Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 27 August 2026

Carrie Cracknell directs Nikki Amuka-Bird as Hannah Jarvis, Oliver Chris as Bernard Nightingale, Seamus Dillane as Septimus Hodge and Isis Hainsworth as Thomasina Coverly with a supporting cast of eight in a revival of Tom Stoppard's dazzling 1993 play Arcadia, in which Hannah and Bernard, two English literature academics, are trying to reconstruct events at the Coverly estate which occurred in around 1810, in particular to determine whether Lord Byron visited and was subsequently impelled to leave the country. The audience is privileged to see, or to piece together more accurately, what in fact occurred (though Lord Byron does not appear on stage) and to witness the burgeoning mathematical talent of the soon to be 17-year-old Thomasina as she bounces ideas off her tutor Septimus.

In this production the action takes place on a circular stage which has two revolving platforms, designed by Alex Eales. The nineteenth and twentieth century scenes are intertwined allowing full play for Stoppard's characteristic cleverness at creating thematic connections which the audience may well appreciate more than the characters can. For example, Valentine Coverly (Angus Cooper), a modern scion of the Coverly family completely au fait with contemporary number theory and chaos theory, explains to Hannah why Thomasina cannot possibly have developed similar theories so long ago, even though we have just witnessed her doing so. He has all the cocky self-assurance of the modern scientist who implicitly patronises the efforts of earlier generations. Even as we ourselves can feel superior to him through what we have seen, we benefit from his explanation of these difficult theories, and Stoppard has brilliantly found a way to inform us without having Thomasina say anything anachronistically.

The play is shot through with this kind of intellectual sparkle, while also containing running jokes about English literature (and literary figures). All the while, the clandestine love affairs taking place on the Coverly estate are juxtaposed with scenes showing the ease with which they can be misconstrued by modern researchers from the meagre evidence left behind. With the enticing prospect of explaining Lord Byron's activities there is far too much danger that the "evidence" will be bent to the researcher's goal - and this can be exploded by one insignificant detail brought to light by a minor character in a most satisfying comeuppance. The affairs in the modern world, on the other hand, leave a more sour taste as Bernard is revealed to be shallow and self-centred as well as intellectually rash. Septimus Hodge back in the nineteenth century, though unscrupulous in his own way with the unfortunate (and unseen) Mrs Chater, is poignantly redeemed by his courteous refusal to take advantage of the young Thomasina at a critical juncture.

Even though the Duke of York's is a conventional West End theatre, in this production some seats were provided for the audience at the back and the sides of the stage; we occupied seats at the back and had a chance to see the auditorium's "wedding cake" decoration from the usual point of view of the actors. With the revolving platforms, and adroit direction, this somewhat artificial theatre-in-the-round approach worked well and we were not at a disadvantage. It was a pleasure to see another Stoppard revival, particularly as Arcadia is one of his greatest plays.

Electra/Persona

by Benedict Andrews after Sophocles and Ingmar Bergman

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 21 August 2026

Benedict Andrews has had the interesting idea of presenting a stripped down version of Sophocles's Electra (in which an impassioned daughter seeks vengeance for her father's murder by her mother) followed by a stage version of Ingmar Bergman's celebrated 1966 film Persona (in which an actress playing Electra has fled a performance of the play, has refused to speak, and is being cared for by a loquacious nurse). He directs Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss who alternate the parts of Electra and Clytemnestra in the first half and the silent actress Elisabeth and the nurse Alma in the second half, with Ella Lily Hyland as Chrysothemis (Electra's sister) then Anna (the doctor treating Elisabeth), and Patrick Robinson as Aegisthus (Clytemnestra's lover) then Elisabeth's husband.

At the beginning the four actors enter in front of the front row of the audience and the two leads ask a member of the audience to toss a coin, with the rules that apply for determining first service in a tennis match; on this occasion Nina Hoss lost the call so Cate Blanchett could choose the roles and she chose to play Clytemnestra and Alma. Whether this ploy is in some way "fixed" so that a reasonable alteration of role playing can take place is an uncertain point; it will apparently not be possible consult the box office in order to arrange to see two performances with a guarantee that the roles will be reversed.

On a strikingly bare set designed by Magda Willi, consisting of a steep series of white stone steps covering the full width of the Lyttleton stage and leading apparently nowhere, and with a stainless steel hammer centrally placed and spotlit, the play Electra begins with Electra crawling up towards the hammer groaning in grief and anger, her desperate desire to avenge her father's murder unassuaged for years due to the absence of her brother Orestes. Her sister's appeals to reason appal and disgust her. When Clytemnestra appears the dreadful tangle of familial love, anger, hatred and resentment threatens to boil over: both women are implacable in their self-righteous justifications. 

In the absence of an actor taking the part of Orestes, the recognition scene between brother and sister is dispensed with, and Electra in some sense becomes Orestes, or assumes his character, in order to despatch Aegisthus when he arrives thinking to hear news of Orestes's death: unlike the formal arrangements of a Greek tragedy, the murder takes place on stage (and in a further departure from Sophocles, his death occurs before that of Clytemnestra). When "Orestes" confronts Clytemnestra (a scene drawn more from Aeschylus's version of the story) we might expect further butchery - but it is at this point that Electra inexplicably flees the stage through the auditorium; a curtain descends as if to deal with an unforeseen emergency and we are at the interval.

In Persona, the actress Elisabeth has been silent for some time, and her doctor assigns the nurse Alma to look after her; eventually they go to live in a seaside cottage, an arrangement which the doctor hopes will be restorative. But Elisabeth remains silent, while Alma talks and talks and talks. Elisabeth's features are projected from a hand-held video camera onto a large screen so that we can see that her perpetual silence is given subtle nuances by the smallest fleeting expressions on her face: it is a masterful piece of acting and a surprisingly resilient foil to the nurse's prolonged and at times desperate chatter as Alma deploys increasingly frantic methods to get Elisabeth to talk: only a direct physical threat leads to a distressed cry of alarm.

Is this juxtaposition a success? There are complex factors at work. We see actors choosing their parts in front of us, but then their performances are so intense and convincing that we perhaps "forget", in the usual way of audiences, that we are watching people who are acting, and we immerse ourselves in the presented dilemmas of the characters they are portraying. Then the performance inexplicably stops, and we never go back to it: we do not see the second murder nor do we have any idea of the consequences of this particular matricide (an issue not addressed in any surviving play by Sophocles, though it is the subject of surviving plays by Aeschylus and Euripides). Instead we see an intense and increasingly unhealthy relationship between a patient and her nurse, a reminder at one level that we are concerned with the trauma of an actress who was playing Electra when she fled the stage. But now we are watching an actress playing a traumatised actress, and another actress playing an increasingly vulnerable nurse.

Although the ostensible link between the two parts is that the actress we saw playing Electra did indeed leave the stage precipitously, and throughout the Persona section is almost entirely silent, there is perhaps a subliminal connection relating to the issue of trauma. For the Greeks, the Electra story was one episode in a blood feud within the Mycenaean royal family which lasted for generations, and clearly the character of Orestes suffers what we would call trauma in killing his mother, depicted in the form of the Furies pursuing him - and it is noteworthy that he is totally trapped since his father's murder cries out for vengeance, but so too does his mother's murder. Clearly there are traumas in Persona - Elisabeth's silence is a traumatic response, and Alma too has deeply repressed feelings, some of which are articulated in her long monologues. The questions of childbearing and maternal affection are raised both by Clytemnestra in Electra (famously she dreams of having given birth to a serpent when bearing Orestes) and by Alma in Persona (as she attempts to imagine Elisabeth's reasons for tearing her child's photograph in two) and these parts are taken by the same actress.

It's an intense experience: Greek tragedy is by its nature intense, and so too are most of Bergman's films, this one not the least. The two parts, though derived from theatrical and filmic works from centuries apart, do nevertheless make for a compelling if strange unity. Some of the power undoubtedly comes from the format which forces us to recognise that acting is taking place - and superb acting at that. Deep human emotions are being explored, but the theatricality of the process is being highlighted at the same time instead of being taken for granted, which is unusual but stimulating.

Cyrano de Bergerac (revisited)

by Edmond Rostand

seen last the Noel Coward Theatre on 19 August 2026

It was interesting to experience a second visit to this RSC production currently in London. In June I was in the Royal Circle, some distance from the stage and looking down on it (from excellent seats). This time I was in the fourth row of the Stalls, giving an entirely different exposure to the staging.

Since the play opened with a "warm up" for the audience we in the stalls were necessarily more involved from the start, and in general the theatrical experience was more involving at close quarters. Also, knowing in advance how the opening worked, it was less confusing at it turned out not to be essential to know who everyone was in order to enjoy the proceedings. (In June I had been a bit distracted by trying to work out who these characters were in relation to Cyrano who does not appear for some time.)

Adrian Lester's performance as Cyrano remained superlative and it was of course possible to notice more nuances in his delivery. It turned out to be well worth a second visit.

See my review for 22 June for more details on the production as a whole.

Atlantis

by Emily White

seen at the Minerva Theatre Chichester on 8 August 2026

In a co-production with Theatr Clwyd Guy Jones directs Vivien Parry as Gwen, Richard Elfyn as her husband Bryn, Catrin Aaron as their daughter Claire, Eirlys Lovell-Jones as their granddaughter Rhiannon, Alfie Llewellyn as their grandson Phillip and Sara Otung as Phillip's girlfriend and later wife Astrid in Emily White's accomplished play Atlantis, which deals with the impact of climate change on a beleaguered Welsh fishing village in the years from 2011 to 2039. There are three pairs of children variously taking the parts of young Rhiannon, young Phillip, and Phillip and Astrid's child (either David or Eleanor depending on the child performing: we saw Eleanor). 

Fairbourne, an imaginary place, is a small village surrounded by salt marshes. We see the beach - sand and pebbles strewn across the front of the acting area and partly covered by sun-bleached board walks - and the living room of the family: a versatile set designed by Frankie Bradshaw. Bryn is a fisherman; Gwen has often been absent while participating in various activist causes, most notably for her perhaps the long-running Greenham Common protest of the 1980s. They are bringing up their young grandchildren as Claire, their daughter and the children's mother, is swamped by her shift work in a care home. At the play's opening Gwen is telling folk stories to the youngsters, including those tales of kingdoms lost under the sea, but the adults have just become aware that their whole village is imperilled by the council's decision to abandon the modification of any sea defences even though sea levels are projected to drown the village within the next few years. Not only that, but the home owners will receive no compensation - and of course once the situation is publicised it is impossible for the homes to be sold.

Though we don't care to think closely about this, such a predicament will be widespread in Britain (let alone the rest of the world). When village activism brings reporters to Fairbourne, Bryn reels off a list of places likely to be affected, including major cities on river estuaries. The reporter superciliously points out that hard decisions must be made since resources will be too scarce and unaffordable to protect the entire coastline - but this is scant comfort for anyone about to lose their home and livelihood. The only concession the locals win is that the council will not force evictions by cutting off utility supplies.

Such issues could swamp a play with earnest rhetoric, but in Atlantis the wider picture is skilfully interwoven with the family drama, though we are witnessing a family with its own rich traditions of political awareness and engagement: Astrid, when she first gets to know them, is absolutely amazed and impressed, though later she becomes disenchanted. Likewise the family drama, with tensions between Bryn staunchly defending his own perceived rights often exasperated by Gwen who goes off saving the world, Claire almost overwhelmed by work, and the youngsters facing a very insecure future, could have become mawkish and melodramatic, but it never does. Bryn and Gwen have serious disagreements, but their bond can cope with the strain. Later, Rhiannon and Astrid have an excoriating argument about the issue of bringing children into the world, but with the long time frame of the play, we see that years later they manage a tacit if still somewhat frosty accommodation with one another. This is the stuff or "ordinary" family life portrayed in an unfussy style which makes it totally believable. The passage of time brings loss and illness, and some degree of bitterness and estrangement, all revealed with an understated poignancy in the midst of the encroaching environmental crisis.

All in all, this production manages the difficult feat of blending the widest ecological issues with an intimate family portrait without compromising either strand. The result is theatre doing what it does best: challenging and entertaining at once.

The Oresteia

by Simon Stone after Aeschylus and others

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 6 August 2026

Christopher Nolan's recent film The Odyssey has garnered critical acclaim, but also reservations (some of which are justifiable) about "authenticity" and interpretation. However, re-imagining classic myth and drama is inevitable as performance practices change and cultural and societal norms evolve. Hence for the Bridge Theatre Simon Stone has written and directed an Oresteia for our times, and it is a far more radical venture than anything attempted by Nolan. The essential outline of the traditional story - the catastrophic implosion of the family of Agamemnon - is here presented as the travails of an extremely modern and dysfunctional family: the time lines are given as running from 2016 to 2026. (Interestingly, the last time versions of The Oresteia were given professionally in London was in 2015: see my reviews of the Almeida and Globe productions.)

It may be useful to list the cast with their classic correspondences (a courtesy omitted by the program):

Marie-Louise Parker    -    Montie             (Clytemnestra)

David Morissey            -    Christopher     (Agamemnon)

Tom Glyn-Carney         -    Augie              (Orestes)

Rosie Sheehy               -   Alice                (Electra), and briefly her twin Isobel (Iphigenia)

Lloyd Hutchinson         -    Melville            (Menelaus), and also Lester a police inspector

John Macmillan            -   Jerome             (Aegisthus)

Archie Madekwe          -    Lorenzo           (presumably Pylades, imagined as Jerome's son)  

Alyth Ross                    -    Jenny and Letitia

Rakhee Thakrar           -    Chandra           (Cassandra)

Even the Almeida's modern-placed production used the familiar names and entangled the familial disasters with statecraft, but Stone's adaptation eschews the public sphere almost entirely by placing the Middleton family at one remove from political power. The brothers Christopher and Melville run an arms company which is inevitably supplying weapons to unsavoury states, but Christopher's business woes are more personal in that he has been embezzling company funds. Isobel, the rebellious but indulged child, has fallen in with protesters, while Alice, more socially awkward, remains at home with Augie.

Domestic tensions are already running high in 2016 as the family prepares for the twins' twenty-first birthday celebrations, and over the succeeding decade the cycle of vengeful murders plays out, leaving the hapless Augie in a frenzied and traumatised state: in the absence of the gods and the turning away from civic involvement there is no place for the healing of his mental state by the establishment of communal judgement such as is presented in the final play by Aeschylus. Rather, Augie is apparently sectioned and still damagingly haunted by his past actions, in a manic state perhaps inspired by the character's predicament in Euripides's play Orestes.

The Almeida's production focussed intensely in its first act on the sacrifice of Iphigenia, an episode only referred to in Aeschylus, partly no doubt to bring the full horror of that episode to the minds of an audience which may no longer have been familiar with the tale. At the Bridge the first act shows the tensions in the family at the point when Isobel is still alive, but not present, but there is an increasing sense that a disaster is waiting to happen, since so much family discord cannot possibly be dissipated. As the years pass we are witnesses of the later developments (ie, the murders), though the events are not presented in chronological order. There is an element of withholding information for dramatic effect which runs the risk of turning the whole affair into a thriller. In the most extreme case we hear of Isobel's death and its traumatic effect on her surviving relatives long before we actually witness its circumstances, and it is not clear that what we see can really account for all that has followed.

Lizzie Clachan provides an extraordinary set - a series of rooms in the Middleton's Kentish house on two levels, all enclosed by vast glass windows to create a huge box, rotating slowly as needed to reveal the different rooms. It's a visual style used in previous productions by Stone (I have seen his Yerma and Phaedra), and it perfectly reflects the suffocating claustrophobia in modern family life. But it has its costs. Because of the enclosed space the actors are all miked, and this leads to an unfortunate flatness of tone and occasional jarring noises if two people are too close to one another (for instance, when hugging - a rare event in this appalling family). Another signature feature of Stone's direction, the tendency for many characters to speak at once, makes it even harder to concentrate on what is actually being said when everything is flattened electronically. While it might be claimed that this reflects the realities of social life when no-one is particularly interested in what anyone else is saying, it is an extremely disconcerting experience when witnessed on stage where one expects cues to focus one's attention. (This was also a problem with Phaedra only slightly mitigated here by being used more sparingly).

Overall, after the disconcerting start, the production became more gripping as it settled into developing its plot rather than just introducing us rather bewilderingly to the characters. The cast was excellent, with a powerhouse performance by Marie-Louise Parker as Montie matched by David Morissey's already somewhat crushed Christopher and Tom Glynn-Carney's increasingly deranged Augie. Rosie Sheehy's Alice was an extraordinary study in social awkwardness and entirely credible resentment at being the non-favoured twin, reflecting Electra's degraded position in her mother's household after her father's death. There were cunning redeployments of Aeschylean themes and motifs: for example, Clytemnestra's blasphemous invitation to Agamemnon to walk on a purple carpet (which he finally agrees to) is transmuted to Montie's insistence that Christopher should eat some biscuits, wheedling in the face of his firm refusal since he is on a wellness diet. Providentially only Chandra, the Cassandra figure, eats the biscuits, which are poisoned, though they do not kill her. In the maelstrom of recrimination and revenge there was considerable scope for extremely mordant humour, an unexpected byproduct of the "relatable" setting. The character of Letitia (Augie's fiancée, not directly related to a classical forebear) was a fountain of modern entitlement.

I am increasingly unsure that the disrupted chronology, which required projected messages to inform us in which year various scenes belonged, really did the play any favours (a view shared by others with me). Sometimes these scenes looked as if they were flashbacks, and sometimes not, which added to the destabilising effect; it left Augie's final predicament unresolved, with Isobel's fate revealed as the last major scene even though it was almost the first thing to have happened. A dramatic ending when it could have been a dramatic beginning, it looked close to cheating. The material could certainly support a more straightforward presentation as its full power is not really dependant on cliffhangers.

It is exciting to see what directors and actors make of material that in its classic form is nearly 2500 years old; but for modernising I preferred the version presented by the Almeida.

 

Love's Labour's Lost

by William Shakespeare

seen in the gardens of Braboeuf Manor, Guildford on 25 July 2026

The Guildford Shakespeare Company and the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond have created joint open-air productions of both Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing for their summer seasons (quite usual for the GSC, but particularly apt for the Orange Tree, the auditorium for which is undergoing major renovations this summer). Tom Littler from the Orange Tree directs a cast of ten in the two plays, and he has devised ways to link them so that they appear to deal with the same characters before and after the Second World War. This is achieved by a few textual adjustments, but principally by assigning character names from each play to four couples and some assorted others. Thus the plays are linked more explicitly than in a similar exercise presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company eleven years ago (the RSC placed the plays on either side of the First World War and disposed the members of the cast differently).

In Love's Labour's Lost the four young male courtiers of the original are perfectly plausible as 1930's Oxbridge undergraduates (or perhaps they have recently graduated), their aspirations for living hopelessly out of touch with the world of real relationships and awkwardly insistent feelings. The visiting ladies soon scupper their idealistic fantasy of a three year retreat from feminine company, but the social comedy remains untouched almost until the end by the weightier matters of the real world. Even the lesser characters, decidedly from lower social strata, are ostensibly free from want or anxiety.

As in Much Ado (seen last week) James Sheldon gives a tremendously assured performance as Berowne/Benedick, a vital asset as these two characters (here presented as essentially the same person) must be convincing and charismatic for the plays to succeed as entertainment. The supporting cast manages the elaborate wordplay of Love's Labour's Lost with great panache, and often at dazzling speed, allowing us to be impressed by their mastery of the text rather than bamboozled by the now unfamiliar rhetorical wizardry.

The brittle make-believe world of the play is famously shattered in its concluding moments by the arrival of an unavoidably serious message for the Princess: the death of her father. The desperate and perhaps forlorn attempts of the young couples to retrieve something from this interruption by promises to revive their interest in one another after a suitable period of mourning, reflection and seeing to their new responsibilities is handled with due sobriety, and we the audience have some inkling that these four pairs of young people will have a "second chance" in the later Much Ado About Nothing.

The play ends with contrasting Spring and Winter songs concerning respectively the cuckoo and the owl. The text does not assign the songs to characters previously named; in this production Costard (here, an innkeeper) takes the lyrics for spring and Holofernes those for winter. At first they recited them, which had the curious effect of reminding me of reciting poetry in primary school classes, before they were repeated in song. I have seen productions in which the tunes for the two parts were utterly different, reflecting their different seasons, but here the same tune was used throughout. The overall effect was surprisingly poignant: the world of easy love-play was certainly giving way to something more serious.

Much Ado about Nothing

by William Shakespeare

seen in the gardens of Braboeuf Manor, Guildford on 18 July 2026

The Guildford Shakespeare Company and the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond have created joint open-air productions of both Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing for their summer seasons (quite usual for the GSC, but particularly apt for the Orange Tree, the auditorium for which is undergoing major renovations this summer). Tom Littler from the Orange Tree directs a cast of ten in the two plays, and he has devised ways to link them so that they appear to deal with the same characters before and after the Second World War. This is achieved by a few textual adjustments, but principally by assigning character names from each play to four couples and some assorted others. Thus the plays are linked more explicitly than in a similar exercise presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company eleven years ago (the RSC placed the plays on either side of the First World War and disposed the members of the cast differently).

By chance I have seen the "second" play first, and have thus watched the soldiers returning from the war, variously affected by its violence: Benedick Berowne suffers nightmares, while the affable Longeuville has become the treacherous John. But the linkings are a minor matter; the principal pleasure is to be gained from the excellence of the production of a fine play. Beatrice (Phoebe Pryce) and Benedick (James Sheldon) remain the dazzling sparring couple perfectly believable in the heady days of victory in the mid-1940s, while the plot to denigrate Hero (Joëlle Brabant) and humiliate Claudio (Chirag Benedict Lobo) unfolds around them in a milieu where mistrust could very easily develop due to the years-long parting of sweethearts. The comic village constabulary with the pompous Dogberry (Matt Pinches, doubling also as the villainous John) in charge are suitably re-imagined as members of the local home guard in a nod to Dad's Army.

In a corner of the extensive gardens of the former Guildford College of Law the setting was imagined to be a rural village pub festooned with victory bunting but apparently not much used during the war years. Great trees provided a magnificent backdrop and a vital sounding board, and also much needed shade for the actors in a matinee performance (the audience was less fortunate in this respect). Once again the GSC has provided a really enjoyable al fresco production of a Shakespeare play.

45 Years

adapted by Hannah Patterson from Andrew Haigh's film

seen at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester on 4 July 2026

Prasanna Puwanarajah directs Gabriel Byrne as Geoff, Geraldine James as Kate and Gillian Bevan as Lena in Hannah Patterson's adaptation of the film 45 Years which was written and directed by Andrew Haigh and released in 2015 (Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling played the couple while Geraldine James played Lena).

Geoff and Kate are about to celebrate their forty-fifth wedding anniversary, their ruby wedding celebrations having been cancelled due to Geoff's ill-health at the time. Theirs seems to be a marriage of long contentment and companionship, but a letter sent to Geoff throws an unexpected light on his past. He had told Kate of the girlfriend he had had before they met, and that she had died in a climbing accident when they were holidaying in the Alps, but there were evidently things that he had not said, which Kate now finds very painful to consider.

Over the course of the few days between the arrival of the letter and the celebratory party Kate must deal with catering arrangements and the well-meaning chatter of her friend Lena, all the while trying to come to terms with her new awareness of her husband's past, and her lack of certainty about what he might or might not have inadvertently or deliberately told her. In the meantime Geoff too has been knocked off balance by the news in the letter, and he struggles with his natural reticence, and perhaps his failing memory, to realise the pain he has caused.

The play is set solely in various rooms in their house with only the most minimal indication of which room the couple are in (set designed by James Cotterill); there is a clever indication of when Kate is in the loft. Indications that the house may be a bit rundown with age and their long residence perhaps mirror the fragility of Kate's and Geoff's relationship - there are persistent leaks from the rain outside, and a troublesome ballcock which Geoff eventually repairs. Only right at the end are we in the hall where the long-planned party takes place.

Conversation is mostly measured and muted, and the pattern of very short scenes of dialogue punctured by blackouts, very reminiscent of fades or scene-cuttings in film, is at first rather disconcerting, but the overall effect is to emphasise how much goes unspoken in apparently innocuous dialogue, and how fatally difficult it becomes to articulate important things after a lifetime of not doing so. Outbursts of temper never lead to longwinded or tearful confessions. The cumulative effect of all this reticence is etched on Kate's face as she dances with Geoff in the village hall - it is utterly unclear what she will do next, while Geoff appears to think that he has made things right by publicly declaring his love for his wife.

Geraldine James and Gabriel Byrne handle this low-key approach with great skill, though there is a slight danger that at times they speak too quietly. One soon realises how verbose many dramas are on stage and screen in comparison to this stripped back but still very revealing dialogue, which, in this stage version, is perfectly matched by the austere visual style.

Black Comedy

by Peter Shaffer

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 2 July 2026

Caroline Steinbeis directs Joe Bannister as Brindsley Miller, Leah Haile as his fiancée Carol Melkett, Jason Barnett as her father Colonel Melkett, Julia Hills as Brindsley's neighbour Miss Furnival, Simon Manyonda as his other neighbour Harold Gorringe, Patricia Allison as his former girlfriend Clea, Chris Chilton as Schuppanzigh (an employee of the London Electricity Board) and Javier Marzan as Georg Bamberger, a wealthy recluse, in Peter Shaffer's one-act farce Black Comedy.

The action takes place on an evening of chaos (naturally): Brindsley and Carol prepare to dazzle her father and Baumgartner who are about to visit Brindsley's down-at-heel flat. To do this they have surreptitiously "borrowed" impressive items - furniture and knickknacks - from Gorringe's flat in his absence. Suddenly the entire building suffers a blackout during which unexpected visitors turn up and complicate the situation in the ridiculous way in which farces usually operate.

The dazzling visual technique by which all this is managed for the audience's benefit is that the opening scene in which there is electric light is played in total darkness, while the scenes in blackout are played with full stage lighting so we can see all the characters blindly feeling their way about the room. Striking a match or clicking on a cigarette lighter reduces the lighting to a subdued glow. This witty convention allows for any number of tremendous sight gags as characters try to find one another, hand out drinks, or in Brindsley's case try to move furniture into and out of the room. The arrival of a new character can be "concealed" until he or she chooses to speak, providing yet another avenue for laughs.

The physical comedy is rendered even more remarkable as the play is here performed in the round, so the gags have to be convincing from multiple angles; the small acting space means that drinks are occasionally passed in error to members the audience, and some are directly addressed by characters who mis-place where other people are in the room.

The cast and creative team (set and costume designer.Simon Daw, lighting designer Elliott Griggs and physical comedy consultant John Nicholson among others) have done the play proud, and have revealed the astonishing variety of Peter Shaffer's talent - he wrote this play within months of the epic The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Yet though this seems far removed from the high seriousness of his full-length dramas there remains beneath the surface a strong undercurrent of uncertainty and betrayal; Brindsley is tying himself in knots and unwittingly causing damage to himself as well as those around him as he persists in seeing himself only as a victim of circumstances. However, the strongest impression is of immense theatrical fun.

The Marquise

by Noël Coward

seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre Guildford on 27 June 2026

Philip Wilson directs Juliet Aubrey as the Marquise Eloise de Kestournel, Simon Shepherd as Raoul de Vriaac and Tristan Gemmill as Esteban el Duco de Santaguano ("saint guano" - really?) in Noël Coward's 1927 play The Marquise. Though originally set in 1735, and hence a social comedy about the French aristocracy of the ancient regime, this production from the Theatre Royal Windsor has updated the action by two centuries (with permission from the Coward estate) to reflect the upper-class social world of the 1930s.

In an elaborate Art Deco reception room in the country house of Raoul de Vriaac (a wonderful set designed by Colin Falconer), the engagement is announced between his daughter Adrienne (Eva O'Hara) and Miguel (Barnaby Tobias), the son of Raoul's close friend Esteban. The two older men spar off each other while the engaged couple excuse themselves to go onto the terrace; when they return they are eventually left alone, at which point they confess to each other that neither of them really wants to marry. It's the classic comedy situation of the bright youngsters setting themselves against parental pressure, but reversed in that they are hoping to avoid a marriage their respective fathers have set their hearts on.

Into this awkward situation the Marquise arrives, full of joie de vivre and mischief. She is an old flame of Raoul's (from before his marriage: he is now widowed) and her first question to the alarmed Raoul is "How is my child?". Another comic trope has arrived with enormous aplomb as the Marquise insinuates herself into the household and, on meeting Adrienne, she immediately proposes to help her.

Coward is obviously having wicked fun skewering pretension and the conventions of comedy plotting - there is a knowing butler and a sanctimonious chaplain to deal with as well. The Marquise is shamelessly manipulative and fabulously worldly-wise (there's a lovely joke that the furniture of the very à la mode setting is uncomfortable and far too dusty), and the stage seems set for a series of plots and counter-plots, since Jacques Rijar (Martin Carroll), the object of Adrienne's affections and the secretary of her father, has been sacked by the outraged Raoul when their secret has been revealed, and the hapless young man seems determined to flee "with honour".

But (to me and my companions at least) the bombshell that is dropped at the opening of the second half is completely unexpected and very funny: the havoc the Marquise can cause spreads ever wider, and even leads to the two old friends embarking on a preposterous duel, until all is resolved more or less to everyone's satisfaction.

The repartee was excellently handled, and the formalities of pastiche 18th-century courtly dialogue seemed absolutely to suit the brittle milieu of the 1930s, with only a few necessary adjustments to account for technological progress (the Marquise travels in a Bugatti rather than a coach - but it still breaks down conveniently). It was an unexpected pleasure to come across a little-known Coward play and to discover that it is as witty as his better-known works, with the usual undercurrent of seriousness and even a nagging uncertainty as to how to set one's moral compass in a changing world.

Cyrano de Bergerac

by Edmond Rostand

seen at the Noël Coward Theatre on 22 June 2026

Simon Evans directs Adrian Lester in the title role in a new version of Rostand's famous 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, an RSC production transferred from Stratford to the West End. The text has been adapted by Evans and Debris Stevenson. Susannah Fielding plays Roxanne, a childhood friend of Cyrano's with whom he is secretly in love, and Levi Brown plays Christian de Neuvillette, an untutored young soldier smitten by her, who asks Cyrano for help in wooing her.

The play has enormous energy due to the extrovert character of Cyrano, who defends his honour - his panache - on the slightest provocation, and sometimes seems to encourage unwary newcomers to annoy him. The opening scenes contain a dazzling example of his style in vanquishing a "foe". Intertwined with this exuberance is the love story in which Cyrano pours out his heart in the service of Christian's wooing, so that Roxane falls for the young soldier, who is sufficiently naive not to recognise his false position until fatefully late in the day.

The play (being French) was written in rhymed alexandrines, a form almost impossible to maintain convincingly in modern English. Part of the charm of this adaptation its its clever reconfiguring of the language, in which the sophisticated Cyrano and the often ditzy Roxanne often talk in rhyme, and the ridiculous Comte de Guiche (Scott Handy) spouts stilted platitudes in clunking verse, while others do not. Christian in particular speaks in a demotic Brummie accent that perfectly recasts his provincial origins for a modern British audience. The programme notes provide some interesting insights into how Evans and Stevenson went about adapting the play, taking some fascinating liberties with their material.

The theatricality of the piece is emphasised by frequent asides to the audience, and indeed there are zestful elements of pantomime in the behaviour of Cyrano's "gang" in the opening sunnier scenes. These provide a suitable contrast to the more serious developments as the men go off to war with its merciless consequences, while the final scene reaches a melancholy resolution. 

Adrian Lester's superb mastery of language and his physical bravado carry the play, all the while subtly allowing the character's fateful insecurity to flicker through the facade. All the flash and excitement creates a lifetime of missed opportunities for honesty, which leads Roxane to an explosion of anger fully justified by her friend's deceptions. 

It's a great revival, tempering the incipient sentimentality of the play's Romantic sheen with down-to-earth  stagecraft to great effect, using an utter;y different approach from the last version I saw six years ago.

Equus

by Peter Shaffer

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 20 June 2026

Lindsay Posner directs Toby Stephens as the psychiatrist Martin Dysart and Noah Valentine as the 17-year-old Alan Strang who has been referred to him after blinding six horses in the stables where he was working at weekends, in a revival of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus. Emma Cunniffe and Colin Mace play Alan's parents Dora and Frank, Amanda Abbington plays Heather Saloman the referring magistrate, and Bella Aubin plays Jill Mason, Alan's co-worker at the stables.

The horses, traditionally portrayed with eerie head-dresses and metal hooves, are here represented by six black-trousered bare-footed dancers, their torsos smeared with black body paint and their movements expertly choreographed by James Cousins to indicate equine presence. Yet Ed Mitchell as Nugget, the horse that attracts Alan's closest attention, invests a homoerotic frisson to their encounters, allowing us to appreciate more strongly the heady mixture of physical delight and religious fervour in Alan's private world of devotion, matched by his wild incantations and eventually uninhibited re-enactments of his catastrophe.

What struck me most forcibly at the beginning of this revival, in contrast to earlier versions that I have seen, is how significant Dysart's crisis of confidence in his professional and personal life is to the structure of the play. This was largely due to the interpretation offered by Toby Stephens, impassioned and increasingly desperate as he wrestles with his doubts and occasionally succumbs to Alan's wily manipulations. Though the play begins as if narrated by Dysart in retrospect, by the end it is hard to know whether his despairing acknowledgement that he may have destroyed the boy's spiritual life by his therapy work is addressed directly to the sleeping Alan, or is just the culmination of his recollected narrative.

In all this Toby Stephens, giving a superb performance, is matched by an equally assured and powerful performance by Noah Valentine, veering from the nervy twitching and restlessness of the newly convicted teenager, to the excitement of the young boy's first encounter with a horse (recollected in an early therapy session) and then reaching an impassioned climax as he re-enacts the rites of his worship of "Equus" as embodied in the adored horse Nugget. At the same time, once Alan unbends enough to engage with Dysart, he soon learns to play the psychiatrist's games and has no compunction in exploiting his position to needle and infuriate the supposed adult in the room. It's a brilliantly nuanced performance by the young actor. 

The conclusion to the first half of the play is an ecstatic evocation of the boy's fervour which seems impossible to match in the second act, but, amazingly, the final session in which Alan finally acknowledges what he has done (he had apparently remained silent during the court case that led to his referral) explodes in even more power as the full extent of his tortured confusion between sexual awakening and ritualised reverence for his equine god leads to the blinding. This is all enacted with fearless passion in which the distress of the horses is entangled with the frenzy of the boy in a blur of flashing lights and throbbing hoofbeats (lighting by Paul Pyant and sound by Adam Cork).

The intensity of the play is further enhanced by the intimacy of the theatre, much smaller than the other theatres in which I have seen productions. The celebrated 2007 revival with Daniel Radcliffe as Alan was in a conventional West End auditorium, inherently more distancing for all but the closest members of the audience, and, fine though it was, it suffered inevitably from its celebrity-related baggage, and perhaps a too-cerebral interpretation of Dysart by Richard Griffiths. The revival I saw in the Yvonne Arnaud theatre seven years ago (also very well done) was nowhere near as intense an experience as watching it in the small space offered by the Menier. (See also my review of 9th May 2019).

It's intriguing that Shaffer returned again and again to the framing device of a story recollected: the page boy Martin as a grizzled older man telling the story of the conquest of Peru in The Royal Hunt of the Sun; Dysart narrating a case history which shattered his life in Equus; the aged Salieri recalling the crushing impact of Mozart on his career in Amadeus. And he is also really interested in the dynamic of the irruption of a younger man of enigmatic quality in the life of an older man who is otherwise world-weary: the young god-king Atahualpa confronting the aged Pizarro; a deeply troubled teenager confounding a professional expert; a musical genius out-stripping a humdrum composer. In this production of Equus we see the confrontation at its most raw, and it is both a wonderful and a disturbing theatrical experience, enhanced here by two excellent leads, an assured supporting cast, and evocative choreography and staging.

The Tempest

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon on 13 June 2026

Richard Eyre directs Kenneth Branagh as Prospero with Ruby Stokes as Miranda, Amara Okereke as Ariel, Ashley Zhangazha as Caliban and Fred Woodley Evans as Ferdinand in a production designed by Bob Crowley.

A previous RSC production featuring a famous actor returning to the fold (Simon Russell Beale) made a point of using sophisticated computer technology to enhance the magical aspects of Prospero's island (see my review from 19 July 2017). In this new production, with Kenneth Branagh acting for the RSC again after many years, the stage is almost completely bare, with a large slightly raised circular platform; a backcloth allows for projections of a storm, and more tranquil island sunlight, and it is occasionally opened to reveal a further cloth put to similar uses.

The opening storm is thrillingly evoked with projected rain in a wild gale, and waves apparently surging on the stage floor, while the circular platform tilts alarmingly. A directorial decision has been made to have Prospero appear quietly before all this starts, donning mage-like robes and taking up a wand to create the storm, more like the conductor of an orchestra, since the wand was essentially a conductor's baton. Should we not be led to believe that the storm is real, until we discover with Miranda in the second scene that it has been confected by her father? It's just a little awkward to have Prospero so relentlessly visible during the storm when attention should be fully on the hapless ship's crew and passengers.

Branagh's Prospero, though almost entirely in control of all he surveys, is not particularly dictatorial; the long conversation with Miranda was without the emotional tension it sometimes has, allowing for a more genial father-daughter relationship. He has more steeliness in relation to Ariel when she provokes him, and to Caliban who is always provocative, and he pursues his plan of vengeance methodically until the moment when he (to the surprise of the three sinful men, and perhaps himself) offers forgiveness. The overall effect, though of course Branagh has a masterful command of verse-speaking, is somewhat muted in comparison with more volatile interpretations of the character in other productions.

The burgeoning love between Miranda and Ferdinand is nicely played out, and Ferdinand looks suitably sweat-bound after carrying logs for hours in the island's heat. Fred Woodley Evans did not quite have the bearing of a prince, but he was an engaging young man struck suddenly with love for a dazzling young woman.

Stephano and Trinculo representing the low-life of the court were suitably sozzled and clownish, but Caliban's initial subservience to them perhaps strained credulity since he was not portrayed as an almost inarticulate monster. This production chose instead to emphasise that Caliban had in fact been deprived of what he may legitimately have thought of as his inheritance by the arrival of the more powerful Prospero (though this can't be a matter of simple colonialism or enslavement, since Caliban and his mother were also arrivals on the island, not natives of it).

Ariel was continually airborne as befits her name; this required Amara Okereke to be attached to a trapeze-like mechanism on which she swooped into view and disappeared again at the highest level of the stage. This was effective to begin with, but ran the risk of seeming too mechanical a device when used throughout the performance. Ariel's wary respect for Prospero, and his wary affection for the spirit, were poignantly expressed on several occasions when she reached down and he reached up so that their hands almost touched.

The relations between Prospero, Ariel and Caliban are mysterious, and there is plenty of scope for interpreting them in different ways. Here, the matter of Ariel's freedom was given a most unusual twist: as Prospero finally freed the spirit she was released from her trapeze and put her feet on the ground - where she did not know how to walk: freedom, it seemed, would be quite a challenge. As far as Caliban is concerned, the most derogatory references to him by Prospero were cut, and the character always had a certain quiet dignity.

There was more: the great Epilogue speech is usually given directly to the audience as Proposer begs for his own freedom to depart and claims that it is dependent on the audience's applause - the character almost disappearing as the actor breaks the fourth wall. Here, Branagh almost exclusively addressed Ariel and Caliban, asking for their indulgence, and he left them alone on the stage, regarding each other in silence, wondering what to make of their "brave new world" - an extraordinary conclusion to a thought-provoking production.

I was not convinced by every aspect of Eyre's and Branagh's work on this play, but it is a salutary reminder that The Tempest is no straightforward drama. It's the sixth time I have posted a review of the play, and on each occasion there are new insights to ponder.

Eclipse

by John Morton

seen at the Minerva Theatre Chichester on 23 May 2026

John Morton directs his own play which receives its world premiere here. The daughter Sarah (Sarah Parish) and son Jonathan (Rupert Penry-Jones) of the terminally ill Edward are at his house on the last day of his life They are afflicted by various types of inadequacy while attempting to deal with their impending loss. Inevitably in such a fraught situation they must also contend with the help or hindrance of others including Sarah's husband Graham (Paul Thornley), Jonathan's former partner Nell (Mariam Haque), and sundry palliative care and medical staff. 

The classic dramatic unities of time, action and place could prove disastrously restrictive when applied to the contemporary world of dizzying mobility and complex inter-relations, but in John Morton's hands they are triumphantly vindicated. There is a cluttered kitchen in an old Devon rectory adjoining a luxuriant garden; with the medical crisis developing the coming and going of the professionals is utterly credible while cleverly marking the passage of time (the care workers are managing day and night shifts); and the decline of the unseen Edward binds together all the behaviour of the characters we see.

Given the formality of the dramatic design what is astonishing about Eclipse is the dialogue, which is expertly suffused with the ordinary hesitations and misdirections of speech so rarely seen on stage. Long habits of dominance, irritation, tactlessness and indecision clash more by what is not said - what is almost unsayable in such highly charged circumstances - than by self-revealing expository set pieces, and the result is utterly compelling. Such speech mannerisms are fiendishly difficult to manage, though Morton has form as his three highly acclaimed TV series Twenty Twelve, W1A, and more recently Twenty Twenty-Six testify. It turns out that what was employed satirically on TV can be equally successful in depicting both festering family dynamics, and professional efficiency, somehow making the difficult experience of confronting, and even witnessing, a death profound without being melodramatic.

Simon Higlett's design is a stunning piece of naturalism, while the cast is uniformly excellent, even the minor roles adding to the ambience and freighted with their own personalities. One of my companions who had worked in palliative care remarked that the characterisations and strategies of the care workers were astonishingly accurate. The gradual move from social comedy to far more sober seriousness was achieved with consummate skill: a fine ensemble doing the playwright-director proud.

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.