ajhlovestheatre

OTHERLAND 

by Chris Bush 

directed by Ann Yee

Almeida Theatre, London – until 15 March 2025

running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes including interval 

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/otherland/

Nobody could accuse playwright Chris Bush of lacking ambition and imagination. In the beloved Standing At The Sky’s Edge she filtered several generations of British history through the story and characters of a Sheffield housing estate, and now in Otherland she looks at what it takes to become a woman, juxtaposing the trans experience with motherhood. 

Not content with presenting a straightforward (if any such situation can ever be straightforward) tale of a couple driven apart when one of them seeks to change gender, Bush also adds elements of sci-fi and fantasy, a modern variation on a Greek chorus, and a lot of singing. The result is an uneven but compulsive play that frustrates as much as it satisfies, a feminist queer fantasia with notes of sitcom, soap opera and classical tragedy.

Although Bush clarifies in a programme note that Otherland isn’t autobiographical, her experiences as a trans woman must inevitably have coloured the writing, and it’s surely no coincidence that the most sympathetic character is Harry (short for Harriet, but also a bastardisation of Henry), played with warmth and vulnerability by the hugely likeable Fizz Sinclair. To further up the ante, Jo, the woman we see pre-transitioned Harry marrying in the first scene, has a history of dating other woman. Jade Anouka brings fiery energy to a sketchily written role, but whether it’s struggling to come to terms with Harry’s significant life change or cosying up to Amanda Wilkin’s glorious, free-spirited Gabby on a holiday of self discovery, Jo unfortunately comes across as selfish and a bit mean, even though she agrees to carry a child because her partner cannot.

As with the controversial Brie Larson Elektra in the West End, an all-female chorus comes pretty close to stealing the whole show. Vocally and physically, the stellar quartet of Danielle Fiamanya, Beth Hinton-Lever, Laura Hanna and Serena Manteghi are everywhere. They play wedding guests, friends, confidantes, various antagonists, medical professionals, and provide spine-tingling vocals, and narration. Jackie Clune is also superb as Elaine, Harry’s Mum, a deeply conventional woman whose love for her child is tested by said child’s determination to live their life as authentically possible. The combination of cosy familiarity and deep unease in the phone conversations between Harry and Elaine is exquisitely managed.

The lengthy first half of Ann Yee’s fluid, graceful staging, playing out on Fly Davis’s neon-edged disc of a set and gorgeously lit by Anna Watson, absolutely flies by. It’s funny, punchy and has real heart. A key sequence sees Harry standing on the Prime Meridian Line in Greenwich Park, straddling east and west just as their gender is traversing from male to female; it’s a striking metaphor, couched by Bush in language rapturous and poetic. 

The second act is more ambitious but less successful. The trajectory of Jo and Gabby’s relationship, with the former incubating the baby the latter so desperately wants, is depicted, unexpectedly, as a futuristic fantasy with Jo as a robot (or “toaster with tits” as the text amusingly has it) with a spherical silver stomach bump. It may be how the unwilling mother-to-be perceives herself but it’s a volte face so strange that it runs the risk of disconnecting a previously engaged audience.

Equally odd, but more convincingly written, is the second act repositioning of Harry hundreds of years ago in history as a bizarre “fish woman” creation, discovered thrashing about in watery nets by fishermen before being passed along to scientists for scrutiny. The ‘othering’ of a living thing that only longs for acceptance, assimilation and home is another striking metaphor for trans people, and is presented with some power (“How can you solve a problem when you don’t have the words to describe it?” cries a stricken Harry) as it moves the play into edgy, stirring territory. The oft-repeated references to tall ships and burnished gold start to cloy a bit and suggest that Bush might want to widen her lexicon of imagery, but Sinclair invests Harry with so much dignity and sensitivity that it’s impossible to remain unmoved. 

The final scene, possibly the best written of the whole evening, is pretty low key as it suggests a platonic future for Harry and Jo, each woman transformed by her experiences, the balance of power subtly adjusted between them. It has a significant emotional impact in a play where characterisation and clarity tend to take a back seat to the overall concept and message. On the whole, Otherland is a bit of a curate’s egg, but its sincerity and sense of the authentically theatrical are unmistakable.

EAST IS SOUTH

by Beau Willimon 

directed by Ellen McDougall

Hampstead Theatre, London – until 15 March 2025

running time: 100 minutes, no interval 

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2024/east-is-south/

With the intriguingly named East Is South, American writer Beau Willimon successfully parlays technology (specifically AI), religion, superstition and humanity into a snappy thriller. It may not be High Art but it’s engrossing popular entertainment, feasible enough to be gripping but (hopefully) not so nightmarishly prescient that it’ll keep you awake at night. 

Best known here for the US edition of TV’s House Of Cards, author Willimon’s sole Broadway credit to date is the Uma Thurman vehicle The Parisian Woman and, as someone who bore witness to that wan mess, I approached this world premiere with something like trepidation. As it turns out, I needn’t have worried: East Is South is an infinitely more interesting and engaging piece and, for the most part, Ellen McDougall’s oil-smooth production is very well acted. 

The beginning isn’t promising, to be fair, with a bunch of impenetrable techy phrases being hurled around as a coder is interrogated over a possible malfunction or transgression concerning a mind bogglingly sophisticated AI creation. Stick with it though as it’s merely set-up for a story, told partially in flashback, that has a cumulative, and affecting, human interest and asks some genuinely fascinating questions about how both technology and authority impact on our lives, and whether God is real or something which we’ve created to help make sense of the mess of the universe.

In a series of intense, terse scenes we see lovers and co-workers American Lena (Kaya Scodelario, best known for her extensive screen work but here making an impressive stage debut) and Russian Sasha (Luke Treadaway, superb and fielding a creditable hybrid accent) being questioned. Their interrogators make a classic ‘good cop-bad cop’ pairing with Nathalie Armin’s reasonable, kind but firm Dr Darvish contrasting pleasingly with the simmering aggression of Alec Newman’s bullish, steely Olsen (“I’m not the smartest guy but I’m smart enough to know that”).  

Willimon gives us tantalising glimpses of Lena and Sasha’s lives before they were submerged in the murky waters of highly sensitive, life changing tech work. She grew up in a religious cult (Newman also doubles, chillingly, as the Pastor father who disowned her) while Sasha is a polymath cultural expert. There’s a particularly striking, not to say downright horny, sequence where he seduces her while commentating on the music of Bach. The play’s principal intrigue comes less from its preoccupation with the chaos and/or influence on humanity than on the questions of who is manipulating how in these  

Scenes bleed from one into another with a cinematic fluidity, and the sense of dread when Olsen leaves the observation bureau on the upper level of Alex Eales’s starkly effective set to intervene in the interrogations below is keenly felt. There are some head scratching moments even beyond the scientific posturing and pontificating, such as a hymn singing sequence (though the idea of a bunch of high ranking bureaucrats suddenly bursting into religious song feels apiece with an America currently in the grip of Christian extremism, however performative) or the Māori Haka which closes the show. 

This last is performed by Cliff Curtis as a conscience-tormented academic with Jewish and Māori roots and a possible drug problem. This character, Ari Abrams, feels a little like Willimon hurling everything at the wall to see what sticks. Curtis is a fine screen actor but his lack of stage experience is apparent initially, with muffled line deliveries and an unfocused energy, but he improves considerably as the evening progresses. Interestingly, Scodelario also works predominantly in television and film, but exerts a quiet power on stage that lingers in the memory. Armin, the only other woman in the cast, delivers beautiful, detailed work as an official whose duty comes to be at odds with her humanity.

The sound design by Tingying Dong, threatening yet delicate until it explodes in a flurry of sensory overload in tandem with Zakk Hein’s vivid video, is ingenious and almost an extra character in the play. The ambiguity of the principal characters’s back stories adds to the feeling of mounting unease, and Willimon’s dialogue has real punch and snap.

For all its contemporary dressings, this is more potboiler than profound, and not always as clear as perhaps it should be. Still, McDougall’s production has bags of atmosphere and tension, and it’s a pleasure to see a play that so assuredly mixes together the intelligence and the thrills.

LAVENDER, HYACINTH, VIOLET, YEW

by Coral Wylie

directed by Debbie Hannan

Bush Theatre, London – until 22 March 2025

running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes including interval 

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/lavender-hyacinth-violet-yew/

Queer legacy, allyship, platonic friendships and, er, horticulture come under the spotlight in this highly original and deeply lovely new play. Coral Wylie wrote the Alfred Fagon award nominated script and plays Pip, non-binary, mixed race, in their early twenties, and full of questions.

Most of those questions are directed at their parents, Lorin and Craig (Pooky Quesnel and Wil Johnson respectively), a genuinely lovely pair of humans who clearly partied hard in the ‘80s and ‘90s but have come out the other side, albeit with emotional scars that run deep. The source of those scars is the now deceased Duncan (Omari Douglas, entrancing), the chance discovery of whose diaries gives Pip a tantalising glimpse into the youngsters those parents once were. 

It also sets in motion an explosive emotional daisy chain that sees Pip accusing Lorin and Craig of denying them their heritage as a queer person of colour. It’s rich, engaging stuff, served up with one hell of a dramatic wallop as Craig confronts his feelings over losing his best friend to AIDS, and Lorin addresses her own sidelining in the mens story. Duncan was a clever and creative gardener (there’s a particular queer significance to each of the flora that make up the play’s title) and, if the concreting over of his garden by Craig following his death is hardly subtle as metaphors go, there is a satisfying symmetry between his horticultural artistry and Pip finding their place in the world. 

Max Johns’s traverse set undergoes a simple but rapturous transformation in the final scene that, in tandem with Wylie’s inspirational words as Duncan addresses Pip down the years (exquisitely delivered by Douglas) will have anybody with a heart and soul reaching for their hankies. Debbie Hannan’s production, punctuated with banging late 20th century dance tracks, slickly negotiates the shift in decades, and draws a quartet of outstanding, truthful performances.

Even at Pip’s stroppiest, Wylie is totally lovable, in the grip of pain and confusion rather than spite. Quesnel and Johnson don’t belabour the fact that their characters are ageing up and down by decades from scene to scene but achieve differentiation mainly by alternating their energy levels according to which year we’re in: it’s subtle and it works. They entirely convince as a pair of well rounded, essentially kind humans, damaged but not beyond repair. Douglas will break your heart. 

Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew isn’t perfect. Some of the writing is a bit clumsy: there are sections where the characters sound like people in a play rather than people just talking, and making the act one closing moment a revelation about Lorin’s sexuality feels a little cheap. These flaws are perhaps more apparent because so much of the play simply soars. 

It feels simultaneously like a very young and a very wise piece. Young in terms of the energy and the way that the poetic and pedestrian don’t quite comfortably co-exist, mature in the way it understands the corrosion that denial and repression can wreak  on a soul, however noble, and of the bittersweet nature of wondering what might have been. There’s a pleasing sophistication in Wylie’s writing where dialogue echoes between scenes with Duncan in Lorin and Craig’s memory and present day sequences with their bright, sensitive, troubled child. It also powerfully suggests that death isn’t necessarily an end when you have people that love and remember you. 

Duncan’s final exhortation to Pip to “turn your chest to the sun, little one…dig your fingers deep in the mud…cake your nails in the soil and clay…know that the worms that jump out, writhing and churning, I taught them to dance, for you” is sublimely affecting. Wylie is clearly a talent to watch and I just want to live with these wonderful humans they have created. 

BACKSTROKE 

written and directed by Anna Mackmin

Donmar Warehouse, London – until 12 April 2025

running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes including interval

https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/whats-on/33/by-anna-mackmin/backstroke

If, following on from the twin triumphs of The Fear Of 13 and The Great Comet in Tim Sheader’s new leadership of the mighty Donmar, Anna Mackmin’s new play feels like a slight disappointment, it’s still a rewarding, if harrowing and overlong, evening. Backstroke sees mother Beth (Celia Imrie) and daughter Bo (Tamsin Greig) fight, struggle, support and attempt to understand each other over decades. While such family struggles aren’t particularly original subject matter, they unerringly provide fertile dramatic possibilities. 

It’s partially a memory play, the series of reminiscences triggered by Beth’s stroke (the title is a play on words) which has left her incapacitated and hospitalised. It’s also a pretty tough watch: there are graphic depictions of the physical problems (thrush, constipation, reactions to withdrawal from pain relief) that can occur in the long term bed bound, representations of dementia, and the hospital scenes are played out naturalistically and in real time, which may feel like excessively punishing viewing for some audience members. Even the happiest moments, such as when twenty something Bo and her mother joyfully dance to T-Rex’s ‘Get It On’ in their kitchen, come tinged with the sepia hue of melancholy, because, unlike the two women, we know what’s to come.

The acting is magnificent. The script is almost a duet for mother and daughter, and three very fine actors (Lucy Briers, Anita Reynolds and Georgina Rich) are slightly wasted in their functional roles as healthcare professionals, although Reynolds has some lovely moments as the most empathetic of the trio. Despite struggling with her lines at the press performance I saw, Celia Imrie, attired in bohemian shabby chic but before it got trendy, nails Beth’s unique combination of garrulous eccentricity and ruthless manipulation. An artist of sorts and a drifter, she’s the kind of woman who weaponises guilt trips and fat shaming and who happily discusses her enjoyment of cunnilingus in front of her appalled daughter. She’s vain, self-mythologising, slightly monstrous but impossible to entirely dislike, although that may be as much down to Imrie’s charm as anything in Mackmin’s writing. At one point Bo cries “I’m not like you, I don’t have the maternal instinct!” but we don’t see much evidence of that.

Greig is brilliant in the tougher role, having to leap around in playing age from fifties to nine and much in between. This she does with rock solid technique, great sensitivity and exquisite comic timing while never playing the easy laugh, or attempting to ingratiate the character. She acutely finds the rawness of feeling, the helplessness when faced with seemingly impossible choices around the welfare of loved ones: not only is Bo dealing with her mother but she has an adopted daughter with severe behavioural issues. Few actors can match Greig when it comes to conveying civilised women on the edge of despair or possible mania, and she’s on top form here. Her tear-soaked eulogy to her mother at the conclusion is as fine a piece of acting as you can see anywhere in London right now, and it’s matched by a simplicity and beauty in Mackmin’s words that pierces the heart.

Elsewhere, the writing isn’t always so successful. The spiky dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship rings true and is expressed in salty, vivid dialogue, and the grim realities of end-of-life care also come over with clear-eyed, grim accuracy. Structurally though, the play is baggy and confused. Greig’s character spends far too much time on her mobile phone in a bid for the author to demonstrate just how demanding this woman’s existence is, and the terse, brief scenes come to seem formulaic. Having film (striking work by Gino Ricardo Green, Richard Holmes and Damian Daniel) running behind Lez Brotherston’s hybrid hospital/kitchen set, showing both women in different aspects of their lives is more bewildering than elucidating and again becomes wearyingly repetitious. 

The play’s title implies that water will somewhere be involved and so it proves of the second half where a young  Bo is cajoled into swimming by her mother. It’s a beautifully realised section but it’s not clear if water is supposed to be a metaphor for something, and feels like a bit of a non sequitur. The confusion is exacerbated by footage beamed on the back wall of the two actresses in swimming gear but very much looking as they do now. It’s hard to see what Mackmin is getting at, either as writer or director.  

Ultimately, that’s true of the play as a whole. There’s a lot of pain here, a lot of accuracy, and a lot of love. There’s also some bizarre misjudgment, such as a scene involving genital thrush in a hospital bed, that doesn’t know whether it’s hard hitting realism or sitcom. See Backstroke for the acting. Watching performers of this calibre in an intimate space will always be worthwhile.

RICHARD II

by William Shakespeare 

directed by Nicholas Hytner 

Bridge Theatre, London – until 10 May 2025

running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes including interval

https://bridgetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/richard-ii/

Jonathan Bailey may be the principal selling point of the Bridge Theatre’s new Richard II but he’s by no means the whole show. In fact he’s not even the most impressive thing in Nicholas Hytner’s stylish production. 

Although classed as a history play, Shakespeare’s verse drama is really more of a tragedy demonstrating how the hubris of a king leads to a mighty downfall. It’s tempting to see modern parallels in this tale of a self-serving, hotheaded leader whose inability to listen to reason and lack of consideration for other people leads to disgrace and removal of power but Hytner doesn’t belabour the point, despite this being a modern dress staging. 

Instead, he presents it as a noirish thriller with suited and booted men traversing Bob Crowley’s stark black rectangle of a set, placed in the middle of the auditorium as if to to make eavesdroppers of us all on the royal and political intrigues, while Grant Olding’s moody soundtrack thrums omnipresently and Bruno Poet’s ingenious lighting does the heavy lifting in terms of delineating the shifting locales. Machinations are thrashed out in bars, political executions happen in tawdry wastelands, a fighting pit is hollowed out of the stage floor, a prison cell materialises from below ground, platforms rise and fall to cross cinematically between scenes. It’s an admirably swift, clear rendition of a text that can come across as a bit dry in the wrong hands.

Bailey’s Richard is whimsical, nervy, wired (we see him snorting coke with his acolytes at one point). His petulant assertions of power feel more like the self-obsession of an Insta-handsome celebrity than somebody who truly believes in his divine right to rule, but he finds a viperish darkness in the King when he’s cornered and defeated. Note the venom with which he spits “God save King Henry, unkinged Richard says, and send him many years of sunshine days” at Royce Pierreson’s Bullingbrook, or how in the famed mirror scene he smashes the glass not by casting it on the floor but by head butting it. Vocally, he is lightweight and quirky, finding unexpected humour but not much interest in the verse. It’s a valid take but ultimately it’s the more absurd, self indulgent aspects of Richard’s personality that feel highlighted and that, coupled with the contemporary setting, robs him of much of his majesty.

Pierreson’s physically imposing, charismatic rival has more gravitas, and the contrast between the two men is keenly felt. Some of the verse speaking from the younger actors is below par but Vinnie Heaven’s duplicitous cousin Aumerle is a vivid, beautifully realised creation, as is Phoenix Di Sebastiani’s doomed Mowbray. There is fine, authoritative work from Michael Simkins and Martin Carroll (covering on opening night for an indisposed Clive Wood as John of Gaunt) as a pair of father figures, and an outstanding turn by Amanda Root as an impassioned but sensible Duchess of York, delightfully reconceived here as a bossy but loving Lady of the Manor type with the soul of a tigress underneath the doling out of tea, cake and sympathy.

Hytner is such an intelligent director that he can mess around quite drastically with a well known classical text like this but still remain entirely true to its intent and emphasis. He also has this thrilling ability to marshall a large cast around a performance space in a way that feels epic and full of showmanship but always with definite purpose. 

There’s a lot to enjoy here: it has a filmic feel, and also a refreshing clarity and moments of authentic excitement, and bags of atmosphere. It also, and perhaps unexpectedly, seems like a true company show rather than a star vehicle. Bailey is a striking, energised Richard, but it’s Pierreson that you come away longing to see take on other Shakespearean leads.

THE PASSENGER

by Nadya Menuhin

based on the novel by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

directed by Tim Supple

Finborough Theatre, London – until 15 March 2025

running time: 90 minutes no interval

https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-passenger/

Written in 1938 but lost for eighty years, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel Der Reisende (The Passenger) speaks to our time with a horrible relevance. Set around the events of Kristallnacht, when Nazi supporters terrorised Jews and destroyed or seized their property across German cities, and centred on Otto Silbermann, a wealthy businessman on the run thanks to a religion which causes him to lose everything, despite being married to a gentile, over a couple of tense, terrifying days. It now comes to the theatre in a fluid, accomplished treatment by Nadya Menuhin, given a gut punch of a staging by former Young Vic AD Tim Supple…and there are few more powerful productions currently playing in London.

Part of the reason for this is that Menuhin’s script never feels like an adaptation, possessing a vivid theatricality and mordant, slightly surreal wit. It has a cinematic sweep combined with laser sharp focus, and an urgent, inexorable pace. Director Supple masterfully pitches the play somewhere between a thriller and a waking nightmare, with a technically complex staging (Joseph Alford’s sound and Mattis Larsen’s lighting contribute invaluably to the atmosphere of shuddering foreboding) that never loosens its grip across ninety disturbing but exciting minutes. 

Multi-roling actors lurk and appear out of the gloom surrounding Hannah Schmidt’s tiled square set (the audience surrounds the action) to accuse, abuse, engage and just occasionally to comfort Robert Neumark Jones’s Otto, like figures in a dream, the soundtrack thrums along rhythmic and unsettling, and individual moments startle and shock. Mime, shadow then total darkness are used to compelling effect and any hint of style over substance is quelled by the truth and precision of the performances (the five strong cast never hit a single false note) and the horrendous relevance of the story’s themes. This is compelling, richly inventive theatre-making of the highest order, and the sense of creatives and cast all sharing the same vision for the production is exhilaratingly palpable.

Where The Passenger proves so especially troubling, and so timely, is in its depiction of ordinary people getting on with their lives against a background of mounting evil. A simple game of chess becomes almost unbearably tense when one of the participants is wearing a swastika armband while the other is a Jew, albeit one who hasn’t disclosed his religion. The temperature in the room dips when Otto blithely opines that the unrest won’t amount to much and will be over soon, the eroticism of an encounter on a train with an aloof, beautiful fellow passenger (Kelly Price, sublime)  is undercut with distress as the realisation dawns on her of how much trouble the Jews are actually in.

Neumark Jones brilliantly conveys Otto’s journey from self-assured urbanity to blind panic and incomprehension at the way his world is imploding and at what head-spinning speed. The other four actors manage to make it feel as though there’s a cast of dozens, and every one of them shines. Ben Fox is chilling as the worm-turning subordinate emboldened to castigate Otto by the anti-Semitic regime on the rise, Dan Milne breaks the heart as a decent man horribly attacked by Nazi goons, and Eric MacLennan draws a striking contrast between a pompously competitive chess player and an asylum inmate at the edges of his sanity. Price, the sole woman, deploys outstanding physical and vocal technique plus terrific stage presence as she morphs thrillingly between kindly no-nonsense nurse, a slatternly, deranged anti-Semite, then Otto’s sensible, appalled wife, and finally the elusive, intriguing beauty that comes closest to helping our beleaguered hero.

The ending hurts and haunts: the rhythm and cadences of Supple’s production reach boiling point in a stark, loud, distressing sequence where Otto is incarcerated with other humans deemed undesirable by the ruling regime, before finding release, through impenetrable darkness, in the noise of trains whooshing endlessly along tracks. Any sense of comfort is fleeting though, punctured by the thought that this sound – an aural motif throughout the evening – may well be that of the transport that conveyed countless innocent souls to Auschwitz, Belsen, Sobibor, Treblinka and so on: it’s cruel, clever….and the stuff of great theatre.

The Passenger is essential viewing.

UNICORN

by Mike Bartlett

directed by James Macdonald

Garrick Theatre, London – until 26 April 2025

running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval

https://www.unicorntheplay.co.uk

A brand-new play by an established, acclaimed writer and starring a trio of telly names who are equally adept at stage work, feels like a refreshingly old-fashioned proposition, a throwback to West End vehicles of yesteryear. Clearly Mike Bartlett’s new Unicorn, starring Erin Doherty and reuniting the magic team of TV’s The Split’s Stephen Mangan and Nicola Walker is what audiences want: the limited season is pretty much sold out already. A provocative look at a middle-aged couple opening up their marriage, after a couple of false starts, to a young woman (Doherty) several decades their junior, it’s not dissimilar to the same writer’s Cock, last seen in the West End with Jonathan Bailey a couple of years ago, but with polyamory instead of bisexuality as its spice of interest.

Bartlett’s most ambitious stage work (Albion, King Charles III, 13, Earthquakes In London) has a lot to say about humanity and the state of the nation as a whole and with Unicorn he tries to have it both ways. So, while Walker’s Polly and Mangan’s Nick are navigating their marriage through tricky new waters, they and sexual interloper Kate (their ‘unicorn’) also pontificate at length on subjects as random as bygone TV programmes, gender roles and the way that dating and relationships has changed since the pre-digital age. This is a very talky play, and James Macdonald’s slick but static staging mostly has the cast facing front spouting lines like “I don’t know if people change but life does” from random benches and sofas. 

Despite the quality of the acting, it’s not a very theatrical evening. Nor is it a sexy one, although maybe Bartlett’s point is partly that ordinary people can find their relationships going into extraordinary territories; such action as there is, is more toecurling than titillating. At one point Nick starts to talk about butt play, and Polly responds with “do you really want that to be the next topic?”, a line that feels symptomatic of a play that repeatedly throws subjects into the air but doesn’t really do anything with them. In the aftermath of discovering an infidelity, Polly describes their situation as “bloody…it’s fucking Greek!” but actually it isn’t, there’s plenty of swearing and complaining, but the dramatic temperature seldom rises above the tepid. The staccato structure of brief, terse scenes doesn’t help.

Like two thirds of its principal characters, Unicorn feels depressingly middle-aged. There’s some rueful wit (Polly refers to signs of ageing as early symptoms of death, and complains that her hesitant husband uses words like ‘tangibility’ in sexual situations) but the overall tone is whiny and sour. It’s never clear why we should care about these self absorbed characters, about whom we learn surprisingly little beyond their professions (Polly is a poet, Nick a ENT doctor, and Kate in a less than plausible pivot goes from aspiring writer to trainee barrister). 

Walker and Mangan are technically superb actors with a natural likability and chemistry that goes some way towards redeeming the tedious married couple. Doherty fares less well, although that may be a fault in the writing, and Kate seems mostly mannered and disapproving, where she should perhaps be a free spirit. I was never convinced that there was a sexual charge between any of these people.

Bartlett‘s script lurches into darker territory in the second half, but it’s hard to get emotionally invested when the characters remain so resolutely unknowable, and the whole thing would benefit from being approximately an hour shorter. There’s little here that’s revelatory or even particularly insightful, and the anguish never cuts deep enough. As far as plays about the uncomfortable truths within intimate relationships go, Unicorn is pallid and undernourished next to, say, Patrick Marber’s Closer, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, or indeed Bartlett’s own Cock (the play!).

Unicorn ultimately doesn’t make polyamory seem like a particularly attractive relationship choice and it’s “I love you, I love you too, I love you three” conclusion feels pretty pat. Finely acted and produced with the attractive sheen of a West End budget, it’s a decent enough night out, but one that possibly won’t stay with you for long after you’ve left the theatre. I was hugely disappointed. 

ELEKTRA

by Sophokles 

translation by Anne Carson

directed by Daniel Fish

Duke of York’s Theatre, London – until 12 April 2025

running time: 75 minutes no interval

https://elektraplay.com

Well, you can’t accuse Brie Larson of playing it safe. For her West End debut the Oscar winner has chosen this bold, eccentric and (I suspect) highly divisive project which sees avant garde American director Daniel Fish (primarily known here for his radical rethink of Broadway classic Oklahoma!) and Canadian poet Anne Carson take on Sophokles (or Sophocles, depending on which spelling you favour). This Elektra (not Electra, got that?!) is likely to piss off as many people as it delights but, love it or hate it, there’s no denying that Fish’s alienating vision of revenge and matricide in a war torn world is all-encompassing and uncompromising.

The trappings are modern (Larson wails into a microphone, Patrick Vaill’s Orestes carries a motorcycle helmet, a wan-looking cuddly toy hangs on the bare brick back wall, a war correspondent’s reportage of recently clearing al-Assad’s torture prisons in Syria is amplified over the sound system as dry ice engulfs the revolving stage), but the production has a ceremonial feel. With the dissonant choral chanting, stylised movement (choreography by Annie-B Parson) and all-pervasive sense of foreboding, it’s more holistic, cathartic event than traditional play, speaking to the theatre of Ancient Greece that Sophokles was writing for, as much as it does to the playhouses of today. 

Gawd knows, it won’t be for everyone but it’s a legitimate attempt to reinterpret classical tragedy through a contemporary lens without sugaring the pill by making it into a more comfortably familiar dramatic form. It’s resolutely strange and desolate, and singularly unwilling to ingratiate: you’ll either embrace Fish’s concept or you won’t, but you may find yourself haunted by it, just as the black ink seeps inexorably all over Doey Lüthi’s costumes and what there is of Jeremy Herbert’s set as the bitter tale progresses, as if to suggest that the destruction of war and bloodthirst for vengeance contaminates everyone and everything.

“To exist is pain” moans Carson’s text, pitched somewhere between poetry and living nightmare much as Fish’s staging is suspended between performance art and relatable drama, and less adventurous theatregoers may find this very thought flashing through their minds in the course of this challenging eighty minutes. The tendency of Greek tragedy to tell rather than show coupled with this show’s propensity towards static tableaux (at moments the only movement on stage is the revolve, a rising scrim and the machine squirting black gunk everywhere) suggests that boning up on the story before you go might be a good idea if you’re a Sophocles/Sophokles neophyte. But whereas on, say, last year‘s West End celebrity casting misfire Opening Night, there was a palpable sense that multiple talented creatives were pulling in different directions resulting in a show that never coalesced, here everyone seems to be singing from the same hymnsheet, however esoteric that may be. 

There are recurring motifs – every time Elektra’s murdered father Agamemnon is mentioned there’s the sound of a gunshot, when usurper Aegisthus’s name comes up everybody spits, while each mention of Orestes prompts a noble thump to the chest – that add to the overall impression of a ritual being played out, and the emotional temperature remains cool. Larson does a potent line in disaffection and fury but isn’t required to plumb the soul searing depths Zoe Wanamaker reached in the acclaimed 1997 version at the Donmar and later on Broadway, and her crew cut, t-shirt clad punk princess is also a million miles from Kristin Scott Thomas’s raw grief in the Old Vic production from a decade ago. It’s a creditable stage debut, entirely without vanity, but not a spectacular one.

Stockard Channing’s commanding, fur coated Clytemnestra, her bejewelled fingers tinged with deep green like a verdigris substitute for blood, is a magnetic, witty presence (“that’s no way to talk to your mother!”). An underused Greg Hicks briefly impresses as Aegisthus, her murderous, guilty-as-hell consort Aegisthus, and Vaill as Orestes and Marième Diouf’s Chrysothemis – Elektra’s siblings – make valuable contributions to the landscape of howling misery, although the latter sometimes suffers from audibility issues. 

The chorus of women (Hannah Bristow, Wallis Currie-Wood, Jo Goldsmith-Eteson, Nardia Ruth, Rebecca Thorn, Adeola Yemitan) is probably the most successful aspect of the show. By turns sympathetic then sinister, dressed in a sports gear meets flowing robes combo that marries the concept of Ancient Greece to the present day, and delivering Ted Hearne’s complex harmonies with spinetingling clarity and precision, they are the damaged heartbeat of the piece. 

As I said, this is not going to be everybody’s idea of a rewarding piece of theatre, but it has an integrity and consistency that is impossible to write off, and it’s remarkable to find such a bleak, borderline impenetrable staging in a commercial West End house. The sense of the tragedies of Ancient Greece echoing down the centuries to our time is keenly realised and visually it’s often quite astonishing, but emotional connection is scant. I admired much about this Elektra, but did I actually enjoy it? Not massively, no.

THE GIFT

by Dave Florez 

directed by Adam Meggido

Park Theatre, London – until 1 March 2025

running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval

https://parktheatre.co.uk/event/the-gift/

How would you react if you received a massive poo by post from an anonymous sender? That’s the starting point for Dave Florez’s snappy comedy, a merry three hander that begins in a state of amusing revulsion and ends up being an entertaining, if not particularly deep, look at sibling relationships in early middle age and what happens when a marriage loses its sheen. 

The Gift is populated by the sort of sweary, affluent North Londoners (the loss of a table reservation in a Crouch End sushi restaurant is the source of almost as much consternation as the origin of the offending turd in the first scene) you might expect to find in the audience at the Park Theatre, although it also feels like the sort of script and production that would have played for years in the West End a couple of decades ago. With its bourgeois characters antagonising each other but fundamentally being full of mutual affection beneath the surface irritations, it reminded me a little of Yasmina Reza’s long running Art. 

However, where the catalyst for that stroppy trio being at each other’s throats was an all white modern painting, here it’s an excremental MacGuffin in a patisserie box that spurs self-obsessed advertising exec Colin (Nicholas Burns) into paroxysms of navel-gazing while the tensions in the marriage of his sister (Laura Haddock) to his best friend (Alex Price) are exposed. It’s pretty slight but a lot of fun, and Adam Meggido’s crisp staging, played out on Sara Perks’s suitably soulless urban kitchen-cum-living room set, thrums along persuasively, though I’m not convinced it would be quite so satisfying, or plausible, without such a tremendous cast. 

Florez’s creations aren’t bad people but nor are they entirely good, and it’s in those grey areas that the majority of the play’s dramatic meat is to be found, as well as some tangy psychological insights. Burns and Haddock make convincing siblings: he, boisterously unruly and emotionally incontinent while she is warm but incisive with an intriguing mean streak. Price makes something sharp, funny and relatable out of the blustering, opinionated sweetheart stuck in the middle of them, whose attempts to resolve a tricky situation don’t go according to plan.

Florez’s dialogue is smart and nicely turned, provoking chuckles rather than uproarious laughter perhaps, and I doubt I would have bought into the play’s premise (would somebody even as hysterical as Colin really devote so much time to hunting down past loves and foes to discover who might be his toilet-based tormentor?!) if the acting weren’t so good. It ends on a sweet, uplifting note that feels fitting for a comedy that is ultimately less outrageous than it thinks it is. The Gift is a sharp, cute, engaging piece of theatre that probably won’t linger long in the memory but makes for a thoroughly diverting night out that’s likely to be extremely popular.

& JULIET

Music and lyrics by Max Martin

Book by David West Read

Directed by Luke Sheppard

on National UK tour – at New Wimbledon Theatre, London until 1 February 2025 then tour continues to Aberdeen, Leicester, Dublin, Woking, Bradford, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Birmingham, Southend, Stoke, Sheffield, Newcastle, Truro and Cardiff

running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval

https://www.andjulietthemusical.co.uk

With a unique combination of Shakespearean quotes, wise-cracking humour, garishly beautiful spectacle and some of the most uplifting pop bangers of the ‘90s and the ‘00s, & Juliet is the classiest of jukebox musicals. This reimagining of what might’ve happened if Juliet chose NOT to drink the poison when she thinks Romeo has died, is populated with familiar pop numbers by Max Martin, whose name may not be familiar to the lay person but whose songs (Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’, Britney’s ‘…Baby One More Time’, Pink’s ‘Perfect’, Bon Jovi’s ‘It’s My Life’, Backstreet Boys’s ‘I Want It That Way’ and ‘Backstreet’s Back’…the list is endless and all featured here) most certainly are. Surely there are few modern musicals more tuneful or as rambunctiously life-affirming, and seeing it again in this energetic, exhilarating touring version reconfirms why it ran so long in the West End and has enjoyed international success (the Broadway iteration has already been playing for a couple of years and shows no signs of moving on). 

Book writer David West Read is one of the scribes on TV’s beloved Schitt’s Creek and his script for this gorgeous tuner has some of the same off-the-wall wit tempered with moments of surprising emotional depth. He also borrows liberally from the Bard (and not just Romeo and Juliet) so that one moment a character is using modern parlance (there’s a bracingly contemporary, if simplistic, attitude to relationships and gender) and the next they’ve switched seamlessly to verse. The songs of course are utter earworms that would carry the evening even if almost everything else wasn’t so enjoyable. 

Luke Sheppard’s production, dressed up with Jennifer Weber’s dynamic, pop video-inspired dances and the dazzling designs of Soutra Gilmour (set) and Paloma Young (costumes) which fuse Elizabethan ruffs with clubwear and pop art with Olde Worlde elegance, is a turbo-charged treat. It feels a little scaled down from the original and what you can currently see on Broadway (there’s no revolve or rising platform, Juliet only has one parent now, and the vehicle that conveys the leading players from Verona to Paris has been downgraded from an elaborately decorated caravan to a lightbulb-strewn rickshaw) but it doesn’t matter much.

If the physical production is a tad disappointing for anybody who’s seen the show in one of its sit-down versions, the fizzing energy of the cast makes up for it, and other elements (Howard Hudson’s entrancing lighting, Andrzej Goulding’s video designs and Bill Sherman’s consistently enthralling orchestrations and arrangements) remain transporting. This is about as much fun as you can have in a theatre, and Sheppard crucially never loses sight of the humanity amongst the roving spotlights, confetti cannons, camp humour and bravura belting.

The lynchpin to that humanity, and indeed to the overall success of this edition of & Juliet, is a sensational performance from Lara Denning as Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, whose efforts to rewrite her husband’s male-centric trajectory for our heroine exposes the fault lines in her own marriage. Denning has the inspired comic instincts of a true clown as Anne inserts herself into Juliet’s story as her hyper-supportive “yasss girl” best friend, but also conveys with piercing emotional clarity the hurt and rage of a wife sidelined by the ambitions and perceived indifference of the husband she adores. Vocally she is stunning, with a rich, rangy diva-esque belt of many colours, culminating in a shatteringly powerful second act version of the ballad ‘That’s The Way It Is’ that pretty much out-Dions Céline. This is a star turn, full of detail, craft and sheer charisma, that ought to catapult Ms Denning to the top of every casting directors list of multi-faceted musical leading ladies (producers of Death Becomes Her, which surely must be making West End plans, please take note).

As is appropriate for a show that trumpets female empowerment, the women really lead from the front here. Newcomer Geraldine Sacdalan’s Juliet is a hyperkinetic ball of charm, enthusiasm and love. Tiny but mighty, she reads as palpably younger than Miriam-Teak Lee originally, and feels like an actual teenager even more than Lorna Courtenay who premiered the role in North America. This Juliet is a beguiling fusion of can-do attitude, boundless but never obnoxious self-confidence and an irresistible generosity of spirit. She also has a tremendous voice, fearlessly and accurately attacking the role’s taxing demands. Sandra Marvin as the doting Nurse with a romantic past of her own is a weapons-grade delight: a hilarious, deeply lovable belter with a mega-watt smile as big as her heart, she’s just fabulous. 

Jordan Broatch finds real melancholy but also great humour and a core of steel in Juliet’s non-binary friend May and Kyle Cox makes the young Parisian aristocrat they fall for into an utterly adorable goofball, permanently in the grip of mindless apprehension until he recognises his authentic self. TV star Ranj Singh plays his imperious father and, while he lacks the virile authority of his predecessors David Bedella (London) and Paolo Szot (Broadway), he proves a surprisingly adept song and dance man, and has a terrific rapport with the divine Ms Marvin. Jay McGuiness, formerly of boyband The Wanted, is Shakespeare and, surprisingly given his pop background, turns out to be a better actor than singer, offering tentative vocals but capturing the youthful swagger and arrogance of the feted writer. He doesn’t as yet fully convey William’s distress when he realises how close he has come to losing his beloved Anne, but his performance is likely to grow as the tour continues. 

Seeing multiple casts take on these roles and bring their own strengths and hues is testament to the malleability of West Read’s writing and Sheppard’s vision: & Juliet feels a lot less ‘cookie cutter’ from company to company than many other long runners, and that’s a rare and beautiful thing. So too is the sheer joy and delight it elicits from paying customers. This remains a thunderous crowd pleaser, one that, for a couple of technicolored hours, makes the world seem like a brighter, kinder place, and right now that’s something we could all do with. The magic continues.