ajhlovestheatre

EQUUS 

by Peter Shaffer

directed by Lindsay Posner

Menier Chocolate Factory, London – until 4 July 2026

Theatre Royal Bath – 14 to 25 July 2026

running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STAGE KISS

by Sarah Ruhl 

directed by Blanche McIntyre

Hampstead Theatre, London – until 13 June 2026

running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AN IDEAL HUSBAND 

by Oscar Wilde 

directed by Nicholai La Barrie

Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, London – until 6 June 2026

Bristol Old Vic, Bristol – 10 to 20 June 2026

running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND 

Book and lyrics by Richy Hughes

Music and lyrics by Tim Sutton

based on the book by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

directed by Lynette Linton 

@sohoplace, London – until 18 July 2026

running time: 2 hours 45 minutes

https://boyharnessedwindmusical.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1536

by Ava Pickett

directed by Lyndsey Turner

Ambassadors Theatre, London – until 1 August 2026

running time: 1 hour 50 minutes no interval

https://www.1536onstage.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LAST MAN

Book and lyrics by Jishik Kim

Music by Seungyeon Kwon 

dramaturg: Jethro Compton

directed by Daljung Kim

Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London – until 13 June 2026

running time: 2 hours including interval

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/the-last-man/

Maybe something got lost in translation but it’s really not easy to see quite why anybody thought a London run for this one-person Korean musical, a massive hit in Seoul, was a good idea. Perhaps encouraged by the phenomenal Broadway success of Maybe Happy Ending, another tuner from the land of K-Pop and superb skincare, Jishik Kim (book and lyrics), Seungyeon Kwon (composer) and director Daljung Kim have brought their tortuous tale of a loner holed up in a Seoul bunker while a zombie apocalypse rages overhead, to Southwark Playhouse, a venue with a commendable track record in discovering new musicals. You can’t win ’em all though, apparently.

Where last year’s Best Musical Tony award winner found a rich and unexpected humanity and emotional punch in its story of a pair of robots going on a road trip just before they reach obsolescence, and had a shimmeringly lovely score, The Last Man only offers music that sounds like Rent-lite, trite anything-for-a-rhyme lyrics and more head-scratching moments than a case of nits. To be entirely fair, there are several really good tunes in this show, and the rock band augmented by a violin, all perched high up above Shankho Chaudhuri’s bleakly whimsical bunker set, sounds pretty terrific. Unfortunately though, the sound design has the music drowning out the words half the time, and even during the spoken sections it’s not always easy to decipher what’s being said which, in a comparatively small auditorium, is an issue. Jethro Compton, co-creator of my favourite British musical in decades, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which also originated at Southwark, is credited as dramaturg, but has failed to work similar magic here.

The leading, and only, role, named simply ‘The Survivor’ is so demanding that it’s played alternately by two performers, one male (Lex Lee) and one female (Nabi Brown). On press night, Lee gave a decent account of a part that requires him, variously, to ventriloquise a cuddly toy, record himself on a mobile phone, squash imaginary bugs, gag from drinking polluted water, pontificate on what it means to be human…all while belting his face off. He works incredibly hard, but the writing gives him little to really dig into, settling for a set of cliched childhood memories and some fatigued humour where he pretends to be media personalities interacting with each other (the glitchy tech on opening night didn’t help, unfortunately) or the voice of the teddy bear he discovers in a random box. This lack of specificity may be down to the character being open, despite the shows title, to performance by different genders, but it makes it pretty hard to invest. It never feels like that much is at stake -a sense of claustrophobia and/or panic is notably absent- so by the time The Survivor has some sort of isolation-driven breakdown deep into the interminable second act, the overall feeling is less pity and empathy and more hope that we’ll soon be able to get out of the theatre.

Too much of the text is delivered in a colourless monotone and at such a pace that it barely registers, which is less the likeable Lee’s fault than something that the director should have addressed in rehearsals. The barely-there staging has the actor wandering aimlessly all over the set in a way that feels sloppy instead of spontaneous.  Lee’s singing voice has a good range but is mostly serviceable where this score really demands something more bravura. I would imagine Brown’s interpretation of the role is necessarily and inevitably quite different, but I don’t think I’ve got the strength to go back and find out.

Two hours seems ridiculously long for a show where so little happens, and the whole thing would benefit immeasurably by cutting at least half an hour’s material and ditching the interval. Plus, removing the break gives bored audience members less chance to bail out. The ending, when it finally, finally comes, is a massive dramatic cop-out where you may find yourself rolling your eyes when presumably the intention is to have you gasping in surprise. I can entirely understand why the tuneful score has its admirers but the show itself, at least in this iteration, is a queasy, undernourished mixture of would-be horror, potty-mouthed and cute that fails to connect. Still, connoisseurs of so-bad-they’re-almost-good musicals might get a kick out of The Last Man. Ponderous.

GODOT’S TO-DO LIST

by Leo Simpe-Asante

directed by Aneesha Srinivasan

KRAPP’S LAST TAPE

by Samuel Beckett

directed by Gary Oldman

Royal Court Theatre, London – until 30 May 2026

running time (in total): 75 minutes no interval 

https://royalcourttheatre.com/events/krapps-last-tape-godots-to-do-list/

As a theatrical lap of honour, there’s something touching about the globally famous Gary Oldman returning to the venue where he last appeared on the London stage back in the 1980s and, during the Royal Court’s 70th anniversary year, performing a text first seen in this very theatre. Furthermore, Oldman premiered his version of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape last year at York Theatre Royal where his career began. 

So, multiple ghosts (not least those of late actors like Patrick Magee, John Hurt and Michael Gambon all of whom have played this unusual piece to acclaim) and echoes hang over this project. Even the format of the evening recalls Krapp’s Last Tape’s original 1958 outing: conceived as a curtain raiser to Beckett’s Endgame, here it’s the main attraction, with Godot’s To-Do List, winner of the 2025 Royal Court Young Playwrights Award, as the first half of a very short show. The whole thing lasts little over an hour and, depending on your threshold for existential gloom and staring at one person on stage reacting to a disembodied voice, that may very well be enough. 

Leo Simpe-Asante’s piece is really an extended sketch rather than a play, a response to Waiting For Godot, arguably Beckett’s masterpiece. Godot’s To-Do List sees a besuited, bowler hat carrying Shakeel Haakim as the eponymous figure Vladimir, Estragon et al were waiting on in the Beckett. Simpe-Asante, in a jokey, slightly alarming script that suggests real promise, examines why Godot was held up. A female voice (Flora Ashton), by turns bemused then caressing then aggressive, gives Godot a series of instructions (“take a breath” “write a limerick” “do the splits” “stop having an existential crisis”) and he has to complete each one before being allowed to go meet his friends. Even if it feels more like a drama class exercise than something that needs to be played out in front of paying customers, the likeable Haakim is superb, mixing exasperation, resignation and sweaty desperation to fine comic effect, Ashton sounds suitably unsettling and director Aneesha Srinivasan keeps it moving at a punchy pace. It’s a tangy appetiser.

After a brief pause, we’re into Beckett’s memory-monologue Krapp’s Last Tape, which Oldman not only performs but also directs and designs. The set suggests an attic full of dusty jumble, atmospherically lit by Malcolm Rippeth. Oldman’s aged, dishevelled Krapp -womaniser, drinker, philosopher, writer- shuffles on from the rear to take his place at a desk from which he listens to tapes of his younger self holding forth on subjects from religion to his relationships with women (sound design by Tom Smith). Even sitting down, almost motionless, his eyes, cloudy with memory and regret, fixed on the middle distance, Oldman is a commanding stage presence, laconic, melancholy and with an undertow of something else, a sense of danger maybe.

Beckett’s text is elliptical, bleak, possibly autobiographical, but is probably the nearest the old maestro came to sentimentality. Such is the level of Oldman’s fame that the entire run is sold out, and for those content with being in the presence of their beloved star, watching him eating a banana or playfully rolling the word “spool” around his mouth, then I guess Krapp’s Last Tape will be time well spent.

For anybody else, unless they’re in tune with, or invested in, Beckett’s particular brand of desolate inertia and solipsism, it’s likely to prove a pretty hard sit. Sad to say, I belong to the latter group.

MASS

by Fran Kranz

directed by Carrie Cracknell

Donmar Warehouse, London – until 6 June 2026

running time: 1 hour 40 minutes no interval 

https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/events/mass/?instance-type=standard

Based on his own 2021 movie, Fran Kranz’s Mass, currently devastating audiences at the Donmar, is a powerful reminder of why the arts matter, of how they can speak to important issues and reflect healing, understanding light back on to them. It should be required viewing for every parent, and for everyone who still believes the gun laws in the USA are acceptable. It’s also unmissable for anyone who wants to see the kind of raw, humane performances that entirely transcend artifice and barely feel like acting.

Reminiscent of, and equally as impressive as, last year’s multi award-winner Punch, it’s about the aftermath of an almost unbearable tragedy and the turbulent road to acceptance and forgiveness. It’s an emotional rollercoaster that never feels manipulative or contrived, and you leave the theatre moved to wonder at what human beings are capable of finding in their hearts.

Set in an anteroom of an Episcopalian church in an unnamed American town, Mass focuses on an uneasy meeting between two couples: Gail and Jay (Lyndsey Marshal and Adeel Akhtar) lost their teenage son in a school shooting perpetrated by the son of Linda and Richard (Monica Dolan and Paul Hilton). What plays out is so much more complex, emotionally satisfying and dramatically rich than simply recriminations flying around and vengeance being invoked however. Kranz’s script, subtle yet meaty and marbled with welcome seams of humour and warmth, picks at the thorny issues of how much responsibility can be laid at a parents feet once their offspring reach a certain age, and also how well we ever truly know those closest to us.

Carrie Cracknell’s hyper-focussed, note-perfect staging, the table around which the couples sit, revolving barely perceptibly as they talk, confront, remember and feel, is technically much more sophisticated than it initially appears, but puts the central quartet front and centre, which is exactly where they need to be. Akhtar’s journey from chipper chumminess to raw anger rings completely true, and Hilton delivers a remarkable, magnetic portrayal of an urbane, professionally successful man on his guard but well informed yet utterly at sea with the horrors he has been exposed to.

It’s the mothers that really pierce your heart here though. I doubt I’ll ever forget the look on Dolan’s face as she all but pleads for the right to take some pride, some love in the memory of the child who wrote the tragedy in which they’re all now embroiled. I’ve always enjoyed Marshal’s performances but I’ve never loved her like I love her here as a beacon of damaged goodness and almost superhuman forgiveness. There’s a moment near the end when Gail and Linda embrace and it will break you, but in the best way.

The play’s title refers to a mass shooting but also to the religious music being rehearsed elsewhere in the building of the setting by an unseen choir. As the play draws to its conclusion, sunlight floods in through the overhead skylights, the doors are opened and the room is bathed in an almost celestial sonic chorale (composer Katrina Rose, sound designer Donato Wharton and Guy Hoare’s lighting all delivering world class work here). It could be cheesy or sugary but in practice it just feels like healing, hopeful, putting a theatrical button on a play that deals, unflinchingly, with the messy disarray of humanity. 

Everyone here is singing from the same hymn sheet (pun intended), from the superb supporting performances of Rochelle Rose as a guarded mediator, and the lovely, edgy dynamic between Amari Bacchus and Susie Trayling as a pair of contrasting church workers, to Anna Yates’ vividly realistic set and unshowy costumes. Everything about the production, performances and writing does exactly what it needs to be doing, and the ultimate effect is searing, transformative and unforgettable. They’re preaching to the choir in terms of the difficult subject of the right to bear arms, and I would imagine the long term goal of this brilliant production must be American stages where it will hit with even more white-hot force, although it’s hard to see how these central performances will ever be matched.

Unquestionably one of London theatre’s must-sees of 2026. Essential.

BECKY SHAW

by Gina Gionfriddo

directed by Trip Cullman

Hayes Theater, New York City – until 14 June 2026

running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval 

https://2st.com/shows/becky-shaw

Gina Gionfriddo’s 2008 Becky Shaw, only now receiving its Broadway bow in an exceptionally well cast production courtesy of Second Stage Theater, is a fascinating but frustrating play, one that considers interdependence and mutual responsibility in human relationships with a forensic precision, but is populated by a quintet of wildly unsympathetic characters. This new production by Trip Cullman doesn’t sugarcoat any of Gionfriddo’s cynical but acute observations and his magnificent cast make no attempt to endear their roles to us; the result is a bracing evening, often bitterly, even shockingly, funny, but an undeniably chilly one. It teases, worries and entertains, but never delves as deeply as it might.

The first scene takes place in a New York hotel room where self-centred post-graduate psychologist Suzanna Slater (Lauren Patten) is being comforted, or at least handled, after the death of her father by the acting family financial advisor Max (Alden Ehrenreich), who she grew up alongside when Pa Slater effectively adopted him as a child to get him away from his less than ideal parents. Not that Suzanna’s parents were any picnic either: Suzanna’s late dad may have been having a gay affair with his previous finance man, and mom Susan (Linda Emond) has descended on the city from her well-appointed Virginia home, like an acerbic, elegant Black Widow with toy boy lover in tow, much to Suzanna’s annoyance and disgust, and wielding her ongoing MS condition like it’s a weapon. Susan and Suzanna can’t even agree on how long Slater has been dead, and Max has a chronic if entertaining (for us) empathy problem, advising grieving Suzanna to enter the upcoming estate negotiations with “no crying. Big dick.”

It becomes swiftly apparent that there is more to Max and Suzanna’s relationship than meets the eye but fast forward eight months to Providence, Rhode Island and she has married aspiring writer Andrew (Patrick Ball), a slightly younger man with a penchant for ‘saving’ apparently fragile women then leaving them (“he hears ‘I want to hurt myself’ like a fucking mating call”). One such woman in crisis is the eponymous Becky Shaw (Madeline Brewer), a co-worker acquaintance of Andrew’s, and whom the newlyweds are planning on taking on a blind double date with Max. The implausibility of setting up anybody who doesn’t have the hide of a rhino with the emotionally savage Max needn’t be dwelt upon, but the stage is set for some serious fireworks.

Those fireworks don’t fully materialise, or at least not in the way one might have expected, and one of the interesting things about Gionfriddo’s tell-don’t-show script is how our expectations and assumptions about this flawed bunch are repeatedly confounded and shifted. It’s a static, talky piece but the complexities and casual cruelties in intimate relationships are put over with biting humour and some truly delicious writing.

It helps that the five performances are so on point. Screen star Ehrenreich (Hail, Caesar!, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Brave New World) delivers a knockout Broadway debut, deservedly in the running for this year’s Tony award for Featured Actor in a Play (although arguably this is a leading role). More obviously traditional ‘alpha male’ perhaps than the late, great David Wilson Barnes who similarly slayed in this role in Peter DuBois’ original off-Broadway and 2016 London Almeida stagings, Ehrenreich nails Max’s unsettling sociopathic combination of charisma, self-interest and sheer bloody mindedness. Although Ball’s role isn’t as coruscatingly well written but he’s excellent. 

Patten’s tetchy chemistry with both her leading men is brilliantly done and her ability to make Suzanna relatable even at her most unpleasant is impressive. Brewer is wonderful as Becky, by turns sympathetic then infuriating, smug, unknowable and, possibly, extremely dangerous. The majestic Emond makes such a strong impression as poisonous, pragmatic, smart Suzan, the kind of woman who says things like “when someone with damage -as we have damage- courts a lover, we must be like the pedophile with the candy. Lure with candy no matter how frightful your nature and your intent” and whose view of humanity can be reduced to the observation “some people are retarded and they eat paint, others split atoms and write symphonies“. She’s an appalling human being but she’s such compelling theatrical company that you actively miss her when she’s not on stage.  

There are several different locales required by Gionfriddo’s script but David Zinn’s set unhelpfully and confusingly places almost everything in a black void resembling a corridor punctuated by doors. It’s pretty ugly to look at until the final scene when the play shifts to Susan’s house in Richmond, Virginia and the design suddenly and inexplicably opens out into something airy, opulent and naturalistic. Kaye Voyce’s costumes are spot on throughout. 

The laughs to gasps ratio in Becky Shaw is pretty equal, and the erudite, ferocious script is unlikely to ever again be cast as perfectly as it is here. It’s great that Gionfriddo’s work is finally on Broadway and here’s hoping that the critical and popular enthusiasm for this one prompts further reappraisals of her body of work, but perhaps especially her 2012 Rapture Blister Burn which is, arguably, a more engaging and colourful piece than this one. Still, if it’s provocation and faultless acting you’re after, it’s right here.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON 

by Stephen Adly Guirgis 

based on the Warner Brothers film, and the LIFE Magazine by P F Kluge and Thomas More

directed by Rupert Gould

August Wilson Theatre, New York City – until 28 June 2026

running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval 

https://dogdayafternoon.com

I suspect the best way to enjoy Stephen Adly Guirgis’ stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon is to try to forget about the 1975 Sidney Lumet movie starring Al Pacino. That’s easier said than done though when Jon Bernthal, in a sensational Broadway debut as Sonny, the bungling bank robber with a surprisingly good heart, looks so uncannily like Pacino at moments in Rupert Goold’s flashy, propulsive staging. The award-winning film is a fascinating, painful mixture of social document and crime drama, inspired by a real Brooklyn bank raid that went wrong, and has cultural significance for its warts-and-all depiction of a New York in crisis, barrelling towards bankruptcy and with crime on the rise, and also for sensitive LGBTQ+ representation at a time when that was scarce. The play, with the inevitable softening glow of the footlights, is still potty-mouthed and reasonably unflinching but leans much more into the comedy. That may be problematic for some, but, taken on its own terms, it’s a cracking entertainment, outrageously funny but with a warm, beating heart and a lot of grit; it’s also supremely theatrical.

There’s an undeniable thrill when David Korins’ Tony-nominated set first rolls on, a fully realised mid-1970s bank interior and exterior, complete with tellers’ desks, lounge chairs, corridors off into other parts of the building, and that punishingly functional decor redolent of the time period. It’s an absolute eyeful, and theatrical world-building of the highest order, made immersive by Goold having actors as cops prowling the aisles of the August Wilson and, at a crucial point, the audience corralled into playing the crowd of approving rubberneckers waiting outside on the Brooklyn street waiting to see how the bank robbery and subsequent siege plays out. Brenda Abbandandolo’s sometimes garish but entirely realistic costumes (also Tony-nominated) and Isabella Byrd’s acidic lighting add to the sensational visual impact.

Perhaps inevitably constrained by having to adhere to the beats of the screenplay, Guirgis hasn’t produced a script to rival his very best work (Jesus Hopped The A Train, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the Pulitzer winner Between Riverside And Crazy) but Dog Day Afternoon on stage, despite a couple of sequences that threaten to run out of steam, has a manic energy and grim vitality that compels and intrigues. Goold’s production is populated by a bunch of terrific New York character actors who invest their roles with such a world-weary authenticity that you can almost feel the exhausted ache in their feet from perpetually pounding the pavements. It’s a feast of wonderful acting, without vanity or sentimentality, but alive to every last scrap of unease, spite, spiky kindnesses and caustic humour in these flawed, jaded humans.

Jessica Hecht, an actress incapable of turning in a bad or even indifferent performance, is on fine, laconic form as head teller Colleen, initially scathing but becoming more and more sympathetic to the desperate Sonny as the bank siege continues. Andrea Syglowski, Wilemina Olivia-Garcia and long term Guirgis collaborator Elizabeth Canavan are all vivid and superb as her professional underlings. John Ortiz brings a grizzled warmth to Detective Fucco, attempting to mediate between the force and the would-be bank robbers, and Spencer Garrett is deliciously horrible as Sheldon, the fellow cop hell bent on disparaging and discrediting him, repeatedly and deliberately mispronouncing his name as “Fuck-o”. Michael Kostroff adds potent comic value as another bank employee and Danny Johnson is genuinely affecting as a former military vet now working as a security guard who becomes collateral damage. There’s firecracker work, witty, full-throttle and eccentric, from Esteban Andres Cruz as Sonny’s lover Leon. 

Ebon Moss-Bachrach, the other above-the-title star, plays Sonny’s sidekick Sal and he delivers an alarming, accomplished portrait of an unstable, unhappy chancer who’s as much to be pitied as feared. Bernthal is stunningly good, mining his role for every ounce of caffeinated macho desperation, exasperated humour and unexpected tenderness.  Magnetic and multi-layered, he’s a one-man powder keg of explosives and it’s impossible to take your eyes off him and not to root for him.

It’s impossible to make much of a case for Dog Day Afternoon as a great play, but as a unique theatrical experience, one that brings back to life a specific period in New York history, evoking the atmosphere and feel of a city on the verge of breakdown, it’s a considerable success. Edgy, hilarious and strangely charming, it also seems to be a bona fide crowdpleaser: at the performance I attended, the audience roared their approval and enthusiastically joined in with the chants of “Attica! Attica!” as Bernthal’s Sonny whipped them up into a frenzy of joy and righteous indignation.