ajhlovestheatre

THE GLASS MENAGERIE 

by Tennessee Williams 

directed by Jay Miller

The Yard Theatre, London – until 10 May 2025

running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes including interval 

https://www.theyardtheatre.co.uk/events/the-glass-menagerie

It’s fitting to close a theatre building (and this iteration of The Yard has joyfully occupied a canal-adjacent corner of Hackney Wick since 2011 while a larger, improved version is set to open in 2026) with Tennessee Williams’s classic memory play. The Glass Menagerie is a gorgeous piece of writing, an elegiac, poetic meditation on family ties and dependencies, etched in guilt and sorrow but with pops of faintly ridiculous humour. Crucially and appropriately, it’s a play all about commemorating and analysing the past. The Yard’s Artistic Director Jay Miller stages it as a ravishing, shabby-chic, vaguely anachronistic last dance of regret, awash with feeling and flights of imagination. 

As a production this is very on-brand for The Yard: it’s wildly eccentric, achingly cool but feels as in tune with the author’s intentions as it is with the unconventional but atmospheric warehouse space it’s playing in. I laughed more than usual at this bittersweet play and marvelled at the cheekiness of some of Miller’s choices but still had the required lump in my throat during the final scenes. 

The Wingfield family, Amanda and her adult children Tom and Laura, cloistered together in a tiny St Louis apartment surviving on a meagre income while the mother recalls bygone days of moneyed gentility, are a stand-in for Williams’s own (Tennessee’s real first name was actually Thomas). Tom Varey’s Tom, looking back on his fractured home, has in this version become a multidisciplinary artist: although the text refers to him as a poet, he’s first discovered here as a painter, clad in overalls and head-mounted light visor, working on the back wall of the stage as the audience files in. 

Cécile Trémolière’s set looks like an art installation, with a chaise longue and (inventively used) wardrobe marooned atop scatterings of the dust we all eventually come to, while a large sand pile is studded with motifs from the text such as multiple blue roses and the telephone Amanda makes increasingly desperate sales calls on, bursting through. Meanwhile, outsize beaded curtains hang, a larger than life sized image of the absent father beams down jocularly next to a giant, unattainable moon. It’s simultaneously literal and dream-like, an impression reinforced by Josh Anio Grigg’s haunting, reverb-heavy music and sound design where single words and phrases are repeated like fragments of memory, and by the pearlescent make-up on all the other actors except Varey, rendering them as not-quite real, yet entirely plausible, as they’re caught under Sarah Readman’s effective lighting which goes from stark to sensuously colourful by the second.

This is a play that sometimes in performance can feel a little precious but under Miller’s bold guidance, one is struck by the youthfulness and energy it can muster. The exquisite language and delicate characterisations are underscored by mini-explosions of colour, light and sound, and the piece reveals itself as an altogether more muscular, vital beast than it seemed in its last two major London outings: John Tiffany’s expressionistic, dead-of-night-set Broadway transfer, and the gentle Amy Adams revival which split the role of Tom between two actors. 

This production isn’t perfect. Lambdog1066’s hipsterish costumes, sometimes more redolent of the 1970s than the period of the play, are maybe trying a bit too hard (Amanda’s cotillion dress donned for the arrival of the long awaited gentleman caller is unhelpfully hideous, while Jad Sayegh as Jim, said caller, is somewhat bizarrely got up to look like Jim Carrey in The Mask) but they are certainly striking. There’s a fantasy dance sequence for Laura and Jim that doesn’t really add anything. For all Miller’s obvious understanding of, and affection for, the text, there are moments when the cast are stuck in one corner of the large stage leaving the majority of the audience staring at blank space (there’s also onstage seating for no particular reason).

Still, I’d rather sit through a take with this much guts and imagination than a more staid, conventional version, especially when the acting is so good. Sharon Small’s Amanda is a magnetic combination of sweetness and steel, and probably the most sympathetic rendering of this role I’ve ever seen. The love for her children is palpable, and her muted, brave reaction when she realises that Jim is not going to be the answer to her mother’s prayer for Laura is as heartbreaking as it is subtle. The volcanic fury that follows is grounded in real human feeling and disappointment. It’s a flawless performance.

Equally compelling is Varey who invests Tom with a throbbing vein of torment, but also a baggy, louche charm and slight air of camp. His exasperation is deeply felt but so is his affection for his now-lost mother and sister, which is as dysfunctional as it is potent (note the way he assumes the foetal position when being held by Laura). 

Eva Morgan’s neurodivergent Laura is a beautiful creation (first seen wearing modern ear defenders), as delicate as the tiny glass animals she treasures, and almost convulsing with panic or staying eerily still during moments of high stress, but with a gentle self-possession and wry humour that makes it all the more gut-wrenching when things don’t pan out for her. I’ve never seen the moment when Amanda cajoles her daughter into opening the front door to the stranger coming for dinner played with so much tenderness and care, and watching Morgan blossom then deflate is quietly devastating. Sayegh brings an authentic warmth to the ambitious but kind young man who offers a brief glimpse of normality and romance. 

On a fun note, the production makes much use of the tinkling piano and doomy  bombast of Shakespear’s Sister’s 1992 hit ‘Stay’ (an instrumental version plays during the pre-show then returns at the end as in increasingly desperate Tom tries to outrun his memories, in an inspired bit of staging). The melancholic tone of the song suits the script but is doubly appropriate as Jim’s nickname for Tom is Shakespeare, and The Glass Menagerie centres on his sister. 

The sense of America on the brink of something seismic (in the time frame of the play as written, it’s WW2), with unhappy souls burying their misery in liquor and casual encounters, feels shudderingly persuasive at the present time, but Miller and team don’t belabour this, investing the text with magic realism and an infinite amount of care. The ending is galvanising and emotionally affecting, befitting a production that thinks outside the box but never loses sight of the riches contained in that box. It’s a hell of a way to say goodbye to a space that has presented some of the most interesting, shape shifting fringe theatre London has seen in the last fourteen years. Even Williams purists may find themselves stirred and surprised by this Glass Menagerie. I loved it.

PUNCH

by James Graham; based on the book Right From Wrong by Jacob Dunne

directed by Adam Penford

The Young Vic, London – until 26 April 2025

running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes including interval 

https://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/punch

Something authentically remarkable happens in the second half of this new James Graham play, probably his most emotionally charged to date. Punch is a distillation of Right From Wrong, Jacob Dunne’s autobiographical account of a criminal youth stemmed by a manslaughter conviction and culminating in an astonishing rehabilitation. There’s a heartstopping moment in act two where we watch David Shields’s guilt-ridden, awkward, barely articulate Jacob tentatively but definitively blossom into somebody with a positive future under the steady, forgiving gaze of the parents of the young man whose life he accidentally ended with a fatally aimed sole punch to the head. The detailed subtlety of Shields’s work against the stoic warmth of Julie Hesmondhalgh and Tony Hirst as the pair of humans who are entitled to vengeful fury but instead choose an entirely different path quietly takes the breath away and elevates Graham’s writing and Adam Penford’s staging, already both quite wonderful, into the stratosphere.

No contemporary playwright can beat Graham when it comes to state-of-the-nation narratives onstage and if Punch doesn’t feel as epic as say Dear England or This House, it provides, with humour and sparky theatricality, a clear roadmap of the social deprivations and conditions that drive a restless working class youngster into petty crime and gang membership. At least, that’s the first half which plays out like a Nottingham-accented stage version of Shameless as Dunne, in a group therapy session, relives his early life in the hardscrabble Meadows Estate, with his scally mates, his well meaning but alcohol abusing single mum and his sullen younger brother. 

Jagged and episodic, it has the ring of savage truth, undoubtedly because it’s culled from Dunne’s actual lived experience. It’s tremendously watchable, staged with genuine panache by Penford and his movement associates Leanne Pinder and Lynne Page, underpinned by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite’s electronica score. In a towering performance, Shields impressively manages the transitions between cocky, wired youth through withdrawn disaffection to maturity and gravitas, his physicality and voice unerringly conveying which stage of life the man we are looking at is in.

It’s the second act though where the play moves into a more fascinating zone as the consequences of Jacob’s actions are subverted by the sheer kindness and almost superhuman grace of Joan and David, the parents of Michael Hodgkinson, whose life support machine was turned off nine days after the fateful punch outside a Nottingham night club. This production is dedicated to Michael’s memory which is a fitting tribute to the young paramedic if no substitute for him living out his full lifespan. 

This second half is extremely moving, all the more so for the lack of histrionics. Graham is too good a writer to make Joan and David into beatific saints, investing them with a questioning humanity that sears as much as it heals. Note the way David states he won’t shake Jacob’s right hand as that is the one he hit Michael with, and you’ll have a hard time getting over the look on Joan’s face as she listens to saved mobile messages from her deceased son. It’s hard to think of another actor as adept as Hesmondhalgh at conveying an innate goodness that never cloys, tempered with direct, warm humour, and Hirst complements her as a man bewildered both by his own feelings and the warm glow of forgiveness emanating from his beloved wife. 

For all the truth and brilliance of the performances, if this weren’t a true story, one might have trouble buying that these people could find such kindness in their hearts, but it’s couched here with such sensitivity and intelligence that instead of incredulity you just find yourself sitting there strangely elated and with tears pouring down your cheeks. Graham’s dialogue is gritty, accessible – sentences get jumbled up or go unfinished as characters try to articulate a myriad of conflicting thoughts- and feels entirely credible.

The acting throughout is magnificent, rooted in truth rather than theatrical grandstanding, each of the performers apart from Shields playing multiple roles. Emma Pallant is so touching as Jacob’s troubled mother and then is a spiky joy as his nice but tough social worker (“you’re on the housing list, but it’s a very long list and there’s no housing”) who bemoans that the local councils seem to favour potholes over people when it comes to fixing what’s broken. There’s equally memorable work from Alec Boaden and Shalisha James-Davis as a bunch of contrasting figures in our anti-hero’s troubled life.

Anna Fleischle’s unit set of a metallic bridge atop a forbidding looking tunnel evoking the walkways and no-go zones of soulless urban estate planning is almost aggressively ugly, which feels about right. By contrast, Robbie Butler’s stunning lighting runs the full gamut from stark to fantastical, conjuring up detention centres, intimidating corridors, dancefloors, churches and dark nights of the soul with technical virtuosity.

Punch is a play about healing, and forgiveness. It’s refreshingly non-preachy and well alive to the flaws in a social system that can so easily write people off, while also acknowledging that there are solutions, some of which are not readily obvious. It also pulls no punches (pun intended) in depicting the dangers of wreckless violence. Ultimately though, it presents the finest of humanity, celebrating how kindness and compassion can genuinely turn around an existence that seemed to have gone to the bad. Provocative, life-enhancing theatre.

KENREX

written by Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian

music composed and performed by John Patrick Elliott

directed by Ed Stamboullouian

Southwark Playhouse, Borough – London, until 15 March 2025

running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes including interval 

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

Reviewing theatre is a privilege and a challenge. Usually the challenge is to pick apart what works and what doesn’t about a production. But what about when a production is so good that not only do you have no criticisms, but you seriously doubt that you have sufficient superlatives? Kenrex is one such show. Billed as “a true crime thriller”, Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian’s genre-busting, technically breathtaking (on every level) piece is so much more than that. 

Performer and co-writer Jack Holden and his genius composer, musician and co-star John Patrick Elliott have form when it comes to shapeshifting almost-monologues, having been responsible for 2021’s Cruise, an evocative trawl through AIDS-era gay Soho that had audiences and critics on their feet in the wake of the pandemic. Brilliant as that was, Kenrex, apparently seven years in the making, is next level magnificent. Co-writer and director Ed Stamboullouian is now on board and drives Holden to even more ambitious heights of storytelling and characterisation, in a staging that takes elements of podcast, thriller, western, rock musical, performance art, stand-up comedy and even classical tragedy, and fuses them into a bold new genre. It’s also remarkable in that it manages to make a grim if fascinating true story into something so unforgettable, shattering and ultimately exhilarating. 

Set simultaneously in the tiny rural American town of Skidmore, Missouri where aggressive outsider Ken Rex McElroy terrorised residents for years, every legal conviction quashed by his showboating defence lawyer Richard Gene McFadin, and in the memory of David Baird, the prosecuting attorney recalling his part in what would turn out to be the final case against the vicious drifter. An entire community is magically, vividly conjured up – the feisty female barkeep, the local butcher and his kindly wife, the scrappy underage girl McElroy impregnates, various others who have been intimidated and abused – as Baird tells the tale of ordinary people who finally decided enough was enough. As with Cruise, Jack Holden plays all of the characters, changing from male to female, young to old, civilised to feral, with an adjustment in voice, stance or emphasis, in a breathtaking display of actorly craft. He’s mesmerising, powerful then tender, pathetic then terrifying, turning on a dime, his handsome features endlessly malleable, as he snarls, simpers, pleads or just looks on with impassive authority. The word “stunning” gets bandied about frequently with regards to acting, but Holden truly is: this is a stupendous performance.

The text, tense, white-hot and vivid, pulls few punches in describing the fear and brutality, shot through with unexpected shards of humour, all underscored and punctuated by Elliott’s thunderous, thrilling score. Tinged with C&W, emo rock and haunting bombast, Elliott’s music works mostly like a film soundtrack but occasionally explodes into full on numbers…it’s wonderful.

In fact, Stamboullouian’s production is packed with wonders. The originality of his staging astonishes: an array of spotlit microphones stands in for an entire community, their systematic unplugging taking on a sinister tone, a neon lit doorway spins and pivots to simulate movement and change of location, a pair of roving spotlights suggests an oncoming truck, the invention is the very stuff of theatre, and it’s executed with razor-sharp precision. Joshua Pharo’s acidic, transformative lighting and Sarah Golding’s galvanic movement direction are indispensable, as is Natasha Fields’s starkly effective set design. 

There are multiple stage pictures that linger long in the memory, but Giles Thomas’s sound design is equally essential to the overall success of the show. At times it’s like listening to a rock concert, at others a radio phone-in…or a seance. Whispers and shouts from a vengeful mob come from behind you, Holden barks, bellows and murmurs into hand held mics. It’s incredibly complex but thoroughly clear.

This is theatrical storytelling at its most dynamic and compulsive, edge-of-your-seat stuff that plays out with a cinematic fluidity and the intensity of a thriller. Holden must be on the brink of major stardom, but this tour de force turn will surely go down as a career highlight. Don’t even think about missing it. Kenrex rocks.

ALTERATIONS 

by Michael Abbensetts, additional material by Trish Cooke

directed by Lynette Linton

National Theatre/Lyttelton, London – until 5 April 2025

running time: 1 hour 50 minutes, no interval 

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

The space where a play takes place is important. The late Sheridan Morley, theatre critic of Punch and International Herald Tribune, once opined that the Piccadilly (currently home to Moulin Rouge) was such an unsympathetic venue that any show not solid enough to be successfully performed on a busy railway station platform, should never play there. The National’s Lyttelton Theatre isn’t as tricky as that, but it’s the least forgiving of the three South Bank houses, lacking the intimacy of the Dorfman and the imposing uniqueness of the Olivier. I was reminded of Morley’s words watching this sparky, rediscovered 1978 comedy drama by British Guyanese author Michael Abbensetts in the NT’s proscenium house and thinking how much better it would play round the corner in the Dorfman. 

The Lyttelton doesn’t quite swallow Alterations whole, but the sheer size of it means it’s harder work to connect with Abbensett’s vibrant characters and Lynette Linton’s staging than it should be. While the play isn’t truly an overlooked classic, it has a lot to commend it, particularly a free-wheeling humour that surprises and delights, and a thoughtful undertow of seriousness.

It’s certainly not that Linton, one of the most consistently brilliant directors of her generation, can’t master the space, as her uniformly acclaimed 2022 revival of Blues For An Alabama Sky on this very stage proved, but Alterations is a very different kind of play. Although its themes are epic (the experience of Guyanese immigrants coming to late twentieth century UK and their efforts to assimilate and to forge successful futures for themselves sometimes in the face of open racism), its physical scale is small. 

There’s really only one set (the clothing alterations shop of ambitious Guyanese Walker Holt, who projects for himself a future as a high end bespoke tailor, realised in an elaborate but superfluous dream sequence) and Linton and her designer Frankie Bradshaw do as much to open up the piece as possible, blasting it with music (fabulous, reggae-infused work by XANA, another of the director’s regular collaborators), mood-shifting lighting (Oliver Fenwick) and atmosphere. The dinginess and the unease of working class ‘70s London is accurately evoked, as is its vitality and urgency. With moments of stylised movement, a perpetually revolving set and rails of colourful garments flying in and out, it’s certainly striking theatre-making but it sometimes feels more borne out of a need to fill the space rather than to really serve a six character script.

As often with Linton’s work, it’s the detail in the relationships and the pinpointing of humour springing organically from the characters and their situations that is so impressive. The edgy dynamic between Arinzé Kene’s Walker and Horace (Karl Collins, gloriously louche and surprisingly sensitive), the flamboyant, upwardly mobile frenemy with designs on his wife, is superbly done. Cherrelle Skeete as said wife Darlene turns in a beguiling, multi-layered study of a woman whose natural exuberance and formidable strength is under constant attack from disappointment and exasperation at the unreliability of the principal man in her life. 

There’s an absolute peach of a performance from Gershwyn Eustache Jnr as Buster, Walker’s co-worker constantly waiting on the phone for news from the hospital where his wife is about to give birth. Eustache Jnr is a natural clown, able to wring irresistibly funny business out of things as simple as asserting his right to a coffee break or passing round the celebratory liquor. It’s an endearing performance steeped in pathos: his reaction to the long awaited birth when it finally happens is a beautiful, heartwarming thing. A hugely likeable Raphel Famotibe brings a very different energy as Courtney, the second generation kid who’s now as much a Londoner as he is Guyanese, and who floats the interesting idea that the difficulties the older men have with fitting in are as much a generational as a racial issue. There’s fine work too from Colin Mace as Mr Nat, a moneyed white immigrant better able to assimilate in less enlightened times by dint of his skin colour.

Walker as a central character is a curious one. While his desires for betterment and the attendant frustration is easy to understand, it’s harder to feel sympathy for a man who isn’t just a terrible husband to Skeete’s magnificent Darlene but is also giving another (unseen) woman the runaround. An almost unrecognisable Kene invests him with a manic edge but ultimately the actor’s personal charm and charisma is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

Abbensett’s script, with additional material by Trish Cooke, is racy and witty, shifting seamlessly between Caribbean patois and conventional English, the frequently gorgeous dialogue bouncing off the stage with a crowd pleasing vivacity. If it’s essentially all talk and little action, it provides an arresting snapshot of a moment in time, and Linton’s inclusion of a non-speaking Windrush generation couple and a cucumber cool modern day youngster usefully contextualises it within the history of Black Britons. There’s a lot here to love and to think about, but I can’t help feeling most of it would pop and focus so much more satisfyingly in a smaller house.

THE LAST LAUGH 

written and directed by Paul Hendy

Noël Coward Theatre, London – until 22 March 2025

running time: 80 minutes no interval 

https://thelastlaughplay.co.uk

The basic format of Paul Hendy’s delightful play, based on his 2016 film of the same name and a smash hit at last year’s Edinburgh Festival, would seem to be quite simple: a trio of British comedy all-time greats (Tommy Cooper, Bob Monkhouse, Eric Morecambe) hang out in a dressing room shooting the breeze about their craft, careers and personal lives. It’s an opportunity to resurrect some of the most inspired gags and routines from these beloved titans of mirth, and the show does indeed buoy up its enraptured audience on a warm sea of helpless laughter.

But The Last Laugh goes a little deeper than that: the clues are there from the outset in the way that the dressing room mirror lightbulbs sputter and flicker, in the ghostly soundtrack of a distant audience roaring with joy, and the way that the first comedian we encounter, Damian Williams’s gorgeously realised Cooper, materialises out of darkness. It quickly becomes clear that the three men aren’t just reliving their past glories and providing mutual support in the face of demanding schedules and a tough business; each of them is preparing for what will be their final live performances, magically connected for the purposes of this play but in reality several years apart and in different locations, literally ‘the last laugh’. 

This lends a poignancy to the merriment, and elevates what could otherwise have been a series of riotous sketches and uncanny impersonations into something truly special. Watching The Last Laugh is like receiving a warm hug immediately cooled by a brief icy breeze. Anybody who grew up with these comedians will adore this, but equally it’s required viewing for any younger people with a genuine interest in the history of comedy.

Bob Golding (Morecambe), Simon Cartwright (Monkhouse) and the aforementioned Williams are so good and so accurate that the show is almost as eerie as it is hilarious. Almost. Golding nails Morecambe’s off-the-wall joie de vivre and musicality while Williams brilliantly hints at the gleeful curmudgeon that lurked beneath Cooper’s endearingly bumbling exterior, along with his permanent sense that everything is about to go heroically, hysterically wrong. Cartwright beautifully suggests that Monkhouse was perhaps, under the debonair-borderline-smarmy persona, the sweetest of the three. He was certainly the most analytical of the trio when it came to appreciating their craft, and his working knowledge not just of the jokes but of who wrote them make him an easy target for the other mens’s affectionate mockery.

It’s Monkhouse here that makes the interesting observation that he differs from the other two because they are innately funny human beings whereas he just tells jokes well. All three actors transcend mere impersonation to create fully rounded characters, but with joyously familiar vocal tics and body language. They are simply astonishing.

Hendy directs with a commendable lightness of touch and a laser sharp precision. He has also done an inspired job of melding the anecdotes, comic schtik and familiar routines (there are even a couple of songs) into a coherent stage play. There’s zero dramatic conflict in what is essentially a celebration of three iconic talents. Some of the inclusion of biographical details feels a little clunky, and the writing loses momentum when the three men start to bemoan the difficulties of being in showbiz at their level. That said, Morecambe’s description of the addictive, exhilarating nature of making people laugh, citing one particularly successful instance, remembering the audience response itself yet not being able to recall the location or the joke told, isn’t funny in itself but serves as a piercing indictment of what makes funny people tick. 

Lee Newby’s dressing room set and Johanna Town’s lighting are so atmospheric you can almost smell the greasepaint and the dust. As a whole, The Last Laugh is more on-the-nose than the phenomenally successful The Play What I Wrote which conjured up Morecambe and Wise in a more impressionistic way than what Hendy and gang are attempting here. The impersonations are phenomenally good but the humanity behind the comedy genius is potently evoked in all three cases. It’s perhaps a rather slight piece but it is a wonderfully enjoyable one, and nostalgia has seldom felt so seductive or so uplifting. 

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.