A leftfield, Tony-winning phenomenon on Broadway, Cole Escola’s comedy comes to London very much living up to the hype. This is a gloriously eccentric, rude, riotous marvel – laugh-out loud and daft as a brush.
While many regard the current White House as a mad house, Escola’s naughty revisionism goes back in time to debunk one of the country’s most genuinely revered presidents. But the chief focus of this breezy 80-minute play is the first lady, Mary Todd Lincoln.
In a warehouse, Tube trains rumbling below, Noah, his sister Tamara and his (Gentile) girlfriend Maud, live in a disused space, a North London simulacrum of a kibbutz, but with drug dealers at the door, unhinged co-tenants wandering in and out and a Christmas tree in the corner.
If your heart sinks every time a Shakespeare funny-man enters, here comes the RSC to put an unforced grin on your face. Its latest Feste is the real deal: an emcee with true comedic chops, abetted by a rising-star director who understands exactly how to exploit the innate comedy of both the play and its most anarchic spirit.
With teasing timing, the latest revival of a Tom Stoppard play at the Hampstead Theatre arrived just hours after his funeral, a weird echo of his maxim, “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” As at its debut in 1995, Indian Ink features a luminous Felicity Kendal, but this time not as perky young poet Flora but in the role of her older sister Eleanor, 65 years on,
Bat away your lurgy, stop that coffin’ and get up to Finsbury Park for a laugh laden, ballad blitzing, sensational spoof starring the toothsome Transylvanian. If that sentence is boiling your blood with its rich vein of bad humour, you’ll be spitting bile in the house; if not, you’ll be so relaxed at the end of the evening, you shan’t be needing your statins before bedtime.
Wonder is a word that is used too often in theatre, somewhat emptied of meaning by marketing’s emasculating of language. It’s used even less honestly by critics - we’ve seen too much to really feel wonder. But, for the first time since seeing the RSC’s magnificent My Neighbour Totoro, I’m here to tell you I was as wide-eyed as the Sophies sitting transfixed in my row as this lovely show unfolded before us.
Ask many a boomer about their scariest childhood memory, and they may very well cite the extraordinary 1957 East German production, The Singing Ringing Tree, shown regularly on the BBC before, one presumes, an adult saw it and thought, “Uh oh…” It was a kind of anti-Disney (well, the saccharine commercialised studio that emerged after World War II at any rate) that pitched us kids into a Mitteleuropa world of magical threat and fractured families, the grotesque far outweighing the fair in the narrative.
The National Theatre has a long record of starry revivals so this version of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, with a cast led by Nicola Coughlan (yes, from Derry Girls and Bridgerton), quickens the heartbeats of anticipation, although audience reaction won’t be anything like that of the play’s 1907 premiere.
That young person sitting next to you on the bus, earbuds wedged in, an enigmatic, Mona Lisa-ish smile on their face - are they listening to a podcast? If so, is it one of many, many such concerning True Crime, a genre that has moved out of the WH Smith’s magazine shelf with the National Enquirer and the large print section of the library, and into a much more youthful market in the 2020s? Chances are that it is.
As reports come in of theatre audiences behaving badly, slumped drunkenly in the aisles, gorging on noisy food and wrestling with their latest smartphones, it’s refreshing to see that kind of behaviour safely onstage, and played for big laughs. Surprisingly, perhaps, this mayhem comes courtesy of Noel Coward.