Indian Ink

by Tom Stoppard

seen at the Hampstead Theatre on 30 January 2026

Jonathan Kent directs Felicity Kendal as Mrs Swan, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis as Flora Crewe,  Gavi Singh Chera as Nirad Das and Donald Sage Mackay as Eldon Pike in a revival of Tom Stoppard's play Indian Ink. Interestingly, when the play was first performed in 1995, Felicity Kendal played Flora Crewe; and poignantly this revival (continuing the Hampstead Theatre's custom of reviving Stoppard's plays) occurred at the time of Stoppard's death.

The play features a typical Stoppardian flair for interrogating human foibles by intertwining time frames and contrasting stories. In the 1930s Flora Crewe is travelling to India partly on account of her health and partly out of curiosity; she meets Nirad Das, a painter, and the two engage in a wary friendship characterised by many misunderstandings about culture and propriety. The action proceeds through direct dialogue combined with extensive quotations from letters Flora has written to her younger sister back in England. In the 1980s Mrs Swan is fielding enquiries from Eldon Pike, a would-be biographer of Flora, who was her elder sister; she has Flora's letters of course, and a considerable amount of knowledge which Pike wants access to, but she is cagey. She also meets Das's son who is able to clarify some details in Flora's life which have hitherto been somewhat mysterious.

The two timescales come and go on the stage counterpointing one another and occasionally producing some inspired comic effects, such as when Pike interrupts the flow of 1930s action with pompous "footnotes" explaining references - or when, by contrast, he is utterly baffled. In some ways the Indian scenes seem to be evoked or imagined by Mrs Swan - except that it is clear that she could not know all the details presented to us.

The set, designed by Leslie Travers, allows scenes from the two times to flow into one another without causing any confusion, just as Stoppard intended. The result is that we see things happening in the 1930s, and we see people in the 1980s trying to discover these things or recall them from memory, and the discrepancy between the lived life and the biographical enterprise is delicately presented: a wonderful achievement.

Lacrima

by Caroline Guiela Nguyen

seen at the Roslyn Packer Theatre Sydney on 23 January 2026

The Théâtre national de Strasbourg on tour for the Sydney Festival presented Lacrima, written and directed by Caroline Guiela Nguyen. 

A wedding dress has been commissioned for a (fictional) English princess; an atelier in Paris is to design and make the dress while an antique veil is to be taken from the V&A and repaired by the lacemakers of Alençon (successors to its original makers), and the train is to be embroidered with thousands of pearls in Mumbai. The complexity of the commission and the high-handed demands of the royal household collide with intense personal problems in Paris and emerging health issues in Alençon and Mumbai. The whole situation is increasingly tense as deadlines approach and impossible decisions have to be made.

The play was brilliantly presented in a set designed by Alice Duchange which principally evoked the atelier in Paris, with subtle changes for the other locations and a clever use of cameras to focus on particular characters or represent others not physically present (the dress designer, for example, a man-child wrapped up in self-glorification at the expense of all around him). The gradual emergence of the dress, created from swathes of cloth mounted on a mannequin, was almost like an evolving character in itself, a silent witness to the dramas surrounding it.  

The play was performed almost entirely in French, with some Tamil and English; luckily subtitles were shown on the screen used for the camera projections and matched by surtitles above the stage. Despite the added levels of concentration needed to follow the English text the audience remained completely attentive to an evening of high drama, a probing insight into all sorts of exploitation in the global rag trade and the human cost involved in creating a fabulously extravagant article of clothing which would only be worn once.

The Comedy of Errors

by William Shakespeare

seen in the Everglades Gardens, Leura (NSW) on 10 January 2026

Sport for Jove presented their annual outdoor summer Shakespeare production in various venues this year, including the atmospheric Everglades Gardens in Leura, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. On a perfect summer evening, mercifully made cooler by incoming breezes after an extremely hot day, Damien Ryan's and George Banders' production of The Comedy of Errors proved a delightful choice of play, its comic plot of mistaken identities and unexpected reunions bolstered by some inspired physical comedy and enhancements to the text.

In a timely reminder of the plight of refugees in the modern world, the directors decided to open proceedings with a speech that is rarely performed: the address to the London mob pleading the case of "strangers", delivered by Sir Thomas More from Act One scene 6 of the play of that name. Sir Thomas More is a collaborative play, but this scene is known to have been written by Shakespeare, and the speech asks the incensed Londoners to put themselves in the strangers' shoes - to imagine how they would feel if they were exiled - before condemning the influx of refugees.

This all adds weight to Egeon's long speech explaining why he, a merchant of Syracuse, has come to Ephesus, when the two cities are mutually excluding each other's citizens from visiting. The prospect of his imminent execution for transgressing this law hangs (lightly it must be admitted) over the increasingly manic proceedings of the day, to be removed only by the final twist of the plot when all the errors are explained away and Egeon's family is fortuitously made whole again.

Blessed with (unrelated) actors who, thanks to physical style and costume, could plausibly be mistaken for one another, and unexpectedly more prominent roles for the sisters Adrian and Luciana (the latter fantastically fit and clearly a force to be reckoned with), the production proceeded to milk the play's comic confusions with great verve and energy, providing a wonderful evening's entertainment.

The Rivals

by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 8 December 2025

Tom Littler directs a revival of Sheridan's first really successful play to celebrate its 250th anniversary, re-setting it in the Wodehousian world of the 1920s, "about as modern as you can go," he says in a programme note, "before the plot makes no sense". (In any period it stretches the bounds of credulity, but that is partly its point.)

Kit Young plays Captain Jack Absolute, who has disguised himself as Sergeant Beverley to win the affections of Lydia Languish (Zoe Brough), a girl lost in dreams of romantic poverty inspired by reading sentimental novels. Their liaison has been discovered and forbidden by Lydia's aunt Mrs Malaprop (a wonderful Patricia Hodge, managing the lady's hilarious mangling of language with unerring dexterity). 

All very predictable, but the comedy intensifies when Mrs Malaprop and Jack's father Sir Anthony (Robert Bathurst) agree that Jack should marry Lydia (essentially for her fortune, so far as Sir Anthony is concerned). Jack at first refuses his father's overbearing pressure to marry under instruction, until he discovers who the intended bride is, and then he must juggle being Beverley and Jack to try to keep everyone happy, knowing that Lydia will not be impressed at being forced to marry a captain. Subplots abound, involving Lydia's cousin and Jack's friends, and Mrs Malaprop's clandestine flirtation via letters to the ludicrous Lucius O'Trigger (re-imagined as an American tycoon/"typhoon" rather than an Irish chancer).

The transition to the glamorous (and highly unrealistic) world of giddy young flappers bewildering their old-school elders works remarkably well, and the cast manage multiple scene changes in semi-darkness with consummate aplomb, blending the removal and replacement of furniture items with sophisticated dance-steps to bright 1920s-style music. The high level of energy and speed of delivery make for an invigorating and amusing evening, and the text, which could sound rather stilted if kept in its original 18th-century milieu, fizzed with the glitter of the play's updated setting.

The Line of Beauty

by Jack Holden based on Alan Hollinghurst's novel

seen at the Almeida theatre on 29 November 2025

Michael Grandage directs Jasper Talbot as Nick Guest in Jack Holden's adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 novel The Line of Beauty. Nick, a naive young gay man, has accepted the invitation of his university friend Toby Fedden (Leo Suter) to lodge in his parents' London house while he researches for his doctorate on Hogarth's aesthetics of beauty. Gerald Fedden (Charles Edwards) has become a Tory MP in the 1983 election so Nick is on the periphery of the euphoria surrounding Margaret Thatcher's second election victory in a house of philistine parents with "progressive" pretensions (they are studiedly tolerant of Nick's being gay). At the same time he becomes entangled in the family dynamics through "Cat-stitting" - looking out for Toby's wayward sister Cat (Ellie Bamber).

Nick is also taking his first steps into the gay world, uncertainly with Leo (Alistair Nwachukwu) whom he has met through classified ads (the print pre-cursor to social media), and then even more uncertainly but also consequentially with Wani Ouradi (Arty Froushan), a wealthy and dissolute entrepreneur with whom he sets up a magazine devoted to the exposition of beauty. Inevitably, as tolerance decreases during the 1980s and the AIDS crisis begins to take its toll, Nick's worlds begin to collide rather than to cohere, and his blithe way of muddling through his life completely fails to shield him from a stark turn of events.

The novel is a rich examination of the contradictions of the time - the hedonism of some, the blindness of others, the frightening power of the establishment to protect itself at all costs - and this adaptation cleverly captures these themes in dramatic terms without being didactic or too expository. Nick's initial blandness, well portrayed by Jasper Talbot, allows for some cringing social comedy as he witnesses and uneasily adopts the superficial glamour of the Feddens, but his later outbursts of grief and anger are no match for entrenched prejudice. Yet even as he is rejected by the Fedddens he is transfixed by the beauty he sees in the park outside their house - the line of beauty has always guided him.

Christopher Oram's set hints at the general opulence of Nick's surroundings, framed by elegant mouldings and signified by various items of furniture indicating the Feddens' London house, their country retreat, the offices set up by Wani for the magazine and so forth. This allows for a fluid passage through the years and locations with minimal fuss. Perhaps the full force of Cat's trajectory is rather muted, so that her part in the final turn of events is not entirely clear, but all in all this is a fine rendering of. the novel on the stage.

Safe Space

by Jamie Bogyo

seen at the Minerva Theatre Chichester on 25 October 2026

Roy Alexander Weise directs Jamie Bogyo (the playwright) as Connor, Ernest Kingsley Jr as Isaiah, Céline Buckens as Annabelle, Bola Akeju as Stacy and Ivan Opik as Omar in Safe Space, a play using fictional characters to examine the pressure from Yale students to rename Calhoun College since John C Calhoun, a prominent Senator and Vice President after whom it was named, had supported slavery. (The college was renamed in 2017.)

Connor, a mildly autistic white student, and Isaiah, a Black student, share a room in Calhoun College and also belong to the Whiffenpoofs, Yale's prestigious a cappella singing group. Their friendship, such as it is, arises from this common interest, but on other matters, such as the issue of renaming the college, they disagree with one another, Connor intensely against and Isaiah quietly for. In the meantime Annabelle, Connor's girlfriend, feels she is mentoring the newcomer Stacy and is then shocked to find that Stacy has successfully won the presidency of the Women's Leadership club that she was also standing for, and that the freshman student is not a naive Black newcomer to Yale but on the contrary a savvy and ruthless operator.

In a series of scenes the tensions between these four and the more overtly activist Omar (who has prepared the latest petition for renaming the college) are revealed, though the cultural references lying behind the scenario are occasionally obscure, requiring an attentive reading of the program notes to become more clear. This means that the tone of the play veers between an earnest investigation of the political questions and a not always convincing series of scenes which could more easily belong in a campus comedy. The performances are good, and the a cappella singing excellent, but the characters are perhaps too flat to bear the weight of the issues.

The staging, designed by Khadija Raza, impressively manages a retractable platform stage which is obscured by a painted screen when exterior scenes are required, but in which various rooms are set for the interior scenes: Connor and Isaiah's room; Omar's room; the anteroom of the Principal's office.

Hedda

by Tanika Gupta inspired by Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 21 October 2025

Hettie Macdonald directs Pearl Chanda as Hedda, Joe Bannister as George (Jörgen) Tesman, Milo Twomey as John Brack, Bebe Cave as Alice Smith (Mrs Elvsted), Jake Mann as Leonard (Ejlert Lövborg), Rina Fatania as Shona (Berte) and Caroline Harker as Aunt Julia (Juliane) in Tanika Gupta's adaptation of Ibsen's 1890 play Hedda Gabler, cleverly re-imagined as taking place in London in 1948.

In this setting Hedda is a film star of the 1930s and 40s determined to retire rather than keep up the pretence of her public persona. The social constraints which suffocate the original Hedda are here replaced by the trauma created by long suppressing her identity as an Anglo-Indian in order to succeed in a film world bedevilled by ingrained racism (the parallel with the careers of such stars as Merle Oberon is obvious). Aristocratic hauteur is replaced by Hedda's consuming insecurity masked by reserve, but the consequent ruthlessness remains as formidable as ever.

Around her the constellation of hapless academics - her second-rate husband and the fragile alcoholic genius - are replaced by rival screenwriters, and the calculating judge Brack by a powerful film producer. In perhaps the boldest realignment, the household servant becomes Hedda's ayah; the menfolk and Aunt Julia cannot understand the hold this figure has on her mistress, but there is a clever twist which explains all to us but remains opaque to the characters. on stage

The great scenes of the original - the disparaging of Julia's hat, the condescension towards George, the manipulation of Alice and the corruption of Leonard, Brack's machinations - all survive and thrive in this new atmosphere, and the cast deliver exemplary performances in a fascinating variation on Ibsen's themes. The evocation of the prejudiced world of glamorous film-making is transmitted with shocking directness when the men talk contemptuously about half-castes, and the threat to Hedda's position is made abundantly clear when the details of Leonard's screenplay are discussed - he has used Hedda's own story in fictional form to create what the others see, without irony, as a masterpiece of cinema, where she sees only an unforgivable personal betrayal. (In the original the details of Lövborg's manuscript are not revealed.)

There is thus slightly more melodrama in the situation, but nonetheless this was a fascinating evening.