There are two main reasons to revive classics. The first is that they are really good; the second is that they have something to say about how the world is changing, perhaps more accurately, how our perception of it is changing. Both are true of Annie Kershaw’s slick, sexy, shocking production of Martin Crimp's translation, up close and personal, at the Jermyn Street Theatre.Even if you haven’t seen the play (and, with productions as frequent as they have been, many buying tickets for this sold out run will have) the set-up is familiar. Two maids, resentful of their unpredictable and needy Read more ...

Maybe it was the timing, even though most of the action takes place in bright sunlight, that made The Split’s two-parter uncharacteristically soft-centred. This was a Christmas-but-filmed-last-summer special, often a guarantee of a mushy mash-up. And indeed, it was as if writer Abi Morgan had started channelling Richard Curtis. The opening scene was Four Weddings by way of Mamma Mia!, as the tribe of Defoe women, led by divorced Hannah (Nicola Walker) and accompanied by her ex-husband Nathan (Stephen Mangan, pictured below, with Annabel Scholey) though not his new wife, descended on Read more ...

Broadway shows sometimes hit the West End like, well, like a comet, burning brightly but briefly (Spring Awakening, for example), while others settle into orbit illuminating Shaftesbury Avenue with a neon blaze every night for years.So it might be a wise decision to install Dave Malloy’s much-awarded, 2016 musical, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, in the bijou Donmar Warehouse – fortunately, it’s a gem of a show.“It’s not exactly War and Peace!” was a meme before there were memes, said of anything that was a little too facile to satisfy, the slabby novel a shorthand reference Read more ...

Growing up within a few hundred yards of a major dock, I hardly knew darkness or quiet – the first time I properly felt their terrible beauty was on the Isle of Man ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, its voids still vivid half a century on. Only a couple of years or so later, I was alone (friends must have left early) and had miscalculated the time required to walk back from the sandhills of Freshfield Beach to the railway station, 20 minutes or so away. Within the briefest of windows, the familiar woods – friendly with the smell of pine and the cuddly toy-like red squirrels Read more ...

Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a loner, too intense to huddle with the geeks, too stubborn to avoid the fights with the jocks, and his mother won’t tell him anything about his absent father. Who turns out to be a Greek god. Could happen to any kid. It’s that blend of familiar anxieties and fantastical backstory that propelled Rick Riordan’s bedtime stories into novels, films, Read more ...

"All’s well that ends well". Sounds like the kind of phrase a guilty parent says to a disappointed child after they’ve been caught in a white lie and bought them a bag of sweets to smooth things over. It’s a saying that betokens bad behaviour, a need to sweep things under the carpet, portending a fresh start. There’s an edge of power in it too, implying that the speaker can now define their interlocutor’s feelings. In short, it’s ugly.So too is the play of the same name, a soi disant "problem play", Shakespeare at his more mean-spirited, sometimes giving the impression of indulging in a bit Read more ...

Mac is in prison for a long stretch. He is calm, contemplative almost, understands how to do his time and has only one rule – nobody, cellmate or guard, can touch the photo of his daughter, then three years old, attached to his wall. Though he is a man who gets through the days with few problems, he solves them through violence. On his release, his only wish is to find the daughter who will have forgotten him. Scratch (spiritual sister of Maxine in the playwright's 2022 monologue, Wolf Cub) is a wild child. With no mother (we soon guess why) and a father inside, she grows up in care Read more ...

It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs dry up. When it comes to humour, as is the case with mothers, it’s each to their own.It’s an unusual production right from the off when the playwright, who is also a main character, is also acting himself too – but not entirely, as there’s a pre-teen and post-teen version of him too, played by different actors. Got all that? When you add his Read more ...

The misadventures and misbehaviours of the English upper-middle class is catnip for TV executives. All those posh types on which us hoi polloi can sit in delicious self-righteous judgement, as we marvel at their cut glass accents, well-tailored clothes and ostentatious wealth. Meanwhile their worlds are always collapsing due to villainy, venality or misconceived virtue. Lovely stuff! While such tales are seldom far from a screen, they are often far from a stage, the challenge of scaling down just too intimidating for most adaptors. Not so Shaun McKenna and Lion Couglan who took on the Read more ...

Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.We open on the Booth family kids rehearsing Julius Caesar (a motif that runs through the play) with John Wilkes Booth already displaying narcissistic tendencies in kids’ squabbles. That changes when their father, a successful British-born actor with a murky past, returns from touring to dominate the space, physical and mental. It’s easy to spot the damage done to Wilkes and one’s Read more ...

There’s a moment in writer/co-director, Jonathan Brown’s, gritty new play, Knife on the Table, that justifies its run almost on its own. Flint, a decent kid going astray, is "invited" to prove he’s ready for the next step in his drug-dealing career by stabbing Bragg, another "soldier", who has become more trouble than he’s worth.I immediately thought of The Godfather and the iconic, seductive, even beautiful language in which this rite of passage is labelled "making your bones". So much gangster culture is framed by the script, cinematography and charismatic acting of Francis Ford Read more ...

Merchant bankers then eh? It’s not a slang term of abuse for nothing, as the middlemen collecting the crumbs off the cake (in Sherman McCoy’’s analogy from The Bonfire of the Vanities) have a reputation for living high on the hog off the ideas and industry of others. They’re the typess who might work as a subject for a cynical musical, but in a straight drama?Stefano Massini's play, adapted by Ben Power, never quite loses that vacuum at its centre, as it tells the story of The American Dream for the umpteenth time, sidestepping some inconvenient truths (also for the umpteenth time), while Read more ...