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PRIDE

WHO could resist the musical Pride? 

It is perhaps the best new British musical since Standing At The Sky’s Edge (sorry, Paddington).

Before discussing its enduring merits, however, we should face the possibility that younger audiences might need reminding just how big a deal Pride was. 

People from all walks of life, many of whom had been treated harshly by their family, employers and community because of their sexuality. In this moment they could be themselves and feel united with people who had gone through similar experiences

Everything on stage is valuable, even when the action seems thin. For me it’s both a celebration and a protest. 

There’s wit and heart galore in Stephen Beresford’s very shrewd, sweetly charming script – one he has adapted for the stage – teaming with composers Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde, under Matthew Warchus’s direction. Where the 2014 film played it restrained, this version goes full throttle: louder, brasher, unapologetically sentimental.

Anyway: the plot. 1984, Mark launches Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, insisting his community and the striking Welsh miners face the same enemy. What starts as an uneasy pact between London activists and the pit village of Onllwyn blossoms into genuine kinship, forged under Thatcher’s boot.

Bunny Christie’s scaffold set is the real workhorse—morphing in seconds from protest rally to nightclub to a bleak doctor’s waiting room, keeping the pace electric. Five narrators steer the story, tossing in cheeky asides to the audience, and the show doesn’t flinch from the grim stuff: slurs, family rejection, the AIDS crisis all land with real weight alongside the razzle-dazzle. A true expression of this instant hit.

Certainly, the score is the show’s ace card—no lazy ‘80s pastiche here, but a genuine mashup of Welsh choral swells, disco strut and rock-fuelled ballads, sometimes colliding within a single song. Willowy Samuel Barnett’s Jonathan steals scenes outright: a cabaret-flavoured number about his HIV diagnosis swerves from quip to gut-punch, and he later tears up a working men’s club with a blistering disco solo. 

There is scarcely a false touch. The book tricks you with tropes, then twists out of shape.

Lewis Cornay’s Bromley carries the coming-of-age thread, his fumbling self-doubt exploding into a brash, hilarious coming-out anthem. On the Welsh side, Darren Lawrence brings understated grit as union boss Cliff, while Kirsty Malpass, Gillian Elisa and Sarah Pugh give the women serious bite (especially during a riotous Soho jaunt).

Lizzi Gee’s choreography and the cast’s easy chemistry sell the slow-building camaraderie between the two camps, and the production knows exactly when to wink at its own soppiness without ever deflating it. Crucially, it never dodges the wreckage; grief and loss get just as much stage time as triumph, which is precisely why the hope hits so hard. Act two is genuinely moving. 

The show’s core message, finding common ground across difference—lands with fresh sting, given the current backlash against queer rights. It’s a maximalist, no-holds-barred retelling: bolder, funnier and rowdier than its cinematic parent, but the raw honesty beneath the glitter is what earns every tear and every laugh.

A very pleasurable surprise. Just one word of advice: take tissues.

Pride runs at National Theatre until until 12 September before transferring to Bridge Theatre from 12 November

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Sweeney Todd

NOT for nothing did Stephen Sondheim once say: “I wanted to write a musical like a horror movie. I wanted to scare people.” 

With the tasty pairing of Ramin Karimloo and Meow Meow leading an acting company of 11 and a band of 7, this staging is anything but cautious. And what a cast.

Cautious as I am about superlatives, I think the term “one-of-a-kind masterpiece” must be applied to Sweeney Todd. This Birmingham Rep production is a knockout. 

In a world where climate and energy shocks drive a relentless cost of living crisis — where people skip meals, children go hungry, and diet-related illness runs rampant — the suggestion is that there is something completely insane about a society where the gap between rich and poor is so great.

Anyway. The plot: a skilled barber with a grudge returns to Victorian London to seek his revenge on the judge who wrongly convicted him. Karimloo is a melancholy Sweeney Todd “the demon barber of Fleet Street” whose menace is growing. He is our quiet beefcake ‘Mr T’ who transforms into a mass murderer. 

“And no wonder with the price of meat what it is.”

Mrs Lovett is an amoral loner too — desperate enough for love that she becomes an accomplice to cannibalism. Meow Meow – baker of the ‘worst pies in town’ – is perfect in the grasping role: we laugh as she’s overtaken by her love of profit and her lust for Sweeney. 

She is never funnier or more disconcertingly lovable than during ‘A Little Priest’, that ingenious hymn to the delights of cannibalism. 

There is some great singing and some terrific performances too: Shem Omari James is a lyrical sailor, Jo Stephenson is Sweeney’s imprisoned daughter, David Bedella a oily judge, and Julius D’Silva his sadistic henchman — all first rate. Leo Munby’s musical direction and Kelsh Buckham-Drage’s sound design ensure every word is audible.

By Act 2 blood lust spirals out of control with appalling consequences as Sondheim’s rasping and jittery music winds its way into urban anxiety, it has an unusual integrity of vision. Wow. 

“Inconspicuous Sweeney was, Quick and quiet and clean ‘e was.”

Tinovimbanashe Sibanda’s expressionist movement direction is a shrewd corruption of everyday movement. It’s a brilliantly delivered, vivid, sometimes frightening staging of this penny-dreadful murder story. 

Whichever way you slice it – Joe Murphy’s nearly three-hour unfussy production uses the vast Rep stage imaginatively, lit so the main characters seem to appear in shafts of the animated staging and Rory Beaton’s lighting as if from heaven, or vanish into the furnaces of hell. The result is quietly lethal. 

All in all, the show is a hit (Sir Matthew Bourne was sat behind me) and is selling out. 

This is unmissable.

Sweeney Todd runs at Birmingham Rep until 15 August

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End of the Rainbow

She’s drunk, scheming and downright hilarious. 

Jinkx Monsoon’s superbly vulgar star turn as Judy Garland in the last raddled months of her life is blackly comic.

The action is set in 1968, the year of Garland’s death. Garland on the comeback trail once again: “It’s a terrible thing,” says the heroine, “to know what you’re capable of and never get there.” 

Her greatest role, in an otherwise mediocre play, directed by Rupert Hands.

The camp action is mostly set on a staircase, in a suite at the Ritz, designed in flamboyant style by Jasmine Swan. What follows is a picture of the struggle and the wretched diva’s sympathetic gay pianist to get her through the season.

Judy is bookended by two men who embody her destruction and her salvation: her fifth husband Mickey (Jacob Dudman), a controlling enabler who feeds her addiction with one hand and tightens his grip with the other, and her devoted pianist Anthony (Adam Filipe), a quietly gay man who credits her with saving his life and repays the debt with unwavering tenderness. One might expect the latter to bring the best out in Garland, but the piece is too pettily contrived, and the craftsmanship is right on the surface. 

Alas, this lack of storyline means it’s heavily reliant on the soundtrack, showbusiness, and star quality and indeed is so ­consumed by the lack of those ingredients in the wider cast that the show often loses grip of its own continuity.

But it does bring me on to the quality of the acting, which varies wildly in End of the Rainbow. 

For, on the one hand, you’ve got luminously loony Monsoon, who is really good.

While on the other you have blandly dull Dudman and Filipe, who spend the duration struggling to suppress their frustrations with nightmare Garland. It’s is hard to tell, because their vacant stares are so prolonged and unnerving.

Have you ever lived with an alcoholic? It is hell on earth.

This bittersweet 2005 play sugarcoats that sadness. Tweaked out after decades of drug addiction and alcoholism, broke and haunted by past trauma, she is forced to go to London for five weeks of performances at the London Palladium in a bid to earn enough money to help her reunite with her two younger children.

Sensibly enough, Prema Mehta’s exquisitely styled lighting transforms the Soho Walthamstow Theatre auditorium in an instant — hotel room one moment, cabaret stage the next, flooded with colour and heat. 

Anyway. Monsoon shares the scatterbrained cultural icon’s vibrato, in capital letters, and she’s a keen mimic. And overall, Hands directs this three-hander with a bang; Nick Barstow’s big-band arrangements make it impossible to look away.

Monsoon has talked at great lengths about sobriety. (In the 2022 series, Monsoon won Drag Race’s “Snatch Game” round with impersonations of Garland) That’s probably why the actor, who has herself been sober from alcohol for around seven years, suits the part so well. And may also explain why she is the glue that holds the whole thing together. 

I was bored for most of End of the Rainbow. Why? Well, it’s not even a proper drama, for starters. The whole thing seems to exist in a frame of reference that rules out authentic feeling. Whether this mixed-up production and its star were offering homage, pastiche, or tribute to Garland, I left none the wiser. That is a problem. 

“I gave them everything,” she says wearily of her audience. “There’s nothing left.” 

It’s more exhausting than entertaining.

‘End of the Rainbow’ is on at Soho Theatre Walthamstow until 21 June

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Summerfolk

WHAT makes Robert Hastie’s productions different from other theatre directors is an extraordinary combination of visual richness and visual freedom. His shows just seem to flow. Summerfolk is stunning. 

It is the height of summer, and the well-off are well ensconced in their dachas doing very little. They walk. They write bad poetry. They complain.

Maxim Gorky’s 1904 satire of Russia’s holidaying middle classes — that unfamiliar layer between the landed aristocracy and the peasantry, people who’ve grappled their way up to wealth and promptly lost their nerve — fills the vast Olivier stage to the brim with people not having a good time, and telling us about it at considerable length.

It’s an ensemble evening, all drifting into a 20th century about which the only thing they know is that it is not going to live up to any of their private or public hopes.

“I want to live” is the repeated refrain of these restless, self-deceiving characters. It is also, one suspects, their problem.

Robert Hastie steers an ensemble of two dozen magnificently, and the acting is uniformly terrific. Paul Ready’s Sergei is infuriating and odious, all gravelly voice and grating laugh. Doon Mackichan’s Kaleria is a hilariously pitiable woo-woo figure with a penchant for cringey poetry.

Sophie Rundle’s Varvara perfectly strikes the balance between aloofness and likability. Best of all is Alex Lawther, whose Vlass is sharp, anguished and deeply funny: a comic performance of real precision.

Gorky’s script has been given an idiosyncratic, often coarse updating by siblings Nina and Moses Raine that will divide audiences (quite a lot of people left at the interval) but which I found entertaining. Peter McKintosh’s design and Paul Pyant’s half-gloom blue-green lighting conjur moods and subtle action with quiet authority.

Nipping at the edges of this charmed circle are the poor: beggars shooed away, servants barely acknowledged, a woman frantically searching for a missing child. The world, we sense, is quietly breaking apart.

Yet the evening remains fascinating rather than forceful. With 18 named characters, it is hard to care deeply about any of them for long. Once you’ve established who loves and who despises whom, dacha life proves stubbornly circular. Characters repeat themselves — “I’m so unhappy”; “This picnic is boring. Like life.” — and the play occasionally earns the same verdict. 

One character delivers a withering notice of The Cherry Orchard: “Went on too long. Didn’t like it.” Summerfolk goes on a tiny bit too long as well. It is, though, considerably more likeable than that. A sumptuous and emotionally charged experience.

There are a few minor imperfections: I could have done without superficial nod to female solidarity – it disrupts the tone and its simplifications put the past in an artificial perspective. On the other hand, it serves as an incredible reminder of how far we’ve come. Class is in the air. 

To me, this adaption is a fine piece of craftsmanship — every detail in place, nothing wasted. But it neither rouses nor amuses. It’s a class fable that knows exactly how close it stands to camp, and holds its laconic distance like someone gripping a ledge.

Anyhow. What unsettles me is not the rare, striking adaptations and revisionism — the ones that make us genuinely care about the characters and what befell them (Vanya, Yerma, 1536) — but the indifference of so many. The politics are in the original piece. 

Summerfolk is on at the National Theatre until 29 April

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American Psycho

LATE to the party, as always. It’s taken a flurry of gushing reviews to make me realise that something curious has been going on at the Almeida Theatre in Islington.

It’s a blood-soaked electro-pop musical called American Psycho, and the phrase “murderously bad” could have been invented for this show.

You could call it “so bad it’s good”, but that would massively underestimate the scale of what’s happening here: it reflects the vacancy it criticises, and the cleverness is unpleasant.
And it is all surface and whacking emphasis. I have nothing really to say about Lynn Page’s feeble choreography.

This production isn’t afraid of being silly (which is its chief charm) and I thought the violence was managed half well – in some ways some of the jokes are funny.

Emptiness is a recurring theme – is murder a defence against death? I’m interested in how exact it could be – I saw a character of sculpted blankness that was interesting- but very sleekly charming; we see his fragility break down.

The central part is played, repellently, by rising star Arty Froushan, whose convincing performance (this is a demanding role – but his singing voice is variable) is at once eerily disturbing and edgily comic, bringing ultimate narcissist Patrick Bateman chillingly to life.

The kind thing to say would be that American Psycho – first staged here in 2013 – belongs to a long tradition of messy, risk-taking pieces that feel less like coherent productions than a bold miscellany in search of an editor. (See: Tammy Faye.)

In fact, director Goold has a visual sense of menace, but he isn’t very gifted with musical theatre actors, and he doesn’t seem to have any feeling at all for motivation or for plot logic. It urgently needs to be cut back to a manageable 2 hours.

Nonetheless, this timely revival also marks the end of an era at the Almeida and the close of Rupert Goold’s 13-year tenure: 72 productions, 14 transfers to the West End (11 of them to New York), and an extraordinary haul of 21 Olivier Awards — a remarkable achievement.

Anyhow. The plot? Wall Street yuppie Bateman, who, between raking in money and dining at exclusive restaurants, secretly indulges a brutal compulsion to murder, on a sleek monochrome set by Es Devlin (it’s different to the previous iteration).
Or does he?

In truth, Goold’s deadpan and expensive production is so epically, wonderfully, galactically awful at times that it somehow becomes brilliant. In fact, it’s absolute drilled havoc. Laughs will only come accidentally.
Ugh. At one point, a character announces: “Maybe this schism is just a symptom of late capitalism.”

One of the show’s best-worst songs rhymes ironically with Manolo Blahnik. Elsewhere, Les Miserablès is ridiculously rhymed with The Phantom of the Opera. ‘Crème de menthe’ with ‘Oscar de la Renta’.

And chiming “story” with “memento mori”.
You get the picture, I trust.
Meanwhile, the all-singing, all-dancing ensemble rounds off every third or fourth neon scene with Eighties pop numbers — In the Air Tonight, Don’t You Want Me — that have absolutely nothing to do with anything that has happened in the previous hour.

And if you leave your preconceptions at the door, you might just love it. It’s a fable – it’s a warning. Yet it twists in and out of working. There’s a porn movie soundtrack constantly throbbing around in the background and the second half drags like hell.

It does, though, get some spiky dynamics right. Underneath the mask of sanity is the psychopathy.

Yet with each passing decade, American Psycho seems to become more resonant — and Bateman more in step with the nutty times.
Of course, Donald Trump is Bateman’s hero and even makes a brief appearance. The joke does wear thin and that’s a bit of a sadness for theatre. It is all a bit odd and jolts you in the sheer futility of sitting among polite, well-dressed people in a theatre while the carnage still rages outside.

If nothing else, American Psycho cuts to the quick and is a sharp reminder that The Old Vic’s next artistic director made the Almeida zing – an exceptionally effective curator of gloriously, striking and freewheeling theatre. Take a bow.

American Psycho Runs until 14 March.

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Good Night, Oscar

AN internet acquaintance constantly criticises me. He tells me off for name-dropping, being crass, and making jokes.

I ignore him and think he should lighten up. Ultimately, we’re from very different generations.

Anyway, comedy serves as a pressure valve, providing a brief escape from the daily challenges and existential dread that we face.

“Strip away the phoney tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath,” piano virtuoso Oscar Levant says, eviscerating the industry that made him.

Back in 1958, Levant left a psychiatric ward to appear on live television. That’s not strictly what happens in Good Night, Oscar, but no matter. This is showbiz, not a Wikipedia page. And like its subject, the play takes liberties. It riffs, it improvises, it collapses timelines for effect.

But it always lands on something emotionally and theatrically true — a kind of cracked honesty that Levant himself would appreciate.

Sean Hayes, best known as Jack from Will & Grace, commands the stage. His cigarettes clenched between frantic fingers. This isn’t some twee impersonation. It’s a full role, writhing, full-body possession.

Hayes gives a physical performance that flirts with caricature but never crosses the line. You can’t look away. He times Levant’s lacerating bon mots with the precision of a jazz soloist — arch, caustic, and funny. Some of the zingers are greatest hits (“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity — I have erased this line”) and yes, the Marilyn Monroe gag gets another outing. But Hayes makes them feel like thoughts being formed in the moment, not recited. Tensions on and off-air.

Beneath the mid-century retro gloss — the chic furnishings, the immaculate suits (Emilio Sosa nails it) — Good Night, Oscar is asking: what do we do with people like Levant? Those too brilliant, too broken, too unpredictable to play nice? Then and now.

Playwright Doug Wright doesn’t offer easy answers. Nor does director Lisa Peterson, who keeps the pace snappy but makes room for devastating stillness. The story takes place in real time: one hour before Levant’s segment on Jack Paar’s NBC talk show, now relocated from New York to Hollywood. Paar (Ben Rappaport, gleefully exasperated) is excited; the network is not. Levant, after all, might say anything — about God, politics, Freud, or himself. That’s the thrill. And the danger. And the show.

Part of the evening’s success, admittedly, lies in co-star Rosalie Craig as wife June, Levant’s elegant, granite-hearted companion who had him committed. Here, she has swung a four-hour psychiatric day pass so that her husband can perform — and, perhaps, remind himself who he is.

June is loving, exasperated, enigmatic. You sense a lifetime of rehearsed negotiations behind every line. She knows this might destroy him, but what else is there? He needs an audience. Maybe we all do.

Anyway. Hypochondriac Levant’s actual demons are never made clinical. He doesn’t arrive with a diagnosis. He just talks. Endlessly. Brilliantly. Self-loathingly. He obsesses over his mother, over his stalled music career, over Gershwin — George Gershwin — who literally appears to him (a suave David Burnett), or rather Oscar’s heightened, unreliable memory of the composer. They talk. They argue. He haunts Oscar, inspires him, possibly ruins him.

Rachel Hauck’s lavish set slyly collapses the border between the dressing room and the sound stage. In the end, it is a padded cell — as if entertainment itself might be the asylum.

We move to a vast studio where bulky cameras observe the actors from every angle. The line between performance and breakdown gets blurrier as Levant hurtles toward his moment.

The real payoff comes in the classy production’s final act, when we finally get to see classically trained Haye’s seven-minute performance of Rhapsody in Blue at a Steinway — it lands like a majestic and jagged thunderclap. He plays live.

It’s not just a flourish. It’s a revelation.

Some of this is schematic — the structure creaks a little under the weight of its ideas. Its message is one of music as an instrument of survival: but it’s damn good theatre. Be more Oscar.

Comedy has become impossible. Good Night, Oscar is a theatrical, tender-hearted success.

At the Barbican Theatre, London, until 21 September

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Inter Alia

What would this evening be like without Rosamund Pike? Even if the dialogue and direction were the same, the meanings wouldn’t be. Pike dramatises herself seriously as posh mum judge. 

Pike blazes as tough-minded Jessica, a crown court judge who has fought her way up through the old boys’ club only to find the patriarchy lurking in her own kitchen.

She opens the play rising from the floor like a rock star — literally: her husband and son bash out drums and guitar as she takes the mic and eviscerates a sexist barrister. This musical element doesn’t really work for me. 

But it is an electrifying start — Miller’s feminism delivered with a rock’n’roll snarl.

“You’re not the judge of me!” Harry yells at his mum. It’s the kind of petulant teenage barb thrown across kitchen tables everywhere. 

And in Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia, the line lands with a thud. Because Jessica is a judge — and as her home life bleeds into her courtroom, the charge sticks in ways that chill.

Miller’s crisp play is narrated from Jessica’s perspective. This is her first major play since Prima Facie, her legal juggernaut that made Jodie Comer a Tony Award winning stage sensation.

Anyway: The same team returns — director Justin Martin, designer Miriam Buether — and so does the anger. Once again, the legal system is in the dock, this time alongside a family dinner table that might as well be an active crime scene.

But this is no easy empowerment anthem. Jessica is also a wife juggling Tesco orders, a mother fretting over her sweet, bullied son. And then comes the horror: a sexual assault allegation at Harry’s school, the accused being Harry himself. Miller’s question: what happens when the system you defend your whole life suddenly turns on your own child?

This is not a subtle play. It’s also not trying to be. Miriam Buether’s pistachio-hued family home splits apart and reconfigures into a courtroom, a robing room, a nightmarish fairytale forest. Puppets, illusions and child actors flicker through Jessica’s mind as she tries, desperately, to hold on to the story she wants to believe.

Pike is on stage the whole time, and she’s terrific — bracingly funny, unbearably raw, equally convincing in karaoke kickback or stony put-down. She multitasks in Marigolds and wig, party frock and robe, laying bare the cost of being both public moral authority and mum.

The play’s limitation is also its trick: we’re trapped inside Jessica’s spinning head. That means the men are mostly sketched too thinly. Husband Michael (Jamie Glover) is decent but dim, a dad in a nice jumper who wants to keep the peace.

Will she use her knowledge of the system’s flaws to help son 18 year old Harry? Harry (Jasper Talbot) is basically good — just desperate to fit in, lost online like every Gen Z kid; they could be any family. Their problem is they often feel like ciphers. 

It is true that the polemic keeps pushing through as the part-flashbacked family relationships are unravelled.

But Miller’s rage gives the piece its power. She isn’t just angry at a legal system rigged against victims — she’s horrified by a society that keeps breeding boys like Harry. 

The 100 minute production lurches from courtroom to kitchen sink to haunted woods, the real monster never quite named but always there: a culture of violence, hardcore porn, and casual misogyny that seeps through bedrooms and screens.

The final stretch wanders a bit — Jessica, literally lost in the woods, drifts into symbolism so heavy it nearly stalls. But the question it leaves behind is knottier than any verdict. 

How do you raise boys who understand consent when the world is spinning poison? What happens when the thing you’ve spent your life fighting comes home in your child’s Macbook?

Inter Alia — “among other things” — is exactly that: a Greek tragedy, a family drama, a legal thriller. It’s flawed, messy, and sometimes obvious, but that hardly matters. It’s meant to sting — and it does.

Pike’s face is etched with anguish and self-recrimination as she falls. This scenario is relatable to many parents, highlighting the dangers of complacency and the dread of catastrophe. If the evening sparks a debate about how one generation guides the next, the appropriate behaviour of men, and how society can foster respect, safety, and justice for women, it’s all success.

Like the National’s tote bags that shout “The fucking patriarchy!” in big block letters, this is theatre as a provocation. Either way, you’ll leave the theatre chewing this over — which, in Miller’s world, is the point.

In the end, a lot is so familiar and so evocative that a feeling of empathy floods over us. Inter Alia doubles as a rich work of social critique.

A couple of months ago, my bright teenage cousin got into trouble at school for “arguing the toss” — he refused to hand over his phone when a teacher tried to confiscate it. When his mum showed me the daily report from school, one line stuck with me: he’d told the staff he wouldn’t give up his phone to “random women that he didn’t trust.” That phrase set off alarm bells.

Schools are on the front line. Many teachers witness boys repeating rhetoric about resisting women’s “control,” mistaking basic rules for attacks on their manhood. What seems like a teenage tantrum often hides a fragile masculinity fueled by manipulative, misogynistic influencers.

Alienated young men are a big problem for us all. And they are closer to home than we realise. 

“Inter Alia” runs the Lyttelton theatre, National Theatre, London, until 13 September. In cinemas from 4 September.

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Till the Stars Come Down

WEDDINGS have long been a staple of the stage, providing dramatists with a setting for characters to gather, burdened by history and ready for recriminations.

Beth Steel’s Olivier-nominated drama, Till the Stars Come Down, retains its humour and poignant melancholy in this timely West End transfer.

Three sisters from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, find themselves battling on the wedding day of their youngest sister, Sylvia, to a Polish newcomer, Marek (Julian Kostov).

Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews), the bride, calls on her sisters Hazel (Lucy Black) and Maggie (Aisling Loftus) to help her prepare for her wedding. 

Hazel, the family’s sole breadwinner, is fed up. Her husband, Adrian Bower, barely looks at her, and she longs for a bad day. However, she knows she can’t, as her fragile family depends on her.

This bruising play could be said to be a strange one to begin its life in London. 

The National Theatre should totally take it on tour.

Anyway. Gifted Steel taps into a wider mood of uncertainty, resentment, and yearning for change, exploring the subject of post-industrial Britain.

Xenophobia is in great supply: “That’s not a language, it’s a Wi-Fi password,” Aunty Carol (a hilarious Dorothy Atkinson) says of the Polish language. It becomes impossible to ignore.

Steel’s chaotic portrait of sisterhood and community divisions, with its unpatronising portrayal of working-class life, is energised by strong a ensemble performance. 

The play is hilarious, intimate, and bears the tragic inevitability of a soapy Greek drama. It has around 100 brilliant one liners.

Samal Blak’s unassuming in-the-round set design features an artificial turf and a glitterball, fracturing light designed by the brilliant Paule Constable.

Gareth Fry’s classy sound design adds pop anthems to the mix alongside Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. These moments remind us that time marches on.

This vibrant play constantly asks what it meant to be a family and how communities can sustain themselves in the face of changing times and division.

Steel’s writing’s greatest strength lies not in its depth or surprises, but in the opportunities it offers its trio of performers, particularly Black. 

The language is rich and resonant, precise and often cutting or savage.

Modern life is out of control, and Steel forces us to confront our national identity crisis by confronting audiences with uncomfortable local ideas. 

At one moment, Pete (Philip Whitchurch), the estranged brother of the bride’s father, Tony (Alan Williams), sets up the guests like a living planetarium, sending them circling one another. It’s a lovely scene.

Instead of assuming everyone is nice, she encourages us to interrogate our own thoughts and beliefs, as well as those of others, and the inevitable fallout of globalisation on a local level.

People aren’t choosing to go right-wing; they’re opting for the destruction – creative or otherwise – of the old ways that haven’t worked for them – because the country is screwed.

Indeed, the polls are going Nigel Farage’s way, and it’s not inconceivable that Reform could win the next election.

As old ideologies resurface and the nation divides once again, we’d do well to heed its warning. This is England, after all.

N.B. Last night, I had the pleasure of bumping into Dame Helen Mirren. 

During the play, a rogue pair of elasticated Spanx launched by a character from the stage, landed squarely on her head mid-stalls. She had a good time.

Till the Stars Come Down runs at Theatre Royal Haymarket until 27 September
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 Evita at the London Palladium – review  
ONE only needs to revolutionise theatre once to secure one’s legacy.
Giving a show a contemporary spin is fine, but Jamie Lloyd’s production of EVITA (a reworked version of the 2019 Open Air piece) substitutes decibels for drama.
If ever a subject suited director-slash-mogul Lloyd’s myth-making artistic instincts, this is the one.
Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, it tells the story of Eva Perón, first lady of Argentina from 1946 to 1952.
Perón’s journey was nothing short of extraordinary: born illegitimate and raised in hardship, she defied society norms — adored by the masses, yet mired in controversy.

Rachel Zegler, in fine voice, makes her West End debut as Evita, the icon: a glamorous populist. She stands as both a symbol of female ambition and a cautionary morality.
His monochrome Evita is so alienating – how to put this? – because Lloyd has done all this gimmickry before. And having no emotional centre, this production leaves little impression — only a chill. This pouting Evita evaporates. 

Furthermore, Soutra Gilmour’s bare design, with just a set of steps, leaves us little to get excited about. White balloons go pop. Handheld microphones are passed around, a large EVITA sign looms, coupled with a jagged sound. We are told to vote.
To that end, Lloyd’s fragmented production holds you, in a suffocating way. It’s all over-deliberate, metallic, and the nightmarish choreography (Fabian Aloise) doesn’t make the story accessible – it drove me up the wall.
Along the way, the dedicated young dancers push their bodies to extreme physical limits, twerking, spinning and stomping around. Yet they rarely convey identifiable emotions or ideas. Stomp, stomp, stomp.
Anyway: populism, whether left or right, always ends badly. Eva and her repellent husband resented critics. They plotted against the middle classes. They created division.

James Olivas is a strangely laid-back Juan Perón, relaxed to the point of blankness. His singing is, unfortunately, flat. But he’s hot.
Anyhow. As everyone knows, vast crowds are gathering daily outside the London Palladium to watch tiny Zegler sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”, the show’s signature song, from the balcony — while paying theatregoers inside see it on a screen.
Don’t Cry for Me— incidentally the actual words carved on Eva’s tomb in Recoleta Cemetery — unfolds at the start of the second act.
Zegler, with her sparkling jewels, blonde hair scraped back, jewellery and a white dress ablaze, is made up to look like Eva briefly, but this is hardly enough to carry the production. Despite her impressive vocal performance, we’re never remotely tempted to cry for her.
Of course, it’s well done for what it is: those who made it are experts at manipulating responses; they are like Pavlov’s dogs, turning the hoi polloi into salivating spectators. Hypnotised.
Meanwhile, Diego Andres Rodriguez as narrator Che— drawing constant attention to Evita’s wiles and weaknesses— sings well.

However, near the end, he strips to black pants, before buckets of coloured paint and confetti tar and feather him. The front row is a splash zone.
Look, the most irritating thing is that Lloyd himself almost seems to be conscious of the minimalist creative pitfalls.
Is he trolling us?
“You let down your people, Evita,” Che sings. She let down the poor, providing cover for a fascist dictatorship, by squirrelling away charity cash, and by distracting from her husband’s protection of Nazi war criminals.

In the end, Evita perishes. It’s no coincidence we don’t care about character deaths. Lloyd’s hip people are uninteresting because characters and individual fates aren’t big enough for certain big theatre directors.
Along with the score, that sinks into a trough of repetitiveness, blue confetti at half time adds entertainment, but it lacks impact. It gets the material across, but does little of any note with it.
With every scene, Lloyd lays out the image, the music, and the movement concept, but rarely allows these elements to develop or to acquire nuance. It is relentless.
What you get is spectacle, but very little variety – the tender moments lost. After we’ve watched a director loading the dice, it’s not really much fun watching him roll them.
Lloyd will next direct Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on Broadway, reuniting Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter after Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Certainly, this is what populism looks like.
Evita runs at the London Palladium until 6 September 2025
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 Giant  
I have just experienced one of the most thrilling theatrical tour-de-force I have ever witnessed: John Lithgow.
Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play Giant deftly blends fact and invention to dramatise a controversial chapter in the children’s author’s life, earning three Olivier Awards ahead of its West End transfer.
Bob Crowley’s naturalistic, cluttered set evokes a mood of looming catastrophe: precarious steel beams loom above, a pile of walking sticks gathers below — a world burdened.
At the heart of the brainy drama is Dahl’s incendiary 1982 article for the Literary Review, which unleashed a wave of public outrage, death threats, and even required police protection outside his home.
John Lithgow effortlessly delivers a magnetic turn as Dahl, a “fu**** human boobytrap.” He has an uncanny physical resemblance to the author, channeling a bear with a sore head (building work is enraging the author) — cranky, sharp-witted, and in pain. Physical pain (his back is sore), emotional pain (his son Theo developed hydrocephalus after being hit by a taxi, aged four months), and political pain (today, he’d be cancelled).
I loved Lithgow’s brittle explosiveness. Never overdone.
In the opening sequence, Elliot Levey, typically superb as Dahl’s long-time editor Tom Maschler, and Rachael Stirling as Felicity, Dahl’s future second wife — both navigating the minefield of getting Dahl to apologise publicly.
Lithgow captures Dahl’s complex duality: brilliant yet bitter, childlike yet domineering.
Aya Cash’s Jessie Stone — an emissary from Dahl’s American publisher sent to contain the fallout — simmers with urgency, her calm masking a rising tide of frustration.
“Are you Jewish?” Dahl fires at Stone barely a minute into their meeting. Their time together becomes increasingly upsetting.
This sophisticated play draws out the obvious and turns itself into a classic, and is permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts.
Dahl, having appeared ready to back down, instead breezily phones the New Statesman to deliver a fresh volley of antisemitic vitriol. The words, chillingly drawn from his own remarks: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t pick on them for no reason.”
While Dahl’s children’s books remain beloved, his history of antisemitic remarks – which had previously largely been overlooked – clouds his legacy.
In an interview with the Independent in 1990, months before his death, he described himself as antisemitic and railed against the “Jewish-owned” media.
He told the publication: “It began in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon. They killed 22,000 civilians when they bombed Beirut. It was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned …
“I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism. I think they should see both sides. It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel … ”
Wow.
In its own terms, this is the best acted – and paced – and slyly entertaining production in the West End currently.
A lot of reviews note the ‘timeliness’ of the play owing to the fact in the second act, Rosenblatt constructs a monologue for Dahl in which the author reflects on the severe injuries sustained by a Lebanese child during an Israeli bombing raid, alleges the existence of a clandestine Ashkenazi conspiracy tied to the foundational history of the Israeli state.
But the drawing-room play is much more than that—it’s a powerful exploration of anti-Semitism, a wound that feels more exposed now than at any other time in my life.
This production is sure to transfer to Broadway, and no doubt scoop up some Tony Awards next season.
Frankly, Giant has a powerful cumulative effect; when it’s over you know you’ve seen something. 
This is unmissable British theatre.
Giant runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London until August 2025
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