The world’s largest arts festival returns with gusto this weekend. Edinburgh is plastered with posters promoting over 4,200 shows, more than ever before. In 2025 2.6m tickets were sold during the month-long jamboree. And this year’s eclectic lineup promises to pull in the punters. Visitors can watch theatre in a sauna, stand-up comedy by Amanda Knox (who was convicted, then acquitted, of murdering a student in 2007) or a musical about a Nebraskan sect that wears butt plugs.

But Edinburgh’s landlords will have the last laugh. The price of accommodation during August has rocketed by 300% over the past six years. The city has introduced a 5% tourist tax on overnight stays; performers are not exempt. Meanwhile, a cost-of-staging crisis means many will struggle to break even. The likes of Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry and Phoebe Waller-Bridge all credit the Fringe for launching their careers. For performers, though, this catalyst does not come cheap.

Theatre News:

• Theatres are forbidding audience members with Meta glasses from ‘covertly’ filming shows

  

• Spirited Away (World Tour 2028): The acclaimed stage adaptation plans a London return for 2028, with tickets going on sale in 2027.

• The Traitors – Acts of Betrayal: John Finnemore has written a West End stage adaptation of the hit BBC show featuring five distinct versions - one for each night of the week -ensuring five different endings and betrayal arcs.

• Golden Boy at the Almeida: Continuing their trend of casting heavyweights, the Almeida’s revival of Odets’ Golden Boy starring Josh O’Connor sold out its entire run immediately.

• The Standard Of Living: Prolific playwright James Graham returns with a new drama centreing on the influential rebel economist John Maynard Keynes. Directed by Nick Hytner

What Shows To Book at Edinburgh Part Two: Comedy

Elf Lyons Elf is an Edinburgh legend and her new show looks set to win some nominations as her journey from heartbreak to rediscovery, exorcising the anguish caused when her fiancé broke off their engagement via WhatsApp a few months before the big day.

Frankie McNair: The Australian comic’s show, Huge Ass Mindset, was nominated for the top award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival earlier this year. It is McNair’s inspiring story of how she took back agency and rebuilt her self esteem from rock, ahem, bottom to become the assertive person she is today. Runs at Soho Theatre post Fringe

Ele McKenzie: Bringing It All Back Home Ele McKenzie delivers a debut hour probing family roots, geographic displacement and the strange feeling of returning to where you grew up. Expect a deeply relatable show built on authentic vulnerability.

Underground Monk Show This cult-favourite experimental comedy hour strips away traditional stand-up structures in favour of immersive chaos. Blending physical theatre and absurd comedic rituals, it will be weird and unpredictable.

Freddie Meredith: Need a Light? Freddie Meredith brings an effortlessly charming, low-key energy to the stage, tackling life’s minor existential crises with self-deprecating flair. Classic stand up

Jonno: Here Comes Mr Funny Lead writer on SNL UK and member of sketch trio, Sheeps (who I used to watch religiously at Fringe), Jonno’s set will be silly, theatrical and probably filled with relentless visual gags. Solo stand up debut

David Elms Describes a Room Understated, gentle and brilliantly crafted, David Elms presents a unique hour of comedy that turns quiet observation into high art.

Harriet Richardson: Creep Harriet Richardson offers a dark look at modern awkwardness, obsession and the uncomfortable sides of human connection. Blending deadpan delivery with deeply intimate storytelling, Creep explores what happens when boundary-pushing thoughts leak into polite everyday life. Lydia S rec.

Frankie Thompson: Horrible Things A master of chaotic lip-syncing and clowning with collage, Frankie Thompson is one of the most exciting experimental acts on the circuit. Expect a surreal, hyper-creative hour that feels entirely unique to the Fringe.

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It Will sell out - so grab Soho Theatre tickets if you don’t manage to snap up.

Henry Paker – Pencil Case Preview A veteran of British comedy, Henry Paker combines crisp, clever writing with his signature live illustration and visual aids.

And some rogue ideas:

Aufguss X The Waves

Fringe’s hottest ticket? This reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s novel, which takes place in the UK’s first purpose-built sauna theatre. Woolf’s writing is so sensual and I hope that, by heightening the senses of the performers and the audience members, it supports that, as opposed to being so uncomfortable that it detracts from it! Might be amazing, might also be awful.

Summer Cinema - three films to watch instead of The Odyssey

Backrooms

A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom, leading to an endless network of interconnected rooms where time bends and the only thing scarier than getting lost is the sense that something is lying in wait.

Obsession

After breaking the mysterious “One Wish Willow” to win his crush’s heart, a hopeless romantic gets exactly what he asked for. However, he soon discovers that some desires come at a dark and sinister price.

The Invite

Joe and Angela’s marriage is on thin ice. When their upstairs neighbors visit for a dinner party, the night spirals into unexpected places. Have they reignited the spark or lit the match that burns it all down?

Reflections

The Oresteia at The Bridge

Simon Stone - like Robert Icke - is an entertainer and a moderniser; together they have excited young audiences with glitzy reimaginings of ancient texts. Stone has turned his sledgehammer this time to Aeschylus, emerging with a slick, glass-encased thriller that is equal parts electrifying HBO TV series and an emotional cathartic vacuum. The House of Atreus is rebranded as a filthily moneyed arms-tech dynasty. Bollinger is dismissed as cheap cooking wine and corporate malfeasance sits neatly alongside filial slaughter. David Morrissey reigns as the lugubrious patriarch and Mary-Louise Parker is the brilliantly erratic matriarch. The issue for me here is how Stone plays with chronology, splintering the narrative backwards and forwards through pre-Brexit melodrama to a modern police procedural, a structural gamble that fails to sustain tension and an emotional punch. And it is all quite silly. There’s a shit load of breathy swearing into mics. Everyone speaks like they’re at cokey Waystar RoyCo board meeting. Yes it is entertaining and thrilling for large chunks but it systematically strips the drama of ancient, inexorable fate. Lizzie Clachan’s set - a revolving, transparent terrarium - provides a breathtaking arena, yet one cannot shake the feeling that we are watching lab rats in designer clothing rather than tragic figures bound by the gods.

The trouble with this hyper-literate patchwork which borrows promiscuously from Euripides and Sophocles too is that in trying to say everything about British complicity and endless cycles of violence, it ultimately suffocates the moral core that makes tragedy devastating. There is no shocking moment of familial slaughter because we are told in advance that they have happened. There are no audience tears that swept through The Almeida during Icke’s 2015 production. Parker gives a powerhouse performance of shifting, contradictory rage, yet her motives wobble between noble retribution and drunken whim, while Tom Glynn-Carney’s war damaged avenger feels pulled from a Tom Hanks movie rather than antiquity. Rosie Sheehy, who is one of the best young British actors right now, slips into Sloaney caricature which feels like a waste of her talent. Stone possesses a master satirist’s scalpel and a director’s flair for thrilling pacing (some of the dialogue is hilarious) but his refusal to trust the stone-cold, uncompromising machinery of the original leaves us with flat characters trapped in a frantically spinning box. And they are all frantic which completely reduces the effect. It is a work of undeniable theatrical swagger, relentlessly watchable (even at 3 hours and 35 minutes long) and thoroughly draining but by the time an Anglo-Saxon narrator wanders in to lecture on historical invasion, the ambition has outstripped the art. It earns its applause for the fireworks, but leaves the soul entirely uncleansed.

The World Is Full of Married Men at The Yard

Puppets. Blowjobs. Video Cameras. This might sound like a throwback to the days of giggling at Team America on the sofa after school - but it’s actually the play that opens the Yard after a year of renovations. Jackie Collins’ novel is transformed into the innocent friction of plastic dolls rubbing their crotches together in the dark. Erik Holmström, whose Malmö Puppet Theatre adaptation of Collins’ debut is a marvel of miniature theatre. Staged across six stunning double-decker dollhouses - from a glossy Hampstead kitchen to a smoky, palm-sized Ronnie Scott’s - and enacted by an uninhibited troupe of tongue-slurping, erect-waggling puppets, the production captures the raw wonder of early play. The effect makes theatrical sex astonishingly fresh, backed by vocal performances of a very muscular conviction that we in the stalls become the true marionettes, utterly hooked on the performers’ string.

Beneath the riotous hilarity and technical triumph lies a political pulse too to the tale. The Weinstein casting-couch and the anti-Vietnam protests lurk at the fringes of the storry to remind us that the men who view humanity merely as fuel for their own engines still hold the levers of power. The 1960s promised a sexual revolution but it was drafted entirely in the male gaze; Collins’ story, faithfully honoured by every inch of this staging, insists that genuine liberation requires tearing down the framework altogether. I expect to see this show return as it has dominated theatrical conversations and expanded the imagination of commissioners throughout London. Most original show I will see this year.

Sting at the Young Vic

Sophie Swithinbank’s Sting starts in the mundane clutter of an archive, where Lily (Phoebe Ladenburg) is researching the victim-blaming of 17th-century witches. Her new assistant, Ash (Adelle Leonce) arrives with a mercurial energy who, in a stroke of sudden horror, suffers a miscarriage on her first day. When her partner Dom (Nick Blood) arrives, the trap snaps shut. Dom is a policeman, and the play’s sharpest thesis is that those invested with the state’s power are too often the most adept at executing private terror. Nancy Medina’s direction is a showcase of psychological claustrophobia, keeping the actors cycling through a restless choreography of closeness and distance. The production brilliantly recreates the dizzying vertigo of abuse, leaving the audience with dread knotting the stomach.

I would say the dramaturgy occasionally chokes on its own ideas. The central metaphor that the abusive Dom is fatally allergic to bee stings is dropped into the narrative with a Trumpian subtlety. Furthermore, towards the end, as the piece hurtles into the territory of an ITV revenge thriller, it begs for a sharp pair of editorial cuts. Swithinbank unnecessarily overstates her themes, turning what should be a sharp, lingering ache into an ideological lecture. But for all its structural spluttering, Sting contains several plays wrestling for dominance: a history of witchcraft, a portrait of domestic entrapment and a fierce indictment of police misogyny. It does not quite sting with the lethal precision it promises, but as a modern Gothic thriller gripped by a righteous rage, it proves Swithinbank is a writer of undeniable talent.

Subscribe now

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi

If you liked Butter by Asako Yuzuki (which I actually didn’t), this is a ‘better’ accomplishment of food writing in my opinion. It won the International Booker this year and is a tale about forbidden love and Taiwanese food. Written by Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi and Taiwanese-American translator Lin King, it follows two women on their culinary tour across Taiwan in the 1930s, when the island was under Japanese rule. Elaborately framed as the translation of a rediscovered travel memoir, complete with fictional footnotes, many readers thought it was about a genuine historic text when the book was first published in 2020. It centres on a fictional Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, who is on a government-sponsored tour of Taiwan with a Taiwanese translator, O Chizuru, whom she falls in love with. Through their lens, the novel explores issues of love, culture, colonial history and power.

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

Barnes has always been obsessed with memory, time and how we construct our own histories (most famously in his Booker Prize-winner The Sense of an Ending). Departure(s) tackles the heavy machinery of aging: it is a beautiful and witty goodbye to his readers.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

This one is not for the faint of heart. Melchor’s prose is the El Nino storm of fiction. Set in a Mexican village (and I read it in Mexico) following the murder of the local witch, the novel is a propulsive and brutal exploration of poverty and misogyny in rural Mexico. A masterpiece of modern gothic/horror realism. I bought Melchor’s other book straight away - Paradais - which I similarly devoured.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

I read about this novel after reading in the FT an article about Netflix series Vladimir and the enduring appeal of campus satire. In late-1990s America, Roth gives us Coleman Silk, a classics professor whose life unravels over a single, misunderstood word. As a campus text, it’s an autopsy of political correctness, identity and the secrets we keep to survive in a 90s society that loves nothing more than a public execution.

Look What You Made Me Do by John Lancaster

Imagine settling down to watch the year’s buzziest, most talked-about Netflix drama only to slowly realise that the characters are doing and saying things that only you and your spouse could possibly know. That is the nightmare facing Kate, a comfortably retired baby boomer living an idyllic metropolitan life in North London with her architect husband, Jack. Across from her is Phoebe, a sharp, ambitious millennial screenwriter who has just launched Cheating to massive acclaim. The book becomes a gripping mystery: Who leaked the secrets? Who is stealing whose life? And who actually owns a story? Fun holiday reading

Vigil by George Saunders

Would I recommend this for people? No as it’s ultimately a disappointment but still - for Saunders fans - you will read as a companion piece to Lincoln In The Bardo. Part Christmas Carol, we return again to Saunder’s liminal world between the dead and the living at the deathbed of an oil tycoon tended to by a spectral death doula.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I’d never read this before and it is excellent. Following Raskolnikov, a destitute former student who convinces himself he’s above the law before murdering a pawnbroker, it is the ultimate exploration of the claustrophobia of guilt and redemption. Feels like all modern TV thrillers owe something to this delirious fever dream.

Turbulence and All That Man Is by David Szalay

‘You okay?’ his friend asks him.

‘Yeah,’ István says.

Lots of people have read Flesh by now and have varying opinions on it - I feel that Szalay older work is actually better (Turbulence is far more varied). Turbulence is structured as 12 linked stories, each of them presenting a brief glimpse into the life of a solitary air traveller. The characters brush past one another, their tales overlap, there is a sense of a narrative baton being passed from one story’s protagonist to the next. With its sweeping vision of a complex, interconnected world always in motion, it feels like Turbulence is attempting to do on a global scale what Szalay’s, All That Man Is, did for Europe: present us with a series of lives that feel at once profoundly particular and yet also emblematic, a portrait of our species at a time of crisis. Szalay presents us with lives that are messy, stalked by the threat of disease or bankruptcy or domestic violence, lives in thrall to atavistic animal impulses.

The Revolutionists by Jason Burke

In The Revolutionists, international security correspondent Jason Burke explores the dramatic evolution of global extremism and terrorism throughout the tumultuous 1970s. The book details how the era began with a wave of left-wing skyjackings and transnational militancy driven by eccentric, often theoretically illiterate radicals who craved the excitement of the escapade. Burke argues that as these leftist movements inevitably failed and collapsed, they left behind a political vacuum that was swiftly filled by a new wave of religious extremism. This transition ultimately replaced secular revolutionaries with highly organised, unbending Islamist militants, shifting the focus of global terror from publicity-driven hijackings to mass-casualty holy war.

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittinfeld

Caught up in UK SNL fever? Give Romantic Comedy a read - Sally Milz is a successful sketch writer for The Night Owls (a late-night comedy show in the vein of Saturday Night Live) who has largely given up on romance. Her cynical worldview is challenged when that week’s guest host, charismatic pop star Noah Brewster, hits it off with her - a light fun romance.

Rivals by Jilly Cooper

If you dismiss Jilly Cooper’s masterpiece Rivals as mere commercial fluff, you are missing out on one of the most deceptively intelligent and structurally brilliant novels in late 20th century literature. Beneath its glamorous, champagne-soaked 1980s television backdrop lies an intricate, sprawling ensemble piece that functions with the grand scale, width and depth of a Shakespearean comedy. Cooper is an absolute genius of satire and dissects ambition and vulnerability with a huge smile. It is a towering achievement of narrative craft, high-class literature wearing a low-cut dress, proving that writing something this effortlessly joyous requires an immense, masterly intellect.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

This is an interesting and darkly funny memoir by former diplomat and Facebook public policy executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. We get a shocking, front-row seat to the internal culture of Silicon Valley, tracing her journey from an optimistic employee who believed in the platform’s power to connect the world, to a disillusioned insider witnessing corporate amorality. Wynn-Williams details how Facebook’s leadership aggressively pursued global dominance, casually misled the public and repeatedly appeased authoritarian regimes. Despite Meta’s aggressive legal efforts to suppress and silence the author, the book has never reached court…

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins’ groundbreaking 1976 The Selfish Gene fundamentally shifted the universal understanding of evolution by proposing that natural selection operates at the level of the gene rather than the organism or species. It’s a text you hear about but never read - so I did. He brilliantly argues that living bodies -including humans - are essentially complex survival machines built by immortal genes to facilitate their own replication and transmission into the next generation. Through this lens, Dawkins elegantly explains how seemingly unselfish behaviours, like an animal risking its life to protect its offspring, are actually calculated strategies driven by genes to ensure the survival of identical copies of themselves. Beyond biology, the book famously introduced the concept of the meme, defining it as a unit of cultural transmission that replicates and evolves through human minds in much the same way genes do. It is quite dry and I imagine the science a little outdated - but glad to have read.

AND TO PASS ON:

Heart The Lover by Lily King

Pass on this one. Underbaked, overhyped

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Excellent premise (a social media Tradwife wakes up to find she’s been transported back to 1883) - terribly executed to the point where it loses all direction

Subscribe now

The Plot at Summerhall (Main Hall) at 19:30

Two condemned brothers in purgatory. Players reframing the attempted regicide for the masses on the South Bank. Written and directed by Emma Howlett for her company theatregoose (makers of previous hits Aether and Her Green Hell), expect a wickedly smart and visually brilliant exploration of The Gunpowder Plot that will defy all expectation. A real star in the making.*

The Crush Bar

"Rob Icke told me to go and make my own work. It was the best advice."

Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan…

Read more

3 months ago · 5 likes · Fergus Morgan

Roleplay at Summerhall at 17:50

From the producer Francesca Moody (of Baby Reindeer and Fleabag fame), Hannah Reilly’s hilarious take on the commodification of feminism, follows a broke feminist podcaster deciding to reinvent herself as a provocative ‘slutfluencer’ to chase fame - only to find herself completely losing her identity to the performance. Will be the buzziest and most in demand show of the Fringe so book EARLY.*

Women of Will at Summerhall at 18:00

Jack, an aging actor, walks into a pub where Ava is bartending. Ava is struggling through continuous drama school auditions, so Jack offers to help coach her using the Shakespearean canon. If you love Shakespeare, you’ll love this - a homage to the Bard’s heroines and deep dive into his relevance today through his exploration of human connection. The show is inspired by the seminal book by actress, director and founder of Shakespeare & Company Tina Packer in this new play by Siofra Dromgoole.*

When Prophecy Fails at Studio Theatre

The true story of the world’s first UFO doomsday cult. Inspired by the 1950s study that defined cognitive dissonance, award-winning ensemble Groupwork explores a midwestern suburban sect facing the apocalypse. Blending hypnotic movement, voiceover, and striking video design, directors Vicki Manderson and Finn den Hertog deliver a claustrophobic, near-wordless thriller about the chaotic power of belief and the crisis that follows its collapse.*

(*promise I am not biased).

Supposing at Traverse (Various Times)

Rooted in Greek myth, Zinnie Harris’s gripping new play follows a woman battling a house-of-Atreus-style curse. As the world dismisses her plight, the line between reality and delusion begins to fracture in a striking production directed by the playwright herself.

Angels In America at King’s Theatre (Various Times)

Anchoring the Edinburgh International Festival’s spotlight on America, Ivo van Hove brings Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s monumental revival of Angels in America to the UK. Condensing Tony Kushner’s epic, five-hour gay fantasia on national themes into a single, continuous experience, Van Hove delivers a striking, stripped-back production powered by a David Bowie soundtrack. And it’s in Dutch.

After Party at Traverse (Various Times)

Family secrets collide on the night of an actor’s 80th birthday in Morna Young’s epic new drama, directed by Paines Plough’s Katie Posner. Billed as a darkly comic exploration of personal freedom and life-defining choices, this gripping production heads to the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry following its initial run.

Overtone at Paradise Dome at 14:40

A chance meeting after choir practice sparks a relationship that forever alters the lives of two teenagers in this poignant coming-of-age drama from the team at The North Wall. Spanning years, the play follows the couple as they grow older, sharply contrasting the boundless adventures they were promised with the stark reality of the choices they made.

Clown Show at King’s Theatre (Various Times)

After building a two-story house on stage in Home (2018) and transforming a theatre into a massive banquet hall in Food (2023), illusionist and theater-maker Geoff Sobelle returns with his latest spectacle. This time, he uses a clown troupe desperately trying to salvage a crumbling circus empire as a brilliant, chaotic metaphor for modern-day America.

The Jolly Fisherman at Underbelly at 12:45

Rising stars Alex Hill - creator of the fringe smash Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Arse for England -and Jonny Khan (The Shitheads, Royal Court) power John Dinneen’s urgent new play. This gritty, topical drama follows two East London teenagers as they find themselves dangerously pulled toward opposite ends of the political spectrum.

On TV

Two Weeks in August

If you’ve ever been trapped on a big group holiday where the WhatsApp chat expectations completely clashed with reality, BBC’s 8-part drama Two Weeks in August is going to trigger some hilarious, skin-crawling deja vu. Set under the scorching sun of a Greek island villa, the series follows a group of old university friends reuniting in their early 40s. What is supposed to be a idyllic fortnight of relaxation quickly devolves into an absolute pressure cooker of social awkwardness.

Reflections

Are You Watching? at The Royal Court Upstairs

Georgie Dettmer’s debut piece, plucked from the hopeful piles of open submissions, arrives at the theatre less as a play and more as a calculated assault on the nervous system: a triumph of claustrophobic voyeurism. A nimble ensemble of six flit between personas, weaving disparate narrative threads into a single, devastating tapestry of contemporary misogyny and casual violence. It is a fractured and relentless and magnificently grim.

The evening’s through-thread obsession is the dark alchemy of modern arousal. Dettmer spares us nothing. We watch a son unearthing the digital rot of his father’s hard drive; a celebrity drowning in the wake of deepfake pornography; two young women inexplicably exhilarated by the horrors of the Gisèle Pelicot case and its footage; a journalist tracking the feral data of her own excitement; and a couple negotiating the razor-thin ice of a rape fantasy.

Where last season’s Porn Play merely psychoanalysed the isolated addict, Are You Watching? achieves success by insisting that this rot is cultural. Dettmer’s terrifying thesis is that this cruelty is the baseline. It makes a confronting hour of theatre - uncomfortable - yes, successful - largely. There is an unresolved investigation of a missing daughter that doesn’t quite work as a story line and it never really develops past its own outrage. The cast are fantastic nonetheless and am sure Dettmer has a very exciting career ahead of her.

Subscribe now

• Reviews of John Proctor Is The Villain, Romeo and Juliet and Mass

• What To Book Now for the Summer

• Cate Blanchett returns to the NT - and McKellan heads to Hackney

Get Booking

• 1536 at Ambassadors Theatre - Reviewed here during its run at The Almeida, 1536 is the show to watch this summer. You have until 1st August to see it

Book Tickets Here

• The Oresteia at The Bridge Theatre: Simon Stone has assembled a lineup that is full of terrific stage actors. Rosie Sheehy (who was brilliant in Guess How Much I Love You?), Tom Glynn-Carney, Mary-Louise Parker and David Morrissey. Expect a contemporary gutting of Aeschylus and the usual Stone hallmarks: towering glass boxes, high-concept modern misery and epic scale. July 2 – September 19

  

Book Tickets Here

• John Proctor is the Villain at The Wyndham’s: While Sadie Sink is over at the Pinter (more on that below), her Broadway vehicle landed here at the Royal Court and was a triumph (review below!). Set in a 2018 American high school English class studying The Crucible, Kimberly Belflower’s script dismantles Miller’s classic through a #MeToo lens. It fizzes with teenage awkwardness, pop choreography and devastating real-world stakes when a local scandal hits home. It earns every bit of its nightly standing ovation. West End transfer bookings are now open - 2nd February - 24th April 2027

Book Tickets Here

• Driftwood at The Other Place, Stratford / Kiln Theatre, London: Martina Laird - whom I love as a performer - makes her playwriting debut with a historical drama set in a 1950s colonial Trinidad gentleman’s club. Justin Audibert directs for the RSC. It’s in Stratford until May 30, then moves to Kiln from June 3 – July 4. And it stars the excellent Cat White

Book Tickets Here

• Under the Shadow at The Almeida : Stage horror is having a remarkably robust revival (think Paranormal Activity, A Ghost In Your Ear and the terrifying Stranger Things stage show). Carmen Nasr adapts Babak Anvari’s claustrophobic BAFTA-winning film about a haunted apartment during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. Nadia Latif directs, Leila Farzad stars. This could be deeply special. June 2 – July 4.

Book Tickets Here

• The World is Full of Married Men at The Yard: The Yard is reopening its shiny new East London space, which is reason enough to celebrate. Their mid-summer slot is an adaptation of Jackie Collins’ sleazy 1960s showbiz novel. Lulu Raczka translates it from... a Swedish stage version. And it’s performed entirely with Barbie dolls. Obviously. July 21 – August 1.

Book Tickets Here

• Quartet in Autumn at Arcola Theatre: I saw this last week - and it was truly hilarious. Booker-winner Samantha Harvey (Orbital) has adapted Barbara Pym’s 1977 novel about four co-workers hovering on the edge of retirement directed with poise and elegance by Dominic Dromgoole directs. It’s a wonderfully wry, poignant look at the indignities of aging. Reminded of The Office on stage.

Book Tickets Here

• Flow State at Theatre503: Maddie Lynes’ latest play focuses on three young people from different generations are working at a kids drama camp over the summer - an actor, a grad and a party girl. Each longs for some kind of transformation. Very Annie Baker esque and directed by Mimi Pattinson, I can’t wait for this. 9 - 13 June 2026 only.

  

Book Tickets Here

National’s New Season

The National Theatre just dropped a five-show announcement. The headline act is Electra/Persona (August 19 – October 10) which reunites Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss under Benedict Andrews’ direction. It’s a mash-up of the Greek tragedy and Ingmar Bergman’s identity-blurring 1966 film. If that feels too intellectual, the rest of the NT slate includes Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, Anne-Marie Duff in Some Woman, Francesca Mills in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice and the international transfer of Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists.

The Yard is back

Hackney Wick is normally associated with juicy, cloudy IPAs whilst sat on a pub table overlooking the water; it’s not necessarily where you’d imagine to see Ian McKellen starring in Lear: A Reimagining. But The Yard is reopening after a huge renovation and McKellan will be there 17 November - 2 January. Massive coup- in a reimagining by Simon Stephens and Jay Miller.

Reflections

Romeo & Juliet at The Harold Pinter Theatre

There are few narrative surprises left in a 400-year-old feud. Yet, Robert Icke has done what Robert Icke does: he has taken a well known story and made it feel urgent, breathless and deeply uncomfortable. Yes it is overdirected - yes he has a massive clock once again - yes there are Hollywood stars on the West End stage to sell tickets -but did I find this version of Romeo and Juliet completely absorbing? An emphatic yes (as did the school group of teenagers sat in front of me).

Icke’ first success is the casting. Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink and Hamnet’s Noah Jupe anchor an exceptional ensemble. They possess the authentic chemistry that actually sells the absolute insanity of love at first sight (rumours are they are now dating in real life). You entirely believe that these two would rather burn the world down than spend a night apart. Icke also introduces Sliding Doors-style sequence resets, showing how easily minor altercations could have been avoided before snapping back to the tragic reality. It heightens the fragility of it all at first but then slightly serves as a reminder to the audience that we are watching ‘the great’ Icke’s take on. Shakespeare. Yet overall it’s a vibrant, sharp production that reminds you how painful this story is supposed to feel.

John Proctor is the Villain at The Royal Court

Before Sadie Sink crossed the Atlantic to inject her frantic vitality into Romeo and Juliet, she was upturning tables on Broadway in Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is The Villain. Having transferred to The Royal Court, it has blown away audiences, approaching Miller’s Crucible with a crowbar and an admirable lack of reverence. The setting is a mundane high school classroom in rural Georgia in 2018. In English, a group of teenage girls are being fed the orthodox literary line that Salem was a tragedy of false accusations and hysterical women. In their class breaks, however, their smartphones are vibrating with the early seismic shocks of the #MeToo movement. The friction between what they are taught by authority and what they are discovering in their own skin forms the spine of the play.

Belflower’s dialogue captures the cadence of modern youth; her fierce young cast gossips, debates and weeps with a breathless velocity before the theoretical meets the visceral. One of the girls’ fathers is accused of sexual misconduct by his secretary. The community immediately gathers around its own, denouncing the scandal as a contemporary witch-hunt. But these young women have outgrown Miller’s architecture; they realise that life -and predatory behaviour- is infinitely more complex than the syllabus allows. And what prevents this from falling into a trodden piece of polemic is its immense warmth. It never flinches from the darkness of its theme but it allows its characters to fulfil their full helping of teenage absurdity, messiness and joy. It takes on a text we all know but also is a thrillingly alive portrait of female solidarity in the face of institutional gaslighting. It concludes with a burst of interpretive choreography that will be one of the standout moments on the London stage this year - all to the sound of Lorde’s Green Light- I can’t remember such an effective use of song and movement onstage since Beyoncé’s Hold Up in The Yard’s The Glass Menagerie. No wonder this is transferring next year.

Mass at The Donmar Warehouse

If John Proctor is a testament to the evolving noise of youth, Mass is the terrifying silence left in its wake. Set in an anonymous church basement, in real time, there is no plot to speak of other than a discussion of past events, no dramatic action and very little physical momentum. The catastrophe - a mass school shooting - occurred six years in the past, and the play dares to be still. Two sets of parents meet on this neutral territory to attempt the impossible: closure. One couple is hollowed out by the murder of their son; the other couple is paralysed by the knowledge that their own boy was the shooter.

What follows is a masterclass in psychological laceration, executed by a quartet of actors operating at the absolute peak of their powers: Adeel Akhtar, Monica Dolan, Paul Hilton and Lyndsey Marshal. The lineup is absurdly strong. Every averted gaze, every swallowed syllable and every second-guessed sentence feels painfully human.There are no vulgar theatrical victories or sentimental hand-wringing or the miraculous tidiness of absolution at the denouement. It is simply four ruined people attempting to exist. To witness a production this quiet is a rare thing. It’s not the easiest watch (you might prefer to spend your summer evenings at something slightly more upbeat). Yet in the claustrophobic cockpit of the Donmar, the silence was absolute - save for the collective, involuntary sniffle of the stalls.

Subscribe now

• Reviews of Summerfolk, Siegfried and Jaja’s African Hair Braiding

• A new Rob Icke Play now on sale

• New season at The Young Vic announced

Theatre News:

• Michael Sheen and Callum Scott Howells will star in a new production of Amadeus

• Arcadia and John Proctor Is The Villain will transfer to the West End;

• Indira Varma will star in the Old Vic’s all-female Glengarry Glen Ross;

• Cynthia Erivo ran the London marathon in 3:21 and performed 23 parts in Dracula the very next day - she also stopped the performance of Dracula when she spotted someone filming her

• Nick Hytner and Nick Starr’s Bridge Theatre is unexpectedly up for sale

Heart Wall at The Bush Theatre

I am biased but this gem of a play is brilliant - and you get to sing karaoke on stage for free at the beginning. Don’t take my word for it…

Buy Tickets Here

Ben Whishaw heading to The Young Vic and Kiera Knightley in a Rob Icke play

The Young Vic has just unveiled its latest season and Nadia Fall has impressed. The pick of the bunch (other than the Thelma and Louise musical) is Eurotrash, an English-language adaptation of the novel by Christian Kracht, adapted by Colin Teevanand directed by Walter Meierjohann. The production reunites Ben Whishaw and Kathryn Hunter - should be a cracker. Keira Knightley also returns to West End in adaptation of Oscar winner The Lives of Others with Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson set to co-star in Robert Icke’s production.

A24’s The Drama

I’m yet to see this but cannot wait - there seems to be an insatiable discourse about some twist? Who knows - should be entertaining, funny and provocative. A new spin on a rom-com.

Euphoria S3, NowTV - Should we still be watching this?

More Zendaya - on Sunday I morbidly strapped in for Episode 1 of Sam Levinson horror show. Levinson, who writes alone, without a writer’s room, has trapped all four of his female leads into the practice or exploitation of sex work, and Zendaya’s Rue, written as Levinson’s own alter-ego and now working in a strip club, now functions as an extension of the male gaze. I can’t help feel after The Idol that this is now total trash…

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at @sohoplace

Albee’s classic starring Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup is coming to @sohoplace in the autumn, opening September 21 running to December 19.

Love Story on Disney+

Disney+’s most-streamed drama ever, the series is as a Cinderella romance between John F Kennedy, a Kennedy scion and, Carolyn Bessette, a Calvin Klein publicist who became the most famous and scrutinized couple in the US. With 90s nostalgia, a great soundtrack, fantastic outfits, and a brilliant performance from Sarah Pidgeon.

Reflections

Siegfried at The Royal Opera House

The third instalment of Barrie Kosky’s evolving Ring Cycle at Covent Garden is another astonishing feat of stagecraft. In Andreas Schager, Siegfried possesses an exceptional voice and the physical impudence of a hyperactive toddler. He bounds across a scorched landscape - defined by a rickety, wobbling tree-house atop the charred World Ash Tree - with a vocal stamina that makes the treacherous forging scene look like a light morning calisthenics session. Under the baton of Antonio Pappano, the orchestra has a visceral energy, driving the drama through acts of bleak snow and golden stalagmites with a clarity that brings to life this opera over 5.5 hours. I loved it.

Jaja’s African Hair Braiding at The Lyric Hammersmith

Jocelyn Bioh’s Jaja’s African Hair Braiding is a high-wattage riot of vanity and toil, staged with comedic brilliance/ Set within a Harlem cathedral of gossip and grit, the play operates as a secular sanctuary where the personal as political is woven into every micro-braid. Under Monique Touko’s direction, a vivid gallery of vaudevillian archetypes - led by the regal Zainab Jah and the flinty Bola Akeju - navigates the grueling friction between the West African immigrant and her middle-class American clientele. Fingers crossed for a West End transfer so this reaches a larger audience.

Summerfolk at The National

In this pithy adaptation of Gorky’s Summerfolk, we get a sharp autopsy on the Russian middle class, picking up the axe exactly where Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard left off. We are in 1905, the trees are stumps and the nouveau riche have moved into their dachas to talk, drink and decay with a sun-drenched indolence. Directed by Robert Hastie, the production remains an impressively wordy affair yet the language has been buffed to a contemporary sheen. It is Chekhov made explicit; the subtext of sex, repression and class guilt is enlivened by a cast of twenty-three.

The show’s star is Justine Mitchell, who is simply superb as the crusading doctor Maria Lvovna, the play’s solitary liberal conscience. She navigates the unbearable sunny boredom alongside Paul Ready’s alarming, high-living lawyer and Sophie Rundle’s seemingly passive Varvara. Despite its sprawling length, the play lands, painting a portrait of a hollow intelligentsia so blinded by vanity that they cannot see the mess they are destined to leave behind.

Subscribe now

• Reviews of Virgins, American Psycho, Man and Boy and The Shitheads

• The Oliver Awards Nominations

• Game of Thrones x RSC

Olivier Awards Nominations

• The frontrunners for London’s biggest theatre awards are Paddington: The Musical and Into the Woods, which each received 11 nominations.

• There are also three plays with six nominations: the Broadway sensation Stereophonic, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and Kenrex which began life in Sheffield.

• In a rare acting double, Zachary Hart secured two best supporting actor nods for his performances in The Seagull, alongside Cate Blanchett, and in Stereophonic.

• The best new play contenders this year are 1536 written by Ava Pickett (which I reckon will win), Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia, Punch by James Graham as well as Kenrex written by Stambollouian and Jack Holden, who is also nominated for best actor.

• Notably, the National Theatre had a disappointing year with no nods for the productions that have opened under its new artistic director Rubasingham.

News Roundup

• Wuthering Shite? Email me your thoughts on Fennell’s film - am keen to collate a few responses for the next edition (you can just reply to this newsletter).

• Ava Pickett’s 1536 to be adapted for TV as BBC drama - it’s also transferring to the West End so get a ticket to see it later this year

• Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down is having its regional premiere at Nottingham Playhouse in a new production directed by Caroline Steinbeis, opening in September.

• Jonathan Groff is to make his RSC debut in all-male As You Like It - the production will run from 26th September to 7th November. There was a little bit of uproar in the Times about its male cast considering it is the Shakespeare play with the highest percentage of female character lines… but they failed to note that Phyllida Lloyd’s 2012 all-female production of Julius Caesar starring Harriet Walter is also announced in the same season (the Shakespeare play with the second fewest number of female lines).

To Book Now

Marie and Rosetta at sohoplace

Two momentous performances from Beverley Knight and Ntombizodwa Ndlovu provide a stirring gospel evening in London’s West End. If you are a fan of swinging gospel music, go to see the brilliant renditions of “This Train”, “Didn’t It Rain” and the risqué “I Want a Tall Skinny Papa”. This show radiates an infectious joy (from the performers themselves) in these moments of musical perfection.

Equus at Menier Chocolate Factory

Toby Stephens is to star in Shaffer’s equine play which runs in London from 8 May to 27 June, before transferring to Theatre Royal Bath from 13 to 25 July. It’s a fabulous play about a child psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man who has a pathological religious fascination with horse.

Game of Thrones: The Mad King at The RSC

The RSC announced the world premiere of Game of Thrones: The Mad King, a “sweeping new stage epic” from the world of George R. R. Martin, written by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Dominic Cooke. Spanning the final years before the events of the novels, it will dive into a previously unseen chapter of Westeros history. Public booking to open in April - I imagine this will have unprecedented demand before it inevitably transfers to the West End.

What To Watch

Small Prophets on iPlayer

This show is a total breath of fresh air. Going in, I wasn’t sure what to expect from a cast featuring Pearce Quigley, Jon Pointing, Sophie Willan and Lauren Patel, but I ended up absolutely loving it. Between this and Detectorists, Mackenzie Crook has solidified his reputation for crafting truly exceptional, original drama. I sincerely hope the BBC continues to commission him for future projects. What makes Crook’s work so special is how he captures a specific brand of Englishness - one rooted in folklore, the natural world and quirky eccentricity. It’s a vision of the country that feels inclusive rather than political.

Dirty Business on Channel 4

Not so apolitical is Joseph Bullman’s brilliant Channel 4 mini-series on the corruption and failure at the heart of the countries water companies. Dirty Business has a strong message (without being too didactic or superior), a sharp creative vision and brilliant performances from David Thewlis and Jason Watkins. An awkward watch when you live with a DEFRA employee…

What To Listen To

James’s Marriott’s ‘How Reading Made Us’

Did learning to read rewire our brains and change the way we live today? And with reading on the decline, what does this mean for our ability to think? This newsletter’s favourite Times journalist, James Marriott, explores how reading for pleasure is a relatively recent phenomenon but one that is in genuine danger of extinction in the smartphone age

Listen Here

Reflections

The Virgins at Soho Theatre

Miriam Battye’s The Virgins is a sharp, anthropological plunge into the excitement of a Friday night ‘pres’. Centred on a parentless house fuelled by the medicine of vodka cranberry, the play depicts a hormonal no mans land. On one side, Anushka Chakravarti’s Chloe and Ella Bruccoleri’s Jess navigate the evening with the bravado of soldiers who have memorised the manual but never seen the front; on the other, the boys treat video games as a tactical shield against the looming catastrophe of a conversation with the fairer sex. It is a world of out out ambitions where sexual knowledge is presided over by the slightly order Zoë Armer’s cynical Anya, a high priestess of the hair-straightener.

Blackouts and orchestral stabs sever the scenes, creating an atmosphere where a knife-wound feels more likely than a kiss. It is a nauseating spectacle: children trapped in a grotesque pantomime of maturity, terrified that their masks will fall to reveal the trembling novices underneath. While Battye leaves some psychological threads loose, her dialogue rings with a frighteningly true pitch. Between the frequent belly laughs, The Virgins carries a weight of genuine gravitas, tackling peer pressure, sexual violence and the mutual bewilderment of the sexes. However, the shifts into darker territory, though vital, occasionally lack finesse. While the awkwardness of the sexual encounters feels earned and honest, a reflective, accusatory monologue from Alec Boaden’s character feels slightly forced and heavy-handed. Nevertheless, this is a formidable piece of writing: a high-energy romp with sharp fangs and a heart of genuine pathos.

American Psycho at The Almeida

Watching American Psycho was a little bit like listening to an album of Keane for three hours - fine at first, surprisingly easy for fifteen minutes, but then a bit boring. I guess in the world pre Industry, pre Succession, pre memes of Luigi Mangione and pre theatre’s makeover of the last 10 years, Rupert Goold’s production would have been a pre-Brexit glitzy, satirical romp. But the material (and the novel too that it’s based on) is now just deeply conventional - it was (in hushed tones) a bit boring. Lily fell asleep with 10 minutes to go. And I nearly joined her. Es Devlin’s set is wonderful and the lighting carries the show at points -but the music is totally forgettable. As a spectacle, it’s not very scary or shocking or thrilling. Returning to the Almeida like a recurring nightmare in a charcoal Armani suit, Rupert Goold’s production attempts to set Bret Easton Ellis’s blood-soaked nihilism to a synth-pop beat, resulting in a victory of surface over substance that Patrick Bateman himself would surely admire. Arty Froushan captures Bateman’s existential vacuum with chilling precision, emerging from a steaming shower cubicle with the sculpted indifference of an Abercrombie and Fitch model but he is trapped in a production that is too chic to be terrifying and too muted to be transgressive.

Sheik’s score is a genre-defying fantasia that mimics the hollow melodies of the era, yet it remains as difficult to grasp as Bateman’s own soul, frequently requiring the life support of 80s staples like In the Air Tonight to achieve any genuine musical propulsion. While there are flashes of brilliance - notably a business card sequence that perfectly distills the novel’s petty horrors and Jon Clark’s masterly, predatory lighting - the piece falters in a sluggish second act where the visceral violence is sanitized by being outsourced to red splats on video screens. We are left with a piece of theatre that is exceptionally well-dressed but fundamentally bloodless.

The Shitheads at The Royal Court

There was a lot of buzz around Jack Nicholls’ The Shitheads. It made its way up through the open submissions at the Royal Court not once but twice under two different administrations. So I have to say I was a little disappointed; the production felt incoherently disjointed with direction and writing pulling in opposite directions. Co-directors David Byrne and Aneesha Srinivasan have marked the theatre’s 70th anniversary by reproducing its heritage of in-yer-face shock but with rather a flat result. We are in prehistoric Britain - a land where life is nasty, brutish and short. The evening begins with a flourish of genuine theatrical shock - an elk puppet of wounded, antlered majesty, but soon devolves into a tribal chasm between Clare’s dreaming cave-dwellers and the nomadic Shitheads, a subspecies who turn out to be every bit as eloquently verbal as their self-appointed superiors.

The play’s intellectual furniture is strong but jumbled: Anna Reid’s design litters the stage with furs, bones and even at one stage a Sports Direct mug, suggesting that our savage past is merely our depleted present in a different skin (or perhaps the whole play is post apocalyptic). While the cast remain honourably committed, the script succumbs to a wearying, reactionary pessimism. Ultimately, The Shitheads opts for the easy, Flintstones laugh over the ghastly truth of its imagined world - I can’t pinpoint whether this is the writer’s or the directors’ fault. But what do I know? It then was Olivier nominated a few days later…

Man and Boy

Anthony Lau’s revival of Man and Boy at the Dorfman exhumes and electrifies one of Rattigan’s forgotten (and muddled) plays. Staged in the round upon Georgia Lowe’s billiard-green floor - a Brechtian landscape littered with willful anachronisms and glowing dot-matrix cast lists -the play is reimagined with an audacity and director’s boldness that makes for a brilliant evening of entertainment. The evening belongs, body and soul, to Ben Daniels. As Gregor Antonescu, the Machiavellian financier prowling his son’s basement, Daniels delivers a performance of psychotic bonhomie, an avatar of the worst human instincts. Think Sam Altman and Jeffrey Epstein rolled into one. Beside this howling triumph, the supporting cast wisely act as the stunned bystanders to a man who treats the world as a final, desperate gamble.

This will be a paid subscriber only edition - do subscribe below if you haven’t already

Subscribe now

In This Edition:

• Two more plays to book now.

• Review of Arcadia at the Old Vic

• Troubles-rooted play Sapling wins Women’s prize for playwriting by Georgie Duncan - the prize offers its first prize-winner £20,000 alongside an option for Ellie Keel Productions, Paines Plough and Sheffield Theatres to co-produce the work.

Hamlet as it should be

Welcome back to the gritty modern takes of Shakespeare that still use the original language - how we’ve missed you. I can not wait to see this Riz Ahmed production in the cinema. His Lunch with The FT explains how growing up in London, “I constantly felt like an outsider. And without knowing Shakespeare, he seemed the dead centre of a particular kind of Britishness I also felt on the outside of.” The revelation came with an inspirational teacher who “joined the dots” for the teenage Ahmed between Hamlet and the things that fascinated him: hip-hop, politics, Beat poetry. The lesson stuck. “Through what has, so far, been a 20-year career, making a film of his own Hamlet has been a constant aspiration”.

Read Here

Read more

• Reviews of Guess How Much I Love You? and All My Sons

• What to book this month

• HBO glossy dramas

What I am seeing this month:

• Virgins at Soho Theatre - Friday night. Four girls. Two boys. Alone in a house. Some of them are in love. Most of them are virgins. Everyone’s pretending they know what they’re doing.Tonight’s the night they stop pretending. Miriam Battye, a writer on HBO’s Succession, is intent on staging the honest conversations we never have. Her two-handed comedy Strategic Love Play, a hit at the 2023 Fringe, was a winningly frank portrait of modern dating.

• Arcadia at The Old Vic - Brilliant minds, burning hearts and the unstoppable pull between chaos and order. In a country house, two centuries apart, genius unfolds. A teenage prodigy discovers the mathematics of the universe, as the adults around her fail to hide their passions under reason. In the present day, scholars chase the ghosts of that same household — seeking truth, proof and perhaps each other. I don’t think I will ever get bored of watching this play.

• The Shitheads at The Royal Court - Tens of thousands of years ago, Britain’s earliest inhabitants learn that love and violence feed the same fire. When strangers arrive at a secluded cave, domestic harmony shatters – and survival turns savage. New writing at The Royal Court directed by the AD, David Byrne - this play worked it’s way up through open submissions TWICE (under the two different leadership teams).

• The Boy At The Back Of The Class at The Rose Theatre - There used to be an empty chair at the back of the class, but now a new boy called Ahmet is sitting in it. He’s nine years old (just like me), but he’s very strange. He never talks and never smiles and doesn’t like sweets – not even lemon sherbets, which are my favourite! After learning that he has fled his own war-torn country, Ahmet’s classmates have ‘The Greatest Idea in the World’ – a magnificent plan to reunite Ahmet with his family. A modern family classic returns for a UK tour.

• Man and Boy at The National - Jazz, Broadway and the Great Depression. In 1930s New York City, international financier Gregor Antonescu’s luck has finally run out. As news of a catastrophic business deal ripples across the world, he flees to the apartment of his estranged son Basil. The Rattigan revival sweeps the Dorfman.

• American Psycho at The Almeida - Patrick Bateman has it all – looks, money, style and status. Engaged to the beautiful Evelyn Williams, he is about to win the prestigious Fischer account for his investment bank and celebrate by dining at Dorsia. But there’s another side to his life that Patrick keeps secret. And people – including those closest to him – keep disappearing… The original run in 2013 was notorious for its synthesizer score, Kickstarter campaign and post-Doctor Who Matt Smith. Now the show returns as a conquering hero.

What To Book This Month:

• 6th Feb - The Donmar Warehouse has stage adaptations of the excellent film Mass about the aftermath of a mass shooting and The Guilty with Russell Tovey taking on Jake Gyllenhaal’s role.

• 12th Feb - The National Theatre has announced exciting shows (Cate Blanchett is heading to the South Bank), but the three going on sale are Sandra Oh in The Misanthrope (as adapted by the weirdly brilliant Martin Crimp), a revival of the puppet-led War Horse and Letitia Wright in The Story.

  

• 12th Feb - The Almeida Theatre is joining the Ibsen trend with an update of A Doll’s House. Nora will be played by Romola Garai, who was double nominated for Best Actress at last year’s Oliviers. They are also staging Under the Shadow, an adaptation of a 2016 Iranian horror film.

  

Euphoria Season 3 - out on 12th April

From Sam Levinson, the eight-episode third season of Euphoria will feature a time jump that takes the characters out of high school. Now is the time to watch the first two series (though it’s definitely not for everyone). Inspiration for shows like Industry and how TV direction can break boundaries.

Industry Season 4

I cannot remember a show that has got so starkly better from series to series than Industry. As per, Industry smartly and gamely rips from the headlines: much of season four revolves around a payment provider, Tender, on the verge of becoming a bank. This series focuses in on the tortured psyches of its leads - and every episode is like a short independent feature.

Sunday in the Park with George at The Barbican

Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande. Now that’s star casting. Both are heading to the Barbican in 2027 for a new revival of Stephen Sondheim‘s Sunday in the Park with George.

Reflections

All My Sons at The Wyndham Theatre

Having previously doused Miller in a bucket of literal (and metaphorical) blood with A View from the Bridge, Ivo van Hove now applies the same aesthetic enlivenment to All My Sons. He has stripped away the dusty didactic moralism of the suburban parlour and replaced it with a Greek tragic autopsy. This is Miller yanked out from the museum; the cracks in the American Dream aren’t merely papered over but split wide open by a production that treats the fall of a patriarch with the clinical gravity of a plane crashing from faulty parts (I’m quite proud of this joke).

The company is quite simply the best group of actors you could imagine on a West End stage. Bryan Cranston’s Joe Keller is a masterpiece of slow-motion shrivelling, declining from blazered geniality into a gaunt, agitated shadow. Beside him, Marianne Jean-Baptiste is remarkable, playing the mother with hardened unsentimental steel. They are matched by Paapa Essiedu, who drifts across the stage with an melancholic grace-the idealist son whose eventual collision with the truth provides the play’s most potent agony.

In Van Hove’s hands, the imagery of the fallen tree becomes a visceral reality rather than a literary device. It is a production of essential, bone-deep truth-telling that reminds us why Miller first mattered and why he still matters. By the time Cranston begins his final disintegration, the theatre feels more like a courtroom where the sentence is already being carried out. Surely one of the theatrical events of the year.

Guess How Much I Love You? at The Royal Court

In the antiseptic purgatory of a hospital scan room, Robert Aramayo and Rosie Sheehy are waiting for a doctor to return with the results of their 20 week scan. This pregnant pause present us with a marriage in its final moments of blissful ignorance. Aramayo (just BAFTA nominated the day I went for his performance in I Swear) is superb as the sensitive modern man, a poetry-quoting, bumbling vessel who finds himself suddenly, cruelly obsolete. But it is Sheehy who provides the play’s jagged edge; she delivers a performance of scorched-earth intensity, mined from the same depths of maternal desperation that defined Jessie Buckley’s work in Hamnet.

The production, directed by Jeremy Herrin with a lean efficiency, functions as a dive into the darkest trenches of the parental psyche. It’s a work of uncensored emotional agony where Grace Smart’s brilliant sets emerge from inky pools of darkness like fragments of a recurring nightmare. The rooms are slightly too small for breathing space like jumpers shrunk in the wash. The play posits that parenthood is not a shared journey but a violent recontextualisation of the self. Norris’ script is particularly good at portraying how pregnancy is a crossroads where the couple teeters between ecstasy and tragedy. They are left to stare at one another across a disjunction of rage and startling distance.

One must ask if such unremitting bleakness is to everyone’s taste - it is a gruelling watch, easier to admire than to love, stripped of the comforting lies we usually tell ourselves about babies and the miracle of life etc (the audience was full of sniffling and weeping when I went). Yet, there is an exquisite purity to its nihilism. While it briefly touches the abyss before retreating into a final, tenuous grace, the play remains a masterful autopsy of the spirit and the love within a partnership. For those who value the theatre as a place of surgical truth, it is essential viewing.

Subscribe now

Thanks as ever for reading - please do share if you’ve enjoyed!

Anyway, here’s what to look out for in the year ahead…

On Stage

The London Heavyweights

• Romeo and Juliet @ Harold Pinter Theatre, opens 16th March: Robert Icke, director of the incredible 2015 Oresteia and 2024’s Oedipus returns to Shakespeare with a powerhouse Gen-Z cast: Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) and Noah Jupe (Hamnet). Expect Icke’s signature modern polish and hopefully not another ticking clock onstage.

  

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest @ The Old Vic, opens 1st April: A rare revival of the 1963 play made famous by the Jack Nicholson film. Clint Dyer directs Aaron Pierre and Giles Terera in a visceral look at institutional rebellion.

  

• Dracula @ The Noël Coward Theatre, opens February : Following the tech-forward success of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the same Australian creative team brings Cynthia Erivo back to the West End for a high-tech, solo reimagining of Stoker’s vampire.

  

• Arcadia @ The Old Vic, opens 24th January: Stoppard’s masterpiece on chaos theory and landscape gardening returns, weaving 1809 and the present day into a brilliant meditation on history.

  

New Writing & Modern Classics

• John Proctor is the Villain @ The Royal Court, opens 20th March: a rural Georgia high school re-examines The Crucible through the lens of modern scandals. It took New York by storm.

• The Afronauts @ The Royal Court, opens 14 Nov: Ryan Calais Cameron (For Black Boys... and Retrograde) tells the “true-ish” story of the 1964 Zambian Space Program.

• Jaja’s African Hair Braiding @ The Lyric Hammersmith, opens 18 Mar: Jocelyn Bioh’s Broadway comedy brings the vibrant, rhythmic life of a Harlem salon to London.

• Heart Wall @ The Bush Theatre, opens 7th April: Kit Withington’s family drama about returning home to the local boozer is a fantastic piece of new bold writing.

• Aether @ The Jermyn Street Theatre, opens March: Emma Howlett’s fabulous 2025 Pick of the Fringe gets its inevitable West End transfer. Tickets rapidly selling out.

  

• Under the Shadow @ The Almeida, opens June: A stage adaptation of the 1980s Tehran-set horror film, starring Leila Farzad.

Further Afield

• Even These Things @ The Royal Exchange, Manchester, opens 15 May: Rory Mullarkey’s epic spans 300 years of Manchester history, centering on the 1996 bombing.

  

• A Trial (Edinburgh/Amsterdam/Avignon, Summer): A massive international co-production; a sequel to Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People starring Narcos actor Wagner Moura.

TV: The 2026 Binge-List

Literary Adaptations & Historical Drama

• The Seven Dials Mystery (Netflix, Jan 15): Chris Chibnall tackles Agatha Christie. Starring Mia McKenna-Bruce, Helena Bonham Carter and Martin Freeman.

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (Sky/NOW, Jan 18): The new Game of Thrones prequel. Forget dragons; this is about Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire, Egg.

• Shuggie Bain (BBC1): Douglas Stuart’s heart-wrenching, Booker-winning novel comes to the small screen, capturing 1980s Glasgow with raw intimacy.

• Pride and Prejudice (Netflix): Dolly Alderton gives Austen a 2026 makeover with a stellar cast in what is set to be one of the most talked about shows of the year.

Thrillers & Comedy

• Steal (Prime Video, Jan 21): Sophie Turner leads this high-tension office-siege thriller.

• Half Man (BBC1): Richard Gadd (Baby Reindeer) returns with a 40-year saga of two estranged brothers.

• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast (Netflix, February): From Lisa McGee (Derry Girls). A dark comedy-mystery following three friends across Ireland.

• The Reluctant Vampire (BBC): A stellar ensemble (Lenny Rush, Sian Clifford, Bill Bailey) in a comedy about a boy discovering he isn’t the monster he thought.

Cinema: The Big Screen Events

• Wuthering Heights (Feb 13): Emerald Fennell’s provocative take starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. Expect red gags, not just moors.

• The Bride! (Mar 6): Maggie Gyllenhaal directs Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale in a 1930s Chicago gothic horror.

• The Devil Wears Prada 2 (May 1): Meryl Streep and the original crew (plus Lady Gaga) return to navigate the death of print.

• Disclosure Day (June 12): Steven Spielberg returns to his sci-fi roots with Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor.

• The Odyssey (July 17): Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to Oppenheimer. Matt Damon and Zendaya lead this epic Greek reimagining.

Reading List Continued from last year

• What We Can Know by Ian McEwan: McEwan returns with his trademark intellectual precision in this exploration of scientific certainty and the messy, emotional chaos of human understanding. Provocative and expertly paced, it’s dark academia with a dystopian flavour. He sets it partly in 2119 in climate-ravaged Britain, where a combination of nuclear war and ecological collapse has killed off more than half the Earth’s population. This unsettling premise allows McEwan to take a long view of right now. How will we be judged in 100 years’ time? What will scholars in the universities of the future teach their students about our present culture, literature and politics? Has some of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments about it.

• Seascraper by Benjamin Wood: An atmospheric, immersive journey that builds tension through its claustrophobic setting. Wood’s Booker-longlisted novel about a young shrimp scraper is easily one of the most beautifully written books I read last year. Thomas is a 20-year-old shanker and frustrated folk musician living in an English coastal town. He lives a slow and lonely existence until the arrival of a mysterious Hollywood film director who claims to need Thomas’s help scoping out the beach as a possible filming location. A strange, utterly engrossing tale, Wood explores the depths of loyalty and ambition in a way that feels like a modern epic - think of it as a grand-scale Claire Keegan novel.

• How To End A Story by Helen Garner: A titan of observation, Garner delivers what has been called a fearless and unsentimental look at the mechanics of narrative and the natural closures of life. Excited to read this masterclass in sharp, honest prose. The book won the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction this year, a sure sign of its excellence.

• Heart the Lover by Lily King: Following the success of Writers & Lovers, King returns with her signature warmth and wit, studying the intersection between the intellect and the heart. It starts life as a campus novel, when our narrator is taken on a date by Sam and brought back to meet his housemate, Yash - it’s about illness, parenthood, lost chances, regret and the dizzying aliveness of youth.

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico: A biting Instagram satire set in 2010s Berlin. It follows a couple of “digital creatives” whose lives - from natty wine to flat white aesthetics - feel like a hollow performance of consumerism for an invisible audience. Only 120 pages or so - the prose personification of the Real Housewives of Clapton. This slim book, written by an Italian author who had never been translated into English before, might be one of our most unusual picks for novel of the year.

• The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie: This is Rushdie’s first book of fiction written since he was violently attacked on stage in 2022 and it’s ludic, boisterous and full of irreverent humour. The Eleventh Hour is a collection of five stories about ageing and dying, losing friends, insane despots and corruption of power. If this sounds depressing, rest assured the writing is full of humour and metafictional play.

The Wait-for-Paperback List

• Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis: currently dominating the cultural conversation, Fundamentally follows a young academic traveling to Iraq to help a British Asian who joined IS at 15 - a rollicking comedic account of a UN deradicalisation programme. Younis gets to joke about this because she’s done it herself, having avoided being radicalised as a child and then gone on to work with these women in Iraq.

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai: a heartbreakingly beautiful study of isolation and the silent, unspoken spaces that exist between two companions. A close up second in the Booker. Kiran Desai worked on this rich 670-page novel for nearly two decades. The result is a twisty, funny, maximalist love story with the feel of classic literature. Set between the mid-1990s and early 2000s, it follows Sonia, an aspiring writer in Vermont, and Sunny, a journalist in New York - both of whom hail from affluent Indian families.

  

• Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt: I can’t wait to read this. Have only heard fabulous things. It’s the story of two young men - bright but socially stunted James and charming but lazy Roland - who go to Oxford together, work at McKinsey and then start their own tidal energy company. Business meets fiction if that’s your sort of thing.

Reflections

Othello at The Royal Haymarket

Tom Morris’s Othello milks the irony of Iago’s honesty until it moos, offering an evening that prioritizes the audience’s comfort over visceral carnage. I didn’t feel much but I did have a wry smile at the humour. David Harewood, returning to the role thirty years after his debut at the National, giving us an Othello of granite-like rationalism. This Othello is so unflappable that his collapse feels less like a descent into madness and more like a catastrophic clerical error. When Toby Jones’s Iago presents his ocular proof, Harewood accepts it with chilling detachment: a performance of immense lucidity that suggests Othello’s tragedy is rooted in a systematic, almost academic, misogyny.

Jones is the most companionable devil in years, treating the verse with a coarse, vigorous familiarity. He destroys the Moor for the sheer sport of it - a bored virtuoso playing high-stakes chess. Notably, the production swerves away from the racial animus that has dominated recent interpretations. In this pluralistic Venice, racial prejudice is ignored in favor of a domestic tragedy of manners. Caitlin FitzGerald’s Desdemona is a welcome departure from the drippy ingenue; she is a forceful, middle-aged woman whose logic is met by her husband’s refusal to grant her the dignity of a fair hearing. It is a solid, commercial achievement, but in a London theatre scene currently defined by the Icke and Lloyd, it felt disappointingly safe.

Christmas Day at The Almeida

Sam Grabiner’s award-winning debut Boys on the Verge of Tears offered an investigation of the male condition through the prism of the urinals. His latest play, Christmas Day, is a bittersweet interrogation of contemporary British-Jewish identity. It is brilliantly bold in its exploration of all the knotty baggage of Jewish identit. The setting is a East London warehouse, abandoned and meticulously rendered by Miriam Buether with that sort of chilling accuracy that makes one feel cold just looking at all the hard grey surfaces. Here, a Jewish family congregates for the traditional ritual of Christmas Day Chinese takeaway. Noah (Samuel Blenkin) inhabits this cavernous void alongside his sister Tamara (Bel Powley) and his girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke). They are eventually besieged by their father, Elliot (Nigel Lindsay), and Tamara’s former flame Aaron (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), a man who recently packed up shop in London for Tel Aviv.

Grabiner’s play finds its identity not in a rooted centre but in the frantic pull of elsewhere. We are presented with a family of spiritual and geographical defectors: Elliot Zooming with a Manhattan shrink, Aaron rhapsodizing over orgies in the Tel Aviv ocean with the smug zeal of a religious convert and Tamara retreating into the vaporous comfort of apocryphal mysticism. They are all defined by their projected sub-identities and a shared disdain. When the inevitable explosion over Gaza arrives, the writing is deceptively deft - the characters sidestep the carnage until the tension combusts into a sudden, uncontrollable vitriol.

Yet, for all its eerie strangeness - rendered by James Macdonald with a groaning, atmospheric oddity that occasionally stifles the play’s broader comedic lungs - the piece ultimately betrays its own sophistication. Beneath fox corpses and shroom microdosing lies a histrionic structure that surrenders to the crude, percussive beats of a TV climax. Much like the erratic industrial heater suspended from the rafter - which flares into life with an intermittent, gasping fury- the family dynamic is punctured by Wren, a stoned housemate who seems the loneliest of the lot. But these interruptions are merely atmospheric; they do not so much advance the action as trip it up. Macdonald’s production is nothing if not assured- and the acting is terrific. Grabiner takes risks that don’t always come off but the moments of genuine, affecting power - when the dialogue turns to the bruised topic of the fragile nature of belonging- are sublime. And of course it’s great to watch the universal experience of a blazing row over food on Christmas Day.

• Stanley Tucci directs Springwood at The Hampstead Next Year

• Outrage as the NT highlights dynamic pricing as ‘exciting’ area for investment

Tom Stoppard: The Real Thing

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. And so now is Sir Tom Stoppard. The loss marks the death of the sharpest, most theatrical wit in English theatre since George Bernard Shaw. I was lucky enough to hear him lecture a number of times whilst he was Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford in 2017 and I can’t remember anyone speaking with such precision, clarity and verbal judiciousness. He wasn’t just a playwright in the traditional sense but a majestic impresario who resurrected the art of conscious artifice - where we as an audience are acutely aware of the wool being pulled over our eyes by a puppet-master outwitting us with his pen. He created a theatrical blend of the philosophical, the absurd and the vernacular that surpasses all contemporary comparison.

When in his twenties Stoppard turned Hamlet inside out, the ground-breaking effect went beyond linguistic dazzle and beyond theatre itself: it suggested new ways of approaching literature with formal innovation; he once said he would like to have written Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (incidentally my favourite play) where formal play is paramount to the show’s exploration of nuclear fission. In summoning characters from the wings into the spotlight, he brought a whole new formalistic and revisionist approach to the craft of playmaking. He gave one of the best descriptions I have read of what it feels like to give form to an idea: ‘When you write a play it makes a certain kind of noise in your head, and the rehearsal and staging is an attempt to persuade the actors to reproduce this noise.’ Playwriting for him was about controlling the flow of information, arriving at the right length and the right speed and in the right order. Critics who mistake his work for mere surface froth miss the point entirely. His stylistic artifice is the means by which he captures debate as drama. Yet, this artifice is not simply about what survives as art. Stoppard’s theatre is filled with moments of fleeting intimacy and profound, gentle emotion (the heartbreaking conclusion of Arcadia for example) that reveal how much is being lost.

But that’s of course not how he would see it. We only need to turn to Septimus’ slightly absurdist response to Tomasina in Arcadia who speaks of loss in very different terms after she mourns the lost plays of Ancient Greece:

“Oh, Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by [Cleopatra’s] ancestors. How can we sleep for grief?”

“By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we should be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

Stoppard’s singular genius lay in the bold and intoxicating fusion of the highbrow and the lowbrow. This profound commingling of all sorts- the philosophical dread of R and G or the manic wordplay of Travesties -is his essential structure. And the man away from his work had a gentle jollity and playfulness; when Felicity Kendal was appearing in Jumpers, she sent him Kendal mint cakes, asking if he fancied one (which it seems he did as they had a notorious affair). In her biography of Stoppard, Hermione Lee notes how Stoppard always gave big tips to program sellers at theatre because he knows they are probably out of work actors. He was a rockstar as well as a playwright, a sardonic wit and an autodidact. What he worshiped above all was words: “If you look after them, you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos,” as Henry, the playwright character, says in The Real Thing, “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are.”

Fortuitously two of his plays are on early next year: Indian Ink at the Hampstead Theatre and then Arcadia at the Old Vic. You’d be mad not to go to both.

A nice letter in The Times yesterday:

A new Buzz in the air

Buzz Goodbody was a blazing force at the Royal Shakespeare Company, becoming its first female director. She pioneered bold school tours and radical main-stage productions and was the driving force behind The Other Place, the RSC’s crucial experimental space that opened in a tin shed in 1973. Tragically, she died by suicide less than two years later at the age of 28. Her nephew, Adam Goodbody - a very close friend - has now launched Buzz Studios in her memory. Its terrific inaugural production, Petty Men - a two-man adaptation of Julius Caesar is currently on at the Arcola.

I interviewed Adam about setting up his new company and about Petty Man below:

Buzz Studios is named in honour of your late aunt, Buzz Goodbody, and aims to continue her legacy. What core principles or aspects of her work are you most committed to upholding with this new exciting company?

When Buzz helped set up The Other Place at Stratford (the second theatre at the RSC) she wrote a manifesto for theatre.

The three main elements were:

It should be affordable

It should engage young people at all times (both in the making and watching)

It should be bold and rebellious

We want to stay true to all those things in our work.

What do you hope will be the defining signature or style of a Buzz Studios production?

We want to create theatre that is thrilling and exciting to watch. Nowadays, theatre is competing against so many easier forms of content, so it needs to really ‘grab’ people and justify its place. It needs to be unpredictable and really lean into that feeling of ‘liveness’, which is what makes theatre unique. I really hope all Buzz shows will embrace that style.

Are there specific types of work or artists you are keen to focus on in the next few projects?

There is one clear project that will launch at the beginning of 2026: a piece of new writing. We are in the process of commissioning people to work on that show. It’s going to be epic - focused on one of the most important political issues in the U.K. today. I am working on this project with Tom Dixon, our producer for Petty Men and co-founder of the Handlebards.

I am incredibly excited about it and also a big new personal challenge for me, which will accompany our production of the show.

We are also actively seeking writers, actors, and directors interested in reimagining classical plays for smaller spaces. If you are one of those people or have a different project you’d like to talk about that might fit our style, please get in touch.

You co-wrote (and star in) Petty Men with John Chisham and Julia Levai. Can you introduce the play and take us back to the initial spark of inspiration for setting a Julius Caesar adaptation in a dressing room?

Petty Men opens on the 100th night of a West End production of Julius Caesar. Instead of watching the play, we are downstairs with the two understudies to the main parts, Brutus and Cassius. These two actors have never been on: they are tired, bored and sick of the job. Our play is about what happens on that night.

The main inspiration was the work our amazing director, Julia Levai, has done with understudies at the RSC and the National Theatre. It’s a really unusual professional role that is barely understood by people inside and outside the theatre world. We wanted to explore the psychology of being an understudy - what it does to your sense of self, etc.

It maps neatly onto the Shakespeare play as well, given Brutus and Cassius refer to themselves self-consciously as frustrated actors who are physically inferior to Julius Caesar.

Every performance is captioned, which is a fantastic commitment to accessibility. How does the use of technology/mixed media integrate into the play’s unique staging and narrative?

It’s a central part of the production. Our amazing caption designer Perri Schofield has designed a whole programme on which the captions are built. For audiences who are D/deaf and hard of hearing, but for others too. We hope this will bring Shakespeare’s text closer, making it more engaging and vivid.

With Shakespeare being so ‘wordy’, we wanted to make the show more linguistically accessible, and so in the caption screen and beyond, we have tried to design a show that feels easier to understand and relate to.

From working as actor before, what has been the biggest challenge in making the leap to not only star in a show but also co-write it and launch your own production company simultaneously?

It’s been great fun. As an actor, you’re often the last part of the puzzle, so with this job it’s been great to have more autonomy and creative freedom. It’s personal for me too. My Auntie Buzz was an amazing theatre director, and she tragically died aged 28, the age I am now.

If we can have half the impact she would have had, Buzz Studios will do some great things.

Petty Men is on at the Arcola Theatre until December 20th

Buy Tickets Here

My Books of The Year to gift to Parents:

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett

Following on from the excellent Pond (a collection of vignettes and short stories), Bennett returns with this novella where protagonist is a writer, and her writing has consequences in the world: winning her a readership and prizes allowing her the rare chance to take Xavier out for dinner. Her commitment to writing variously impresses, mystifies and discomfits Xavier, who wants her undivided attention. When he reads her new book, he writes to her that he finds it ‘some sort of HELL’. Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp. This novel is difficult to pin down but the prose is so poetic and entrancing I struggled to put it down.

Look Closer by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Cannot wait to dive into my college tutor RDF’s latest book on how reading enhances and refocuses the world around us. He writes on the experience of literature in such a way that makes the academic feel accessible to all.

Flesh by David Szalay

A lean, hypnotic novel tracing the life of István, a shy Hungarian teenager whose traumatic first sexual relationship spirals into a decades-long ascent through the world of London’s super-rich. It’s a spare, piercing work of realism about chance, money and the passive character of a man carried along by the currents of the 21st century’s demands for status and wealth. And it won the Booker.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

This is an intimate, spanning story narrated by Dave Win, a mixed-race, gay actor reflecting on his life across six decades. Beginning with his complicated schoolboy relationship with a bully who becomes a dangerous politician, the novel tracks Dave’s career in experimental theatre, his love affairs in London, and his lifelong struggle against discrimination, offering a luminous, detailed portrait of modern British life, race, and sexuality. Classic Hollinghurst - but one of his better ones.

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

A genre-defying work of non-fiction that weaves together memoir, history and literature. Flanagan connects his Tasmanian family history - including his father’s forced labour near Hiroshima - to the detonation of the atomic bomb, H.G. Wells’s affair with Rebecca West and the nature of love. It’s a hypnotic journey that explores how our most personal choices are ultimately shaped by catastrophic, world-historical events.

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Adichie’s novel explores the intersecting lives of four Nigerian women - Chiamaka, Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou - isolated during the early days of the pandemic. Through their reflections on past lovers (”dream count”), ambitions and betrayals, the book delivers a transcendent commentary on modern womanhood and immigrant experiences.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

This book was just so good - I wish I had read it 10 years ago/

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

This sequel to Brooklyn returns to Eilis Lacey over twenty years after she settled in America. Eilis’s life on Long Island is shattered when an Irishman arrives with the news that her husband, Tony, is having a child with another woman… Toibin writes with such effortless beauty.

Dark Renaissance by Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt, one of the greatest writers on the Elizabethan era, tells the thrilling and subversive life story of Christopher Marlowe. A magisterial (if a little speculative) biography - we follow the mysterious chronology of life from Canterbury to Cambridge to espionage to the South London stage.

A Great Essay on The Decline of Deviance in this Substack:

Experimental History

The Decline of Deviance

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline…

Read more

10 months ago · 1717 likes · 227 comments · Adam Mastroianni

Reflections

Maids at The Donmar

Kip Williams, fresh off his West End success with Dorian Gray starring Sarah Snook, is back with a new technological hurricane. This three-hander adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids is a brash and truly relentless spectacle. He replaces the original’s quiet eroticism with constant turbulence: live smartphone footage projected onto the set. It is dizzying and chaotic and perhaps could do with a little tidying up (!) - but overall, I really enjoyed it.

The play finds its modern hook in online celebrity culture. Williams digitally augments his actors, turning their faces into smooth, botoxed, slightly alien avatars using Snapchat filters. The sisters’ dangerous role-play rebellion against “Madame” slips directly into this curated, augmented reality.

Lydia Wilson and Phia Saban, as the two maids, deliver ridiculously high-energy performances, moving from diva posturing to cringe-inducing subservience. The music is an eclectic shock, ranging from Bach to acid - house. Yerin Ha’s Madame, unfortunately, enters as a comical, puerile tyrant in leather shorts, a caricature of a narcissist that lessens the sense of genuine terror or enslavement somewhat.

But the show is driven by sheer speed. The pumping music and unstable, handheld Snapchat footage give the action a necessary hallucinatory dread. While the velocity prevents a deep exploration of the sisters’ psychological dynamic, the overall effect is powerful. A superb theatrical stunt, deserving of recognition for its sheer technical ambition and its committed leading performances - but not sure it will clean up at the Oliver Awards.

Petty Men at The Arcola

A bucket catches the drips in the backstage purgatory of a Julius Caesar production, where two understudies skulk, desperate for their moment on stage. Adam Goodbody’s new company debut, Petty Men, is a smart, fierce and utterly relatable look at the vaulting ambition that festers in the wings. Goodbody’s wired Cassius and John Chisham’s slumping Brutus - known only by their covers - deliver a mesmerizing, high-velocity rehearsal, spitting out lines with genuine theatrical yearning. Director Júlia Levai brilliantly uses the claustrophobic set, cracking it open to phantasms that mirror the men’s desperate hopes.

While the focus stays strictly on personal ambition, sacrificing some of Rome’s political thunder, the execution is superb. Goodbody and Chisham are a great pair, turning a tale of Godot-like waiting into a triumph of frustrated talent. A sharp, gripping debut. And it ends in a brilliant jig. I hope all their shows do…

The Unbelievers at The Royal Court

Nick Payne (Constellations) and Marianne Elliott deliver a shattering but muddled non-linear play about a mother frozen by her child’s disappearance. The entire piece is galvanized by Nicola Walker’s magnetic performance as Miriam. She steers a catastrophic, disjointed arc, culminating in a spectacular, breakneck-speed emotional meltdown. While at times the dialogue feels forced and formal, the cast is otherwise excellent, particularly Lucy Thackeray, who provides a comic flash of life. Ultimately, the lack of resolution and mystery surrounding the son’s disappearance does render the ending a little dissatisfactory - the Bunny Christie set has a waiting room at the back of the stage to really nail the point home. A good play - but not a great one.

End at The National

Eldridge closes his trilogy with End, a mortality piece featuring Clive Owen as the dying former DJ and Saskia Reeves as his long-suffering partner. Under Rachel O’Riordan’s direction, the 90-minute real-time confrontation is a harrowing look at a non-communicative couple finally forced to talk. David Eldridge’s script is once again excellent but for me the lack of intimate chemistry between Owen and Reeves rendered this piece slightly flat as they navigate sudden, monumental dread.

The real-time constraint, however, is a structural problem: forced exposition and sudden twists make the crisis feel theatrical rather than truthful. Still, as the final, dark commentary on middle-class life, it’s a necessary conclusion to the trilogy. A gripping, technically strong display that resonates despite its flaws. I just never really bought in as much as Beginning and Middle.

• RSC Curriculum Launch for schools

• More Star-Studded Casts: Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe star in Romeo and Juliet (West End); David Suchet stars in Murder in the Cathedral (Orange Tree/Bath) and Aaron Pierre and Giles Terera lead One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

• Reviews include a naked Australian bodysurfing in the West End, Hamlet at the NT and The Line of Beauty at The Almeida.

  

New ways of teaching Shakespeare

Funded by the Foyle Foundation, the RSC Shakespeare Curriculum launched this week to transform Shakespeare study in schools. This free online resource is designed for teachers and students in UK state schools, using the RSC’s dynamic, rehearsal-based techniques. It moves beyond glumly taking turns to read by treating Shakespeare’s plays as living performance texts. The platform provides access to more than 2,000 resources, including exclusive rehearsal footage and ready-to-use lesson plans. Macbeth is available first, with Romeo and Juliet to follow in early 2026.

Shows To Book:

• Starry (Crossed) Lovers: Robert Icke is to direct Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe in Romeo and Juliet at the Harold Pinter from March 16 to June 6 next year.

• The Orange Tree New Season

  • David Suchet will star in a site-specific production of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, directed by Artistic Director Tom Littler.

  • OT on the Hill will present a summer rep season in the gardens of Thomas’s College (Summer 2026): Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing.

  • Future Productions (Spring 2027) announced for the main venue includ King Lear and Richard II in rep, starring Roger Allam and Freddie Fox, directed by Tom Littler.

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at The Donmar: A bold new staging of Ken Kesey’s masterpiece, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, will play a limited run from April 1 – May 23, 2026. Directed by Clint Dyer and stars Aaron Pierre and Giles Terera.

• 1536 heads to the West End: The critically acclaimed drama 1536 transfers to the West End for a strictly limited run at the Ambassadors Theatre, with previews beginning 2 May 2026 following a sold-out run at the Almeida Theatre. READ MY REVIEW HERE:

• And one to miss: The Hunger Games - it sounds like the odds were not in its favour. Suzanne Collins’ novel is the latest franchise to get an expensive stage spin-off at a custom-built £26 million arena in Canary Wharf with Conor McPherson (The Weir and The Girl From The North Country) writing the script, not to mention Jamie Carragher’s daughter Mia in the lead role. It has been slated; the script is leaden, the staging is an underwhelming mix of fireworks and dizzying projections and there seems to be a strange, removed cameo on screen from John Malkovich. Given how much this has cost, it is challenging to be the biggest disaster of the year

To Watch

The Beast in Me on Netflix

Even without two astonishing performances from the lead actors - Claire Danes (of Homeland fame) and Matthew Rhys – the script, the sheer style and confidence of it all would be things of beauty. But add what that pair are doing, and this clever, eight-part psychological thriller is top-tier television.

All Her Fault on Sky Atlantic and Now TV

When Marissa arrives at a house to collect her son, Milo, from a playdate with a new friend, she is horrified to discover the woman who answers the door is someone she doesn’t recognise. She also doesn’t have Milo and claims to have never heard of him. As news of the disappearance ripples through the affluent community, time is of the essence to find Milo and an unexpected suspect is named – but as people become eager to find someone to blame, rumours and gossip about all the women involved start to grow. Starring Sarah Snook (from Succession), Jake Lacy (The White Lotus) and Dakota Fanning, I loved the first episode - think it’s going to be a cracker.

Reflections

The Line of Beauty at The Almeida

This adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel arrives freighted with the dismal ambition of being adapted from a much loved novel and also of becoming a great AIDS play - in the vein of The Inheritance or Angels in America. It achieves something sadly a little below the mark: a glossy, attenuated and messy mix of comedy, satire and nostalgia. Where Hollinghurst’s novel offered a unique peep hole into the diseased flesh of Thatcher’s Britain, this production feels too obviously performative and plot heavy.

Jack Holden adapts and Michael Grandage directs to create an 80s mood-board, masked by clouds of cocaine. Into Kensington Gardens drifts Nick Guest, the horny Henry James scholar. As played by Jasper Talbot, he is a creature of soft focus and bookish sympathy. Charles Edwards and Claudia Harrison are brilliant ciphers for ruling-class decay and Ellie Bamber’s Catherine is a flurry of tics with twitching hands and a fragility that seems on the precipice of a cold, clear terror into collapse. Leo Suter as Toby Fedden’s primary contribution seems to be the quite astonishing removal his shirt to reveal his oiled up pecks and 10-pack. The rest of his performance is disappointingly shallow. All of this seems to suggest a rather glib evening - but that’s far from the case. It is very entertaining and funny - but for a play that I was so excited to see I could not help leaving a tad disappointed. But a West End transfer is probably inevitable as it was fully sold out before it begun!

Gary Starr: Classic Penguin at Arts Theatre

Garry Starr - the clown alter-ego of Australian performer Damien Warren-Smith - undertakes a mission to act out every great work of literature published by Penguin Classics. What this actually involves is a series of increasingly insane gags riffing on the books’ titles or plots, frequently involving audience members doing incredible/ disgusting things. For Gulliver’s Travels, he tapes someone to the floor. For War and Peace, he stages a food fight. For The Bodysurfers, he manages to crowd-surf across the auditorium. It is a work of supreme silliness but one conceived with genuine care. Oh, and Starr is entirely naked for the duration, save for a top-hat, tailcoat and flippers. Now, under the producer Francesca Moody and production company Fiery Angel, it arrives in the West End, with dates at the Arts Theatre until mid-December.

Book Here

Hamlet at the National Theatre

I found Robert Hastie’s production of Hamlet just a bit stale. It is fine, a production defined by a frustrating emotional vacuum. Hiran Abeysekera’s Hamlet is solid - a cocky, limber teenagePrince - but his rapid-fire delivery turns philosophy into a little bit of jumble, rendering him a bit weepy only when his manic energy briefly subsides. His wit, like Geoffrey Streatfeild’s Polonius, is used primarily to undercut the play’s core seriousness. The opulent, yet politically inert, stale set of a Restoration ballroom frames a court where Alistair Petrie’s Claudius and Ayesha Dharker’s Gertrude (so criminally sliced to a bit part) share any frisson, leaving their tragedy politely vacant. Francesca Mills as Ophelia, steals the show bringing strength and dangerous intensity, that truly ignites the stage. I wouldn’t say there is much chemistry between her and Abeysekera though and even her powerful performance cannot save the production’s weak directorial handling of the fate of Ophelia. This is Hamlet designed for comfort, not catastrophe. What a shame.

Subscribe now

Hamnet

A heartbreaking adaptation destined for Oscar success, especially for Jessie Buckley. Jacobi Jupe is fantastic as the young Hamnet, captured in beautiful, sweeping shots. The scenes of Buckley in the woods are a hauntingly beautiful portrait of witchcraft. While Paul Mescal might feel slightly miscast, the amazing score holds the powerful emotion together. After the disappointment of the RSC stage adaptation, this will make you weep.

After The Hunt

Luca Guadagnino’s latest is a messy, generically blurred sexual scandal drama set at Yale. Julia Roberts stars, but all the characters are quite horrible, and the relentlessly grating, ticking score only adds to the irritation. Didn’t love it.

It Was Just An Accident

A tense Iranian drama that grips you from the start. The plot kicks off when a group of former prisoners recognises their sadistic prison guard and, in an act of delayed justice, kidnaps him to plot their revenge. Interesting take on a revenge drama - won Palme D’Or this year- not quite as good as I thought it would be however.

The Mastermind

Josh O’Connor stars in this beautifully shot heist film that proves carrying out an art theft isn’t as easy as it looks. It’s a stylish ride, though it slightly runs out of steam by the third act.

Is This Thing On?

Bradley Cooper’s third directorial feature is a surprisingly intimate and heartfelt dramedy - with genuine gags. Will Arnett gives a fantastic performance as a man navigating a midlife catharsis (based on the life of John Bishop - yes THE John Bishop) by impulsively trying stand-up comedy to process his amicable divorce from his wife (Laura Dern).

The Left Handed Girl

A delicate and vibrant Taiwanese drama from director Shih-Ching Tsou, co-written with Anora director/writer Sean Baker. The film follows three generations of women - a single mother and her two daughters -trying to make it by running a Taipei night market stall, as a family superstition about the youngest being left-handed begins to unravel their hidden secrets. My favourite film of the festival.

No Other Choice

A sensational, darkly comic satire from the master, Park Chan-wook. Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun is perfectly cast as a family man laid off from his job, who decides to take eliminating the competition for a new role literally. A chilling and hilarious thriller.

Pillion

A charming, sexy, and surprisingly tender debut feature - think 50 Shades of Gray on motorbikes. Harry Melling plays a quiet wallflower who finds an unexpected community - and himself -when he enters a relationship with a charismatic biker, played by Alexander Skarsgård. The film, which adapts Adam Mars-Jones’ 1998 novel “Box Hill,” is a graphic and unapologetically kinky exploration of dom/sub dynamics, reframed as a tender gay romance. And it has some great gags! Great acting too.

Alpha

The long-awaited new film from Titane director Julia Ducournau. This is an absolute shocker. Dull and boring. This body-horror drama centers on a 13-year-old girl whose rebellious tattoo becomes a source of terror, as fears grow that she’s contracted a new bloodborne disease that turns its victims to marble. A messy and failed allegory.

The History Of Sound

An aching period romance starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor that has all the elements to succeed - but I felt the emotional stakes were just lacking throughout. The two play men who bond over music in 1917, are separated by war, and reunite for one winter to travel rural Maine, recording folk songs and capturing a love that echoes for a lifetime. Some people will love it for its style but it felt like I never quite believed in their relationship enough to care.

To Book

Royal Court 70th Season

The Royal Court Theatre has just unveiled its 70th-anniversary programme, and it’s a belter.

Artistic Director David Byrne’s third season is a “year-long party” that merges the theatre’s historic past with a bold new future. And sees Gary Oldman and Tilda Swinton return to Sloane’s Square. Here is a quick lowdown of the shows

Man to Man: Features Tilda Swinton in her first stage performance in more than three decades. She returns to her celebrated solo role as a widow who takes on the identity of her deceased husband.

Krapp’s Last Tape: Stars Gary Oldman in Samuel Beckett’s iconic 1958 play.

The Afronauts: A new play by Ryan Calais Cameron (For Black Boys, Retrograde) telling the real-life story of the Zambian space race.

Guess How Much I Love You?: A romantic drama from Luke Norris, starring Robert Aramayo and Rosie Sheehy, about impossible choices and enduring love.

The Shitheads: A debut play by Jack Nicholls about cave-dwelling cannibals.

Are You Watching?: A new work from 25 year old Georgie Dettmer tackling digital voyeurism and deepfake porn.

Monument: By Rhys Warrington, this play follows a Welsh community torn apart by a tragedy.

Blood of My Blood: A story centred on a pregnant woman, an inheritance and an Airbnb.

John Proctor is the Villain: Kimberly Belflower’s Broadway hit - modern retelling of The Crucible.

Archduke: Rajiv Joseph’s play retells the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, featuring stage design by the world leading designer Es Devlin.

Between The River and The Sea: The acclaimed play by Isabella Sedlak and Yousef Sweid transfers after runs in Berlin and at Edinburgh

Tickets on sale to the general public at 12pm on Tuesday 4th November

Book Tickets Here

Arcadia at The Old Vic

Septimus, what is carnal embrace? A revival of Tom Stoppard’s much-lauded Arcadia is the next production in Matthew Warchus’ final season as artistic director of the Old Vic. As with all the shows in this final season, the piece will take place in the round. It marks Carrie Cracknell’s directorial debut at the venue after doing Grapes of Wrath at the National and Portia Coughlan at The Almeida. Tickets on sale now.

Buy Tickets Here

Aether transfers to London

Fresh from its sold-out run at Edinburgh Fringe 2025, Aether makes its London premiere at Jermyn Street Theatre in March 2026. The best show I saw in Edinburgh - it is already SOLD OUT (but 2 more weeks soon to be announced I gather).

Book Tickets Here

Other News

• Daniel Radcliffe to star in Every Brilliant Thing on Broadway

• Great plays seem to be abound at the moment - Maids at The Donmar, The Unbelievers at The Royal Court, The Line of Beauty at The Almeida have all opened.

Reflections

Romans at The Almeida

Alice Birch’s epic play kicks off with a brilliantly ambitious premise: three brothers, born into the iron nursery of Victorian cruelty, pursued across a century and a half of moral decay. Jack, the ambitious seeker; Marlow, the capitalist consumer; Edmund, the nervous, sheltered escapee. The first half of Birch’s saga is a triumph of construction: a tour de force of fractured memory and modernist daring. Out of its splinters emerges something rare on the British stage - a perfect study of male failure rendered with delicate precision. There is a brilliant scene where their narratives overlap with a rotating revolve - and everything completely clicks. A fabulous piece of choreography.

Then comes the interval and with it the fall. The second act deserts coherence in favour of a postmodern collage (maybe on purpose - but dramatically it grows tedious). Marlow, once a swaggering imperialist, reappears as a Joe Rogan-esque provocateur; Jack becomes the head of a hallucinogenic cult after his success as a writer: it feels like a playwright’s bad trip rather than a revelation.

By the final act, the family of Romans - like the empire - collapses altogether . The ruin is deliberate, but no less ruinous for that. Masculinity, Birch tells us, is not a birthright but a disease - contagious, untreated and frighteningly terminal. Her lost boys, stripped of conquest and meaning, drift into a night of their own making. It is theatre as vivisection: breathtaking in its ambition, but occasionally insufferable in its execution.

The Land of The Living at The Dorfman

David Lan - the former AD of the Young Vic - writers his first play in year in an attempt to distill the vast grief of displacement after the end of the War into an intimate piece at The Dorfman. The Land of the Living begins with the ashes of 1945 Germany, following an UNRWA worker, Ruth (played excellently by Juliet Stevenson), as she discovers an Aryanized Polish boy, Thomas. The play’s ambition is colossal, cleaving time between her pragmatic survival and his adult confrontation 45 years later.

Stevenson is intellectually formidable, but the play’s gravitational centre is the boy. As a child, Artie Wilkinson-Hunt is a brilliant embodiment of trauma; as an adult, Tom Wlaschiha is a silent volcano of contained rage. Yet, this is a play seemingly suffocated by its own research. At nearly three hours, it mistakes the sprawl of an epic for the intensity of the stage, descending into pedestrian exposition. The result is a soggy anaesthesia. Given its horrific, urgent relevance - with echoes from Ukraine to Gaza - this play should ignite an audience’s outrage. Instead, it is a meandering overlong evening in search for a message at its heart.

Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway

My first ever Broadway show - and this was as saccharine as I imagined. Maybe Happy Ending posits a romance at the precipice of obsolescence: two ‘Helperbots’ (think retired robots, Klara and The Sun style) in a Seoul hospice, awaiting their final malfunction. The love story is sweet, the songs bright and cheesy, but this intricate two-hander is suffocated by Michael Arden’s high-tech direction. The score is pleasant but unmemorable; the plot’s structure is flawed by being overly predictable. It is a work of undeniable, minor-key warmth, a meditation on love before an inevitable unplugging (literally). But what do I know - it won 6 Tonys!

Thanks for reading!

It is safe to say that Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights will cause some controversy among literary purists (even if this trailer - as I suspect - is a very deliberate marketing campaign from producers).

Considering the film is not released until next year, it is getting lots of attention already:

Especially with The Times readers in the comments section… impressive that Peter feels the need to tell us he has read it:

What To See Now

In Theatres

The Land Of The Living @ The Dorfman

After a summer closure for renovations, the Dorfman stage at the National Theatre is still showcasing the final picks from former artistic director Rufus Norris. For his penultimate show, Norris has brought together the incredible pedigree of director Stephen Daldry and actor Juliet Stevenson. This story of rebuilding post-war Europe is a perfect encapsulation of Norris’ tenure at the NT and Stevenson is an unparalleled stage presence.

The Weir @ The Harold Pinter Theatre

Conor McPherson’s modern classic, The Weir, receives what critics are praising as a magnificent revival, with the playwright himself directing. In a remote rural Irish pub, a group of local bachelors mesmerize a newcomer, Valerie, with ghostly fireside stories. What begins as blarney and banter soon takes a darker, supernatural turn. The real ghosts, however, are those of loneliness, loss and regret. Brendan Gleeson makes a powerful West End debut - sounds like a perfect Autumn evening to me.

The Lady from the Sea @ The Bridge Theatre

Joe Alwyn topless in a pool will no doubt draw a crowd but Simon Stone’s adaptation of Ibsen’s classic set in modern-day English countryside sounds like a good solid evening. Ellida, married to a well-off doctor, feels trapped in a comfortable but predictable life. When a mysterious lover from her past reappears, she is forced to choose between the life she has built and the one she left behind. Starring Andrew Lincoln and Alicia Vikander, this version is a comedic but tense in a brilliant play that explored the impact of trauma and how we carry it with us.

And on Screen

One Battle After Another

I saw this on Sunday and though it is 2 hours and 40 minutes (and causing queues at the urinals), I really enjoyed it. Paul Thomas Anderson directs a fabulous cast in an absolutely unique and quite unsettling story that is simulatenously funny, quirky,and exciting without delving too deeply into parody. Sean Penn is spectacular and deserves all the praise for his performance. Chase Infiniti does an unbelievable job of holding her own surrounded by this award-winning cast. DiCaprio and Del Toro give us a welcome change of pace, going for bonkers, comedic performances this time around. Some will say it is too indulgent in parts but I loved it.

The Girlfriend on Amazon Prime

It’s a battle royale between a narcissist and a sociopath - am currently binging this revenge drama in the mode of most Amazon rich-white-woman-in-gorgeous-houses type thrillers usually starring Nicole Kidman. Olivia Cooke is fantastic. The whole thing is a bit silly but very entertaining.

Frauds on ITV

A new drama starring Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker concerns a grand heist carefully planned from prison but it is doubling up as a vehicle for an exploration of friendship, betrayal and love in all its forms.

Coldwater on ITV

This gripping, six-part ITV thriller marks the much-anticipated return of Andrew Lincoln (The Walking Dead, the best man in Love Actually and in The Lady And The Sea mentioned above) to British television. He stars as John, a stay-at-home dad who moves his family from London to a remote Scottish village to escape the guilt of failing to intervene in a violent confrontation. He is quickly befriended by his charming and confident neighbour, Tommy (a brilliantly creepy Ewen Bremner), a pillar of the community who harbors horrifying secrets. When John’s long-repressed rage finally explodes with disastrous results, he finds himself indebted to the one person he should fear most. Written by David Ireland, it’s a dark, twisty thriller about ordinary people dragged into extraordinary danger. Not at all what you expect from an ITV thriller.

Soho Theatre New Season

I like the look of EVERYTHING just announced at the Soho Theatre:

• Eoin McAndrew’s Verity Bargate Award-winning Little Brother (17 October to 22 November), directed by Emma Jordan. Set in Belfast, the play follows the fraught bond between siblings Brigid and Niall as she attempts to save him from a spiral of self-destruction.

• David Ireland (writer of Coldwater)’s Most Favoured (11 December to 24 January), directed by Max Elton and co-produced with 19th Street Productions and María Inés Olmedo Projects, stars Lauren Lyle and Alexander Arnold. Taking place in a Travelodge bedroom after a chance encounter, the play unpicks hidden truths between a woman and her American lover.

• Miriam Battye’s The Virgins (29 January to 7 March), directed by Jaz Woodcock-Stewart, is a feverish look at adolescence and desire. Set over one night with four girls and two boys alone in a house, it captures the awkwardness, intensity, and bravado of teenage years.

• Sarah Power’s Welcome to Pemfort (12 March to 18 April), directed by Ed Madden, transports audiences to a crumbling country estate preparing for its first living history event.

And shows to book now for 2026:

Kenneth Branagh in The Tempest and The Cherry Orchard

Kenneth Branagh will make his historic return to The RSC in 2 summer 2026 productions, playing Prospero in The Tempest, directed by Richard Eyre, and also appearing alongside Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt in a new version of The Cherry Orchard by Laura Wade, directed by Tamara Harvey.

Jaja’s African Hair Braiding

Jaja’s African Hair Braiding is written by Jocelyn Bioh and will be directed by The Stage Debut Award-winner Monique Touko. The show is produced by the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, Madison Wells Live and Chase This Productions.

Book Tickets Here

Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy

Artistic Director Lisa Spirling makes her directorial debut at Stratford East with this fierce new play by Ava Pickett (1536, Almeida Theatre, upcoming Baz Luhrmann film about Joan of Arc) which asks what happens when the woman who started a war comes home to finish it. Helen has been brought home from the decade-long war fought in her name. Her husband celebrates. Her best friend Cee does not. Confronting the reality of Helen’s homecoming, old wounds reopen, loyalties fracture, and her true plans emerge.

Book Tickets Here

Reflections

Deaf Republic at The Royal Court

What is the theatre to do when the guns drown out the poets? What voice can it raise against the clatter of artillery and the finality of the firing squad? The Irish theatremakers of Dead Centre propose a radical and audacious answer: silence. Or rather, a silence that roars. Their latest enterprise, Deaf Republic, is drawn from the poetry collection from Ilya Kaminsky and plunges us into a chimerical, snow-dusted republic, a theatrical no-man’s-land groaning under the boot of an unnamed occupier. After a deaf child is shot dead in the street for his inability to heed a soldier’s command, the townsfolk perform an act of sublime resistance. They stop up their ears. The entire citizenry adopts deafness as a uniform of solidarity, communicating through a muscular poetry of sign, a language their oppressors cannot understand.

The stagecraft, co-directed by Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, is a veritable box of tricks, puppetry mixed with circus acrobatics, the actors dangling (sometimes rather too perilously such as the preview night I went) like stranded human marionettes. Criticizing it, at times, it felt like a box ticking exercise in this decade’s theatrical technology: video streams, a mechanical drone indoors (buzzing like some inquisitive mosquito) and screens with subtitles. The best moment have us witness the domestic warmth between a poet, Alphonso, and his pregnant wife, Sonya, both in the flesh and then as miniature puppets, their apartment a fragile haven against the encroaching chaos outside. With the war in Ukraine, we begin to understand the fear when violence erupts.

At its core, the production is a polemic on the nature of communication itself. We are taught that sign language is no mere transcription of speech: it is revealed as an art form that is inherently active, poetic and irrefutable, far more expressive and theatrical at times than words, demanding that the signer inhabit the statement, embodying the verb.

And yet, for all this impressive intelligence and technical splendor, I did feel somewhat distanced and emotionally absent. While admiring the show, I struggled to really get immersed in it at all. Perhaps the heavy use of allegory itself risks alienating the audience. The bloodshed of soldiers in a brothel at the end felt symbolic, rather than real. The final, haunting tableau of bodies suspended in the air - a human chandelier - could be an image of immense aesthetic power but it felt like a card that had been already played. I cannot fault the audacity of the enterprise but I left the theatre somewhat impressed, but unmoved.

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe now

What Happened?

Now that the posters are being scraped from The Mile’s pillars we can ascertain the essential psychological contract of the Fringe. One must be simultaneously overwhelmed by abundance while haunted by the gnawing suspicion that the truly great show was the one (or two or three) you didn't see. Any clear-eyed analysis is only possible in hindsight. To be up at the Fringe is to be caught in a relentless forward momentum, a state where deep contemplation and reflection on what you’ve just seen is a luxury the schedule does not allow nor can afford. Days are atomized into 60-minute units, separated by frantic sweaty 15-minute dashes across the city. It's a conveyor belt of culture that allows for consumption but rarely for digestion. It’s an utterly mad and breathless way to commune with art. But I love it all the same.

This year, the character of that art seemed to be in flux. The festival's creative centre of gravity felt mobile, with Summerhall’s once-unshakeable theatrical dominance waning and a new challenger emerging in Francesca Moody’s Shedinburgh (not that I made it there to see a show). Alongside this geographical shift was a thematic one: a noticeable retreat from the raw, personal trauma narratives that have defined recent years, suggesting a subtle but distinct recalibration of the festival’s artistic mood. As The Stage reported, a worrying economic headwind has arrived. For the first time since the pandemic, ticket sales did not grow. This dip in revenue collides dangerously with the spiralling cost of participation (not made easier by Edinburgh council organising Oasis’ reunion gig in the second weekend of Fringe) placing the entire model under palpable stress. Yet the true currency of August in Edinburgh is the shared experiences with mates, the hurried conversations, the exchange of recommendations and spilt pints and for the performers, the creative collaborations born in the crucible of overwhelming exhaustion. It is this human infrastructure that underpins the entire mad, precarious and utterly essential enterprise.

The Comedy Award Winners

Sam Nicoresti has made history at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, becoming the first transgender comedian to win the prestigious Edinburgh comedy award for their show, Baby Doomer. The routine, which explores a mortifying incident in a retail changing room, secured the festival's top honour and a £10,000 prize. The ceremony also celebrated the rising star Ayoade Bamgboye, who won the £5,000 best newcomer prize for her show, Swings and Roundabouts.

What comedy to book now in London (based off the best of Fringe):

• Sam Nicoresti: Baby Doomer at Soho Theatre, Wed 3rd- 27th Sep (Winner of Best Show)

• Jordan Brookes’ Work In Progress at Bill Murray, 9th September

• Ayoade Bamgboye at Soho Theatre, Mon 6 – Sat 11 Oct (Winner of Best Newcomer)

• John Tothill at Soho Theatre, Mon 6 – Sat 11 Oct 25 (Nominated for Best Show)

• Ada & Bron: The Origin of Love at Soho Theatre, Mon 13 – Sat 18 Oct 25

• Lou Wall at Soho Theatre, Mon 10 – Sat 22 Nov 25

• Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! (Good Fun Time) at Soho Theatre, Mon 17 – Sat 29 Nov 25

• Tim Key at Wilton’s, 10 - 22 Nov

• Theo Mason Wood…when he announces dates

And the theatrical highlights:

Aether

Wrestling with the cosmos on a festival stage is an act of either sublime audacity or spectacular folly. Emma Howlett and her TheatreGoose company have audaciously attempted to bottle starlight, weaving a dramatic treatise from the threads of particle physics through to the forgotten histories of extraordinary women. The ambition is galactic and the result is stupendous: a work of immense intelligence and wit. The production made magnificent use of Summerhall’s anatomy lecture theatre, a natural cauldron of learning where the tiered wooden benches bear down on the performers like a tribunal. The four actresses—Sophie Kean, Abby McCann, Anna Marks Pryce and Gemma Barnett—dart through centuries with a disciplined grace, and Barnett, in particular, lends the doomed philosopher Hypatia a statuesque grief. The entire affair is polished to a high sheen. One of the best and most intelligent pieces of Fringe theatre I’ve seen. Surely a London transfer is coming…

Lost Lear

Dan Colley’s brilliant Lost Lear places the malady of dementia within Shakespeare’s storm. Here we have a thespian empress, Joy, exiled to a care home; her mind a ruined kingdom where only the line of King Lear remain pristine. Her carers are conscripted into an endless loop of Goneril, Fool and Regan, playing hapless courtiers to a monarch trapped in her own text.

Venetia Bowe gives a fine performance as Joy, a flicker of the monarch she once was, and the production is impeccably mounted. The play masterfully evoked the pathos of diminution - superbly crafted by a fantastic ensemble.

Eat The Rich

In her buzzy solo show, Eat the Rich, Jade Franks announced herself at this year’s Fringe as a formidable original voice. Directed with precision by Tatenda Shamiso, Franks recounts her journey from working-class Liverpool to the rarefied air of Cambridge with blistering, deadpan wit. The relentless humour, however, is a vehicle for a searing rage against the casual cruelty and unthinking privilege she encounters (a privilege that occasionally is dramatised into well trodden clichés). But the POV makes for a vital, and brutally funny, piece of theatre. A future star.

Ordinary Decent Criminal

Following the sustained shriek of fury that was England and Son, Mark Thomas and Ed Edwards revisit the brutal topography of the British penal system. Where their previous collaboration was a white-hot poker of a play, Ordinary Decent Criminal is a work of far cooler temperature, a collage of impressions from behind bars drawn from Edwards' own experience. The protagonist is a writer, a man of letters navigating a world of visceral threats, where his only currency is the written word. Thomas, a seasoned stage pugilist, populates this world with a vivid gallery of convicts and screws, demonstrating his chameleonic skill. Yet while the piece succeeds as an authentic document of incarceration, it falters as a piece of theatre. It lacks the propulsive, narrative engine of its predecessor, content to be a tapestry of prison life rather than a taut drama. The result is a work that, for all its undeniable authenticity and flashes of humanity, feels strangely inert. It does not conclude so much as cease, extinguishing itself in an abrupt final moment that leaves one feeling not shocked, but marooned.

And the disappointment:

Skye: A Thriller; strong performances, excellent sound design, but an OK script and strange staging decisions made Ellie Keel’s two-hander a real disappointment. Struggled to get my teeth into the narrative at all.

And back in London… Inter Alia at The National

Following the formidable, Olivier-winning success of Prima Facie, the creative team of writer Suzie Miller and director Justin Martin have reunited with Rosumund Pike at the helm of a thoroughly entertaining show. Pike plays a distinguished judge whose professional and personal lives collide when her son is accused of rape, forcing her to confront the principles she has built her life upon.

Pike is commanding and physically dynamic, animated with a kinetic, high-voltage energy, she charts her character’s descent from controlled authority to personal crisis with compelling precision. Martin’s highly stylised direction employs onstage musicians - notably a drum kit and an electric guitar - so that he creates a rock-and-roll aesthetic that frames the protagonist's initial power and subsequent unraveling in a bold, expressionistic manner.

My criticism would be that the play revisits many of the same themes as Prima Facie - namely, the intersection of law and sexual assault - but feels more like a thematic retread than a fresh examination. The direct-address narration from Pike proves to be a critical flaw as exposition overrides dramatic interaction, sidelining the male characters who feel less like fully realised individuals and more like catalysts for the next monologue. Perhaps the play has been kneecapped by Netflix’s Adolescence slightly but where Prima Facie felt urgent, this work covers familiar ground of the manosphere with a predictable trajectory that culminates in a heavy-handed denouement. Rosamund Pike is more than a compelling reason to see the show but one is left wishing her extraordinary talent were in service of a slightly more sophisticated text.

Subscribe now

• Richard Flanagan on Screen and to take to the beach

• Picks of Toronto Film Festival and Edinburgh

• After Netflix announced more details of their Pride and Prejudice revival, see below for another Jane Austen update

I fell down a wonderful rabbit hole this week, starting with a brilliant takedown of the Cannes Film Festival and ending with a history of something I hold very dear: ice-cold drinks. Tim Hayward’s piece on the now-booming premium ice trade in London is fantastic, revealing a history that’s far from mundane:

It’s basic physics that if you get a lot of ice together in one place, it will stay frozen longer. This will be true for you as you drag your cool box out for a barbecue this year: more ice, closer-packed, will chill your drinks deeper and stay frozen longer. The wealthy in places like the UK, northern Europe and North America had long been able to take advantage of the same principle, harvesting by the tonne from purpose-built shallow ice ponds in the freezing winter and then tight-packing it into insulated ice houses, usually built underground, where it would stay frozen through summer and into autumn.

It was in 1806 that a New England businessman called Frederic Tudor began building the network of ice ponds, insulated ice houses and insulated carts and railway cars that meant he could export ice commercially by boat from chilly Boston to the harbour cities of the Deep South (cradle of the Julep and Sazerac) and on as far as Havana (home of the Daiquiri). I’m not saying that plentiful ice, suddenly available in popular bars along the eastern seaboard, entirely spawned the cocktail, but it was certainly a powerful catalyst. The first mention of a cocktail as a drink appears in The Balance and Columbian Repository, published in New York . . . in 1806.

The admin before freezers was extreme.

TIFF

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is the unofficial starting pistol for awards season. It’s where the autumn’s biggest films make their debut. As usual, the roster is massive, so I’ve waded through it to bring you a cheat sheet of the absolute must-sees.

The Christophers (dir. Steven Soderbergh)

The ever-prolific Soderbergh is back, uniting two commanding talents: Michaela Coel and Sir Ian McKellen. Plot details are locked in a vault, but the combination of his slick, inventive direction with two absolute powerhouses makes this one of the most intriguing films at the festival.

Nuremberg (dir. James Vanderbilt)

Russell Crowe plays Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi on trial, sparring with Rami Malek as the army psychiatrist assigned to him. With Michael Shannon presiding as the chief prosecutor, this is poised to be a blistering, dialogue-driven drama about the psychology of pure evil.

Train Dreams (dir. Clint Bentley)

Joel Edgerton stars as a railroad labourer in the American West whose life is torn apart by distance and loss. Following their Oscar-nominated work on Sing Sing, the writers are masters of the quiet, lyrical heartbreaker. Expect this to be a dark horse favourite, a beautifully rendered period piece with the understated power of Nomadland.

The Ballad of a Small Player (dir. Edward Berger)

After the WWI trenches of All Quiet on the Western Front, director Edward Berger swaps mud for the neon-drenched, morally murky casinos of Macau. Colin Farrell stars as a high-stakes gambler on a losing streak, hiding out in the city’s shadows. Expect a stylish, atmospheric thriller anchored by Farrell at his magnetic best.

Hamnet (dir. Chloé Zhao)

Finally, the spotlight shifts from the world's most famous playwright to the woman who shaped him. Based on Maggie O'Farrell's stunning novel, this film stars the brilliant Jessie Buckley as Agnes, the fierce and intuitive wife of a young William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). A heartbreaking story of love, grief, and creativity, this promises to be one of the festival’s most profoundly moving films.

Frankenstein (dir. Guillermo del Toro)

The master of beautiful monsters finally tackles the foundational gothic horror. Guillermo del Toro has assembled a dream cast, with Oscar Isaac as the tormented Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his Creation. Expect a visually stunning and deeply empathetic retelling that asks what it truly means to be human—and to be monstrous.

Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier)

From the celebrated Norwegian director of The Worst Person in the World, this is an automatic must-see. Details are top secret, but if it’s anything like his previous work, anticipate an emotionally intelligent, witty, and achingly real exploration of modern life and love.

Richard Flan-again

Richard Flanagan, one of Australia’s greatest living novelists, is having a moment. If you're looking for your next great obsession, look no further than the adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, currently on BBC iPlayer. Starring Jacob Elordi (he is everywhere) and Ciarán Hinds as the younger and older versions of the same man, it’s a stately, compassionate and haunting look at the psychological stain of war. The timelines swirl and overlap like a river current, creating something truly special.

The inspiration for that novel is found in Flanagan’s recent Baillie Gifford prize-winning memoir, Question 7. This book has all the complexity and emotional heft of his fiction, and it's an absolute marvel.

The book looks at chain reactions in time: what connects a Japanese POW camp, H.G. Wells's love life, and the atomic bomb? Flanagan weaves these threads together in a way that will rewire your brain. His own father was a slave labourer in a Japanese mine who only survived because the US dropped the bombs. This moral calculus of war - what happened versus the infinite what-ifs is the book's beating heart. But it’s the personal moments that truly stun. Describing his grandmother’s tears of remorse, he writes:

“Tears in the old do not roll, they catch and stall in the lines and furrows of the face, spot-glossing the price paid for time.”

It’s just a reminder of what a remarkable, once-in-a-generation writer he is.

To Book

Emma at The Rose Theatre, 17 September-11 October

Jane Austen with a beat drop. From the writer of The Almeida’s hit 1536, this adaptation of the classic rom-com swaps drawing room duets for dance floor-fillers. An irresistible proposition.

Every Brilliant Thing with Lenny Henry (or Ambika Mod) @sohoplace

I saw this show at the Fringe last year and it’s an absolute gem: funny, beautiful, and profoundly moving. The story of a boy who makes a list of all the wonderful things in the world to cheer up his mother, it features a rotating cast of solo performers, including the legendary Lenny Henry.

King And Conqueror

Craving a historical epic to fill that Game of Thrones-shaped hole in your heart? This story of 1066, starring James Norton and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, looks like it might just be the brutal, kingdom-battling ticket.

Further Fringe Recommendations:

If you're heading to Edinburgh, here are a few more recommendations

• Lost Lear @ The Traverse: A staggeringly empathetic, gut-punch of a play about dementia and family, viewed through the lens of King Lear.

Book Here

• The Nature of Forgetting by Theatre Re: Simply amazing physical theatre that tells a story of memory and loss without a single word. A Christopher Stonehill favourite.

Book Here

• Pigs Fly Easy Ryan @ New Diorama: I'm just going to give you the official logline, because it says it all: “An aviation bimbofication transubstantiation ritual for big-boy audiences 18 and over… Rip off your own oxygen mask before furiously making out with the person next to you, and brace for landing.” You have been warned/enticed.

Book Here

• Julia Masli - Seen this show twice and loved it for its innovation - the less I say the better…

Book Here

• The Horse of Jenin - In a festival overflowing with noise and silliness, some stories simply demand to be heard. Based on a true story from the Freedom Theatre in Palestine, this play is a haunting and powerful look at art, resistance, and survival. Transfers to The Bush later in the year

Book Here

• Ayoade Bamgboye: Swings and Roundabouts - a hot Fringe debut, Ayoade has only three years of comedy under her belt and is a brilliant mid afternoon show.

Book Here

• Will Owen - newbie on the block. 26 year old comic tipped for great things

Book Here

• John Tothill - John’s shows are always a whirlwind of unapologetically camp, theatrical and maximalist fun.

Book Here

• Ada and Bron - a journey into a world populated by weird, wonderful, and wickedly funny characters. Expect brilliantly observed, slightly off-kilter and hopefully hilarious. Late night sketch duo.

Book Here

• Eat The Rich (by maybe not my mates) - former Cambridge Footlights president Emma Franks’ autobiographical one-woman comedy has already got a lot of buzz around it, having earned glowing reviews in The Scotsman, The Guardian and elsewhere. Look out for extra performances. Directed by rising star Tatenda Shamiso

Book Here

Thanks for reading and have a lovely time away if you’re holidaying. And please do email me any good shows at Edinburgh!

Subscribe now

As expected, Apple’s Severance was the most nominated drama at this year’s Emmys with 27 nominations, followed by limited series HBO’s The Penguin with 24 nods. The White Lotus and The Studio additionally are among the most-nominated titles, tied at 23 each. The Studio even got auteur Martin Scorsese his first Emmy nomination for a guest-starring role.

British hopeful Adolescence dominated with 13 total nods, including co-creator Jack Thorne recognized for Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie and Philip Barantini for directing.

The Best Show I’ve Seen This Year (and last year)

As keen readers will note, I never really recommend shows that are on in the West End. The seats are normally pricey and claustrophobic and you’ve normally missed out on watching the show in its original, more comfortable space. However, for Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down at Theatre Royal Haymarket I will make an exception. I have banged on about this play since it first opened at The Dorfman in January 2024 where it sold out so quickly that most couldn’t get a ticket at all. It opened again last week with an equally brilliant cast so here is your chance to book this fabulously funny and whip smart show. The writing is the perfect blend of humour, joy and pathos - I have rarely had such a visceral watching experience in a theatre. If you book one thing this summer, BOOK THIS.

Book Here

The Donmar’s new season

The Donmar Warehouse has revealed its upcoming season:

• Juniper Blood (from 16 August): The world premiere of a new play by Mike Bartlett, directed by James Macdonald. The cast, featuring Hattie Morahan and Jonathan Slinger, will explore the cost of idealism in an imperfect world. I am a little wary after watching Unicorn, Bartlett’s last show however…

• The Maids (from 13 October): Following his award-winning success with The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kip Williams makes his Donmar debut directing the world premiere of his own new translation of Jean Genet’s brilliant classic.

• When We Are Married (from 6 December): AD Tim Sheader directs a revival of J.B. Priestley’s beloved comedy, starring Siobhan Finneran, Samantha Spiro, Sophie Thompson and Marc Wootton.

Book Here

What I have Booked For Fringe So Far

Theatre:

• Paldem

• Club NVRLND

• Centre of The Universe

• Aether

• Ordinary Decent Criminals

• Consumed

• Nowhere

• Skye

• Body Count

• Florence

Comedy:

• Tim Key

• Theo Mason Wood

• Josh Glanc

• Jordan Gray

• Andrew Doherty

• Frankie Monroe

• Ahir Shah

Subscribe now

Summer Reading

Here is James Marriott’s list of Summer Reads in case you need something for the beach!

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (soon to be adapted for the Almeida stage and a favourite read of mine from lockdown - RS)
Not only incredibly readable but also plausibly the best novel of the twenty-first century. The meaningfully-named Nick Guest stays with the family of the fabulously wealthy conservative MP Gerald Fedden. Nick gets involved in a great deal of gay sex, political intrigue and high-living. Beautifully plotted, beautifully characterised and beautifully written.

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
I don’t love all Anne Tyler’s novels — there are too many of them and several are a bit twee — but this is a jewel. It’s set in one day, an elderly mid-western couple drive to a friend’s funeral. And over the course of that car journey you learn all about their past, their family their future. A lovely, melancholy and emotionally persuasive book.

The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante
Lenu and Lila are childhood friends growing up in Naples in the 1950s. Their lives take dramatically different trajectories. The book has nineteenth century scope and rattles you through Neapolitan slums, gang warfare, sixties’ universities and national politics with incredible confidence. I once read a lovely piece by (I think) Francesca Wade in which she recalls reading one of the Ferrante books at the same time as her mother who was so desperate to find out what happened next she sawed the last book in half with a bread knife so they could both read it at once.

+ The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
If you have read The Neapolitan Quartet, Ferrante’s most recent novel The Lying Life of Adults provides all the same pleasures — not quite at the same intensity but its brilliant nonetheless. I read it a couple of years ago and was suitably entranced.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Just a stunningly ambitious and absorbing book of the kind only produced in America. It follows the middle class (in American terms) Lambert family. Alfred Lambert (the father) has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease; Enid, the mother is frantically trying to keep up appearances. All the children are suffering various crises and breakdowns. Along the way you see all of life. For my money the most enjoyable of the would-be “great American novels”.

In Gratitude by Jenny Diski
This is not a novel but everybody I’ve ever recommended to has loved it. Before she died a few years ago Jenny Diski wrote a series of beautiful memoiristic pieces for the LRB about her cancer diagnosis and childhood. Those pieces form the basis of this book. The extraordinary fact of Diski’s life is that as a troubled teenager she was adopted by … the novelist Doris Lessing. Her account of how she went off the rails and her introduction to Lessing’s exciting (yet troubled) bohemian world is great. One of those books that is a little world.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
I vividly remember reading this on holiday in Portugal in my teens. I was sleeping in the kitchen of a holiday cottage on an airbed that kept deflating so I lay awake at night just racing through it, thrilled by a world of finance and combustible race relations I only half understood. I re-read it a couple of years ago and — for all that Wolfe is sometimes sneered at by critics — I think it holds up. Sherman McCoy is a bond trader and Wall Street “master of the universe” whose life falls apart after he gets involved in a hit-and-run incident in the Bronx. Just so thrilling.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
A twenty-first century Victorian novel but with sex in it. I’m perhaps somewhat less confident about this as it’s been a while since I read it. But it is on the canonical list I always send to friends and everyone who read it liked it. I suspect some will (probably justly) find the sexual politics of this book dodgy and feel (also justly) put-off by the graphic descriptions of Victorian prostitution in the early pages. But when Sugar (the prostitute heroine) snares a position as the mistress of a wealthy man, things really take off. I remember thinking that seeing the familiar sumptuous world of the Victorian upper middle class through the eyes of a modern novelist was just endlessly entertaining.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Another modern novel interestingly pretending to be a nineteenth century novel and much more of a classic (I think my dad used to teach it). Charles Smithson is torn between his wealthy and proper fiancée Ernestina and the mysterious fallen woman Sarah. There are a couple of post-modern gimmicks and eventually multiple alternative endings.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
Less “absorbing” than the other books on this list but included because I find it so pleasurable. Adam Gordon is a cynical, pretentious and not necessarily talented poet wasting time in Madrid where he is living for a year on a student grant to write a poem about the Spanish civil war. Half the enjoyment of the book is in Adam’s voice. The scenes in which he gets himself into scrapes by pretending he can speak Spanish are genuinely hilarious.

The Past by Tessa Hadley
I love Tessa Hadley. The Past is my favourite of her books. Four middle aged upper middle class siblings converge on their inherited family home with their partners and children for one last summer holiday together. It’s an absorbing story (though the plot is wrapped up a bit too neatly at the end) but the main pleasure is Hadley’s characterisation. She’s a superb observer of modern of life. Characters like Roland (the successful media academic) you suspect she could do in her sleep but she really comes into her own with the younger characters. Kasim, the bored and would-be worldly LSE student is perfectly observed. So is Molly the phone-addicted teenager. You can tell she has really paid attention to people. It makes you realise how good it must have been in the nineteenth century when you recognised all the types of people in novels.

In Marriott, I trust - and finally, here is my photo of the week. Just look at Cole’s face…

Jamie Lloyd causing a stir

It’s the theatrical talking point of the summer: in Jamie Lloyd’s daring new production of Evita, the show’s most famous song, ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’, is performed by Rachel Zegler on an actual balcony of the London Palladium. This single directorial choice serves a dual purpose with remarkable success. On one hand, it’s a brilliant marketing move. Every evening, crowds gather on Argyll Street, creating a unique piece of street theatre and generating a palpable buzz around the production. Some have criticised Lloyd for falling into a formulaic repetitiveness that he now will struggle to escape from. But to see it only as a gimmick is to miss the sharp creative intelligence at play. The decision astutely mirrors Eva Perón’s own genius for political theatre. She was a figure who understood the power of the public stage, constantly performing for a crowd to secure her influence. By placing Zegler outside among the people, Lloyd cleverly exposes the mechanics of charisma and the performative nature of power - and brings an altogether more democratic notion of theatre to London’s streets.

Ocean Wrong

I really enjoyed this review by Tom Crewe of Ocean Vuong’s latest novel - it’s literary writing at its very best (unless you are a huge Vuong fan):

To Book

Titus Andronicus at The Hampstead

After a smash-hit run at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre, Titus Andronicus transfers to Hampstead Theatre for a strictly limited London run from 5 September to 11 October. Starring Simon Russell Beale - arguably the GOAT Shakespearean actor alive. I definitely will be going.

To Watch

Too Much

The much-hyped new Lena Dunham comedy follows Jess (Megan Stalter, Hacks), an open-hearted American woman who moves to London to escape a broken heart. There, she falls for a messy indie musician called Felix, whom she meets when he’s playing a gig in a pub. Dunham co-created the series with her husband Luis Felber, and it is loosely based on their real-life romance and marriage. And it is stacked with a stupidly strong cast, who drop in seemingly for fun: Richard E Grant, Stephen Fry, Rita Wilson, Rhea Perlman, Naomi Watts, Andrew Scott. Out on Thursday

Such Brave Girls Season Two

The return of this twisted tale of two troubled sisters and their mum is yet more scary, lairy and perfectly portioned comedy. It is feral.

Reflections

Liberation at The Royal Exchange, Manchester

At last, the stage performs an act of historical restitution. Ntombizodwa Nyoni’s Liberation wrests Manchester’s 1945 Pan-African Congress from dusty obscurity, exposing the furious human drama behind the politics. Though its first act sets the scene with at times lengthy exposition, the play ignites when its titans clash. Eamonn Walker’s Padmore is flinty authority, while Pamela Nomvete’s Garvey is a veritable powerhouse. Monique Touko’s brilliant direction thrusts us into the chamber, making us witnesses to history being forged. This is not a polite historical document but a vital reckoning; a messy, necessary and shockingly immediate act of theatrical justice.

Book Tickets Here

Echo at The Royal Court

I can’t be the only one to think that the theatrical experiment of guest starring a different famous actor in a play they know nothing about is dull and failing. Nassim Soleimanpour, a playwright in exile, proffers another of these cerebral parlour games in Echo now showing at The Royal Court. He beams in by video, a disembodied oracle, while a distinguished actor - tonight, a sadly underused Daniel Kaluuya - serves as his automaton, reading a script unseen from a laptop screen. The central conceit is that of a Persian rug, its value enhanced by the tread of many feet; a metaphor for a shared experience that feels more asserted than earned. But this is theatre as vicarious autobiography, a clever sleight-of-hand mistaking absence for profundity. While fragile personal anecdotes land with some grace, the evening too often collapses into cosmic banalities, smothering us in stock-projections of the galaxy. The writer’s predicament is real, but the theatrical result feels like a fragile, high-concept exercise whose intellectual reach exceeds its dramatic grasp. I just felt sorry for Kaluuya who is far too good an actor to be awkwardly shuffling around on the stage here with very little point in his presence. Dominic West, James Corden, Milly Alcock, Nish Kumar and Juliet Stevenson should pull out while they can.

Next Edition - What to Book at The Fringe

Subscribe now

• Reviews of 1536 and The Fifth Step

• Tim Key’s new comedy out in cinemas now

• What To Book at The Almeida and RSC

The Almeida’s New Season + New Artistic Director

Award-winning theatre director Dominic Cooke (Mrs Warren’s Profession and Follies) will succeed Rupert Goold at the North London venue, joining the Almeida in 2026. His other recent credits include Medea and Good in the West End, and The Normal Heart and Follies at the National Theatre. Cooke was Artistic Director of the Royal Court from 2007 to 2013. His screen credits include the films The Courier and On Chesil Beach, and directing episodes of TV series The Hollow Crown. Goold’s last season has also been announced - see below:

• Romans

  • World premiere by award-winning writer Alice Birch (Anatomy of a Suicide; Normal People) starring Olivier Award winner Kyle Soller (The Inheritance; Andor) and directed by Sam Pritchard (all of it), former Royal Court Associate Director

• The Line of Beauty

  • Adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel by Alan Hollinghurst by Olivier nominee Jack Holden (Cruise; Kenrex) and directed by Tony Award winner Michael Grandage

• 81 (Life)

  • Second installment of the ‘Islington Trilogy’ with creative Direction by Dani Parr and Stephanie Bain and co-created by Rhianna Ilube with associate artists and over 80 community members

• Christmas Day

  • World premiere by Olivier Award winner Sam Grabiner (Boys on the Verge of Tears) reunited with James Macdonald (Infinite Life; The Children)

• American Psycho

  • Revival of Rupert Goold’s 2013 musical thriller with music by the composer of Spring Awakening

• A Doll’s House

  • Romola Garai returns to play Nora, following her Olivier-winning performance in The Years, in a new version by Anya Reiss (Becoming Elizabeth; The Seagull)

  • Directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins (The Tragedy of King Richard the Second; Ghosts)

• Under the Shadow

  • Adaptation of Babak Anvari’s BAFTA-winning horror film

  • Written by Carmen Nasr (The Maladies; The Climbers) and Directed by Nadia Latif (Fairview; Marys Seacole) starring Leila Farzad (I Hate Suzie; Kaos)

• Cleansed

  • Rare revival of Sarah Kane’s intense masterpiece, directed by Almeida Associate Director Rebecca Frecknall (A Streetcar Named Desire; Cabaret)

• Golden Boy

  • Revival of Clifford Odets’ classic American drama, directed by Olivier Award winner Sam Yates (VANYA; Magpie) starring Josh O’Connor (The Crown; Challengers)

• Desire Under the Elms

  • Directed by former Almeida Resident Director Ebenezer Bamgboye (The Lonely Londoners) and starring Zackary Momoh (Seven Seconds; Harriet)

  • Eugene O’Neill’s searing tragedy about passion and reason

RSC New Season

• Henry V with Alfred Enoch

• A new version of Cyrano de Bergerac with Olivier award-winning actor Adrian Lester making his RSC debut in the title role

• Josh Roche's two-part The Forsyte Saga

• And new musical, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

At The Other Place:

• Daniel Raggett directs Sam Heughan and Lia Williams in Macbeth

• Artist and director Whitney White’s All Is But Fantasy sheds new light on four of Shakespeare's most famous characters.

To Watch

Dept. Q on Netflix

This Scotland-based adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Danish crime novels is fantastic, rich TV and another addictive thriller developed by Scott Frank, best known for The Queen’s Gambit and Logan. It’s tense, layered and fantastically deliberate. Set in Edinburgh, Dept. Q follows Carl Morck (Matthew Goode), a sharp but rude detective who is unexpectedly put in charge of a newly formed cold case unit. A better version of Black Doves.

Salt Path

I’ve heard great things about this adaptation of Raynor Winn’s memoir about walking the South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset, with her husband, Moth. Unlike other hikers, the couple were not walking for pleasure – at least not to begin with. They had nowhere else to go after losing their farm. From theatre director Marianne Elliott, it stars two actors at the top of their game– Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs – both giving lovely, emotional, low-key performances. No poisoned pina coladas in sight.

The Ballad of Wallis Island

This comedy from James Griffiths, based on his BAFTA-winning short, I hope becomes one of the films of the summer. It tells the story of former lovers and bandmates reunited for a private island show hosted by an eccentric lottery winner, Charles (Tim Key). Key - one of my favourite comedians and Partridge regular - plays an eccentric lottery winner who lives alone on a remote island - and is note perfect in his delivery. One to watch when it inevitably starts raining one evening.

Reflections

The Fifth Step @SohoPlace

I saw David Ireland’s play first at Edinburgh last year; Ireland’s script, which gently wrongfoots you whenever it sees the opportunity, is very funny and brilliantly delivered. James (Martin Freeman)’s chummy authority is lapped up by the booze and porn-addicted Luca (Jack Lowden), in desperate need of a good father figure. But when the lad eagerly grasps at an unconventional spiritual awakening and embarks on his own path, diverting from the one James thinks he should be on, the older man’s carefully constructed bonhomie begins to crumble, revealing a darker core. Both actors are brilliant: Lowden crackles with energy and allows Luca’s vulnerability to sit close to the surface, while Freeman is utterly convincing as a man trying his best to believe his own nonsense. Get a ticket now. Ireland is a very very special writer.

1536 at The Almeida

In a muddy field in 1536, three young women’s lives are irrevocably shaped by the fall of a distant queen. The news of Anne Boleyn’s arrest for treason, carried from London by the innocent Jane (Liv Hill), is more than mere gossip for the spirited Anna (Sienna Kelly) and the pragmatic midwife Mariella (Tanya Reynolds). It signals a dangerous shift in the political climate, one that directly threatens their own freedoms.

The play’s great strength lies in its use of modern, relatable language. The conversations about sex, love and marriage feel immediate and urgent, not like dusty historical reenactments. We are drawn into the trio's friendship, their laughter echoing defiantly in a world that seeks to silence them. All three performances are strong, but it is Sienna Kelly’s magnetic Anna who forms the spine of the narrative. Her desire for a life lived on her own terms becomes a reckless provocation as the patriarchal society around her, emboldened by the Queen’s fate, begins to tighten its grip.

The male characters, initially figures of romance, reveal themselves as instruments of the very violence sanctioned by the state. What begins with flirtation and laughter on a small patch of grass culminates in a raw and intense climax, as the consequences of their defiance become brutally clear.

1536 is a sharp, intelligent play that powerfully connects the political machinations of the powerful to the everyday lives of ordinary women. It’s a tightly constructed and superbly acted piece of theatre that brings the past to life with wit and a shudder of recognition. A transfer should be inevitable.

Subscribe now

• New Season at The National announced

• Reviews of An Oak Tree, The Brightening Air and Marie and Rosetta

The New National Era

Indhu Rubasingham, the National’s new head, presents her initial programme: a substantial slate of sixteen productions, notable for nine new commissions and the significant return of a repertory system. It's a structural ambition that past reformers of the institution might well have regarded with marked interest.

The season will feature names of considerable current appeal – Paul Mescal, Nicola Coughlan, Letitia Wright, Stormzy– enlisted, one hopes, not merely for more starry screen nameyness but to engage with demanding roles that will genuinely test their talents. Artistically, the stated ambition is to cultivate a “modern mainstream”. This appears to mean a dynamic interplay between established plays - which will doubtless be re-examined through fresh adaptations and casting - and the immediate concerns of new writing. Whether this results in a truly vital fusion of the classic and contemporary or perhaps a more intellectually refined populism remains to be seen. The proof will be in the playing.

That this institution is now led by a woman, and a woman of colour, is a significant development in its history, far exceeding mere statistical interest. There is, understandably, a palpable sense of anticipation surrounding this new era, blending high expectation with keen industry curiosity. This programme is clearly intended as a statement. The pressing question now is whether this iteration of the National will indeed prove to be truly national in scope, genuinely audacious in its choices, and, ultimately, critically necessary to our cultural life.

Here’s the season broken down:

• Bacchae:

  • This new play by debut playwright Nima Taleghani will premiere on the Olivier stage in September 2025, directed by Indhu Rubasingham.

• Hamlet:

  • Robert Hastie will direct this production in the Lyttelton Theatre in autumn 2025, featuring Hiran Abeysekera in the title role.

• The Playboy of the Western World:

  • John Millington Synge’s classic will be staged in the Lyttelton, directed by Caitríona McLaughlin of the Abbey Theatre with a reunion of cast members from Derry Girl: Siobhán McSweeney, Nicola Coughlan, and Éanna Hardwicke.

• Ballet Shoes:

  • Kendall Feaver’s adaptation, directed by Katy Rudd, will return to the Olivier stage for the 2025 festive season.

• The Jungle Book:

  • A new adaptation by Anupama Chandrasekhar, directed by Indhu Rubasingham, will be presented in the Olivier for Christmas 2026.

• The Story:

  • Tracey Scott Wilson’s play will have its British premiere in the Olivier, directed by Clint Dyer. Letitia Wright will make her National Theatre debut in this production.

• Les Liaisons Dangereuses:

  • Christopher Hampton’s adaptation returns to the National Theatre in a production directed by Marianne Elliott, starring Aidan Turner and Lesley Manville,

• Cloud 9:

  • Dominic Cooke will direct Caryl Churchill’s play, marking the playwright’s return to the National Theatre for the first time since 2019.

• A Whistle in the Dark

  • Directed by Caitríona McLaughlin (Translations), in a co-production with the Abbey Theatre starring Paul Mescal

• Death of a Salesman

  • Mescal, in rep, will also take on the role of Biff, directed by Rebecca Frecknall.

• Pride (musical):

  • A musical based on the 2014 film will be presented in the Dorfman.

• The Authenticator:

  • Winsome Pinnock’s new play, directed by Miranda Cromwell, will be staged in the Dorfman and explores family history and political legacies.

• Samira:

  • Carmen Nasr will make her National Theatre debut with this play in the Dorfman, inspired by the story of a Syrian blogger and originally commissioned by Kiln Theatre.

• Man and Boy (2026):

  • Terence Rattigan’s play will be staged in the Dorfman in 2026, directed by Anthony Lau and starring Ben Daniels.

• A Punchdrunk Piece and a Stormzy Production - TBC

New Hot Fringe Venue

Fleabag and Baby Reindeer producer Francesca Moody has launched a new Edinburgh Festival Fringe venue that promises to "reimagine" the model for paying and supporting artists. A new 100-capacity venue, Shedinburgh, will debut at this August's festival, featuring exclusive one-night performances from a mix of well-known fringe acts, famous personalities and emerging talent. Confirmed performers include comedians Mark Watson and Ivo Graham, Six creators Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, and Olivier-winning actor Maimuna Memon, with the complete schedule expected later this month.

To Book

Stereophonic at Duke Of York’s Theatre until October 11th

Get ready for the arrival of a theatrical heavyweight: the most Tony Award-nominated play in history lands in the West End next week. This David Adjmi-penned drama, with a score by Arcade Fire's Will Butler and direction from Daniel Aukin, transports audiences to a late 1970s recording studio. The story centres on the turbulent dynamics of a famous five-member British-American rock band that bears a striking resemblance to Fleetwood Mac.

Book tickets here

The Weir at The Harold Pinter 12th September to 6 December

Brendan Gleeson (The Banshees of Inisherin and In Bruges) will make his West End debut in a new production of The Weir. The play's acclaimed writer, Conor McPherson will direct this work for the first time. Set in a rural Irish pub, The Weir sees local men share unsettling stories to impress a newcomer, Valerie, only for her own tale to deeply affect them all. It’s a powerful exploration of human connection and the enduring strength of storytelling.

Buy Tickets Here

Every Brilliant Thing @sohoplace 1st August - 27th September

Every Brilliant Thing will run in the West End for a limited spell at @sohoplace this summer. Written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, Every Brilliant Thing originally premiered at Paines Plough’s Roundabout at Summerhall in Edinburgh in 2014- it was on at last year’s Fringe and I loved it.

Told from the perspective of a child who begins making a list of life’s joys for their mother amid her struggles with depression, the play spans decades, showing how the list shapes their own life. A rotating cast of guest performers will lead the show across the run, including Lenny Henry (dates from 1 to 30 August), Donahoe (dates from 13 August to 1 September), Ambika Mod (dates from 2 to 26 September), and Sue Perkins (dates from 4 to 27 September).

Buy Tickets Here

Othello at Theatre Royal Haymarket

Tom Morris will direct a cast featuring David Harewood as Othello, with Toby Jones as Iago and Caitlin FitzGerald as Desdemona and will have music by PJ Harvey. Harewood returns to the role after being the first Black actor to play Othello at the National Theatre in 1997.

Buy Tickets Here

Reflections

An Oak Tree

Tim Crouch’s "An Oak Tree," an intriguing theatrical experiment now marking a double decade of performances, has taken up residence at the Young Vic. The premise is distinctive: Crouch plays a hypnotist who, in the narrative, has accidentally killed a child. Each night, he performs opposite a different actor playing the child’s father - an actor who arrives entirely unrehearsed, having never seen the script. This high-wire act has, over the years and across various countries, attracted a starry list of guest participants, from Frances McDormand to Peter Dinklage. For this London run, the guest on the night I attended was Luke Thompson, familiar to many from the popular series Bridgerton.

Its reputation suggested an eloquent meditation on the nature of theatre and the mechanisms of grief, yet An Oak Tree in practice feels disappointingly under-developed, its emotional impact curiously muted. The spartan set - red sliding doors, scattered chairs - resembles a workshop or rehearsal space more than a site of profound drama, save for a deliberately out-of-place piano stool. Crouch, as the hypnotist, sports the waistcoat of a slightly faded magician, while his guest actor wears standard rehearsal blacks, a visual pairing that feels more expedient than thematically resonant. The concept itself holds a certain intellectual allure, echoing Pirandello in its play on reality and performance. However, the production's significant weakness lies in Crouch’s script. For a piece banking on the live, unprepared spark between performers, the text often feels strangely inert, even restrictive. Repetitive dialogue induces not tension but a creeping tedium, and its occasional forays into poetic language sit awkwardly with the otherwise pedestrian tone. While simplicity can be a theatrical virtue, here it veers towards the simplistic, underestimating both the actors' improvisational capabilities and the audience's engagement.

As the guest, Luke Thompson offered a rather hesitant, diffident presence. The frisson expected from the unprepared actor confronting the material never quite materialised, his performance rarely igniting the necessary dramatic friction. One couldn't help but feel somewhat short-changed, particularly when recalling reports of other, perhaps more dynamically suited, actors who have previously tackled this unique challenge. Ultimately, An Oak Tree feels like a theatrical experiment whose time has passed.

The Brightening Air

Conor McPherson's new play, The Brightening Air, aims for some big ideas, but doesn't quite hit them. The title comes from a W.B. Yeats poem and is supposed to be about that moment "where dreams meet reality and our most important illusions fade away." That sounds pretty deep, but the play, a family drama that often goes for big laughs, doesn't really explore it fully. McPherson says he was inspired by Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, especially after he couldn't see his own version of it due to Covid. But the only thing that feels like Chekhov here is the basic setup: a family gathered in a country house. The play is set in 1980s Ireland and tries to mix magic and folklore with everyday life. But the everyday stuff – especially the arguments and fights – ends up being the main focus, often in a very funny way. Chris O’Dowd makes a welcome return to the stage, playing Dermot, a heavy-drinking, argumentative character, and he's fantastic from the moment he walks in. He really shakes things up for his quieter brother Stephen (played by Brian Gleeson, another talented member of the Gleeson family) and his blunt sister Billie (Rosie Sheehy whoI found little too histrionic).

Then there are other characters thrown in, like their blind uncle priest with some unusual ideas about God, and Dermot’s much younger girlfriend who might (or might not) be a witch. It all adds up to a comedy-drama where insults and even punches fly. There’s a hint that something magical is happening around the characters, but it never quite becomes clear. Even McPherson admits he’s not sure if he got the balance right between the folklore and the family drama. Sadly I don’t think he did but at least he tried!

Marie and Rosetta

Set against the backdrop of Mississippi in 1946, George Brant's play portrays the pioneering spirit of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer who dared to electrify the genre with her infectious rhythms and groundbreaking guitar skills. The narrative follows Rosetta's bold endeavor to recruit the gifted young quartet singer, Marie Knight, for a tour across the deeply segregated American South.

The play, in a production expertly directed by Monique Touko, unfolds within the unconventional confines of a funeral parlor. This poignant setting serves as a stark reminder of the era's harsh realities, as such establishments often provided the only available lodging for Black performers who were systematically denied accommodation in hotels under Jim Crow laws. It is here, amidst coffins and the somber atmosphere, that Rosetta and Marie hold their first rehearsal, a meeting of two powerful talents that would shape the course of music history. While Rosetta's fusion of gospel with the blues and her performances in nightclubs drew criticism from traditional churchgoers, her vision was to push boundaries and share her unique sound. The play delves into her efforts to convince the initially more reserved Marie to embrace a new, more swinging style. Ntombizodwa Ndlovu as Marie Knight and Beverley Knight as Rosetta Tharpe are a fabulous duo - their electric chemistry and stunning vocal abilities leave the audience reeling.

Subscribe now

• Reviews of Punch, Kyoto and The Habits

• More starry casts coming to the West End

• Oliver Awards 2025

A big Substack recommendation- Exeunt for guest pieces on theatre, brilliant analysis and interviews:

Exeunt

Inventive, in-depth, fierce and playful writing about theatre - now straight to your inbox. The new home for Exeunt Magazine.

Things I’ve Read this Week

• Racheal Healy writing about the Soho Theatre and its importance for talent breaking out.

• I loved Holly Williams writing about what makes a good Theatre Poster

Olivier Awards Roundup

• Giant was the big winner - John Lithgow took home the best actor prize for his performance as Dahl, Elliot Levey won best supporting actor (for playing publisher Tom Maschler) and Mark Rosenblatt received the award for best new play.

• Romola Garai achieved the unusual feat of beating herself to win the award for best actress in a supporting role. She had been nominated twice in that category, recognising her performances in Giant and The Years. The latter brought her victory. Based on Nobel prize-winner Annie Ernaux’s memoir, The Years (at the Almeida theatre originally and now in the West End) also received the best director prize, with Norwegian theatre-maker Eline Arbo becoming the sixth woman to win that award at the Oliviers.

To Book

All My Sons at The Wyndham’s Theatre

A new production from Ivo Van Hove (A View from the Bridge, A Little Life), who reunites with Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) after they did Network together at the National. Also in the cast are Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths, The Amen Corner) and Paapa Essiedu (I May Destroy You) who has just been announced as Snape in the HBO Harry Potter remake. This cast is obviously incredible and I am confident it’ll be great. It starts previews at Wyndham’s Theatre on November 14, and runs to February 7. Arthur Miller skewers the dishonest promise of the American Dream in this disturbingly prescient play.

Book Tickets Here

Born With Teeth at The Wyndham’s Theatre

Daniel Evans directs Ncuti Gatwa as Christopher Marlowe and Edward Bluemel as William Shakespeare in a thrilling imagining of the relationship between two literary icons at odds with their time. Begins in Stratford before moving to London in August

Book Tickets Here

Make It Happen at Edinburgh International Festival

Brian Cox stars in this biting satire on the Scottish banking ambition that shattered the global economy. At the helm is Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin, armed with an unshakeable belief in the wisdom of the ‘founder of modern capitalism’, Adam Smith. The once prudent RBS soars and then plummets, placing Scotland at the heart of the global financial crash of 2008. Written by everyone’s favourite ‘Wiki’ playwright, James Graham (Punch, Dear England, Best of Enemies).

Buy Tickets Here

Reflections

Kyoto at Soho Place

What sane playwright tackles the minutes of a UN 1995 climate conference? Yet Kyoto proves that sanity is overrated when theatrical dynamite is the result. Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, fresh from the necessary grit of The Jungle, have bypassed predictable piety and aimed straight for the jugular. Their masterstroke: ditching the earnest eco-warriors to unleash the devil himself – Don Pearlman, oil lobbyist extraordinaire, a creature of terrifying influence brilliantly summoned from the historical fog.

Stephen Kunken offers a finely judged performance as Pearlman. Introduced around the time of George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, this former Reagan administration lawyer finds his plans for an extended sabbatical with his wife, Shirley (Jenna Augen), interrupted by emissaries from the major oil conglomerates – the so-called ‘Seven Sisters’. Their warning of an impending environmentalist challenge to their industry initially meets Pearlman’s scepticism. Yet, his attendance at the soporific climate conferences of the late 1980s convinces him of the threat’s reality, and crucially, of his own capacity to counteract it.

The play lifts the lid off the squalid process of global agreement, revealing the grubby compromises beneath the polished rhetoric. If the style owes a debt to James Graham’s recently popular histories, it pays it back with interest, crackling with its own urgent energy. Does Pearlman occasionally seem less a man than a snarling embodiment of obstruction and oil greed? Perhaps. Is the final sentimental glance at his domestic life a bit of a clichéd misstep? Almost certainly – but it’s a rare failure of nerve in a play that otherwise stares unflinchingly at the mechanisms of power. Wordy but worth it if conferences are your thing.

The Habits at The Hampstead Theatre

Jack Bradfield’s The Habits grasps the nettle of fantasy make-believe, plunging us headfirst into a Dungeons & Dragons marathon in a Bromley backwater café – a crucible cunningly disguised as escapism. Adolescent Dungeon Master Jess (Ruby Stokes, who is magnificent) wields her dead brother’s cryptic notebook like a map, desperate to keep the game – and his ghost – alive indefinitely. She marshals a wizard and warrior princess against the Nightmare King. But the real world knocks, hard: café owner Dennis (Paul Thornley), scarred by his own gaming past, wants out, wants to sell up, egged on by his pragmatic police officer partner (Debra Baker). It’s a battle, then: Jess’s compulsive fantasy clinging to life versus Dennis’s urgent need to exorcise his own ghosts and flee.

Jack Bradfield’s often fiercely funny script grapples with this, alive to fantasy’s solace and its narcotic danger. The dice roll, the goblins gibber, but the true drama sparks between these exposed souls. Stokes is the raw, compelling centre – adolescent grief channelled into ferocious control. Ed Madden directs with whip-crack energy on a simple set, proving acting itself is the ultimate game.It’s rare that we feel starved of action after 90 minutes - just as we lean in, intrigued by nascent romances or sharp political barbs, the lights fade for the curtain call. We glimpse fascinating territories in the supporting characters, only to have the map snatched away. It’s funny, fiercely felt and asks biting questions about the shelters we build against sorrow. It leaves you buzzing, imagining not just other lives, but a longer, richer, braver version. A great piece of studio theatre.

Punch at The Young Vic

James Graham, who has already been mentioned three times in this newsletter, swaps Parliament for the punch-drunk provinces. Punch, moving soon to the Apollo in the West End, arrives in London freighted with the true, grim tale of Jacob Dunne. It depicts a world defined by youthful swagger and recreational violence, where a single, fatal blow shatters lives in Nottingham. David Shields lends Jacob an apt, angsty animation, driven by Adam Penton’s propulsive staging. But Graham, eschewing cheap sensation, steers towards the harder terrain of restorative justice – the devastating encounter between Dunne and his victim's parents. Here lies the play's noble intent - and its slight dramatic shortfall. While commendably empathetic, refusing to aggrandise its protagonist, the piece occasionally drifts towards the overly didactic. One might wish for less literal transcription of feeling - and how to feel - and instead a touch more theatrical invention. Yet, its power resides in charting genuine transformation that makes up the rarest of dramatic virtues. A serious, moving, if sometimes overly explicit, reckoning with violence and the difficult grace of forgiveness.

Subscribe now