ajhlovestheatre

ALLEGRA

by Peter Quilter

directed by Stephen Mear

Harold Pinter Theatre, London – until 8 August 2026

running time: 2 hours including interval 

https://www.allegraplay.com

Maureen Lipman is many things: a formidable artist equally at home on stage and screen, a witty, relatable writer, an outspoken commentator on international politics, a Dame, and a gifted director (her 2017 production of late husband Jack Rosenthal’s cabbie comedy The Knowledge was a treat). She’s a brilliant comedienne and, as seen in the 2023 revival of Rose, Martin Sherman’s monologue of Jewish resilience and survival, a fine actor of extraordinary potency and poignancy. What she doesn’t come across as though, at least on stage, is especially warm, and that’s a problem for Allegra, the song-studded comedy by Peter Quilter now playing a month-long West End season following a brief national tour. 

Lipman plays the title role, an extravagantly eccentric pensioner with a penchant for breaking into song at the drop of a hat, apparently unable, when off her meds (which she constantly is), to perceive the difference between real life and the elaborate song-and-dance numbers in her head. This gets Allegra in a lot of trouble with nearby businesses, where she’s seen as a bit of a menace, and with the local constabulary, much to the exasperation and worry of her slightly younger brother (a game John Middleton). Lipman brings beautiful comic timing and dominating presence to a role that requires those things but would also benefit from a kooky, off-the-wall fragility and sense of wonder. She’s too flinty and knowing, though genuinely moving later on when Allegra gives in to pressure, takes her pills and stops singing, becoming just a husk of the woman she was.

As theatrical premises go, the perception of fantasy versus reality, and the conflict between personal happiness and conforming to the norm, are both ripe with dramatic possibilities. Unfortunately Quilter’s flavourless writing, reminiscent of an undemanding 1980s TV sitcom, explores very few of them, preferring instead a flat, presentational style where the jokes only intermittently land. 

Allegra’s irrepressible joie de vivre in contrast to the humdrum lives around her, and the assumption that a person of advanced years should fit uncomplainingly into a well-behaved box while their imagination and exuberance ebbs away, makes an intriguing but unexplored jumping-off point for a play that promises but doesn’t deliver. Stephen Mear’s visually attractive staging puts La Lipman – resplendent in a pink-tinged fright wig from JJ Wigs and suitably outlandish outfits courtesy of designer Justin Williams – centre stage, but there’s nothing he or his leading lady can do to rescue the wan script.

The dialogue is punctuated by vintage easy listening songs, including a slightly awkward audience participation singalong, that register but never soar as Allegra disappears into her own special world. ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’ fares best because at least we get tulips bursting through bits of Williams’ kitchen set and an attempt at showbiz exuberance. ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ gets rainbow umbrellas and cute dance moves (Mear also choreographs, and he is authentically one of the UK’s best), but it’s never clear if the aim is nostalgia or irony.

There’s a lack of magic in the gulf between Allegra’s florid imagination and what we get to see: nothing is as funny, touching or transporting as it should be. Elizabeth Bower and Bailey Patrick work hard as, respectively, Allegra’s Czech carer-cum-housekeeper and an increasingly cheesed-off policeman, but the writing gives them insufficient to play with. With the exception of the title role, the characters are thinly drawn to the point of translucence.

Allegra, the character and the play, should touch the heart of, and connect with, everyone – after all, we all have elderly loved ones in our lives, or at least harbour hope to reach a proper old age – but almost everything falls flat. It’s a star vehicle where the star feels miscast. 

FUN HOME

Music by Jeanine Tesori

Book and lyrics by Lisa Kron 

based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel

directed by Sarah Frankcom

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester – until 1 August 2026

running time: 100 minutes no interval 

https://www.royalexchange.co.uk/event/fun-home/

Although Fun Home breaks so many of the rules of traditional musical theatre (only a handful of real numbers, although music runs through, under and over the dialogue like an extra character, a female lead who mainly watches from the sidelines, a deeply flawed anti-hero who makes some appalling choices), every time I see it I become more convinced it’s the most perfect modern tuner. Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron have created a searing modern classic. Sarah Frankcom’s stunning in-the-round production for Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre matches the brilliance of Sam Gold’s original New York and London versions and Róisín McBrinn’s stylishly sepulchral Dublin staging a couple of years ago. There are certain visual choices dictated by Alison Bechdel in the autobiographical graphic novel upon which this Olivier-nominated and Tony-winning Best Musical is based, that each iteration shares, but every version to date is distinctive and finds new colours in this unique musical. 

Visual artist Alison Bechdel grew up with the suspicion that her father Bruce – teacher, aesthete and a funeral director – was gay, only to have that confirmed when he took his own life within months of her own coming out, and she committed her unconventional family history to a pictorial novel that is part exorcism, part exploration. The title is the jokey name the Bechdels gave to the family undertaking business (funeral home = fun home). Kron’s fine script depicts Alison in triplicate: the older woman, played here by Jodie McNee, an artist sitting at her drawing table, summoning up images and figures from her damaged past, the college kid (Alice Audrey O’Hanlon) joyfully discovering love and her own sexuality for the first time, and the child, exuberant but watchful (Harriet O’Shea at the performance I saw, but the kids roles are alternately played by three different teams). It’s a neat, dramatically satisfying concept and one that becomes almost unbearably moving when the three of them interact, as they do in ‘Flying Away’, the luminous, releasing finale.

Tesori has composed the music to three of the greatest American musical theatre scores of the last twenty years (the others being Caroline, or Change and award-winning Kimberly Akimbo, about to get its UK premiere at Hampstead) and her work is so eclectically in tune with the requirements of situation, character and time period that it almost doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Fun Home pastiches the 1970s TV themes that Bechdel grew up with, mixes it up with folk and pop, and then cross-fertilises with an intensity and lyrical beauty that recalls Sondheim at his most interesting. Kron’s lyrics and book make the transition between speech and song barely noticeable. If a tenet of musical theatre is that characters burst into song when they have no other means of expressing themselves, Fun Home is a prime example of that. The score has sweep and drama, a delightful specificity and, at times, an endearing oddness. Snatches of melody shimmer and tantalise, occasionally blossoming into a full blown number, and nothing ever feels wasted.

Visually, this Fun Home is quietly astounding, employing a couple of revolves and a giant, circular light installation that unfurls like a flower, or, less benignly, like a swirling gigantic hydra that threatens to swallow whole the humans engulfed in painful memories and conflicts below. Peter Butler’s scenic design is pretty abstract, augmented by some pieces of antique furniture and at one point an actual coffin, but still gives a strong sense of time and place. Bethany Gupwell’s lighting bathes much of the action in the warm golden glow of memory before whitening out the colour pallet to something stark and unforgiving as the story approaches its shattering, inevitable climax. Yshani Perinpanayagam’s six piece band, perched on one of the upper galleries, sounds impressive and textured but never overwhelms the voices. 

The show is beautifully cast. McNee’s Alison compellingly puts herself through hell remembering traumas past but also finds a compassion for her late, troubled Dad that is tremendously affecting. She’s wonderful, and so is O’Hanlon’s Medium Alison, so open and confused, then enraptured before imperceptibly toughening up as she realises her own survival may depend on drawing a veil over her troubled home life.

Harriet O’Shea’s Small Alison conveys the serious watchfulness of a child who has seen way more than a person of so few years ever should have, and her version of the iconic ‘Ring of Keys’ number where the little girl gets an inkling of her authentic nature (“Why am I the only one who sees you’re beautiful? No, I mean…handsome”) is superb.

As Joan, the rebellious student who becomes Alison’s first love, Natasha Cottriall is gloriously stroppy yet kind, suggesting both a safe haven and a force of nature. As the various men seduced and captivated by Bruce, Lucca Chadwick-Patel registers potently.

Alex Young subtly astonishes as Alison’s mother Helen, an educator and community theatre actress all too aware of the unconventional nature of her marriage. Young offers a nuanced, painfully honest portrayal of a woman for whom being on edge is her permanent default mode, but who’s smart enough to see the damage being wrought. Every student of acting through song needs to see Young’s extraordinary version of ‘Days And Days’, simultaneously a cri de coeur aria, an admission of complicity and a warning. It simply doesn’t get better than this.

Nigel Harman as Bruce is quite different from any of his predecessors, giving us less the self-hating, pernickety closeted man marinated in shame and disillusion, and more the self-possessed ‘sliver fox’ who on some level feels he’s entitled to have it all. When he sings “I might still break a heart or two” we are in no doubt that he believes it. His arrogance gives way to an almost childlike tentativeness once he realises he and Alison are cut from similar cloth. The sense of a man who imposes painstaking rigour and precision on his restoration of artefacts and antiques to mask his messy and murky inner life is still keenly felt, and his flashes of incandescent rage are utterly chilling. This is career-redefining work, magnificently well sung and shedding thrilling new light on one of the most fascinating and problematic leading roles in all musical theatre.

Ultimately, Fun Home, especially when done as well as it is here, demonstrates that something unremittingly sad can prove utterly exhilarating, with that shaft of light that illuminates the darker recesses of the human soul. This Manchester premiere is an unabashed triumph, a world class version of a beautiful gut-punch of a musical. Do not miss it, and take tissues.

ARCHDUKE

by Rajiv Joseph

directed by Lyndsey Turner 

Royal Court Theatre, London – until 25 July 2026

running time: 2 hours including interval

https://royalcourttheatre.com/events/archduke/

Rajiv Joseph’s rollicking, troubling dark comedy only premiered off-Broadway late last year, so this must be one of the most speedy theatrical transatlantic crossings in recent memory. It’s not hard to see why; despite its theme and setting (it’s a surreal revisionist take on the run-up to the assassination in 1914 Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an event that precipitated WW1), Archduke has an unmistakable urgency and relevance to right now. 

Lyndsey Turner’s gruesomely magical production for the Royal Court is not a replica of the Roundabout Theatre version that New Yorkers enjoyed last year and it is quite a treat, if you’ve got a strong enough stomach. There are echoes of Beckett, Orton, Stoppard and Peter Barnes (fittingly, all writers who have had work produced at the Court) in Joseph’s script, as history, absurdity and bonkers swirl headily together. He plays fast and loose with the historical facts but has a masterly command of macabre, gleeful humour and meatily vivid language. 

Joseph sees, in this tale of three apparently expendable young men with hopeless futures and scant critical thinking skills recruited to carry out a political assassination that will have global repercussions, a metaphor for similarly impressionable people in the present day being groomed and indoctrinated into extremist organisations. (“It’s not your fault you’re choking!..You could have had a life, but now you don’t… someone took your life away from you, son! Someone took it all away. How’s that make you feel?”) He doesn’t belabour the point, couching it in salty dialogue and a gallery of characters ranging from the endearing (if morally questionable) to the downright terrifying.

Stanley Morgan and Chris Walley make a delightful tragicomic double act as Gavrilo and Nedeljko, their youthful lives blighted by malnutrition and tuberculosis, but both possessed of a stubborn vitality that makes you care from the outset. There are shades of a young Vladimir and Estragon, only much funnier, in their naive, periodically aggressive ramblings. They’re joined by Abraham Popoola’s winningly disdainful Trifko, who initially imagines himself their superior but eventually realises he too is a pawn in somebody else’s game. 

The principal player of said game is Serbian army officer and Black Hand gang leader Dragutin ‘Apis’ Dimitrijevic, an actual historical figure manifested here as a rampant comic-horror turn, equal parts bluster, bile and brutality. He brags, with nauseating explicitness, about his murder of the late Serbian King and Queen, and the bullets embedded in his body like a badge of honour beneath his lavishly brocaded uniform (excellent costumes by Evie Gurney). Marc Wootton delivers a brilliant, unsettling tour de force as this reprehensible, vain but fascinating bully, relishing the extravagant speechifying, and the malignant control he exerts over everybody else. Apis comes armed with his loquacious cook (a gloriously deranged Janice Connolly), hell bent on feeding the boys up but complicit and deadly beneath all the surface cosiness. Cherries in brandy are not exactly a common delicacy but I doubt they’ll be on anybody’s menu after watching Archduke…

The tone throughout is of quirky comic lunacy with a constant undertow of simmering threat. Joseph doesn’t overemphasise the parallels between Middle Europe in the early twentieth century and now, but he doesn’t need to. The message that hopeless people can be coerced into doing desperate things registers potently through the ages. The violence, when it comes, has a wild cartoonish edge (outstanding fight direction by Sam Lyon-Behan) but not without acknowledging the excruciating pain being inflicted. 

Designer Es Devlin sets the whole thing in what appears to be a satisfyingly well ordered railway tunnel, murky-dark and snaking just around a corner that we can’t see.  The dark cylindrical void is filled for the final scene with a sumptuous train carriage, carrying Gavrilo, Nedeljko and Trifko to Sarajevo as they head off to alter the course of world history, followed by their prescribed suicides (“it’s not a suicide…so much…but rather an embracing of Serbian National Pride” as Apis helpfully points out). Devlin’s work here is a gorgeous feat of stage design, complemented by lighting by Neil Austin that gives us just enough illumination to see what’s going on, but not sufficient that we can begin to work out how Skylar Fox’s understated but impressive tricks and illusions are effected. The whole production has bags of atmosphere.

For all its cleverness and sinister humour, Archduke ultimately feels slightly less than the sum of its parts. It somewhat runs out of dramatic and comic steam a little before the end, something that not even Turner’s well nigh flawless staging can disguise. It’s a richly enjoyable, thought-provoking evening though, and more accessible than the same writer’s Bengal Tiger At Baghdad Zoo, seen late last year at the Young Vic. If your sense of humour tends towards the gallows, you’ll find a lot to enjoy here.

ARCADIA 

by Tom Stoppard 

directed by Carrie Cracknell

Duke of York’s Theatre (soon to be Tom Stoppard Theatre!), London – until 12 September 2026

running time: 3 hours including interval 

https://arcadiawestend.co.uk

Claimed by some to be Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece, Arcadia has now been entrancing and perplexing theatregoers for over thirty years. Buoyed up by generally stellar reviews and the recent death of the playwright, Carrie Cracknell’s in-the-round staging sold out at the Old Vic and now arrives in the West End, substantially recast, at the Duke of York’s, a venue soon to be renamed for Stoppard. That’s a fitting tribute, given the writer’s outstanding long term contribution to British theatre, plus his legitimate connection to this particular playhouse. His Artist Descending A Staircase played here in the 1990s, as did the transfer of his 2006 Rock’n’Roll from the Royal Court, while a starry earlier revival of Arcadia was a success on this stage in 2009.

The word Arcadia in classical literature and mythology suggests a rural idyll, where humans and nature co-exist in tranquil harmony. Stoppard’s Arcadia is set in an English equivalent thereof, the fictional Derbyshire country house Sidley Park, across two time periods. In 1809, sixteen year old Thomasina Coverly (a sublime Isis Hainsworth) studies mathematics with tutor Septimus Hodge (Seamus Dillane, wry, charming and non-threateningly priapic) while her mother Lady Croom is having the extensive grounds remodelled by a gardener (“Culpability Noakes!”) who has quite different ideas about how the finished product should look. 

Then in the present day, academics Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale (Nikki Amuka-Bird and Oliver Chris, both new to the cast but inhabiting their roles with ferocious intellectual glee) are working on opposing works about the history of Sidley Park. He’s obsessed with a possible duel fought in the house involving poet Lord Byron while she is concentrating on the identity of the hermit who had inhabited the hermitage on the house grounds, while the present day Coverly family members, still in residence, regard them both with varying degrees of amusement and exasperation. 

One of the delights of Stoppard’s text is how the sections set in the past inform the ones set in the present. As Jarvis and Nightingale theorise and pontificate, we in the audience are often one step ahead of them, a conceit which becomes heartbreaking towards the play’s end when you realise the fate of probably the most lovable character. The tension between intellect and emotion thrums constantly throughout the play, as does the mind-boggling antagonisms between chaos and order, the past and the present, science and literature. 

It is a lot to take in on one viewing, and Cracknell’s production, playing out on concentric circular revolves under a pair of giant interconnecting neon hoops and a canopy of lights suggesting the celestial infinity of the cosmos (striking designs by Alex Eales and Guy Hoare respectively), isn’t always as clear as it might be in helping elucidate this challenging piece. Although beautiful to look at, the abstract visual approach sometimes makes the play even more confusing than it already is, especially when both time frames are occupying the limited space. Trevor Nunn’s original National Theatre staging and David Leveaux’s first revival were more literal and, honestly, more engaging. 

Some of the performances are terrific. Amuka-Bird’s Hannah is a particular highlight, the isolation of the bookish academic tempered with a wicked sense of humour and generous-spirited warmth; it’s a flawless, selfless, beautifully realised performance. Chris is similarly inspired as egotistical Bernard, a sort of intellectual rock star in his own head, a maddening, charismatic but possibly lethal combination of spoilt child and brilliant scholar. These fine actors find an erotic charge between the two that no other pairing I’ve seen in these roles has quite managed since Felicity Kendal and Bill Nighy in the original production, and it adds a welcome heat to a play that, for all its brilliance, can seem chilly and remote. I now long to see this pair as Annie and Henry in Stoppard’s own The Real Thing.

Angus Cooper is absolutely spot on as a modern day Coverly, an Oxbridge academic who may or may not have a bit of a crush on Hannah (understandable); he nails the character’s innate niceness and a genuine sensitivity under the relaxed intelligence. I was less keen on this production’s treatment of Lady Croom (usually Yolanda Kettle, but played on second press night by understudy Peta Cornish). 

As written, she’s one of the funniest women in Stoppard, a baroque, sexy, whip-smart eccentric, a contrast to the dry directness of Hannah, and entirely plausible as the mother of a self-possessed teenage intellectual like Thomasina. Harriet Walter at the National, Julie Legrand in the West End transfer and Nancy Carroll in the last revival had tremendous fun with her, and the erudite campery sat entertainingly alongside the mind-expanding rigours of the rest of the play. In this iteration she mostly comes across as severe and uptight, not the fault of Cornish who tackles the language head on and has notable presence, but the costuming and direction seem calculated to rob this usually irresistible character of most of her joy. 

The soon-to-be Stoppard Theatre is fairly intimate and there are moments when the actors seem to be mic’d for a much larger venue, which takes a few minutes at the top of each act to get used to. It’s perhaps to be expected that a late twentieth century piece that plays around with time will become dated. So it proves (slightly) with Arcadia where the notion that decades of misinformation surrounding a classical poet would make front page news in the tabloid press seems positively quaint. Running at an unfashionable three hours including interval, it’s also a challenge for some attention spans.

For all that, Arcadia retains its power to dazzle as it fuses humanity and curiosity with science and mathematics, and dialogue that’s laugh-out-loud funny and with a rich, empathetic understanding of what makes humans tick. It’s a remarkable work, and one that anybody with a genuine interest in modern English language plays needs to see at least once. One has to hope that the theatre’s change of name happens fully before the end of the run, as having a Stoppard play at the Stoppard would be as wonderful as Arcadia is in its most persuasive moments.

THE GUILTY

by Chloë Moss

directed by Felix Barrett

Donmar Warehouse, London – until 15 August 2026

running time: 1 hour no interval 

https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/events/the-guilty/?instance-type=standard#content-overview

It’s quite the challenge trying to review a piece of theatre where the surprise is its principal raison d’être, but I love a challenge. So, apparently, does Russell Tovey, taking solo command of the stage for the taut, dynamic sixty minute duration of this mini-thriller distilled by Chloë Moss from the critically acclaimed 2018 Danish film Den Skyldige. 

In The Guilty (the title turns out to be tantalisingly ambiguous), Tovey, with his characteristic mixture of tough guy swagger and unexpected vulnerability, plays emergency response police officer Joe, experiencing a dark night of the soul as he juggles work and personal life. Joe is on the eve of a trial for something terrible, the details of which are only revealed later on, and in between fielding calls from the flotsam and jetsam of humanity who contact him in his professional capacity -some in genuine anguish and need, some time wasters- he tries to take comfort in speaking to his six year old daughter and his furious partner. Then in comes a call from a highly distressed young woman who claims to be in a speeding van with a weapon-wielding maniac, and Joe is plunged into a mission to save her while also protecting her daughter, the same age as his own, who he manages to contact by phone, and the second child who’s still a baby. 

If you’ve seen the original movie, or the American remake with Jake Gyllenhaal, some of the twists and turns will be familiar, although Moss and director Felix Barrett complete the play with a coup de théâtre that departs from the earlier versions. Though exciting and theatrically effective, it feels more like showboating than anything vital to the plot or to significantly enhance our understanding of what we’ve been watching. 

Tovey turns in an impressively naturalistic performance, so low key initially that when Joe gives himself over to panic or fury, we’re left in no doubt as to how high the stakes are. The transitions between stoic professional mode and impassioned humanity are managed seamlessly, and the phone conversations with his slightly too-mature-sounding daughter are touching and tender.

Technically, the show is remarkable. Alex Eales’ set and Anna Watson’s lighting are grungily stylish, their monochrome uniformity punctured only by ribbons and pops of blood red light to indicate either a phone call coming in or a moment of extreme stress, sometimes both. The sound contributions by Gareth Fry and Sally Messham are particularly stunning, and essential to the overall impact of Barrett’s hyper-tense and perfectly paced staging. It’s all so well done that it almost distracts from the possibility that a play where the sole visible character is on the phone the whole time can get a little samey. Moss’ writing is probably superior to that of Levi Holloway’s for Paranormal Activity, Barrett’s other recent West End hit (soon to be seen on Broadway), but The Guilty is less satisfying overall.

As a cat-and-mouse game thriller and as an exercise in how live performance can rack up the tension when all the elements coalesce, The Guilty works tremendously well. From a psychological standpoint though, it’s pretty simplistic, even exploitative (although that’s arguably a charge that could be levelled at much of the thriller genre, to be fair) and running at a mere hour, it’s pretty small beer for a complete night out. Still, Tovey is excellent, Barrett’s world-building is very accomplished, and if you like to feel thoroughly creeped out while sitting in your theatre seat, this show will undoubtedly do that for you.

PRIDE

Book and lyrics by Stephen Beresford

Music by Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde

developed and directed by Matthew Warchus 

National Theatre/Dorfman Theatre, London – until 12 September 2026

running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval 

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

It’s a heck of an achievement to carve a feel-good musical out of one of the grimmest periods of modern history, but that’s what the team behind this gritty yet transporting new tuner, adapted by Stephen Beresford from his own acclaimed screenplay for the 2014 movie, achieves. To be entirely fair, Pride, a joint venture between the National, Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre and P&P Productions, is more of a feel-everything musical. Like the soon-returning Billy Elliot, with which it shares DNA as well as the backdrop of the mid-1980s British Miners strikes, this ambitious, soul-stirring show dramatises real life stories and examines personal despair through the prism of public outrage and triumph. 

Also like Billy Elliot, it has the word ‘hit’ written all over it, repeatedly finding the sweet spot between tearjerking emotion and showbiz exhilaration that all but yanks the paying public out of their seats. You’ll have a wonderful time at Pride, but you’ll also bear witness to something important: a true story where people showed up for each other despite their differences, in this case radical gays and lesbians raising money for the beleaguered striking miners just as the AIDS crisis is biting into their own community. Here’s where humanity and kindness stick two fingers up to division and cruelty, and it speaks to our troubled times with a rare urgency. The tone also recalls Come From Away, the 9/11 tuner which similarly sends audiences out into the night wrung out yet feeling that people are fundamentally good and that life is worth living.

Matthew Warchus’ fast-moving staging, choreographed with attack by Lizzie Gee, is deceptively clever. It succeeds in seeming rough-around-the-edges enough to appear spontaneous and accessible, while also splicing or bleeding scenes together with a cinematic ingenuity, and when it seeks to show off, it’s pretty fabulous. There’s seldom a moment across two and a half engaging hours where it’s unclear where the focus is. These creatives really know what they’re doing.

So does the multi-roling ensemble cast. It’s a treat to hear so many authentic Welsh accents on a London stage, and there’s not a weak link in the company. Chris Jenkins delivers beautiful, sensitive work as the bookshop owner who takes everything on the chin, from bigots attacking his place of work to rejection by his mother due to his sexuality, while nursing a deep well of hurt. Kirsty Malpass is another stand-out as practical but fiery Hefina (the Imelda Staunton role in the film), whose stern exterior masks authentic kindness and acceptance. Caroline Sheen, cast against type as a mean-spirited widow suspicious of a perceived gay agenda, nails the woman’s bitterness but also her loneliness. Gillian Elisa is outrageous good fun as older, indomitable Gwen (“now where are my lesbians?”), although the writing for her character tends to always go for the easy laugh, something which is a bit of an issue for much of the rest of the show too, to be honest.

Lewis Cornay draws a tender, accurate portrait of closeted Bromley (so named because that’s the London borough he hails from), drawn inexorably to the gang of gay activists as he comes to terms with his sexuality. Jhon Lumsden brings steely charm and sex appeal but also winning vulnerability to left wing activist Mark whose political convictions kick-start the whole story, and Courtney Stapleton invests Steph, the sole woman in the central group, with just the right mixture of warmth and attitude. 

Matthew Woodyatt is wonderful as community leader Dai whose world view is genuinely expanded beyond the Welsh Valleys by the well meaning gay interlopers from London, and Sarah Pugh is heartwarming perfection as the young wife who will go on to achieve great things. Samuel Barnett, in a career-redefining performance, brilliantly marries flamboyance with underlying dread as larger-than-life Jonathan, living with, and triumphing over, an apparently fatal health condition (it’s easy to forget these days that an HIV diagnosis in the ‘80s was frequently a death sentence) and determined to wring every last drop of life out of whatever time he has left.

Beresford’s script and Warchus’ staging switches back and forth between time periods (the story is told in flashback) and locations (mainly gay bars and clubs in London as well as the legendary Gay’s The Word bookshop, versus the rural Welsh mining village) with propulsive theatricality and admirable clarity. Bunny Christie’s economical but accurate costuming (also Campbell Young’s wig creations) and malleable steel deck set and Hugh Vanstone’s lighting play invaluable roles in establishing time, place and character. Collectively, this is theatre-making of the highest order.

The weakest aspect of Pride is the eclectic score by Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde, which is good but not great, proving more stirring than memorable. It’s an accomplished, well-crafted collection of pastiches, everything from disco to Welsh hymnal, Broadway show tune to Jonathan Larson-esque theatrical rock, which works well enough in context, but lacks a strong identity of its own. There’s a recurring anthem, rather like a Welsh answer to Les Mis, that thrills the blood, and is thrillingly sung, but oft-repeated lyrics like “I was a fool to ever doubt you, I’ll think again next time you’ll see” sound awkward and don’t trip off the tongue in the same way as, say, “Do you hear the people sing”.

The best lyrics here are the funny ones: Bromley’s poppy coming-out song, despite its unfortunate resemblance to the ‘Gay: The Musical’ send-up in the TV sitcom The IT Crowd, includes the gem “Spare the sermon / I like cock and Ethel Merman”. The gallows humour of the showboating Kander and Ebb-style second act opener, where Barnett’s Jonathan rips with dark, glittering wit into his longevity prospects in the face of his HIV diagnosis, feels like something genuinely dangerous and daring. One suspects Sondheim would have approved. 

Several numbers (Jonathan’s bouncy disco reverie, and a moving choral eulogy to souls lost to AIDS) stop the show cold but you’d be hard pushed to hear any of these songs, attractive as they are, out of context and identify them as being from Pride. Few will care: taken as a whole, the musical is a huge success.

This is one of the most eagerly anticipated new British musicals in many years, and it turns out it is also one of the best. It may be about specific groups of people at a specific time in the last century but it has a life-enhancing universality and well-earned emotional punch that appeals to many. This is a limited initial run on the South Bank, and it’s already sold out, but I would wager that Pride will be around for a very long time.

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

by Edmond Rostand 

in a new version by Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson 

directed by Simon Evans for the Royal Shakespeare Company

Noël Coward Theatre, London – until 5 September 2026

running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval 

https://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/whats-on/cyrano-de-bergerac

Tear-soaked yet full of roaring life, this is the sort of golden, glorious production that reminds you of why you fell in love with theatre.  After playing to packed houses and critical acclaim in Stratford-Upon-Avon last year, this Royal Shakespeare Company version of the 1897 Edmond Rostand swashbuckler about the large nosed poet/warrior/lover arrives in the West End for the summer, and it’s possibly the most beautiful, rambunctiously entertaining show in town. It’s certainly one of the most moving.

This adaptation by Simon Evans (who also directs) and Debris Stevenson uses muscular modern language, equal parts poetry and profanity, but remains faithful to the sweeping romanticism and wit of Rostand’s classic. Grace Smart’s costumes suggest early twentieth century rather than the more formal extravagance of the period Rostand was writing for, and her charming balustraded set exists as an extension of the Coward’s auditorium (particularly appropriate as the first scene is set in a ramshackle Parisian theatre), but the whole production has a timelessness that honours this beloved story’s origins while simultaneously allowing it to feel fresh and relevant. This Cyrano de Bergerac probably has more in common with a traditional version than the stunning Jamie Lloyd rap-battling take with James McAvoy a few years ago but it still has a spontaneous, edge-of-your-seat quality that feels like seeing the play for the first time.

One of the major reasons for this is an intelligent repointing of the three central characters, beginning with Cyrano himself, who is shadowed, in Evans’ singular vision, at key moments by a version of himself as a child, judging him, comforting him, calling him to account, to devastating emotional effect. Is it sentimental? Probably…. Does it make interesting, satisfying theatre though? Absolutely.

Adrian Lester is on thrilling, masterly form as the swaggering wordsmith but makes more explicit than usual the contrast between his heroism and bravado, and the deep insecurities borne of his unconventional physical appearance. He’s magnetic and deliciously funny, a wickedly accurate mimic, with a sly hint of high camp, but his humour and bluster are those of the outsider, somebody who feels he’s tolerated by his peers rather than fully accepted. His aggression, physical and verbal, feel like elaborate acts of self-sabotage, but when he talks about his beloved Roxane his tenderness and erudition take the breath away. He also projects an intriguing self-disgust tempered with a sense of profound intoxication as he makes the irresistible words with which young soldier Christian woos an increasingly besotted Roxane. It’s a stupendously fine, satisfying performance.

Susannah Fielding is a revelatory Roxane. In lesser interpretations, she can come across as a sappy, malleable heroine, but here she is feisty, lusty, smart….a wholly entrancing force to be reckoned with. She plays elegantly at being the demure society princess but gets scrappy and fierce at the drop of a hat, and is very much still the child bride plucked from working in the fields by her wealthy first husband. You fall in love with her but you wouldn’t mess with her. Her multiple conflicted feelings at the play’s conclusion when she realises to what extent she has been deceived are conveyed with startling psychological truth.

Levi Brown is an unusually heartbreaking Christian. He’s less the clueless romantic male beauty of convention but an uncynical, impulsive good guy, stronger in spirit and instinct than in intellect, with a strong Black Country accent. He is tied more to the land than to learning (his repeated verbal motif about hands in the soil is turned tragically back on to him at his demise), and is an unwitting pawn in a game played by smarter humans. His death has never moved me as much as it does in this version.

Every supporting performance, from Christian Patterson as jolly but sensitive baker Ragueneau through Scott Handy as the uptight army captain whose unsuccessful suitoring of Roxanne moves from spite to steadfast friendship as the years roll by, to the sextet of musicians who follow Cyrano everywhere -each one a distinct character- is rich in detail and humanity. Greer Dale-Foulkes is a quirky delight as Roxane’s funny, flirty confidante with the serious hots for Philip Cumbus’ gruff, kind military comrade to Cyrano.

The autumnal ending sears the soul, as Cyrano, the man who commands language like his own personal battalion, is deserted by them and begins spouting unintelligible verbiage as his younger self leads him to oblivion. Good luck with getting out of your head the look in Fielding’s Roxane’s eyes as the true extent of what she’s losing becomes clear to her. A particularly striking touch is that the steadily falling leaves from above become fragments of the letters Cyrano has been showering Roxane with under Christian’s alias. It’s just one gorgeous detail in a production overflowing with them. 

Other things to rave about include Joshie Harriette’s evocative lighting which takes in the whole house, not just the stage, Bethan Clark’s fight direction and composer Alex Baranowski’s outstanding musical contributions. I’m aware that this review is beginning to sound like a ham-fisted equivalent to the love letters showered upon Roxane, so I’m just going to wind it up by saying, please go and see Cyrano de Bergerac. It’ll fill your heart before breaking it. I ugly-cried, you might too. Unforgettable and unmissable.

RON

by Ted Walliker

directed by Lev Govorovski and Ted Walliker

Riverside Studios, London – until 3 July 2026

running time: 1 hour no interval 

https://riversidestudios.co.uk/whats-on/Jf-ron/

Unrequited love can do funny things to a person. If this slippery, unhinged, grimly delightful solo show is to be believed, it can drive one to jealousy, murder, cannibalism, elaborate interior design delusions while under the influence of class A drugs, McDonalds….and stand-up comedy. Although reminiscent of Jack Holden’s Cruise and Kenrex, both of which expanded the monologue form to dazzling technical and storytelling heights, and also Marcelo dos Santos’ Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen which married gay erotic disappointment to edgy stand-up, Ted Walliker’s Ted has a macabre comic sensibility that is entirely its own.

On paper, Walliker’s ubiquitous participation in the show, as writer, performer, co-director and co-designer (with Lev Govorovski), and lighting and sound creator, might seem a tad over-ambitious. In practice though, Ted turns out to be one of the most inspirational, off-the-wall displays of prodigious, singular sheer talent that I can remember in quite some time.

In the promotional materials, the show is subtitled “this is not standup”. Upon entering the theatre and seeing the single spotlit microphone, a comedy set appears to be exactly what we’re in for, an impression reinforced by Walliker’s first appearance as hapless Tony, nervily commenting on the conventions of performance and failing to land his gags. All is not entirely as it seems however, and this deliberately uncertain start belies the wild wild ride in store.

Part of Ron’s considerable power derives from how unexpected it all is, which of course makes it almost impossible to review without spoilers. Suffice to say that Walliker is a remarkable performer, turning on a dime from charming and goofy to borderline terrifying, with the comic instincts of a true clown, and an unsettling ability to present the outrageous and occasionally downright disgusting with a throwaway matter-of-factness that draws you in before leaving you reeling with shock. 

On the surface, Tony is one of life’s followers, socially awkward, perpetually aggrieved and tragically in romantic thrall to loutish Mike, his friend since the age of seven. There’s a lot more to him than that though, a lot of it deeply worrying, some of it hilarious and most of it psychopathic. 

Walliker weaves deftly between the two contrasting men as they embark on a road trip fuelled by booze, spite and misguided indignation at being served with the wrong meal at McDonalds (the eponymous Ron is the unfortunate fast food employee who bungles their order). If you can imagine Tarantino transplanted to the Home Counties you’ll have some idea of what’s going on here, but that description doesn’t convey the quirky lunacy of the humour or the unexpected, but entirely earned, moments of real poignancy. 

Nor does it do justice to the breathless brilliance of the writing. Walliker employs a selection of styles that initially seem to be working against each other – there’s comedy surreal and potty-mouthed, soap operatic angst, overblown poeticism, forensically accurate anatomical descriptions – but make total sense once you have the full picture. 

Technically, the production has a similarly scattershot feel, with complex lighting, sound and music cues, plus an elaborate visual transformation, that fully coalesce by the conclusion of sixty playful, alarming, revelatory minutes. Walliker emerges as a bright new star, his performance as appealing as it is frequently repellent, and his script as gripping as it’s strange and funny. 

Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer and Liz Kingsman’s One Woman Show both started out in modest formats not dissimilar to this one, before moving on to lucrative and much acclaimed further lives. Ron, though not for the squeamish, is a hell of a debut for Riverside Studios as a producing house, and fully deserves a similar level of success as those esteemed titles. It’s that good. 

WE HAD A WORLD 

by Joshua Harmon

directed by Josh Seymour 

Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, London – until 4 July 2026

running time: 100 minutes no interval

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2026/we-had-a-world/

Joshua Harmon’s beautifully wrought three hander exploring the turbulent relationship between his mother and her mother, and the far-reaching effects his grandmother has had on his own life, was a critical and commercial success in New York last year. Seeing this note-perfect London premiere directed by Josh Seymour, on Hampstead’s smaller Downstairs stage, though if there’s any justice it’ll have a longer ongoing life, it’s very easy to see why. 

We Had A World is that rare and marvellous thing, a play that is at once intensely personal and specific (these garrulous, angry, loving women could only be Jewish New Yorkers) but also bracingly universal. Who hasn’t felt resentment when their emotional needs aren’t met by those who should love and understand them the most? Who hasn’t sometimes felt like a pawn in an incomprehensible game being played by individuals who should know and behave better? Who hasn’t experienced deep remorse and regret when a tricky, exasperating loved one is no longer around to spar with or check in on? The sensibility, and the tone, which tends to the sentimental but shot through with flashes of gorgeous humour and moments of cold, hard truth, is quintessentially Jewish, but this play is for all of us.

Opening with majestically fierce grandmother Renee (Suzanne Bertish, soaring and searing in a role created last year by Tony winner Joanna Gleason) instructing Joshua to write about their family (“make it as bitter and vitriolic as possible”), Harmon then plays fast and loose with structure as the play zips back and forth through thirty years of rows, upsets, confidences and life-changing moments. Such is the subtle virtuosity of the direction and acting (Ryan Kopel is Joshua, Anna Francolini is his mother Ellen, both are flawless), and the clarity of the writing, that we are never in doubt as to which point we’re at in these people’s lives, despite the unconventional approach to chronology.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Francolini better than she is here as tetchy, tough-talking but seldom unkind career woman Ellen (“I’m a bitch…it’s one of my best qualities”), perpetually feuding with her (unseen) sister and uneasily aware that wayward Renee is a more glamorous and irresistible figure to young Joshua than she herself is. She’s  not really a bitch of course, as Joshua is quick to point out, but she’s spiky and resentful after a lifetime of hurt and disappointment, and it’s abundantly clear how much she loves her son. Francolini’s multi-layered portrayal shines a light into every crevice of this flawed but essentially good woman; she’s bitterly funny and tremendously affecting in the brief moments when Ellen lets her laconic mask slip. 

Kopel is every bit as impressive as Joshua, traversing the years from impressionable teenager entranced by his free-thinking grandmother but loyal to his embattled mom, through coming out as gay, to successful writer, and back again, with a winning combination of grit and charm. He never overplays the youth of Joshua as a kid, suggesting his essential greenness with a slight shift in stance and the tiniest change in vocal tone. It’s beautiful, unshowy work, ceding the spotlight to the women, but pivotal to the overall success of this intimate, sometimes painfully honest piece. 

Bertish makes a triumphant stage return as incorrigible, free-wheeling Renee. As difficult and unpredictable as she’s loving and hilarious, she’s a clear-eyed survivor with a passion for the arts, her grandson, booze and for riling up her daughter, in roughly that order. It’s a fabulous role, hilarious but too richly textured to subside into mere comic schtick and cliché. It’s impossible to take your eyes off Bertish as she cajoles, manipulates, infuriates everyone around her….and she finds an authentic, tragic nobility in Renee’s final demise (“when you have an especially good time, say, my grandmother is thinking of me….Joshua I’m gonna be watching. From above or below, but I’ll be watching”), even as she rails against Trump from her deathbed (“the great United States is at the mercy of this idiot”). The writing and the performance are both unforgettable.

Within a giant fluorescent-lined box, some sticks of furniture and a small, glacier-shaped object that diminishes as the play progresses, serving perhaps as a metaphor for Renee and Ellen’s relationship as well as an emblem of the environmental concerns that trouble Joshua and a nod to the art that this grandmother introduced her beloved grandson to, are all the visual stimuli we get, and all that we need. Still, Seymour and his designers Sarah Beaton (set and costumes) and Joshua Gadsby (lighting) evoke a New York of museums and theatres and oppressive, lived-in homes. It’s all abstract yet it feels vivid and real.

We Had A World is a total pleasure. A complex but deeply felt and entirely accessible family drama that wears its heart upon its sleeve, and is unafraid to put its audience through the wringer when required. It’s generous, compulsive, and healing with its deep understanding and wry observances of how close family relationships work. A must-see.

HIGH SOCIETY

Music and lyrics by Cole Porter

Book by Arthur Kopit

Additional lyrics by Susan Birkenhead

based on the play The Philadelphia Story by Philip Barry

directed by Rachel Kavanaugh

Barbican Theatre, London – until 11 July 2026 then touring 

running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2026/event/cole-porter-high-society

It’s tempting to contrast this summer’s Barbican musical High Society with the stunning Broadway revival of Anything Goes in 2022, or 2024’s sumptuous, starry Kiss Me, Kate, since they’re all stuffed with beloved Cole Porter numbers and played the same venue….but the comparison isn’t entirely fair. Kiss Me, Kate is a prime example of Golden Age perfection while, even in its rewritten form (the book was heavily revised for the 1980s Lincoln Center production), Anything Goes is a frothily well-crafted theatrical property. Meanwhile High Society was conceived as a film and this stage version, first seen as a Broadway flop in 1998, is a mish-mash of the cherished ‘50s movie and the Philip Barry play The Philadelphia Story upon which it’s based. It’s really a jukebox musical: the soundtrack had nine songs while playwright Arthur Kopit’s adaptation shoehorns in an additional ten Porter favourites, a couple of which, when you listen to the lyrics, don’t feel fully integrated. 

Rachel Kavanaugh’s staging, heading off around the country and to Ireland after this two month run in town, is certainly very attractive to look at. Tom Rogers’ sumptuous scenic design of an ocean-side mansion -a single unit suggesting interiors and exteriors- appears ready to tour, but it’s very much the set for a No.1 tour, augmented by some gorgeous extra pieces, such as magically lit, statuary-filled garden or lavish conservatory. The pastel elegance of Jon Morrell’s costumes and colourful washes of lighting by Howard Hudson are perfect complements; the whole thing is a visual feast, and an aural one too, a seventeen piece band making Porter’s classic tunes snap and sparkle in Larry Blank and Mark Cumberland’s orchestrations. 

Director Kavanaugh doesn’t do much with the material beyond place it prettily onstage, so this precious tale of ultra-rich folk dealing with romantic entanglements, betrayals and misunderstandings in the rarified surroundings of pre-WW2 Long Island plays out with panache, some wit….and almost zero edge. For a night of bland escapism, it works well enough but the emotional temperature never rises above the tepid, the absence of chemistry between Helen George’s spoilt but spirited heiress and Julian Ovenden as Dexter, her torch-carrying ex-husband being a major factor in this. There’s little urgency or sense of real feelings beneath the barbs and quips.

Ovenden is the quintessential old school leading man though, with insouciant charm and humour, good looks, magnetic warmth and a singing voice like melted butter. If he’s pretty much perfect, top-billed George is more serviceable than exciting. She hints at her character’s inability to cope with human frailty and how that repeatedly scuppers her relationships, but doesn’t register much in the way of longing or the fire that makes Tracy Samantha Lord so fascinating to those around her. Her singing and dancing are adequate, and she looks fabulous in the period frocks, but she’s an insipid figure to build a musical around.

Freddie Fox makes a rather wonderful musical theatre debut as Mike Connor, the cynical Left-leaning journalist arrived in Oyster Bay to lampoon the Lords but unexpectedly seduced by the lifestyle. Fox’s singing voice is decent enough but he has a playfulness and lightness of touch that’s just sublime, whether staggering about drunkenly having consumed his body weight in champagne or bug-eyed at the opulence of his surroundings, and he’s a lovely mover. He also achieves that unique combination of camp flamboyance and heterosexual swagger that makes this sort of material fly.

An oddly muted Carly Mercedes Dyer is likeable as his wise-cracking photographer sidekick but doesn’t have as much impact as one might have hoped, and her big second act solo ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ doesn’t sit comfortably in her (usually tremendous) voice. Nigel Lindsay is great fun as boozy, priapic Uncle Willie and David Seadon-Young excels, making comedy and a fully rounded character out of Tracy’s stuffed-shirt, fish-out-of-water new husband-to-be.

There’s fresh, funny work from Naomi Pacquette as the mischievous but whip-smart younger sibling, and from Malcolm Sinclair as the philandering patriarch looking to inveigle his way back into the family fold, though I could have lived without his attempts at singing. Felicity Kendal is an eccentric delight as Margaret ‘Mother’ Lord, gurgingly at odds with the well-drilled shenanigans elsewhere, but with a sense of fun and sly wit that proves irresistible nonetheless.

Anthony Van Laast’s dances are decorative and enjoyable, if seldom particularly exhilarating. Kavanaugh’s staging has a tight pace, though not without its ponderous moments, such as having Tracy twirling briefly and ineffectually behind an upper level French door while Dexter wistfully sings about her from below. Some of the clowning is pretty leaden, notably in a misconceived ‘I Love Paris’ sequence (the song borrowed from Can Can) and in the actual ‘Be A Clown’ number itself. Then there’s a bizarre moment where drunk Tracy and Mike, aiming to go skinny dipping, charge off upstage, completely ignoring the fact that the swimming pool is downstage front (it’s literally right there) ….or are we supposed to surmise that the Lords are so wealthy that they have multiple pools?!

The songs, the frequently ravishing spectacle and the leading men are the main reasons to see this High Society. It’s pleasant and amusing but anybody after a bit of drama and excitement will need to look elsewhere. It’s not vintage musical theatre but it does exactly what it says on the tin.