ajhlovestheatre

SPEED 

by Mohamed-Zain Dada

directed by Milli Bhatia

Bush Theatre, London – until 17 May 2025

running time: 90 minutes no interval 

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/speed/

If you initially think the trio of British Asians in a Birmingham Holiday Inn basement to participate in a course for speeding and aggressive drivers in Mohamed-Zain Dada’s new play, fits a little too neatly into stereotypes then prepare to have your preconceptions blown out of the water. True, in brashly confident CEO Faiza (Shazia Nicholls), the kind of woman who responds with cheery thanks when told she doesn’t look Pakistani, feisty Brummie nurse Harleen (Sabrina Sandhu) and mouthy, streetwise “aspiring entrepreneur” Samir (Arian Nik), Dada presents a set of people that feel familiar, albeit crafted with palpable affection and some laugh-out-loud funny dialogue. But over the course of ninety excoriating minutes, the characters and indeed the play itself undergo satisfying transformations. 

It’s true also that at the outset, with the contrasting “types” and various clanging social faux pas, that Speed is occupying sitcom territory, albeit at the wittier end of the generic spectrum. That impression’s reinforced when the disgraced drivers have to sit through an excruciating motivational video put together by course leader, suited and booted, uber-serious Abz (Nikesh Patel), whose unwittingly hilarious opening gambit is “driving is not a human right, it’s a privilege”. 

There are clues in XANA’s intermittently unsettling sound design and Jessica Hung Han Yun’s changeable lighting that uptight Abz is suffering from some sort of PTSD, and every time he leaves the space he returns slightly more dishevelled than on his last appearance. Patel unravels brilliantly, and Tomás Palmer’s appropriately soulless conference room set springs a few surprises to hasten along his increasing distress. 

Milli Bhatia’s exquisitely judged, bracingly energised production is entirely in tune with the shifts in tone and emphasis, and is wonderfully acted throughout. Nik’s Samir is an endearing combination of bravado and vulnerability, and is helplessly funny right up until the unfolding action takes that possibility away from him. Sandhu fully convinces as a tough but kind young woman juggling family responsibilities and a gruelling job where she’s routinely under appreciated, and delivers sardonic one liners like an old pro.

Thankfully, Dada resists the obvious choice to make money-obsessed go-getter Faiza a nasty piece of work; she’s often crass for sure, and insensitive, and eye-wateringly un-self aware at times (“I think I’m here because I’m misunderstood…I don’t get angry at people, people get angry at me”), but she’s not a monster. In fact, she’s strangely lovable in a toe-curling sort of way. Nicholls is a sublime comic actress and plays her with gimlet-eyed relish, never funnier than when passively aggressively conveying her dismay at having to be present on this mandatory course (“you realise, my absence could have an impact on the economy?”) or pitifully sobbing “I was building generational wealth” when she realises she’s embroiled in something way out of her comfort zone. 

Dada is a cracking writer. The dialogue here is zingy, smart but sensitive, and the building (and breaking down) of characters is beautifully done, as is the manipulation of tension. The play also delivers some uncomfortable truths about what it means to be Asian in present day Britain, and almost miraculously it doesn’t feel grafted on, but genuinely organic. Comic exuberance and trenchant social commentary are larded together with real skill here. The Asian heritage of these four people is never over-amplified but it is an essential part of what Dada has written.

Speed is that rare beast, a comedy thriller that succeeds in being extremely funny and authentically thrilling. It’s crazy, entertaining, mercilessly well observed…and should be at the top of everybody’s list of must-see new plays.

MANHUNT 

written and directed by Robert Icke

Royal Court Theatre, London – until 3 May 2025

running time: 95 minutes no interval 

https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/manhunt/

Toxic masculinity and the long term effects of a traumatic childhood are under the microscope in Robert Icke’s Royal Court debut. The title Manhunt is ambiguous: on the one hand it refers to the extensive 2010 police search for Northumberland murderer Raoul Moat, which is the central focus of this intense, unusual play. But there’s potentially an alternative meaning, which is the quest and struggle that male-presenting humans have to face in order to understand what actually makes a man. 

Icke is best known for his world-beating contemporary adaptations of the classics which reached an apotheosis with his multi-award winning Oedipus (set to go to Broadway this autumn). Here though he is onto something quite different. Serving as director and writer, he seems to be interested as much in the circumstances and experiences that combine to create a hyper-violent criminal as in the specific case of Moat himself, who famously waged war on the police after murdering his ex-girlfriend’s new partner who he mistakenly believed to be in the force before maiming his ex. As described by one of the characters here, he ended up wandering the Northumbrian countryside “like a Frankenstein’s monster with a sawn-off shotgun” before turning the weapon on himself after a six hour stand-off with police. 

It’s a grim tale played out on a metallic grey stage (set by Icke’s regular collaborator Hildegard Bechtler) with the masterful manipulation and combination of sophisticated technical elements that typifies Icke’s work as a director. The aesthetic is characteristically spare and cool, with a surprising scenic transformation near the end. Ash J Woodward’s video contributions, whether spying on Samuel Edward-Cook’s dangerous Moat from above as though he’s under surveillance, or giving the audience regular reminders of the date as the action ticks down to the final catastrophic showdown, is a dazzling, essential contribution. So is Tim Gibbon’s sound design which brews an atmosphere of shuddering suspense, making vivid the contrast between the often distressing content of the script and the banal popular music that accompanies it. The silences, when they come, are telling and powerful.

The writing is perhaps less satisfying than the bravura staging. The play is a cats cradle of viewpoints and situations, eschewing linear storytelling for a dynamic ricochet around Moat’s troubled history, set in motion by an imagined court appearance where the fugitive is defending himself against past misdemeanours. There are distressing scenes of domestic violence and parental neglect but also a surprising  lurch into sentimentality as a child comes on to represent a youthful Moat, while another plays his daughter. Icke even presents the notorious moment when footballer Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne attempted to break through Moat’s standoff with the police. It’s written here as a funny but unsettling man-to-man therapy session (brilliantly played by Trevor Fox) that unravels alarmingly, although the actual event is even more bizarre, with the former sportsman turning up high on coke and offering to take Moat fishing. 

The ambiguity is all. It’s never clear if Moat ever did make the requests for mental health support that he claims were ignored, and which could have helped steered his life in a different direction. He also claimed to be of French origin and bilingual but that isn’t confirmed. Neither is the identity of the man who purports to be his long-absent father (Nicolas Tennant, strangely moving) who comes to talk him down when he’s in direst trouble. All of this lends the evening an elliptical shape that intrigues but also slightly confounds. 

A lengthy section set entirely in pitch darkness commemorates PC David Rathband who was blinded by Moat in an attack and ended up taking his own life. It’s a striking, affecting sequence, with a devastating vocal performance by Tennant) but it unhelpfully renders everything prior to it as a little clichéd, despite the exciting staging, while what comes later as the play hurtles towards its harsh conclusion is much more interesting. The suggestion that Moat had to turn violent to make people take note is probably the most unsettling thing the play throws up…is bad behaviour the only way some men can signal their issues?

Clearly Icke and his artistic adviser, journalist Andrew Hankinson who wrote the book that inspired this project, are interested in what makes such a person as Raoul Moat tick. It’s certainly a fascinating subject and the lack of preemptive judgement is to be commended, but the glow of the footlights inevitably lends the subject a certain Bonnie and Clyde-style glamour, especially as played by the charismatic Edward-Cook. This muddles the creative intentions somewhat as we in the audience aren’t given sufficient leads to make fully informed conclusions, and the bathos in the text further obfuscates what they’re getting at. Are we supposed to feel sympathy for Raoul? Should we be raging at the failures of the welfare state? 

Regardless of these niggles, this is affecting, stirring theatre. Technically it’s wonderful and the multi-rolling cast acquit themselves with a fine combination of attack and finesse. Whether or not it changes one’s opinion on Moat is a question, and one you’re likely to be mulling over long after the curtain comes down. If Robert Icke is a more accomplished director than a writer, he remains one of British theatre’s most iconic talent, and Manhunt is already, and inevitably, a very hot ticket.

(THIS IS NOT A) HAPPY ROOM

by Rosie Day

directed by Hannah Price

King’s Head Theatre, London – until 27 April 2025

running time: 90 minutes, no interval

https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/14/by-rosie-day/this-is-not-a-happy-room

Writer and actor Rosie Day won popular and critical acclaim for her (almost) solo show Instructions For A Teenage Armageddon in which she tackled the repercussions of abuse and the sheer bloody awfulness of being a hormone-crazed youth struggling to connect. Now she’s back with even more potentially relatable trauma but this time via a fractured family united for a wedding that swiftly, and implausibly, turns into a funeral, in a ninety minute tragicomedy that frustrates as much as it delights.

(This Is Not A) Happy Room gets off to a cracking start. Day (in a performance not dissimilar to what she delivered in her earlier show), Jonny Weldon and Andrea Valls play a trio of bickering siblings gathered together in a hideous Blackpool hotel to “celebrate” their Dad’s wedding (there’s some conjecture as to whether it’s his third or fourth) to a younger woman. The writing’s combination of gallows humour and barely suppressed venom suggests an acidic modern Ayckbourn at work. If Day’s characters are more collections of neuroses and symptoms than fully fledged humans, the performances are engaging enough and the zingers funny enough that it’s hardly noticeable….at first. 

Where the wheels start to come off is when the script seeks to make serious points about the long term effects of childhood abandonment with the arrival of the grown-up children’s mother (Amanda Abbington doing sterling work in an underwritten role). The humour gives way to a tsunami of psychobabble that instead of illuminating the characters, instead serves to make them more self-absorbed, and strangely less convincing. Even less believable is the way an upcoming wedding is repurposed with barely any notice into a funeral, and the arrival of the bride-to-be’s cousin (Jazz Jenkins, sparky), who conveniently works in mental health and is somehow dating Weldon’s chronic hypochondriac son. 

There’s often something bleakly funny about a family in turmoil, as long as it isn’t your own, and Day clearly understands that, but there’s an unbridgeable gulf between the comic writing and the less successful, more serious stuff. So, despite the energised efforts of the actors in Hannah Price’s pacy production, the play becomes more laboured as it draws on and the characters reveal themselves to be less and less likable. The show ends on a particularly heartless bombshell, which I won’t reveal here, that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth but neither illuminates nor enhances anything we’ve seen before, especially as these individuals are pretty hard to care about.

Some sections work well however, such as when Day’s actress daughter Rosie starts a funeral eulogy that, to the appalled amazement of herself as much as the other bewildered guests and participants, turns unstoppably into a recital of the lyrics to Steps/the Bee Gee’s pop hit ‘Tragedy’. Or the wildly inappropriate (under the circumstances) references to Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”. Watch also Abbington’s hilariously uncomfortable physical reaction to the news that the interloper into the family gathering is a therapist (“I don’t believe in therapy”). There’s endearing work from Tom Kanji as the elder daughter’s goofy husband and, in a professional debut at an advanced age, Alison Liney as a benignly unaware great aunt in the grip of dementia, although one can’t help but wish Day’s writing around this tricky subject was a little more nuanced.

Ultimately, this is an undemanding bit of theatre, made watchable by the work of a bunch of consummate professionals. But as a piece of writing it feels like it’s several drafts away from being a decent play.  

THE WOMEN OF LLANRUMNEY

by Azuka Oforka

directed by Patricia Logue

Theatre Royal Stratford East, London – until  12 April 2025

running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes including interval

https://www.stratfordeast.com/whats-on/all-shows/the-women-of-llanrumney

The participation of Wales in the international slave trade is a curiously underexplored subject, despite the fact that one of the principality’s most notorious sons of the 17th century, Sir Henry Morgan, was governor of Jamaica for several years and so would have directly benefited from the servitude and exploitation of countless Black souls. Azuka Oforka’s interesting new play The Women of Llanrumney, playing a brief London season after premiering last year at Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre, while not an unqualified success, is to be applauded for shedding a stark light on this traumatic tranche of shameful history. 

Set on the Llanrumney plantation (named after an area of the Welsh capital) in Jamaica, it’s a tale of brutality, humiliation and betrayal, the stuff of meaty drama. It has moments of brilliance and certainly pulls no punches in its descriptions of the inhumane horrors that slaves endured while working in the sugar cane fields and mills, yet it remains frustratingly inert as a piece of theatre. Oforka’s script derives much of its power from its retelling of the vile cruelties serving women Annwyn (Suzanne Packer) and Cerys (Shvorne Marks) have borne witness to, their Welsh first names a direct reference back to the master who controlled them. Some of the descriptions are truly, and necessarily, horrible, but the constant storytelling at the expense of action becomes wearisome.

The three female characters – Annwyn -Annie for short- the middle aged mixed heritage housekeeper who upgraded from slavery to domestic service and is determined to hold on to her position at all costs, her darker-skinned daughter Cerys, rebellious and hungry for change, and their mistress Elizabeth (Nia Roberts), debt ridden, privileged and grossly insensitive – fall rather too neatly into a trio of archetypes. One is afraid to destroy the old order as that may take away what little comfort there is in her life, the second knows that freedom is hard won but is worth making sacrifices for, and the third reaps the rewards of slavery so will never willingly relinquish the reins of power. Putting women firmly at the centre of this examination of this worst of humanity is a tremendous idea and, at its best, The Women of Llanrumney leaves you with no doubt about the fire in its belly, but it’s all a little too on-the-nose, especially when the play lurches into full on melodrama in the second act.

Patricia Logue’s production, played out on a too-pristine set by Stella-Jane Odoemelam that nonetheless suggests a tropical homestead, with green foliage sprouting everywhere and illuminated portraits of dead masters staring down from the walls, is a little rough around the edges. This manifests mainly in a quartet of uneven acting performances. Packer, one of Wales’s finest actresses, suggests with wonderful economy the pain behind Annie’s haunted, fearful eyes but pushes her desperation a little too hard from the outset so that her final outburst as all hell breaks loose around her doesn’t have as much impact as it might. She’s still a powerful presence though.

Roberts is another superb actor but her Elizabeth feels like a misfire, a shrill, rouged, powdered brat, first cousin to Miranda Richardson’s Queenie from TV’s Black Adder but with a mouth like a docker. Initially she bowls on like the comic relief but as the play progresses one becomes acutely aware of how deeply unpleasant and mendacious this woman is. The problem is that Roberts isn’t allowed to develop the characterisation much beyond the fruity voiced comic charlatan so, even at her worst, she’s never as dangerous and chilling as she really ought to be. Only Marks, terrific as watchful, scornful Cerys, gets the tone absolutely right, and the final conclusion for this fierce young woman is an authentic gut punch. Matthew Gravelle, the sole man, does creditable, dexterous work as three contrasting  characters who are more plot devices than fully fledged humans. As the play’s title implies, it’s the women that are the focus here.

Oforka makes valid points about how extreme circumstances can turn morality and culpability into luxuries, and galvanises the play towards a righteously exciting climax. The naked racism in some of the dialogue is pretty hard to listen to, but is essential to appreciate the milieu in which these women existed. It’s an uneven piece of theatre but it provides plenty to mull over, and the causes and aims of its fury and outrage are never in doubt, and it’s fascinating to see another angle on a lamentable tranche of human history. 

SIX

by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss

directed by Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage 

Vaudeville Theatre, London – open-ended run

running time: 80 minutes no interval

https://sixthemusical.com/london/

Another year, another sextet of glittering Queens assume the crowns in Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s banging musical/pop concert hybrid. This time around though, Six hits a little different from the last couple of cast changes. This reimagining of the wives of Henry VIII as a fierce girl group, a permanent fixture in the West End and on Broadway, has always been exhilarating (how could it not be with this profligacy of great pop songs, authentic wit, female empowerment and glossy production values) but lately Moss and Jamie Armitage’s staging had seemed to have lost a little of its edge and specificity. 

It’s therefore joyous to report that the 2025 company brings back a certain detail and individuality to the principal roles that hadn’t always been evident since the original team gave up their bejewelled Steampunk corsetry and high heeled boots. While nobody is going to see Six for nuance, it’s a subtly more satisfying experience when it’s not just about the sass, sparkle and vocal pyrotechnics (all of which are still, fabulously, present and correct of course) and that’s what we get here. It feels like the show has quietly (not that there’s much quiet about Six) regained its heart: these Queens aren’t just belting and strutting, they’re also listening to each other and investing their stories with a touch more drama and genuine pathos than we’ve seen in recent years.

This is one of the strongest London casts to date, a multinational bunch of contrasting women (all of whom, bar one, have previous experience with the show) who nail their individual characterisations before coming together to form a tight, dynamic ensemble. Thao Therese Nguyen’s loose-limbed, adorably batty Anne Boleyn is the sole holdover from last years company while Dionne Ward-Anderson returns as a feisty, histrionic Anna of Cleves and seems to have acquired even more irresistible comic chops than in her previous stint in the role…she was excellent before but now she’s a bona fide firecracker.

Jaz Robinson’s Canadian-accented Aragon fields a sweet but powerful voice with a breathtaking range. Cooler and less manic than some of her predecessors, she brings a unique regality which makes it all the funnier when her facade starts to crack. Hana Stewart, an esteemed standby for a couple of years who also appeared in the Broadway production, brings an affecting sincerity to Jane Seymour and delivers a superlative, power-packed rendition of  ‘Heart Of Stone’, the only ballad in the score. 

Perhaps inevitably, an Aussie Katherine Howard suggests the Minogue sisters but that actually works terrifically well. Caitlyn De Kuyper, looking like the most exquisite porcelain doll, is funny and enchanting but has a curious detached quality which pays off devastatingly in her solo ‘All You Wanna Do’, a bop that darkens and deepens as it progresses into its tale of systematic abuse and is dramatically the most accomplished number in the show. De Kuyper absolutely nails the stark change of tone from playful to disturbing.

In a company of fine voices, Amelia Kinu Muus as Parr stands out with a honeyed belt capable of descending into something down-and-dirty before flipping up into an almost classical flute-like purity. She also invests the surviving wife with a winning combination of warmth, fire and heartbreak; she’s the only Queen not to have done the show before but this is a remarkable Six debut. 

Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s whirling, stomping choreography remains as dazzling as ever, and the complex vocal harmonies have seldom sounded as fine as they do right now. All the technical elements remain tip top – the show is a gleaming, technicolour eyeful – but Paul Gatehouse’s sound design feels more crystal clear than ever, showcasing bold new notes, some thunderous and some surprisingly delicate, in Tom Curran’s orchestrations and the work of Beth Jerem’s cracking all-female band.

It’s wonderful to see this beloved West End staple roaring back to such glorious life. The reign doesn’t just continue, it delights and surprises. A total pleasure.

WHITE ROSE

Book and lyrics by Brian Belding 

Music by Natalie Brice

directed by Will Nunziata

Marylebone Theatre, London – until 13 April  2025

running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes including interval

https://www.marylebonetheatre.com/productions/white-rose-the-musical

This off-Broadway tuner tells the true story of a collective of students and intellectuals who called themselves The White Rose and campaigned bravely and indefatigably against the Nazis in 1940s Munich. It’s a fascinating and inspiring tale that ends in tragedy but points up the importance of resistance and upholding truth to power. It undoubtedly speaks to the world we are living in now, but whether it’s really a suitable subject for the rock musical treatment – or at least THIS rock musical treatment which gets bogged down in superfluous songs and earnest but undramatic exposition – is a question. 

The juxtaposition of historical timeframe and contemporary(ish) music worked fine for Spring Awakening and Hamilton, so why doesn’t this hang together? For starters, there’s the script. Brian Belding’s book presents young Sophie Scholl heading to Munich to visit her brother Hans, who has an unfortunate history as  a member of the Nazi Youth movement before seeing the light (cue a relentless guilt ridden bombast ballad performed with considerable power by Tobias Turley) and becoming a passionate political resister and agitator, in a succession of low key scenes that occasionally explode into dramatic fireworks. Not often enough though and there is insufficient sense of urgency or danger in Will Nunziata’s sluggish production which shuffles the cast aimlessly on and off during scene breaks but never builds up any dramatic momentum.

While one wouldn’t expect a musical with important and serious themes and based on tragic facts to be a barrel of laughs, one would also not expect it to be so colourless and uninvolving. Natalie Brice’s songs sound heavily influenced by the aforementioned Sheik and Sater Tony winner and possibly Jonathan Larson, and while they’re moderately tuneful and occasionally rousing (the ‘We Will Not Be Silent’ finale chorale is genuinely affecting), they sound generic and don’t do much to propel or illuminate the action. Caitlin Morgan’s band sounds good and the voices are decent, and sometimes spectacular, but it all just feels a bit lacking in passion and originality. 

A show that takes itself this seriously runs the risk of tipping over into unintentional comedy as the electric guitars start wailing and the cast stare intensely into the middle distance while solemnly belting their faces off but, to the credit of everyone involved, that seldom happens here. Equally though, apart from the impressive last number, there’s never a moment of inspiration where you forcibly realise why the creatives thought this interesting story would make a decent musical.

Most of the cast do their best with what they’ve been given. Owen Arkrow finds some emotional heft in the young man traumatised by what he witnessed in the Warsaw ghetto and Danny Whelan, playing a youthful dad torn between the need to do what’s right and to provide for his young family, has a ringing rock tenor I’d like to hear let loose on more exciting material. TV’s Mamma Mia! I Have A Dream competition winner Turvey also has a lovely, rangy voice but doesn’t invest doomed Hans with much gravitas, though there’s not much in the writing to support him.

As his sister Sophie, ostensibly the central figure in the story, Collette Guitart, another strong singer, gives one of the most disengaged acting performances I’ve ever seen, barely registering anything beyond mild annoyance or possibly boredom, which seems an odd reaction when you’re battling actual fascism. She finds some real emotion near the end but the character is so unknowable up to this point that it’s impossible to get involved, and it doesn’t help that the number she and Turley are gamely warbling their way through when she turns the waterworks on, is entitled ‘Who Cares?’  Sadly, that rhetorical question pretty much sums up this well meaning but misguided offering. 

CRY-BABY

Book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan

Songs by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger

based on the Universal Pictures film written and directed by John Waters

directed by Mehmet Ergen

running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes including interval

Arcola Theatre, London – until 12 April 2025

https://www.arcolatheatre.com/whats-on/cry-baby-the-musical/

Some shows are surprise hits but the 2008 Broadway musical Cry-Baby was a surprise flop. The formula, and source material, was similar to that of Hairspray which ran over six years on Broadway and enjoyed a lengthy West End run and starry movie version: again a cult movie by John Waters, that notorious doyen of sick humour and high camp, gets the musical treatment, full of outlandish characters and period-specific tunes. Watching Mehmet Ergen’s wonderfully entertaining UK professional premiere for the Arcola, it’s surely impossible not to have a good time, while also getting hints as to why the show failed initially.

For Cry-Baby we’re once again transported back to Waters’ hometown of Baltimore but this time it’s 1954 and rock’n’roll is running riot along with paranoia about communism and the atomic bomb, and anybody who’s a bit “other” is the source of suspicion and derision. Once again, Hairspray book writers Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan have done a capable job of bringing the screenplay to the stage, but, unlike with that earlier show, they barely homogenise the excesses and bad taste of the original movie. 

So we get jokes about the electric chair and polio vaccines, a comedy number about extreme mental illness, arson, promiscuity, and a re-enactment of the panicked reaction to a perceived nuclear attack. It’s a spicy brew, served up as comedy, and is often helplessly, macabrely funny, which is perhaps not surprising as co-author Meehan is also responsible for the books of The Producers and Young Frankenstein so has form when it comes to spinning edgy material into musical comedy gold. While Cry-Baby isn’t necessarily that, it’s a real hoot. The first act is mostly set-up, and occasionally feels a bit too in-yer-face and frenetic to be really satisfying, but the pay-offs in the second half are mostly delicious.

Misunderstood leather clad bad boy Cry-Baby (Adam Davidson) falls for goody-two-shoes Allison (Lulu-Mae Pears, divine) much to the horror of her grandmother and protector, society grand dame Mrs Vernon-Williams (Shirley Jameson, elevating deadpan delivery to majestic comic heights) who has a major skeleton in her closet. The show juxtaposes the squeaky clean, upwardly mobile and all-white Baltimoreans with the much more diverse (both racially and morally) crowd Cry-Baby hangs out with, and depicts Baltimore as a place of wholesome picnics and privileged country clubs or low down music and drinking dives (which, frankly, look a lot more fun) depending on which side of the social divide you’re on. Designer Robert Innes Hopkins provides a unit set backed by a grimy looking giant star spangled banner, with panels being dropped in to denote different locations. It’s hardly spectacular but it has a scrappy, garish quality that suits the material better than a big, glossy presentation.

Songwriters David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger give the wealthier kids a raft of sunny lounge-music numbers while Cry-Baby’s gang gets more of a free-wheeling Rock’n’Roll sound, all twanging guitars and insistent drums. As a score it’s a decent pastiche of 1950s popular music but it has little theatrical heft and the tunes aren’t memorable, although the lyrics have real zip and bite. The vocal performances are all spectacular though, none more so than the roof-raising belt of Chad Saint Louis as Cry-Baby’s sidekick Dupree, in a sensational debut. Pears and Davidson sing their souls out and beautifully negotiate the gear changes between angsty and blissfully romantic. Davidson is also a fabulous dancer (Chris Whittaker’s choreography has a comforting familiarity about it, which works given the time period the show is set in, but also a genuine dynamism that is all the more remarkable for being performed in such a limited space) but can’t quite eclipse memories of Johnny Depp in the original film.

Pears really is lovely, and as heartfelt as it’s possible to be in a show this campy and irreverent, as the sweetheart who isn’t quite as naive as everyone thinks she is. India Chadwick, Jazzy Phoenix and a thrilling voiced Kingsley Morton are terrific as the trio of contrasting women in Cry-Baby’s gang, and Eleanor Walsh is a bona fide camp showstopper as Lenora, the deeply unhinged young woman who’s convinced that Cry-Baby is going to marry her. ‘Screw Loose’, her big number, a doo-wop infused declaration of love and mental instability (“Darling, it’s so hard to be sixteen and schizo / But I know it’s worth the cost / I’ve made up my mind which I’ve lost”) is deeply un-PC but gosh it’s hilarious, and Walsh delivers it like her life depends on it.

Arguably the best song, Mrs Vernon-Williams’ tarantella flavoured ‘I Did Something Wrong, Once’ sees the guardian of community morals makes a startling confession, and doesn’t sound like anything else in the score. It’s a welcome change in tone, and performed with an irresistible, very funny combination of restrained relish and bruised dignity by Shirley Jameson, who almost stops the show cold. The finale ‘Nothing Bad’s Ever Going To Happen Again’ may not be half as catchy as Hairspray’s ‘You Can’t Stop The Beat’ but it goes with a slightly manic satirical swing as the fully company asserts that the future of America is assured, bright and trauma-free: you can almost smell the irony in the air.

The prevalence of that irony is maybe Cry-Baby’s biggest weakness, apart from a scarcity of really memorable songs. It’s very enjoyable, but it’s so busy winking at the audience and daring us to be outraged that it loses sight of the fact that really great musicals have characters we can really care about. The cartoons-made-flesh that populate this raucous, bonkers version of 1950s America are fun to spend time with but never come close to touching our hearts. That’s a flaw in the piece and, to a lesser extent, the staging, but this glorious cast really couldn’t do a finer job of selling it all to us. It’s like Grease gone sour, and it turns out there’s a lot of twisted joy to be found in that.

THE GLASS MENAGERIE 

by Tennessee Williams 

directed by Jay Miller

The Yard Theatre, London – until 10 May 2025

running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes including interval 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PUNCH

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

directed by Adam Penford

The Young Vic, London – until 26 April 2025

running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes including interval 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KENREX

written by Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian

music composed and performed by John Patrick Elliott

directed by Ed Stamboullouian

Southwark Playhouse, Borough – London, until 15 March 2025

running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes including interval 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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