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THE CRUCIBLE 

by Arthur Miller 

directed by Ola Ince

Shakespeare’s Globe, London – until 12 July 2025

running time: 3 hours including interval 

https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/the-crucible/

As long as human beings are prepared to inflict grievous damage on each other due to mutual incomprehension and mistrust, Arthur Miller’s powerful witch hunt drama, a thinly veiled allegory of the McCarthy anti-Communist trials happening in America at the time it was written, will never not feel relevant. That is the genius but also the tragedy of The Crucible, now being presented for the first time at the Globe in an unadorned but mostly effective staging by Ola Ince.

Miller’s evocation of a puritanical 17th century Massachusetts community in the simultaneous grip of religious fervour and mass paranoia remains potent, sitting well in the ‘wooden O’ of the Globe,  even if this production never quite reaches the level of edge-of-your-seat tension that this play is capable of achieving. Ince lets the drama speak for itself which, when the piece is as good as this one, is hardly a problem. Her approach is more solid than inspired perhaps but she presents a commendably clear reading of the text, alive equally to the gritty humour in it and the sinister manipulation by sexually advanced Abigail Williams (a genuinely terrifying Hannah Saxby) of the other local young girls and by extension, the community as a whole.

The coolness in the marriage of John Proctor (Gavin Drea), the farmer with whom Abigail has had an adulterous dalliance, and his wife Elizabeth (a flinty, affecting Phoebe Pryce) is made abundantly clear from the get-go, the two of them sharing the same space but divided by an ocean of unspoken feeling and resentment. More than in other interpretations I’ve seen, these Proctors seem likely targets for a marital wedge to be driven between them by a dynamic, implacable go-getter like Saxby’s ripe, fervent Abigail. The sexual charge between her and Drea’s tormented, handsome John is palpable: note the way places her head on his chest at their first stolen moment alone together while he does nothing to propel her from him.

The accents are distractingly disparate: the Proctors are Irish, Abigail and her cohorts are West Country, Joanne Howarth’s wonderfully dry Rebecca Nurse is Welsh, there’s a bit of RP thrown in, some Estuary accents…it’s not a massive issue but the ear sometimes takes a while to tune in, especially in the open air, and it dissipates the sense of community somewhat. Ince’s production favours a declaratory style which often sees characters placed on opposing sides of the Globe’s wide stage bellowing at each other which gets a bit repetitive, although it fundamentally works for much of the second half where the play effectively becomes a courtroom drama.

Drea’s John has the gruff belligerence of a soul sure of his own mind but less so of his  body, and finds the raw grief in Proctor’s final roar of self-assertion (“How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”) He’s a good man in many ways, but he’s also a bully, because he’s living in a time and place that made it acceptable to be both. Steve Furst is chilling but intensely human as his nemesis Reverend Parris, and Jo Stone-Fewings delivers a beautifully detailed, compassionate account of Reverend Hale, sent in to sort out the mess but unable to reconcile the evidence of his own eyes with the partisan stances of the church and the law. 

Gareth Snook’s presiding deputy governor Danforth is another vivid creation, oleaginous and determined but prone to sudden moments of unsettling rage. Bethany Wooding sensitively but boldly captures the vacillating levels of power and assurance in Mary Warren, the Proctor’s servant who tastes freedom and agency but lacks the strength to follow through with it.

This is a play in part about the fallibility of the patriarchy, as thrillingly considered in the current Broadway hot ticket John Proctor Is The Villain, and it’s interesting to note that most of the creative team on this production is female. The solely female-driven moments, unscripted but striking, such as when the young women frolic with excited abandon on the top level of Amelia Jane Hankin’s rustic, workmanlike set after being freed from interrogation, or the imprisoned wives all accused of dealings with the devil appear in the same spot later on in pious, desperate prayer, stick in the memory. 

Renell Shaw’s underscoring lends an extra layer of tension, individual words and moments accorded stark significance by a terse musical frisson from Hilary Bersey’s five piece band. Crucially, the music never feels superfluous.

This may not be a production for the ages, particularly given that the universally acclaimed National Theatre version was only a couple of years ago, but it is one that undoubtedly gets to the heart of Miller’s troubling tale. The final, uncompromising scene between Drea’s John and Pryce’s Elizabeth is as moving here as it has ever been. The look of this staging may be robustly of the late 1600s in which it is set, but the concerns and the warnings in The Crucible still speak urgently to us today. 

THE DEEP BLUE SEA 

by Terence Rattigan

directed by Lindsay Posner

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London – until 21 June 2025

running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval

https://trh.co.uk/whatson/the-deep-blue-sea/

Terence Rattigan had been in the theatrical wilderness for decades when Czech director Karel Reisz staged a coruscating production of his 1952 The Deep Blue Sea at the Almeida starring Penelope Wilton. The year was 1993 and Wilton was a revelation as Hester Collyer, the middle aged, upper class woman who threw away a privileged life as a judge’s wife for the thrill of a liaison with a former RAF pilot years her junior. But then so was the whole production, unlocking the deep wells of emotion and despair underneath the civilised elegance of the language and igniting a fresh new appraisal of Rattigan’s body of work. 

If Lindsay Posner’s Theatre Royal Bath production, first seen last year and now in London for a limited season at the Haymarket, feels less astonishing than that earlier reinvention, it’s still, on closer inspection, subversive in its own way. From the moment the curtain first rises on Peter McKintosh’s drab, detailed bedsit – all mismatched furniture, peeling wallpaper and hideous drapes, the kind of room where hope goes to die – it’s clear this is at least going to look like a conventional Deep Blue Sea.  

Cleaving nearer to the original spirit of the text than the expressionistic, expansive Carrie Cracknell revival for the National in 2016 which featured the late, great Helen McCrory as a sex pot, drama queen Hester, it’s clear that Posner trusts the play. So he should, as it’s an out-and-out masterpiece, but he still manages to cast some fascinating new lights onto it.

For starters, Freddie Page, the test pilot for whom Hester abandoned her life of privilege and comfort, frequently played as a sort of youthful homme fatal, is significantly older than usual. Hadley Fraser, who previously played the role opposite Nancy Carroll nearly a decade ago in Chichester, is certainly attractive and, when required, charming, but his maturity also lends a chilling edge to Freddie’s less sensitive treatment of Hester: casual carelessness becomes cruelty, and it feels all the more shocking. Similarly, the character’s excessive drinking, if not excused at least explained by the man’s youth in more conventional readings, seems more nihilistic, more hell bent on oblivion when Freddie is older. It also makes the dynamic between him and Hester, where she at times seems more mother figure than lover, all the more twisted. Fraser pierces through to the self-hatred at the core of this handsome loser more than any other actor I’ve seen in the role.

Tamsin Greig delivers a richly textured, multi-layered Hester Collyer. Every inch the vicar’s daughter who became a perfect society cohort, she’s a people pleaser who appals even herself when she gives full rein to desires and urges she’s kept locked away. She finds great power in stillness, but also lets us see Hester thinking on her feet as she manoeuvres an increasingly tortuous emotional life with a combination of manipulation, stealth and sheer desperation. 

Greig uses several voices, all connected:  there’s the mellifluous, cello-like sound of an urbane woman at home with small talk and dinner parties, and able to deal maturely and squarely with her lovelorn, needy QC husband (a beautiful performance by Nicholas Farrell). Then there’s the slightly infantilised ‘little girl’ voice Hester has probably employed as a palliative and a buffer since youth, and, finally, when the stakes get really high, and control and composure have slipped away, a banshee-like screech that denotes a woman at the very edge of reason, which is truly horrible to hear. It’s a riveting account of the role, in charge but generous to the other actors, full of subtle details and unexpected choices, reconfirming Greig as one of this country’s greatest working actresses.

The first half runs acts one and two together which makes it punishingly long, despite the quality of the production and performances. The second half is utterly compelling though. Greig finds a heroic, classical intensity and strength in Hester’s final dealings with the feckless Freddie and is almost unbearably moving as she resolves, at the urging of Finbar Lynch’s unflinching, brilliant struck-off Doctor, to turn her back on her suicidal urges and live without any hope but also “without despair”. Lynch is quietly astounding: dry as dust but full of kindness and a rich inner life.

Selina Cadell finds impressive colours and nuances in the cheerfully gossipy landlady, a role that in lesser hands can easily slip into standardised ‘Cockney char’ territory. There’s lovely, period-authentic work from Preston Nyman and Lisa Ambalavanar as the younger couple residing in the boarding house and who become inadvertently drawn into Hester and Freddie’s drama. Often played either too clipped or too hearty, these two get it just right, she betraying a surprising fragility as she confides in Hester that she cannot bear to be left alone, and he demonstrating a pretty shoddy attitude to women as he confesses to an affair.

Powerful as this revival is, there are moments where one can’t help but wonder how much more potently it must have played in Bath’s Ustinov Studio, where it originated. The ornate, chocolate box-y Haymarket inevitably keeps us at a slight remove, despite the vividness and authority of the performances. Where this production excels is in creating a world where ‘stiff upper lip’ behaving well is the norm, and so when the raw, anguished pain breaks through, it’s all the more shocking and devastating, like a cluster bomb of mess and shame detonating at high brow tea party. It may be defiantly unfashionable but work of this quality unquestionably ages well.

THE MAD ONES

by Kait Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk

directed by Emily Susanne Lloyd

The Other Palace Studio, London – until 1 June 2025

running time: 2 hours including interval 

https://theotherpalace.co.uk/the-mad-ones/

American teenager Samantha Brown is haunted. A super-bright young woman with an unconventional but strangely admirable mom, she lost her best friend Kelly in a car accident and that colours the way she views the world. Kelly is everywhere for Samantha: a cajoling, supporting, sometimes mocking, occasionally furious, presence. That’s the basic premise for Kat Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk’s emotionally rich, deceptively sophisticated chamber musical and if on paper it might appear mawkish and a little clichéd, in practice and on stage it proves anything but.

Originally seen off-Broadway in 2017, The Mad Ones examines grief and the bonds that transcend mere mortality, while also addressing the growing pains every young person has to deal with, and the sexual ambiguity in a relationship between two women who love each other unconditionally. It’s funny and heartfelt, but the overall tone is one of regret and wonder, but with the freshness and energy of youth.

The transitions from script to musical numbers are almost seamless, and when the characters sing with full chest, as they often do, it’s because they’re in that musical theatre nirvana where emotions can only be expressed in song because the spoken word no longer suffices. There’s a lot of gorgeous multiple harmony belting going on here but, unlike with numerous contemporary musicals (including The Great Gatsby, the Broadway juggernaut now at the Coliseum and with which Kerrigan is also creatively involved), this feels entirely organic and true to the story being told rather than just bravura vocals for their own sake. 

The storytelling is non-linear and sometimes a little ponderous. Samantha (Dora Gee, winningly sincere and vocally impressive) appraises her young life story in retrospect as her memories get swirled up and randomly dissipated which can get a bit hard to follow on first viewing. Gee is so lovable you’ll want to stick with her as Samantha tries to sort out whether to explore her academic possibilities (she’s got an offer at prestigious Yale University) or set off on the track of adventurous self discovery, as prescribed by Courtney Stapleton’s sensationally sung, hard-to-resist Kelly. Even if the narrative is sometimes confusing, it’s impossible not to care about these vibrant young women.

Another marvellous creation is Beverly, Samantha’s uber-feminist, neurotic mom, played with a delightful mixture of eccentricity and authority by Thea-Jo Wolfe. She gets possibly the best number, a stunning second act solo ‘Miles And Miles’ about the differences in the futures mapped out for women versus men (“the glass cracks in the ceiling and women swell with pride / but when a woman breaks the rules / the world’s not on her side / The wheels of change / they move so goddamn slow”). It takes the breath away with its clarity of intent and musical sophistication, and it’s delivered thrillingly but with rock solid truth by Wolfe. The acting throughout has that same sense of truth, these feel like real people and because of that, the show becomes increasingly more moving as it goes along.

Thematically and musically, The Mad Ones is somewhat reminiscent of Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s masterly Fun Home, which can be no bad thing. It isn’t as accomplished or ambitious but there are echos in the low-key folk/pop that periodically blossoms into something astonishing, and in the sense of memories that haunt and hurt. The romantic attraction between Samantha and Kelly is presented with genuine subtlety and sensitivity, and even if it’s never explored as fully as the tentative relationship with Gabriel Hinchcliffe’s hugely likeable garage mechanic boyfriend, it’s probably better written. 

Hinchcliffe does lovely work but it’s clear the creatives have far more interest in the women than the sole male. Kelly has a beautifully written section where she’s attempting to galvanise Samantha to run away with her from their smalltown lives, and while there’s a neat symmetry in having the boyfriend Adam repeat the same lines and lyrics later on, it sounds more hollow coming from him.

The Other Palace’s studio space hems in a show that repeatedly trumpets the necessity of freedom and Emily Susanne Lloyd’s otherwise exquisitely judged production is encumbered by having the car that is central to plot developments permanently on stage. Generally, Reuben Speed’s set, like a giant, jaggedly shattered mirror through which figures from Samantha’s memories can magically manifest then disappear, is pretty effective, especially as sensitively lit by Joanne Marshall. It’s like a visual representation of Samantha’s fractured state of mind and also the aftermath of the car accidents that punctuate the narrative.

The second act is a little over long but the quality of the score (superbly played by Callum Thompson’s mini-band on the studio’s balcony level), most of the writing and the stupendously fine cast ensure that attention doesn’t flag. The Mad Ones is a little gem, refreshing, honest and quietly devastating. Enthusiastically recommended. 

HOUSE OF GAMES 

based on the screenplay by David Mamet, story by David Mamet and Jonathan Katz 

stage version by Richard Bean

directed by Jonathan Kent 

Hampstead Theatre, London – until 7 June 2025

running time: 1 hour 40 minutes no interval 

https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2025/house-of-games/

Accepting things at face value feels like an increasingly naive thing to do in a modern world where you can’t seem to log on to your computer without receiving a phishing email, or read a paper without seeing a story about an innocent being scammed out of their life savings. Although based on a David Mamet-scripted movie first seen in 1987, House Of Games feels bracingly contemporary. Or maybe it’s just timeless, as apparently there will always be hustlers to hustle and suckers to be parted from their cash. 

In Jonathan Kent’s Rolls Royce production of a Richard Bean adaptation first seen at the Almeida in 2010, this stage version is a satisfying amalgam of edgy comedy and whiplash-inducing thriller. It’s fabulously well acted and designed, and the use of laptops and cellphones sets it very much in the present, or at least the very recent past. It also features, in Dr Margaret Ford, a Chicago therapist, writer and educator that gets drawn into a murky underworld of gambling and elaborate confidence trickery, a female central figure with agency and credible human layers, which is pretty rare in Mamet, a notoriously male-centric playwright. 

Lisa Dillon, in a superb performance, charts a richly detailed journey from detached but kindly professionalism through an unexpected bout of emotional investment to grim survival mode. She’s steely but warm and utterly credible, intelligently marrying together the career woman with the darker, wilder instincts lurking beneath the surface. 

Kent has surrounded her with quality. Robin Soans, Siôn Tudor Owen and Andrew Whipp offer delicious portrayals of a gang of incorrigible veteran gamblers who gather in the seedy, dark dive bar (realised with such vividness and relish by designer Ashley Martin-Davis that you can almost smell the stale smoke and spilt beer) under the supervision of Richard Harrington’s impressively volatile Mike, who Margaret falls for despite herself. Kelly Price and Laurence Ubong Williams, both electric presences, provide a fascinating change of energy as the pair of out-of-towners who this disparate bunch try to con money out of, or so we are led to believe. 

Oscar Lloyd brings a wired intensity to the gun-wielding, unstable rich kid who begins as Margaret’s patient but becomes her conduit into a shady underworld where her authority proves meaningless and Joanna Brookes finds comedy gold in an opinionated but concerned secretary. The acting from the entire company is so strong that it’s almost possible to ignore that there some tonal shifts in the script, possibly due to Bean’s comic instincts rubbing up against Mamet’s noirish machismo without quite making sparks, that don’t fully work, and that the play as a whole takes a bit too long to kick into thriller mode. When that does happen though, it’s wildly successful.

Kent’s production is strong on atmosphere, aided enormously by Martin-Davis’s intricate, impressive split level set, beautifully lit by Peter Mumford, that jumps between the contrasting locales of the basement bar and Margaret’s airily austere office with a filmic dexterity and speed. A bluesy music score marks the scene transitions and adds to the overall feeling of watching a screenplay on stage, although the performances and laser-sharp focus of the staging at times of high tension are the stuff of pure theatre.

House Of Games doesn’t have anything particularly profound to say about the human condition, beyond the fact that people are gullible (no spoilers here, but that includes audience members who take a while to cotton on to what is really happening) and ruthless, but it’s engaging entertainment. Why revive it now? If there’s no obvious raison d’être beyond giving people a good time in the theatre, well, maybe that’s enough, especially when it’s done this well.

Honestly, I suspect these particular actors invest their characters with rather more nuance and depth than is present in the writing, but when Kent’s enjoyable production hits its stride, the play becomes authentically gripping. I enjoyed this considerably more than the original Almeida version, which felt less streamlined and just generally harder going; it’s a cynical, funny, engrossing slice of twisted Americana with its heart nowhere the right place, and, under Jonathan Kent’s leadership, a feast of terrific acting. 

1536 

by Ava Pickett

directed by Lyndsey Turner 

Almeida Theatre, London – until 7 June 2025

running time: 1 hour 50 minutes, no interval 

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/1536-play/

“Has it always been like this? Will it always be like this?” asks Siena Kelly’s disillusioned Anna, a sixteenth century young woman whose freedom and intelligence is under fire in a world controlled by self-serving men in this historical comedy drama that speaks to the present day with a rare urgency.

Female rage when harnessed and honed is one of the most potent forces on earth. There’s a lot of female rage in Ava Pickett’s incandescent debut play, set in Tudor England but feeling bang up to date: there’s also a lot of passion, raucous humour and electrifying drama, plus some of the spiciest, most heartfelt dialogue written for theatre in quite some time. 

1536 was the year Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, was beheaded (allegedly for adultery although in retrospect the claims seem spurious) and Pickett has imagined 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. One of them (Kelly’s free-thinking, impassioned Anna) manages it successfully, the other two…not so much. 

One of the many wondrous things about Pickett’s script 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 others backs even when it’s actively painful to do so. The acutely observed, truthful performances of Kelly, Liv Hill and Tanya Reynolds – surely three of this country’s most brilliant young actresses – help immeasurably of course, but the writing is cracking. It never tips over into worthiness, and it’s frequently a hell of a lot of fun. The nearest this gets to cliché is that this central trio initially sound like archetypal ‘Essex girls’, which is quite deliberate and delicious.

Pickett’s dialogue is salty, stroppy, contemporary, and at first it seems that the point of 1536 is 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. 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. 

Suffice it to say that the broken hearted love between Tanya Reynolds’s tartly funny, warmly independent midwife and a local landowner (Angus Cooper, multi-layered and compelling) is handled with real sensitivity. Hot button topics such as rape and domestic violence are introduced but it always feels entirely organic. Liv Hill as the most impressionable and (on the surface at least) vulnerable of the three women 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. Adam Hugill is strong but subtle as a male presence who proves toxic to these women but is ultimately just as lost in his own way. There’s not a single false note in any of the acting. 

Lyndsey Turner’s production is basically flawless. It’s entirely, engagingly naturalistic, until it isn’t. The lighting by Jack Knowles conveys rural exteriors but 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. It never feels flashy though, every creative working fully in service of the text. There’s even a section that veers into interpretive dance, furious and abandoned, to a howling vocal by Maimuna Memon (powerful compositon by Will Stuart), and used in a similar vein to that of the current Broadway smash hit, John Proctor Is The Villain, to which 1536 bears more than a passing resemblance. When the piece turns violent, it’s meaty not melodramatic, and has the tragic tang of inevitability.

The switch from off-the-cuff humour and foul-mouthed charm to despair and righteous anger is seamlessly done. So much is at stake here, and we feel it and, if we’re paying attention, are profoundly affected by it. 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 rage and frustration, “how you can be good when they keep changing the definition of what that is?”

Well, 1536 certainly gets to the heart of what a good play is. The Almeida run is, unsurprisingly, sold out already but do whatever you can to get a return or cancellation. Better still, let’s start a petition for a West End transfer. This is (literally) bloody marvellous.

HERE WE ARE

Book by David Ives

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

inspired by the films of Luis Buñuel

directed by Joe Mantello

National Theatre/Lyttelton, London – until 28 June 2025

running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval 

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/here-we-are/

When God’s gift to musical theatre (oh come on, yes he was) died in 2021, he’d been working with playwright David Ives on this distillation of a couple of Luis Buñuel mid-twentieth century art house movies for a decade. In truth, the opportunity to hear the final score by Stephen Sondheim is the main reason why people are flocking to the National this summer and, if you’re a fan of his work, Here We Are is unlikely to disappoint. His detractors probably won’t go anyway, but a lot of the stuff that grinds their gears (dense, challenging lyrics, staccato rhythms, shards of melody, unexpected chord structures) is all present and correct. So too is one of  the strongest ensemble casts on any current London stage and a dazzling Joe Mantello staging based on his earlier version seen at NYC’s The Shed in 2023.

Here We Are is a heck of a lot of fun, and it’s also by turns frustrating, alarming and downright baffling. Despite ten years of work, it feels unfinished, specifically Sondheim’s contribution which is a full, and sparkling, musical score during the first act which sees a bunch of rich, successful, self-obsessed Manhattanites heading out in search of a restaurant brunch that’ll never happen, but is reduced to underscoring and short sequences – non sequiturs in song really – in the elliptical, apocalyptic second half. Sondheim uses music and lyrics conversationally here, and fans will derive much fun from trying to work out if this or that bit sounds more like Sunday….or Company…..or Passion, then suddenly hits us with something thrilling and unexpected, or shimmering and lovely. 

The music never really blooms into the sweet release of something conventionally melodic though, as it does in, say, Sunday In The Park With George or Passion, which may prove unsatisfying to some. Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations are as fine as anything else he ever created from the maestro’s work. Here We Are may be unsatisfactory if viewed as a conventional musical but when you can consider it as its own, bizarre beast, a witty, unsettling hybrid of script and music, then it’s zanily rewarding. 

If any creative team is going to work on a show that casts an absurdist eye on the concept of civilisation totally breaking down, then it’s this one. Sondheim has already dealt with the potential destruction of all that gives us comfort and hope in Sweeney Todd and Into The Woods, and David Ives explored shifts in power with a macabre wit in his hit 2010 play Venus In Fur. While Here We Are isn’t as complete a piece as any of those, it shares a beady-eyed appraisal of the faults and foibles of humans, overlaid with an off-the-wall surrealism that that has audiences rocking with laughter in one moment then reeling in shock the next. 

The characters aren’t sympathetic but they are grimly enjoyable company, especially with a cast that for the most part owe their primary allegiance to the stage rather than the orchestra pit underneath it. That’s especially important in a second act which barely feels like musical theatre at all, and requires the characters to unravel quite extremely (and entertainingly), which this superb team manage in spectacular fashion. The acting really is sensational throughout.

Rory Kinnear’s crazily wealthy vulgarian, living in a permanent state of low level aggression, is a familiar but horribly compelling creation while a bewitching yet hard-edged Jane Krakowski invests trophy wife Marianne with the constant sense of self-absorbed delight and childlike wonder that typifies a certain brand of super-rich. Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Martha Plimpton are gleefully hard nosed and hilarious as the plastic surgeon and publicist that turn up unexpectedly in their apartment. Chumisa Dornford-May continues to deliver on her earlier promise as Marianne’s rebellious younger sister, and Paulo Szot is an absolute riot as a womanising South American ambassador with criminal activity on his mind. 

If Harry Hadden-Paton can’t quite eclipse memories of David Hyde Pearce as shoe-obsessed Bishop having an existential crisis (“God knows / I’m a terrible priest”), he’s funny, endearing and truthful. Cameron Johnson and Richard Fleeshman make bold, essential contributions as a pair of military men with unexpected connections to the central figures. 

Returning from the original New York company are Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare playing multiple variations of serving and hospitality staff, bearing witness to the entitled and/or deranged behaviour of their financial, if not moral, betters. O’Hare was indisposed the night I saw Here We Are but Edward Baker-Duly delivered sparky, detailed, impressive work across a selection of roles. 

An astonishing Tracie Bennett proves once again why she’s been a Sondheim specialist for decades, prising a diamond-hard showstopper out of the extravagantly dour ‘It Is What It Is’ as a lachrymose, preposterously accented French maîtresse d’, but also finding irresistible comedy with an undertow of sadness and mania in a variety of other women, each exquisitely delineated. She has one line in the entire second act, playing an embassy maid whose look and physicality are not a million miles from Julie Walters’s ancient waitress in the inspired Victoria Wood “Two Soups” sketch, but is utterly magnetic whether passing silent judgement on the appalling guests or furtively slurping from a cognac bottle. Bennett was Olivier nominated for her stunning Carlotta (“I’m Still Here”) in the 2017 National revival of Sondheim’s Follies, and I strongly suspect she’ll be up for that same award again for this.

David Zinn’s clinical, chic set which makes the onstage figures look like exhibits in an art installation undergoes a luscious transformation in the second half, and Sam Pinkleton (director of current New York sensation Oh, Mary!) brilliantly makes his choreography feel character driven , like it springs organically from the scripted scenes. Natasha Katz’s lighting has a sculptural, transformative quality that further enhances a production where every creative feels at the top of their game.

In the UK, it’s probably only the National that would have the resources to present this strange yet insistent show with such style. Sometimes bewildering, more often ravishing, frequently delightful, and clearly unfinished, Here We Are is a curio for sure, but a life enhancing, challenging one. I mostly loved it but fully respect the opinions of those who totally won’t. You really have to experience this one for yourself.

HAMLET HAIL TO THE THIEF

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, adapted by Christine Jones with Steven Hoggett

Music by Radiohead 

directed by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett

Aviva Studios, Manchester to 18 May 2025, then Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon 4 to 28 June 2025

running time: 1 hour 50 minutes no interval

https://factoryinternational.org/whats-on/hamlet-hail-to-the-thief/

https://www.rsc.org.uk/Hamlet-Hail-to-the-Thief

A mash-up of Shakespeare’s (arguably) most loved tragedy with one of Radiohead’s least celebrated albums sounds like a bonkers idea, and so it proves in performance. Hamlet Hail To The Thief is however a striking, unusual piece of music theatre that divides its weight equally between the original text, Jess Williams’s angsty choreography, and the haunting, sometimes thunderous, music, played ‘live’ and re-orchestrated for the stage by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. If ultimately this Factory International and Royal Shakespeare Company co-production, created by Yorke, Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, feels like a fascinating experiment rather than a fully fledged piece, there’s much to admire.

Jones and Hoggett previously collaborated on the stage incarnation of Green Day’s American Idiot for Broadway and a world tour, and at its best Hamlet Hail To The Thief has a similar sense of iconoclastic wildness. Rock music in tandem with expressionistic choreography lends itself extremely well to conveying the inner workings of people at the end of their tethers, which is something the creatives here completely understand. 

Where American Idiot gave the songs full rein though, this show uses the Radiohead contributions to set mood and establish background, and to accompany the movement, which is highly reminiscent of the work of Frantic Assembly, the groundbreaking physical theatre company Hoggett co-founded. There are no ‘numbers’ as such – this very much isn’t Hamlet: The Musical – but the music is an ongoing presence, by turns ominous then rousing, and Tom Brady’s band is cracking, as are the ethereal vocals of Ed Begley and Megan Hill, even if the booming acoustics in Aviva Studio’s specially constructed auditorium render the lyrics incomprehensible.

Jones has trimmed the Shakespeare to a lean running time -well under two hours- that hits all the main beats of the Hamlet story but, perhaps inevitably, doesn’t allow for much in the way of psychological insight beyond what the individual performers are able to provide. Some fare better than others. Paul Hilton’s oleaginous, chain-smoking Claudius is a masterclass in imperious paranoia and duplicity; dangerous as a cobra about to strike, he’s magnetic and utterly repellent. He’s also the ghost of Hamlet’s father/his own brother, rendered with massive distortions and effects by video on the back wall of the set, and bizarrely conceived like the villain from a none-too-subtle episode of Dr Who. 

Opposite Hilton, Claudia Harrison is an impassioned, superb Gertrude, in another performance that would work equally well in a more conventional version of the whole play. That’s equally true of Tom Peters’s Polonius and Brandon Grace’s Laertes, both of whom make strong impressions and manage to break through all the bombast and gloom.

Delivering the famous “to be or not to be” not as a soliloquy but as an aggressive verbal attack on Ophelia, Samuel Blenkin only gives us some aspects of Hamlet as a character: he brilliantly suggests the protagonist’s fury and disaffection, yet gives little sense of a rich inner life, but that’s not surprising given how much text has been cut. He also has an idiosyncratic way of pronouncing sibilants that recalls Sigourney Weaver’s much maligned turn in the recent Drury Lane Tempest, and proves equally distracting. The role of Ophelia has been punched up considerably, and Ami Tredrea lends her a distracted but tough quality that works well for this version, but she isn’t especially sympathetic, even when reprising the aforementioned “to be or not to be” utterance at the height of her trauma. 

Her death is ingeniously staged as a grave surrounded by blinding light opens up like a chasm in the black stage floor for her to tumble into. The look of the show is relentlessly dark: AMP featuring Sadra Tehrani’s set is a blank square populated by amps, speakers and a metallic staircase, Lisa Duncan has costumed everyone in deep black, and Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting runs the colour spectrum from white to yellow. It looks impressive but it’s not always clear what’s going on or who’s speaking, an issue exacerbated by the impersonally large space. I suspect the stakes and intensity may be upped when it transfers to the more intimate Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Will Duke’s ingenious, monochrome video design, sparingly used, adds to the overall nightmarish quality. The confrontation scene where Hamlet’s recriminations to his mother are interrupted by the discovery of the hapless Polonius is accompanied by a queasily undulating trompe l’œil effect whereby every object on the back wall seems to pulse and vibrate…the sense of foreboding is palpable and unsettling. This level of theatrical bravura is welcome in a production that, for all its spiky edges and originality of thinking, is not without its longueurs as Hamlet-lite struggles to emerge from the literal and metaphorical murk.

It’s interesting that the RSC is involved with this project in the same season as they’ve had an acclaimed, mould-breaking Hamlet (which just completed a national tour) and are giving us the upcoming UK premiere of Fat Ham, James Ijames’s fabulous Black queer American riff on the fabled text which arrives in Stratford this summer. Hamlet Hail To The Thief isn’t entirely satisfying – Radiohead fans may be frustrated that there are no complete songs, and there are whole swathes and colours of Hamlet that go unexplored – but the marrying together of a play and an album that, despite being created centuries apart, share a similar sense of paranoia and existential ennui, is pretty inspired. You could probably get away with not being familiar with Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief album and still enjoy this, but I suspect that without at least a rudimentary knowledge of Hamlet, you’d be pretty lost.

FAYGELE

by Shimmy Braun

directed by Hannah Chissick

Marylebone Theatre, London – until 31 May 2025

running time: 90 minutes no interval 

https://www.marylebonetheatre.com/productions/faygele

There’s nothing remotely enjoyable about writing a negative review of a play that the author has clearly poured their heart and soul into, but here we are. In a touching programme note for Faygele, the gay Jewish drama at Marylebone directed by Hannah Chissick, playwright Shimmy Braun describes the text as “my baby…deeply personal” before briefly describing his own journey from married Orthodox Jew with four children to out gay man, So, there’s clearly a lot here at stake. 

Thankfully Braun’s life path has turned out differently from that of poor Ari Freed, his eighteen year old protagonist, rejected for his sexuality in his early teens by his father, and whose post-suicide funeral is returned to at intervals throughout the ninety minute duration. We also see his Bar Mitzvah and various scenes in the family home,  with Ari himself (Ilan Galkoff) commenting directly to us from a dimension somewhere between life and death, which has the unfortunate effect of making Faygele feel more like a radio play than a stage property, an impression reinforced somewhat by Chissick’s stilted, static production.

Galkoff, a tremendously likeable and talented young actor, gives a creditable account of a role that requires him to go from sullen to shouty with little in between, apart from one clumsily written sequence where the bewildered youth attempts to seduce Sammy, an older man who’s trying his best to guide him (Yiftak Mizrahi, delivering beautiful work). A consistent feature of the play is that conflicts are set up -between Ari and his parents, between the parents themselves, between the Rabbi (a warm and charismatic Andrew Paul) trying to help the family despite the constraints his faith puts upon him around the subject of homosexuality and the parents, between Sammy and almost everybody- that should be emotionally and theatrically potent but are scuppered by undistinguished, obvious writing and a lack of psychological depth.

The result is that everybody sounds like a bunch of viewpoints strung together rather than real people, which inevitably robs the play of much of its feeling, despite the raw emotionalism of the subject matter. This is especially true of Ari’s parents (Ben Caplan and Clara Francis, fine actors both) whose relationship is depicted as a series of subterfuges and screaming rows, but they are too sketchily drawn for their arguments to feel especially urgent. Caplan starkly depicts Freed’s inability to comprehend his son’s otherness while Francis, a lovely, instinctive actress, finds the pain in the conflict between love for her child and obeisance to her husband. These are very good performances, but with stronger writing and direction they could be great.

On press night, Chissick’s production didn’t seem quite ready, with some fudged lighting and sound cues, and a couple of instances of actors stumbling over their lines. That should all improve with a few more shows under everyone’s belt, but there’s not a lot that can be done about a script that, while it undoubtedly has its heart in the right place, feels unfocused and dramatically inert. I would rather have had part of the comparatively brief running time used to give us more information about the characters than the interminable and pointless enactment of a Jewish fable about a turkey that is staged with little flair or enthusiasm. 

Any head of steam that Braun does manage to build up is dissipated by unnecessarily lengthy scene changes as the cast shift the furniture about on David Shields’s dark, woody, non-specific set. One area where the show is successful in conveying the sense of an entire community of people living in a modern American city yet being quite separate from it. It is almost a shock when talk of cellphones and the internet is first introduced. The recurring motif in the direction seems to be placing the actors in isolation, hands clasped in anguish, and staring at the floor: it must doesn’t make for very interesting theatre.

The fault is in the writing. During the funeral, the Rabbi talks about Ari being too good for this world, and that the people left behind him didn’t deserve him, but there’s very little in the script to support that, beyond the fact that his dad was a massive bully and a hypocrite. It’s a desperately sad story but it isn’t fleshed out enough to make us really feel that sadness. It should break your heart and, despite the efforts of an excellent cast, it just doesn’t.

There is a play stirring, tragic and thought-provoking to be written about the antiquated attitude to sexuality within Orthodox Judaism, and the human fallout from archaic traditions, but Faygele (the title is a Yiddish word meaning “little bird”, also employed as derogatory slang for gay or effeminate men) isn’t it. Maybe Braun is too close to his subject matter, but right now Faygele needs a dramaturg, more complexity, and a snappier production.

BLOOD WEDDING 

by Barney Norris, after Lorca

directed by Tricia Thorns 

Omnibus Theatre, London – until 24 May 2025

running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes including interval 

https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/blood-wedding-2/

Barney Norris’s modern take on Blood Wedding is to the original text as the recent Cate Blanchett Barbican Seagull was to Chekhov, or as the Billie Piper Young Vic Yerma a couple of years ago related to another classic Lorca tragedy. In other words, it’s a completely new play (new-ish actually, having premiered at Salisbury Playhouse just before the pandemic), and a very engaging one at that, hanging on the framework of the great Spanish tragedy. Tricia Thorns’s impeccably acted production for Two’s Company is less poetic than a faithful version of Blood Wedding but it’s also considerably more accessible and a lot more fun. 

Norris transplants this tale of forbidden love and sinister foreboding to the Wiltshire countryside where he grew up, which gives a charming authenticity to the inclusion of place names and local points of interest, and makes it feel bracingly contemporary. The combination of rural British setting, working class grit and the (admittedly watered-down) otherworldliness are as reminiscent of Jez Butterworth in his Jerusalem era as it is of the second Golden Age of Spanish theatre. 

Lorca’s doomed bridegroom is now cocky school leaver Rob (Christopher Neenan), arranging his wedding to feisty, troubled, slightly older Georgie (Nell Williams) while his mum Helen (Alix Dunmore, exquisite) looks on with massive reservations. Where Lorca gave us death in human form as an old beggar woman, Norris has created loquacious Brian, the caretaker of the rickety village hall the aforementioned trio is considering for the post-wedding party, mainly because it’s so cheap. David Fielder, in a masterclass performance of utter brilliance, turns this shambling old widower into a sympathetic, slightly unnerving outsider, all-seeing and a bit needy, frequently hilarious but able to turn on the pathos at a moment’s notice. 

Observing how the figures in this Blood Wedding (lurking on the sidelines there’s also Lee, Georgie’s ex, an Irish Traveller played with a perfect combination of menace and lost-boy charm by Kiefer Moriarty, who has started a family with her estranged school friend Danni, a searing Esme Lonsdale) dovetail with the Lorca adds to the fun if you’re familiar with the original but it’s not essential. Norris’s potty-mouthed tragicomedy hums along compulsively on its own terms.

There’s punchy, relatable dialogue, much of it laugh-out-loud funny, such as the way Helen’s speeches are peppered with half-baked motivational quotes as though she’s gorged on self-help manuals, and some of Brian’s lines are priceless. When Norris gets serious, he never overdoes the foreshadowing: “love doesn’t always behave well, does it?” says Danni to Georgie at one point, and it feels like a warning. It’s telling also how, every time she discusses her upcoming wedding to Rob, Georgie talks about how she ‘needs’ the stability and continuity marriage offers, but never refers to love. 

The only section that doesn’t fully work, although played with spellbinding conviction by Fielder, is where Norris and Lorca most closely connect, in an extended monologue full of purple prose and poetic imagery, fusing the natural world, the mystical and the little lives of the individuals involved here. It’s not bad writing, but it feels like a clumsy gear change, present only to remind us that this enjoyable modern text has its roots elsewhere, and Alex Marker’s amateurish set has a mini transformation that verges on the laughable.

Thorns’s staging could afford to up the pace a bit and sometimes has the actors milling about aimlessly, although she makes interesting use of the auditorium as well as the stage. The performances are wonderful though. Watching Fielder feels akin to seeing one of the all-time greats but in a studio space. Williams charts Georgie’s internal conflicts with real sensitivity and passion, while Moriarty makes it entirely credible that she feels he’s bad news while also being unable to leave him fully behind. Lonsdale is vivid and moving as a young woman who on some innate level realises she’s a pawn in a game much bigger than she is. Dunmore reads as a little too young and glamorous to fully convince as a downtrodden single mum with a young adult as her son, but turns in a beautifully realised, fully rounded portrayal nonetheless, never finer than when managing a potent combination of grief and fury in the final scene.

If the first act is a comedy, act two is a tragedy, but both acts are superbly entertaining. Norris manages to honour Lorca but create something fresh, and as with the better soap operas, you can’t wait to see what happens next. 

TAMBO & BONES 

by Dave Harris

directed by Matthew Xia

Theatre Royal Stratford East, London – until 10 May 2025

Leeds Playhouse, Leeds – 14 to 24 May 2025

running time: 2 hours including interval

https://www.atctheatre.com/production/tambo-bones-2025/

Plays that genuinely think outside the box and set your mind and pulse racing, leaving you questioning and exhilarated in a way that few mediums other than live theatre can manage, are comparatively rare…but here’s one. First seen in 2022 at NYC’s Playwrights Horizons and now enjoying (due to public demand) a second UK outing, Tambo & Bones is an astonishing, provocative piece of theatrical bravura that rips up the rule book on playmaking. 

Philadelphia born Dave Harris was a slam poet before turning his hand to writing plays and I suspect that’s what accounts for Tambo & Bones’s breathtaking, free-form structure and way with language. It’s genuinely not like anything else I’ve ever seen: a challenging, exciting, racially charged almost-duet that examines Black masculinity in the US (although American culture is so all-encompassing that this play is likely to resonate wherever it’s performed in the western world) and comes to some pretty bleak conclusions about the pathways of humanity. 

Matthew Xia’s pacy, shape-shifting production for Actors Touring Company, in conjunction with Stratford East and a quartet of the UK’s most prestigious regional houses, is alive to the nuances and ambiguities in the text. It’s bracing, confrontational, and oh so ambitious….for starters, the satirical piece covers five hundred years in less than two hours playing time. At its best it’s unforgettable, and at times it’s almost impenetrable, but certainly never boring.

It’s divided, not neatly, into three sections. The title characters (Clifford Samuel and Daniel Ward, both extraordinary) initially appear as figures in a minstrel show, complete with artificially bucolic setting and banjo soundtrack, and the unwelcome stereotypes inherent in that mercifully lost form of entertainment whereby Black people are portrayed as lazy, dishonest and sunny-natured to the point of idiocy. There’s a Beckettian pathos and absurdity to this shabbily attired, endearing but vaguely disquieting pair. Tambo just wants to nap in the sun, while Bones is scrounging for dimes to go visit his sick son, or at least that’s what he tells us at first. It’s very funny, and the physical discipline, comic skills and sheer energy of both actors is spellbinding. It’s also disturbing: what is the modern relevancy of these questionable tropes being resurrected, what’s with the confrontational racially insensitive language, and where is this worrying undertow of threat leading? This is electrifying stuff.

Harris proceeds in the next section to draw an uncomfortable but credible line from Black minstrels demeaning themselves for the entertainment of white people, to the rap artists that become wealthy global superstars on the back of their African American heritage. It’s still Tambo and Bones but now it’s a hundred years on and they are winning awards and playing massive stadiums. Samuel and Ward transform with breathtaking conviction from gifted comic players to legitimate hip-hop stars, complete with insouciant swagger and elaborate, intricate word runs. As with a lot of rap performed live and heavily amplified, it’s not possible to catch every word but Bones is still preoccupied with money though the dimes are now dollars (lots of dollars) while Bones is now fully awake and all about social injustice. 

For the final part, Tambo & Bones moves into a more challenging, surreal zone that also carries a feeling of alarming inevitability. Set four hundred years in the future, it’s more open to interpretation perhaps than the earlier sections but it’s hugely powerful. Tambo and Bones have now become activists in an apparently lawless America torn apart by racially motivated strife. It veers nearer to performance art as a pair of white robots are wheeled on in a giant neon-edged box (Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ’s design and the lighting by Ciarán Cunningham are striking) and all hell breaks loose. It ends with an act of extreme violence and the lines “I know what I’ve done”….but what are the implications for humanity as a whole? Harris doesn’t give us any easy answers but if you don’t leave the theatre unsettled and full of questions, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.

Samuel and Ward are chameleonic and brilliant, switching from lovable to menacing, vulnerable to empowered, sympathisers to aggressors as required by the text. Their ability to go from charming to unnerving is quite something to experience, and collectively and individually they deliver acting (and rapping!) of the highest order. Terrific performances. Xia’s staging is slightly hampered by an unnecessary interval that interrupts the flow and tension but other than that, this is fierce, technically accomplished  theatre (Gino Ricardo Green’s video design is another triumph, as is the musical contribution of Excalibah*) that refuses to spoon feed its audience. It doesn’t provide easy answers, but then isn’t that life? Exhilarating and troubling.