish, hyper-sexualised Earnest recently perpetrated by the National. Rajha Shakiry’s sets, but especially her costumes, have a pleasing opulence and slightly outlandish chic. I wish Zeynep Kepekli’s lighting design was a bit brighter though.

Sending the audience out dancing to Soul II Soul’s ‘Get A Life’ isn’t what you’d expect from a play written in the nineteenth century, but then this is a show full of lovely surprises.

THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND 

Book and lyrics by Richy Hughes

Music and lyrics by Tim Sutton

based on the book by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

directed by Lynette Linton 

@sohoplace, London – until 18 July 2026

running time: 2 hours 45 minutes

https://boyharnessedwindmusical.com

A new musical from the Royal Shakespeare Company feels like an event (look at Les Misérables and Matilda, heck even Carrie is legendary, albeit for the wrong reasons) so the arrival of The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind in London after an initial Stratford season was warmly anticipated. That it’s based on an inspirational true story which subsequently inspired a best-selling memoir and acclaimed film, and is directed by the brilliant and versatile Lynette Linton only further ups the ante. In practise though, Richy Hughes and Tim Sutton’s amiable, chaotic tuner is a bit of a disappointment. Its heart is surely in the right place but it mostly remains resolutely earthbound just when you’re longing for it to soar.

Not that there isn’t a lot here to like. For starters, the story of how William Kamkwamba as a school age child found a way to create electricity and water from wind power thereby rescuing his region of Malawi from hunger and desperation is one of those lightning-in-a-bottle tales of possibilities and just how extraordinary humans can be, that quicken the pulse and dampen the eyes. Then there’s the world-building achieved by Linton and her long term design partner Frankie Bradshaw, turning the sohoplace auditorium into a rural African village teeming with life and joy: as we enter the theatre, the cast are everywhere, greeting the audience, getting people to dance, shaking hands, baskets on top of heads, portable stereos pressed to ears. It’s an instant good mood creator but it feels rooted in reality, not Disneyfied.

Within the cast there’s a plethora of talent and, crucially, they feel like a genuine community, with a pleasingly diverse selection of ages and body types. As costumed by Bradshaw and wigged-up by Cynthia De La Rosa (another regular Linton collaborator), they seem like real people, not a glossed-up ‘musical theatre’ facsimile of what this village’s inhabitants would look like, and that’s pretty disarming. Furthermore, they swap between roles with such swiftness and dexterity that it’s quite a surprise at the curtain call to realise that the company is about half the size that you thought it was. 

Alistair Nwachukwu plays William with an appealing mixture of youthful idealism and hard headedness, although the script doesn’t give him an awful lot to work with, beyond innocence and dogged determination. The characters of his disdainful older sister Annie and the school teacher she is not-so-secretly in love with, are similarly thinly drawn, but Tsemaye Bob-Egbe and Owen Chaponda give spirited readings of their roles. Bob-Egbe delivers a powerful lamenting solo in the second half that threatens to rip the roof of the theatre.

By contrast, the roles of the Kamkwamba parents, superbly played by Sifiso Mazibuko and Madeline Appiah, are much better fleshed out. Mazibuko also gets, in the lilting, soaring ‘This I Know’, the best number in the score, a powerful aria of acceptance and taking stock, also one of the few times when the music and lyrics really take wing. 

Elsewhere Tim Sutton’s tunes tend to be pleasant but pedestrian, although the sheer power of Choolwe Laina Muntanga’s vocals as a personification of the wind that William tames is really something special. Hers is one of the few voices that manage to blast through the frustratingly raw sound design which has a tendency to flatten all aural impact, rendering it almost impossible to make out or enjoy the harmonies and much of the lyrics. 

Few of the songs advance the action and the lack of underscoring adds to the sense of this being a stop-start play with songs rather than a fully integrated musical. The simplistic, plodding book by Richy Hughes doesn’t help. Having the villagers as storytellers, a device that works wonderfully well in the far superior Once On This Island, is perfectly fine but here they are mostly stating the obvious as scene after scene shuffles by with very little dramatic momentum. 

Themes like parent vs child confrontation, forbidden love, corrupt authoritarianism, possible total extinction should at the very least raise the theatrical temperature but seldom do. The unjust death of the village chief (McCallam Connell) should be searing but somehow isn’t, and it feels as though there are too many plot strands and characters to concentrate on. Visually and dramatically, the show too often feels unfocused, and there are a number of different performance styles – from Helena Pipe’s nicely naturalistic school librarian who takes William under her wing, to the portentous, to the bizarrely camp (Idriss Kargbo’s histrionic best friend and Newton Matthews as an inappropriately over-the-top headmaster) – that simply don’t cohere.

All that aside, the climactic building of the makeshift windmill to generate power from the wind is beautifully done, as is a balletic sequence (choreography by Shelley Maxwell) where death, characterised as a hungry hyena, stalls the village gaining more and more followers. The puppetry of the stray dog that William adopts (or is it the other way round?!) is also exquisite (designed by Nick Barnes, performed by Yana Penrose) if almost identical to what we saw earlier this year in the Harold Fry musical at the Haymarket, though it concludes with a tragic gut punch that’ll bring a tear to the eye of any dog lover. 

Having footage at the end of the real Kamkwamba, shining and articulate, in a Ted Talk interview broadcast is authentically moving but also counterproductive as it threatens to render slightly synthetic much of the emotion earlier in the show. The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind on stage honours Kamkwamba’s astonishing story and legacy, and has moments of real wonder, but it only fitfully justifies why this remarkable tale needed to be a musical.

1536

by Ava Pickett

directed by Lyndsey Turner

Ambassadors Theatre, London – until 1 August 2026

running time: 1 hour 50 minutes no interval

https://www.1536onstage.com

Harnessed and honed female rage is one of the most potent forces on earth; there’s a lot of female rage in Ava Pickett’s incandescent debut play, as well as a ton of passion, hilarity and messy, relatable human feeling. Already deservedly an award winner, Lyndsey Turner’s enthralling production now transfers into the West End after last year’s sold out Almeida run. 1536 is the sort of play that wakes you up, shakes you up, and leaves you reeling with shock, exhilaration and, if you’re paying attention, white-hot anger. If you didn’t see it in Islington, now’s your chance, and if you were lucky enough to catch it there, go again: it’s possibly even better now. 

Interestingly, 1536 was premiering here in London just as Kimberly Belflower’s equally acclaimed John Proctor Is The Villain was taking New York by storm, and the plays share a similar DNA, wit, vitality….and fury. If you’ve only seen one of them and loved it, chances are you’ll enjoy the other. For me, 1536 is marginally the better play but, really, they’re both essential viewing for young women and anybody who cares about them.

Pickett’s script is set in Tudor England but feels bang up-to-date: 1536 was the year Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, was beheaded, allegedly for adultery although in retrospect the claims seem spurious. The play imagines a trio of young women from rural 16th century Essex fascinated by, and commenting on, a Royal crisis that, on the surface, would only appear to have a tangential effect on their day-to-day lives. As with the narrative of history itself, the information these women receive is controlled by men, with the result that it takes a tremendous leap of faith and imagination for them to think outside the male-centric box they’ve been locked into. 

The dialogue Pickett gives them is in a contemporary, frequently expletive-strewn idiom crackling with urgency and raucous humour, or at least it is until the action of the play puts levity out of their reach. After that point, it just breaks your heart. What’s extraordinary is that these characters never sound like mouthpieces. Far from it, these are recognisable flesh-and-blood humans who switch allegiances, keep secrets and have each other’s backs even when it’s actively painful to do so, and 1536 persuasively makes the case that witty, smart women were just as present in times gone by but that their lives were straitjacketed and stifled by the patriarchy.

The women’s observations on the plight of Anne Boleyn, reports from London being drip-fed through periodically, also feel like a comment on the way news and scandal are shaped by biased mass media in the modern age. The nearest this gets to cliché is that the central trio initially sound like archetypal ‘Essex girls’, which is quite deliberate and delicious. It turns out though that Pickett is on about something far deeper and more dramatic but it’s not fair to give away too much as the play becomes proper edge-of-your-seat stuff as accusations whirl, paranoia boils up, confidences are broke, and violence explodes.

“Has it always been like this? Will it always be like this?” asks Siena Kelly’s bewildered, not-yet-defeated Anna, the working class, sexually liberated young woman whose freedom and intelligence is under fire in a world controlled by self-serving men. Kelly was superb at the Almeida last year but has since found new colours and depths in this wild but kind woman, and is now delivering electrifying work. 

Also returning is Liv Hill as Jane, the most impressionable and (on the surface at least) vulnerable of the three women. Hill finds pathos in her naivety but also a volcanic anger and gut-wrenching pain as her far-from-happy domestic circumstances implode. When she screams at the more worldly wise, sexually confident Anna “a man looks at you, and you call it fucking power” it’s like a cry of agony but it’s also terrifying as one realises the chasm widening between these former friends.

Tanya Reynolds plays Mariella, the local midwife and the most level-headed of the trio but nursing a profound, not-unreciprocated love for a married local landowner (George Kemp, excellent). Reynolds is magnetic, extraordinary, combining laconic humour with deep wells of sadness, as she’s pulled in multiple directions at once. She lets you see this woman thinking and feeling; her strength is galvanising, her pain palpable, it’s a stunning performance.

The domestic catalyst for these women’s lives imploding is Oliver Johnstone’s Richard, toxically entangled in their lives in unexpected ways but also strangely lost. Johnstone charts his journey from priapic befuddlement to swaggering nastiness with more clarity and assurance than his predecessor, and makes compelling and vivid the contradictions at play within this flawed man who ultimately, dismayingly, chooses the darker path.

Turner’s direction remains an exemplary piece of stagecraft but now feels sharper, punchier. It’s entirely, engagingly naturalistic, until it isn’t. Jack Knowles’ lighting conveys rural exteriors, then suddenly bathes Max Jones’s attractively bucolic set – all grass and flower bushels and a picturesque tree – in acidic yellow or deep sanguine red. Will Stuart’s compositions and Tingying Dong’s sound add an invaluable thrum of unease, punctuated by shards of distressing shock. None of this  feels unnecessarily flashy though, every creative working fully in service of the text.

There’s a line near the very end which encapsulates so much of what 1536 is about: as one of her best friends vows, yet again, to stifle her own desires and happiness to get by in a brutalised, male dominated world and to “be good”, Anna asks, in frustration, “how you can be good when they keep changing the definition of what that is?”

1536 at the very least defines what a truly terrific play is. It’s a historical piece that speaks to the present day with a rare urgency. It’s in the process of being adapted for television by the BBC, but you really need to see this in the theatre, where it dazzles and bruises with its relevance and grim vitality. Shattering and unforgettable.