The Waves

adapted by Flora Wilson Brown from Virginia Woolf's novel

seen at the Jermyn Street Theatre on 18 May 2026

Júlia Levai directs Archie Backhouse as Louis, Breffni Holahan as Susan, Pedro Leandro as Neville, Syakira Moeladi as Jinny, Tom Varey as Bernard and Ria Zmitrowicz as Rhoda in Flora Wilson Brown's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel The Waves.

The novel, a series of intertwined monologues by the six characters, was described once by the author as a "playpoem". It follows the lives of six close friends from early childhood - one of their first memories is of witnessing a solar eclipse "before lessons" - to late middle age. Although the children have their first schooling together, the boys and girls are soon separated, and in their adult lives they go their separate ways, though occasionally some or all of them are together again. A seventh character, Perceval, whom the boys meet at their school and who is never presented directly, becomes really important to all of them, and his death in his mid-twenties in India is a crushing blow, particularly to the love-lorn Neville.

In 2006 Katie Mitchell directed a memorable version of this novel at the then Cottesloe Theatre (now the Dorfman), using her trademark technique of having the actors film themselves as they performed the play; the complication of simultaneously watching the acting, watching the extraordinarily detailed manipulation of props, and watching the filmed result caught something of the intricate narrative structure of the original novel. It was dazzling, but required intellectual alertness to appreciate.

At the Jermyn Street theatre a far simpler approach, using a totally bare stage with silvered walls, created a more headlong atmosphere of life rushing by, with the six characters narrating their lives - their inner thoughts and misgivings - as well as talking to one another, moving from the breathless enthusiasms of childhood through the awkward excitements of adolescence to the inevitable disillusionments of adulthood. As time passed one or another of them would carve graffiti into the silvered walls; by this stage in the run the walls were covered in the marks made during previous performances.

In this tiny theatre - there are only 70 seats - and with minimal props, the six actors created the world of the novel, and marked the passage of the years, with exemplary skill, the children believably growing into the very different adults they become, constrained by class and temperament but always supportive of one another insofar as their developing personalities would allow. The two great emotional catastrophes in their experiences - the deaths of Perceval and Rhoda - were wrenchingly poignant in this fine production.

 

The Importance of Being Oscar

by Micheál Mac Liommóir

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 16 May 2026

Mike Fentiman directs Alastair Whatley in Micheál Mac Liommóir's dramatic monologue about the career of Oscar Wilde. This was first devised and performed by Mac Liommóir in 1960, and he performed the piece about 1300 times over the next fifteen years, adjusting it as new facts came to light about Wilde.

In the current production Mac Liommóir's voice is heard briefly at the beginning, and delivering the final Wildean anecdote in a quiet whisper at the end, but otherwise Whatley is on stage alone on a raised disc with a halo-like light angled behind him. In the first half he sketches in Wilde's early life and his high-profile career in London, culminating in a bravura performance of the famous interview between Lady Bracknell and John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest. (Curiously, Simon Callow's reminiscence of hearing Mac Liommóir's recitation on LPs refers to a rendition of the closing scene of The Picture of Dorian Grey, but though the novel was referred to it was not extensively quoted in this performance.) 

The second half of the piece deals with the catastrophic court cases, the humiliations of the sentencing and the journey to Reading gaol (during which Wilde was identified on the platform at Clapham Junction wearing prison clothes and was spat at and vilified by the crowd), the harshness of the prison sentence and Wilde's decline and death after his release.

Although the whole point of this play is that the actor should be talking about Oscar Wilde rather than impersonating him, the first half was rather too discursive, too full of biographical details with only cursory direct quotations. But the second half included lengthy recitations from The Ballad of Reading Gaol (a long poem) and excerpts from De Profundis, the letter Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison (the full letter takes up 85 pages in my edition of Wilde's complete works). The recitation of poetry is immediately more dramatic than the recitation of facts, but the prose of De Profundis was a sheer delight to listen to even as Wilde circles round the awful truth that object of his affection is quite simply not worthy of him. The opening statement of the letter, that he has heard nothing from Bosie in two years of imprisonment, is a shock which no amount of beautifully wrought prose about the calamity of their relationship can quite obscure.

On a practical level I do not think that Whatley was well served by the acoustics of the theatre - a problem I have noticed before. Although his voice was at times amplified, this was erratic, making it hard at times to follow everything that was said. Even though the rhetorical skill of De Profundis made it possible to guess correctly what some of the too-quiet words must have been, this was an unfortunate technical blemish on what was a fascinating and at times moving evening.

The Authenticator

by Winsome Pinnock

seen at the National Theatre (Dorfman) on 25 April 2026

Miranda Cromwell directs Rakie Ayola as Abi, Cherrelle Skeete as Marva and Sylvestra Le Touzel as Fen in a short play in which Abi and her research assistant Marva are invited by Fen, the inheritor of a family estate, to authenticate some diaries she has discovered in a chest, which may relate to her abolitionist ancestor, a Jamaican plantation owner.

The estate is run down - gloriously indicated by Jon Bausor's inventive set, which even contrives a spooky dungeon revealed by the cunning use of a concealed stairway in the floor - and the academics, being Black, have vested interests in the project which may compromise their professional protocols, especially when it seems that the writer of the diaries may have treated slaves badly, and that the family has continued with racist attitudes down to the present day. Yet despite these weighty themes there is much humour in the piece as Pinnock sets about skewering both landed pretensions (Fen's background is belied by her plummy accent) and the clichés of haunted house mysteries with a deft touch occasionally marred by coincidences which are a little too convenient.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

by Christopher Hampton

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 4 April 2026

Marianne Elliott directs Lesley Manville as the Marquise de Merteuil and Aidan Turner as the Vicomte de Valmont in Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the scandalous 18th-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, with Monica Barbaro as Madame de Tourvel and Hannah van der Westhuysen as Cécile de Volanges.

In a stark monochrome space dominated by a vast pastiche eighteenth-century mural of unbridled sensuality, and an occasionally appearing modernistic chandelier almost pre-figuring a glitter ball, the machinations of Valmont and Merteuil are played out in all their brazen cynicism. Dancing maidservants in opulently coloured ballgowns and footmen in white tie and tails swirl around the space creating a frisson of decadence and often expressing the underlying passions and confustions of the major characters. Fragments of elegant but austere walls with convenient doorways are wheeled on and gracefully moved around the stage to create boudoirs and salons as required in a deft choreography that allows for intimate scenes in what otherwise would be a featureless open space. Rosanna Vize's set design provides an evocative and sometimes dreamlike environment for the febrile atmosphere of seduction and betrayal unleashed by the unscrupulous due at the centre of the web.

The moral ugliness of what is essentially the grooming of the naive Cécile is perhaps too muted by all the stagecraft, but the increasing tension caused by Valmont's unexpected genuine feelings for Madame de Tourvel in the second half is magnificently served by the same techniques. Aidan Turner portrays the sensuous rake with a charismatic charm though perhaps lacking the most sinister undercurrents of the character - he does not seem quite dangerous enough. In the meantime Lesley Manville's portrait of the manipulative marquise goes from strength to strength: what would later be seen as "drawing room comedy", the sort of caustic wit deployed by Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward, gradually transforms into naked power plays driven by frustration and passion. Yet even her steeliest resolve cannot withstand the social ostracism engineered by a protegée whose eagerness to learn she has fatefully underestimated.

This production has different emphases from the one I saw many years ago in Sydney (within a year or so of its Stratford premiere in 1985), and from the Donmar's production ten years ago (see my review of 30 January 2016 posted in early February of that year), and from the celebrated film with Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer and Uma Thurman. These earlier productions were, for example, all presented in eighteenth-century costume. On the Lyttleton stage the visual impact was quite different, and yet wonderfully contrived to use the space to its best advantage. The play certainly flourishes even unmoored from its specific historical setting, which is a tribute to the playwright and to this production company.

Summerfolk

by Maxim Gorky

seen at the National Theatre (Olivier) on 1 April 2026

Robert Hastie directs a large ensemble cast in Maxim Gorky's 1904 play Summerfolk in an adaptation by Nina Raine and Moses Raine who are siblings: interestingly a sibling relationship between Varvara (Sophie Rundle, wonderfully calm and inscrutable for much of the time) and Vlass (Alex Lawther, bumbling and unsure of himself and yet managing to be boyishly endearing) is one of the central interests of the play.

The "summer folk" - in Russian, the "dachniki" - are those town or city dwellers who rent or retire to dachas for the summer to escape the stifling weather in their usual residences. In this play the characters are not wealthy enough to own dachas - that is, they are not landed gentry. In fact they are nouveaux riches, and somewhat bewildered by their unaccustomed affluence. Yet, only one generation away from the grinding poverty of their forebears, they are afflicted by the ennui and sense of drift so familiar from Chekhov's plays. Perhaps the unstructured holiday life makes matters worse.

The result is a play full of talk - at times quite clichéd talk - with tensions simmering underneath as friends drop in to Varvara and Sergei Bassov's dacha trailing their own problems, and an idolised literary figure makes a visit, proving to be a disappointment in the flesh, not least because his younger dashing good looks have given way to baldness - hardly relevant to his literary reputation but nonetheless significant in Varvara's eyes. Naturally Vlass, the wastrel younger brother perpetually at a loose end, is attracted to Maria, one of the visitors, but she is too conscious of the age gap between them to allow matters to progress, too painfully aware that she might just become a mother-substitute. Varvara in the meantime fends off declarations of love and finally, after maintaining an apparently icy reserve for much of the time, she explodes with wrath against her overbearing husband and leads a group of women "away".

But where will they go? The play, though at many points handling the sprawling interplay of men and women chatting or sniping at one another with real skill, does have its weak points, and perhaps this dramatic exit is one of them, coming as it does after a series of declamations from various people about the impossibility of their position in the world. Agonising about one's feelings of uselessness can only go so far, and flouncing off stage at the end is all very well - but where can such people go except back to their houses in town? 

Whereas in Chekhov antagonisms rarely become explicit, here a number of them risk becoming merely melodramatic, with little scope for just papering over the cracks to carry on. The famous injunction (adapted from Chekhov's own comments about narrative economy) that if a gun is revealed then it must later be used is somewhat mangled by the fact that one character does indeed flourish a gun during a marital argument, but a completely different character wounds himself (presumably with a completely different gun) later in the play.

A more serious issue is the tone of the adaptation. We are faced with the problem of our own knowledge of subsequent history. Both Chekhov's and Gorky's characters seem to be aware that their situations are untenable, but of course they have no knowledge of what happened in Russia a decade or two afterwards, or in Summerfolk's case, just the year after publication. In Summerfolk the presentiments are sharper, not least with the presence of a couple of local watchmen who speak contemptuously of the seasonal incomers. Their comments must have been disturbing when the play was written, but they now seem grimly ironic - yet the programme note unnecessarily hammers the point home by setting the play in 1905 (the year of Russia's Bloody Sunday and failed revolution) even though the play was written in 1904.

Furthermore the adapters have at times chosen language that could hardly have been spoken in polite society (even under stress) or among those aspiring to be of the intelligentsia or the upper bourgeoisie. Some of the outbursts are unnecessarily vulgar and even references to "sex" in more casual moments are more direct than a more decorous age would have deemed appropriate. 

However, these are minor distractions. The production is finely mounted in a versatile set (designed by Peter McKintosh) which makes full use of the Olivier stage to represent a dacha and its environs, even revealing a swimming hole in the second half. The cast manage the swirling conversations and shifts of emotion with great skill, allowing us to follow the important shifts of focus even if we, as non-Russians, inevitably can get confused by the plethora of characters. It is utterly refreshing to know that modern actors can still participate successfully in a play with a large cast, when so much contemporary writing, constrained by financial restrictions, concentrates on a much smaller group of characters.

The BFG

adapted by Tom Wells and Jenny Worton from Roald Dahl's story

seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 21 March 2026

Daniel Evans directs John Leader as the BFG with a supporting company of actors and puppeteers in an imaginative staging of Roald Dahl's popular children's story extolling the virtues of friendship for all, from orphans to untypical giants and even the Queen of England. The production is a joint venture by the Chichester Festival Theatre, the RSC and Singapore's Esplanade Theatre on the Bay, with the blessing of the Roald Dahl Story Company.

The difficulty in staging a play concerning humans and giants is the question of scale, a problem that besets everything from pantomime (Jack and the Beanstalk) to Wagner's opera Das Rheingold. In this story the challenge is compounded by having humans, a small giant (the titular BFG, albeit his initials stand for "Big Friendly Giant") and regular-sized large giants - a three-fold issue of scale rather than the usual two-fold issue. In a versatile set designed by Vicki Mortimer, the problem is solved by the imaginative use of puppets. At times we see the child Sophie, her friend Kimberley, and the Queen and her court, from an ordinary human perspective, and if the BFG is present he is represented by a large-scale puppet manipulated by three puppeteers. Sometimes we see things from the BFG's perspective: John Leader is on stage and the humans are represented by small marionettes; the threatening regular giants are themselves large-scale puppets. Dizzyingly, on occasion we see actors portraying the human-eating large giants, while the BFG is a small marionette and the child Sophie is a tiny doll.

The staging is brilliantly effective, allowing the story to proceed at a headlong pace with no confusion. Children in the audience are enthralled (though one small voice behind me asked with incipient disappointment at the first blackout "is that the end?" - of course it wasn't) while the adults marvel at the ingenuity. The cast - even the two child actors for Sophie and Kimberley - handle all the logistical challenges with aplomb, and the paean to friendship, ludicrous though many of its narrative details are, rolls forward with unstoppable energy, enlivened by ridiculous word-coinages and a final explosion of fart jokes. 

Vincent in Brixton

by Nicholas Wright

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 19 March 2026

Georgia Green directs Jeroen Frank Kales as Vincent van Gogh, Amber van der Brugge as his younger sister Anna, Niamh Cusack as Ursula Loyer, who becomes his landlady in Brixton (Stockwell actually), Ayesha Ostler as her daughter Eugenie and Rawaed Asde as Sam Plowman, the other lodger in the house.

The twenty-year-old Vincent came to London as an employee of his uncle's art dealership (headquarters in The Hague); naturally he was short of money and looking for affordable lodgings within relatively easy reach of his office. The play opens as he is just finishing an interview with Ursula Loyer, who agrees that he might move in, and even offers him Sunday lunch immediately.

The boy is callow and opinionated, and fairly brusque in the manner of a foreigner grappling with English. He is also emotionally needy and immediately fixates on Ursula's daughter Eugenie, only to be rebuffed by her - she and the other lodger, the easy-going Sam, are already an "item". Ursula initially wants to withdraw her offer of the lodging, but agrees that he may stay if he forgoes any thought of paying court to Eugenie.

It's a situation bristling with tension, made worse by the veneer of respectability required to preserve Ursula's position as the head of a small boys' school (the students meet in the front room of the house).  When Vincent transfers his affections from daughter to mother the situation inevitably becomes more fraught; and when his censorious sister Anna comes to live in the house matters only become even more difficult, and Vincent acquiesces in a family plan to move him to Paris. And yet, some time later, when he, full of unwelcome evangelical fervour, makes a brief call to the house, there is the first glimmer of his future career as he begins to sketch his work boots lying on a newspaper on the table - a knowing reference to one of his celebrated paintings.

In the small space of the Orange Tree the kitchen is suitably cramped, especially as there is a functioning cooker in use to one side, and a table for preparing vegetables in the middle, as Ursula prepares the Sunday lunch. But the space is ideally suited for the intimacy of the piece, and the cast perform it very well. Vincent's earnestness it utterly compelling and the pitfalls awaiting his naiveté all the more wrenching to appreciate. The weird subversion of "respectable" Victorian values espoused by the household are a trap for the unwary, yet they seem completely plausible. In the capable hands of Niamh Cusack Ursula Loyer, the still-grieving widow of fifteen years who flourishes in Vincent's attentions, but is crushed again when he leaves, provides a strong counterpoint to her more famous lodger. Knowing the mental instability that would bedevil Vincent's later career, it is fascinating to see the warning signs in this intriguing play.

 

By a Lady: The Life & Wit of Jane Austen

by Deirdre Shields

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 15 March 2026

Judy Reaves directs Juliet Stevenson and Rachel Parris, with violinist Dave Le Page and cellist Nick Stringfellow, in an engaging entertainment using excerpts from Jane Austen's novels (except Northanger Abbey) and from letters between her and her sister Cassandra and some other correspondents. The aim is to cover Austen's life while giving an insight into her preoccupations and her outlook (so far as it can be deduced from literary sources).

Austen's prose is so poised and eloquent that it is a sheer pleasure just to listen to it and to enjoy the various barbs and surprises sprung upon the listener. The excerpts from the novels are neatly dovetailed into the glimpses of her personal life, showing how her own experiences nourished her imagination and were cunningly employed to create her fictions. For "Janeites" the pleasure must be familiar; for the rest, the fuss may seem to be overblown.

The musicians provided a witty commentary on the proceedings, rendering some very modern tunes in an early nineteenth-century manner as domestic chamber music.

The Signalman

by Charles Dickens (adapted by Francis Evelyn)

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 7 March 2026

Michael Lunney directs Chris Walker as the Signalman and John Burton as the Traveller in a stage adaptation of one of Charles Dickens's most famous short stories "The Signalman". In an elaborately detailed set featuring the Signalman's cottage beside a tunnel's entrance on a remote branch line, the chance encounter between a Traveller curious to explore the burgeoning railways and the Signalman troubled by inexplicable occurrences near "his" tunnel takes place.

The original story is only thirteen pages long in an anthology of Dickens's short fiction published by Penguin in 1976; it originally appeared in the 1866 Christmas number of All the Year Round, a magazine edited by Dickens, which he called Mugby Junction. Naturally the story needed some expansion to justify its being turned into a play of decent length, and so there is far more circumstantial detail including an extended account of the Traveller's experiences in South America, and several references to a serious derailment of the boat train in Kent, in which, as it happened, Dickens was actually a passenger.

The impulse to expand the story is understandable, but some of the details were questionable. The Signalman is made out to be a Roman Catholic, and various noises and mysterious movements of items in his cottage (falling books, and eventually a fallen cross) are added to increase the spookiness, but I doubt that an author as talented as Dickens would have stooped to such devices to create "atmosphere". The strangeness of the story gains much of its power from being inexplicable and quite devoid of tropes of occultism and religiosity that are now all too familiar.

Also, the programme note explicitly sets the tale in 1880, which seems a bizarre choice since the story was written in 1866 and Dickens died in 1870; the only reason is to introduce the extraneous idea that the Signalman has spent years with PTSD after having been involved in the 1865 train derailment.

The effects were well managed, though the appearance of a spectre was perhaps gratuitous: again, in the story the Signalman's experience (narrated by him to the Traveller, who narrates the story) is perforce more enigmatic. In this it looks more to the ambiguities of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) rather than back to the more active ghosts of A Christmas Carol (1843). But part of the impetus for the stage version was to honour occult stage effects as they were practised in the nineteenth century; however, the spectre's manifestation within the cottage undercuts the fateful crisis of the story.

The acting was at times rather perfunctory; the Traveller in particular seemed more disengaged than he should have been; and there is definitely a problem when a realistic set places the fireplace to one side but the characters face away from it towards the audience. After the previous two outings reviews recently, this was far from a memorable experience. 

Dance of Death

by August Strindberg

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 4 March 2026

Richard Eyre adapted Strindberg's bleak play Dance of Death and directs Will Keen as Edgar, Lisa Dillon as his wife Alice and Geoffrey Streatfeild as Kurt her cousin in an intense and yet at times darkly comic production.

Edgar and Alice have been married for almost twenty-five years; he is a captain on an island which is enduring quarantine due to an epidemic (in this version, the 1918/19 flu epidemic, though the play was written in 1900, and in the original the couple's social isolation is entirely of their own making). The marriage is miserable, though one senses a weary sort of camaraderie beneath the constant sniping and bickering. It's all very well playing games of that sort (and it has become a sturdy theatrical tradition with echoes in the work of Albee, Pinter and others), but there is always a risk of overplaying one's hand, or of losing control due to unforeseen circumstances.

Cue the arrival of Kurt, whom Edgar purports to hold responsible for "trapping" him into marrying Alice, and who is uneasily drawn into the toxic atmosphere through sympathising with his cousin, unaware that his own now dissolved marriage has also been contaminated by Edgar's meddling. And furthermore, Edgar is actually unwell, though it is hard to tell whether he is using his illness as ammunition, or is genuinely running the risk of incapacitation. In this production Will Keen gives a mesmeric performance of draining physicality as he spasms with heart failure and veers between fighting for control with all his military experience of fierce disciple, and succumbing to the terror of dying. His grunts and facial tics are astonishing manifestations of years of repression as much as of physical decline, and it turns out to be foolish of Alice to imagine that now is the time to gain the upper hand.

Lisa Dillon's Alice, fluttering with self-deprecation but usually able to hold her own, exhibits mounting desperation while at the same time revealing a morbid dependence. At one level this is the classic dilemma of the victim of an abusive relationship, but paradoxically here she remains unbowed and in a strange way unbeaten. Kurt's stolid diffidence finally fails to protect him from the fireworks, but after he has left Alice and Edgar are still contemplating their approaching silver wedding anniversary.

At such close quarters the play could have been stultifying and melodramatic, but in the hands of these actors, and with Richard Eyre's inspired realisation that there is a disquieting vein of comedy running through the misery, it was thrilling to watch and horribly fascinating. 

Man and Boy

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the National Theatre (Dorfman) on 28 February 2026

Anthony Lau directs this revival of Terence Rattigan's 1963 play Man and Boy with Ben Daniels as Gregor Antonescu, Laurie Kynaston as Basil Anthony (actually Gregor's son Vassili), Phoebe Campbell as Carol Penn (Basil's girlfriend), Malcolm Sinclair as the financier Mark Herries, Nick Fletcher as Sven Johnson (Gregor's assistant), Leo Wan as David Beeston (Mark Herries's accountant) and Isabella Laughland as Countess Antonescu (Gregor's wife).

Basil and Carol, in a not entirely satisfying relationship, are unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of Basil's estranged father; his machinations turn out to be the primary focus of the play, presented here in an extraordinary production designed by Georgia Lowe. Rattigan's reputation for stolid settings (here, of a 1930s New York apartment) is blown away, replaced by an almost bare stage with a billiards-green baize carpet and functional tables and chairs such as one might find in a community hall. Furthermore the theatre has been reconfigured so that the stage is in the middle with banks of seats on either side. The acting style is also transformed. Gregor in particular slinks and prowls like a wild, not to say feral, animal, moving with a catlike grace that is at times extremely menacing. The tables are pushed and pulled around the stage and frequently mounted by one or more characters in moments of acute emotional stress.

Watching all this as the unsavoury plot unfolds - Gregor is shamelessly prepared to pimp his son out to a financier as a bribe to forestall the collapse of a business merger threatened because the accountant Beeston has found suspicious transactions in the Antonescu empire - is an intoxicating experience. The entrapment of Mark Herries, bamboozled by fast talking and fatefully corrupted by the tantalising offer of a young man's services (with no idea that Basil is related to Gregor), is a horrifying spectacle, while the level of exploitation involved seems too grotesque for the somewhat naive Basil to grasp.

But the irrepressible Gregor can after all be crushed: momentarily by Basil's excoriating put-down, and more fatefully by the unravelling of his business dealings (though not directly the affair elaborated in the first half of the play). As the background to Gregor's personality and his conflicted attitude to Basil becomes clearer we are on the more familiar Rattigan territory of strained relationships and family dysfunction. The mesmerising intensity of the first half perhaps slackens, and Basil's quixotic attempts to save his father despite his obvious flaws (because it is "the system" that is at fault, as Basil the good socialist maintains) is perhaps not entirely convincing. 

Ben Daniels puts in a superb performance as Gregor, ably matched by the rest of the cast whom he manipulates with consummate ease while his star is in the ascendant. When his world collapses his anguish is equally overblown; we may not be sympathetic after being exposed to his ruthlessness, but it ids easy to recognise his nihilism as the obverse of his frenetic energy.

 All in all this revival only serves to enhance Rattigan's reputation as a first-rate dramatist. 

David Copperfield

by Abigail Pickard Price based on the novel by Charles Dickens

seen at Holy Trinity Church Guildford on 14 February 2026

Abigail Pickard Price directs Eddy Payne as David, and Luke Barton and Louise Beresford playing all the other parts, in her own adaptation of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield for the Guildford Shakespeare Company, with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches assisting in the adaptation.

In an ambitious move, David both tells his own story and acts in it (reflecting the narrative voice of the novel) while the many characters he meets with are portrayed by the two supporting actors employing fast costume changes and prodigious feats of memory and energy. The extremely tall Luke Barton is a natural fit for the strong young fisherman Ham, but he also looms large as Peggotty, David's childhood nurse (as an adult remembered from infancy would seem large in recollection), a frightening Mr Murdstone rendered even more terrifying by being faceless, and a chilling Mrs Steerforth. In a more genial mood he makes a delightful Mr Micawber and an engaging Mr Dick amongst others. In the meantime Louise Beresford takes on the various more feminine parts - Mother, Aunt Betsey, Mrs Micawber, Emily, Dora and Agnes - but also the dangerous James Steerforth and the cringing Uriah Heep. Since many of the scenes cleverly required only three characters this is largely manageable, but there are extraordinary exceptions when it is necessary to have Emily and Steerforth dancing together, and later when Mr Micawber finally denounces Heep, achieved by an inspired sleight of hand with the costumes.

Dickens's characters are often thought to be verging on caricatures rather than 'real' people, but in an adaptation such as this, the broad strokes of his characterisations are ideally suited to the speedy appearance and re-appearance of familiar faces identified by particular postures or turns of phrase, and the sheer pace and skill required to keep the story rolling and the characters clear for the audience matches the headlong style for which Dickens was famous: even with only three actors the stage seemed to teem with characters just as the novel does. The childhood scenes veer from happiness to horror; the Micawbers survive by the skin of their teeth; the Trotwood household is suitably eccentric; David's marriage to Dora is cloying and disastrous as it should be without being over-sentimentalised; and the tragedy of the family in Yarmouth so disastrously introduced to Steerforth by the naive David is surprisingly poignant even if the tidying away of awkward consequences to Australia now seems too easy. Perhaps the long-suffering and patient Agnes does not get her due - but this is arguably a fault in the novel too.

By careful plotting and wise pruning the essential elements of the novel were all present, with only a few lesser characters excised in the streamlining necessary to present a coherent story even with such versatile resources - no Barkis being willing, no Miss Murdstone adding to the oppressive atmosphere in David's childhood home, no Rosa Dartle mysteriously scarred by Steerforth, no Traddles and only a fleeting vestige of Uriah Heep's even more 'umble mother. But in the full flow of action these would only have added needless complications, and what was presented was a hugely enjoyable entertainment.

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.