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Hamlet at the National Theatre

Andrew Scott has ruined my life. His unforgettable fresh-minted Hamlet was mercurial, devastating, and left a profound mark on me.

Bernard Shaw defined Hamlet brilliantly: his passions are those that have produced philosophy, poetry, art, and statecraft—not merely weddings, coroners’ inquests, and executions. 

Any production of Hamlet stands or falls by its prince, one of the most complex characters in dramatic literature. The real problem arises when the weakest link in Hamlet is Hamlet himself.

Alas, this production’s prince is flat, unfocused, and ultimately forgettable.

Robert Hastie’s staging arrives freighted with significance: it is a showcase for Olivier Award-winner Hiran Abeysekera (Life of Pi) in the title role, and an early statement of intent under new artistic director Indhu Rubasingham. What emerges is visually striking, often witty, occasionally inspired—but muffled when it comes to the emotional force of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Most of the action unfolds on sparse Ben Stones’s single set: a cavernous, palatial hall, part banqueting chamber, part mausoleum. Renaissance angels and cherubs gaze down from the walls, which double as camouflage for entrances. It is a striking backdrop—eerie and atmospheric in torchlit ghost scenes, aided by Jessica Hung Han Yun’s shadow-drenched lighting design. But if it dazzles, it never quite becomes the prison of Elsinore. The same applies to the production itself: atmosphere without tension, style without substance.

Abeysekera’s Hamlet enters not as a tortured philosopher but as a smartly dressed, forlorn figure who punctures his gloom with humour and acrobatic energy—childlike leaps, sly asides, bursts of sardonic wit. He queens out with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, grabbing their arse; his febrile, excitable prince feels modern, ADHD, full of nervous charisma.

He darts in and out of the action, sometimes narrating his own story, and there is freshness in his conversational, ironic delivery. 

Yet that same energy undermines the great soliloquies. “To be or not to be?” becomes throwaway, tossed off with a finger-pistol gesture and distracted by a T-shirt gag. The anguish is swallowed. Hamlet’s defining hesitancy—the struggle between thought and action—never lands.

If Abeysekera’s prince eludes us, Francesca Mills’s Ophelia seizes the heart of the play. Mills commands the stage with a presence at once playful, tender, and moving. She brings clarity, warmth, and humour to the early scenes, then fragility to Ophelia’s madness; the rest of the production, however, fails to coalesce around her. Her performance is rooted in real emotion, providing the rare intimacy this production otherwise lacks. The estranged lovers’ chemistry—strained, touching, doomed—offers flashes of genuine poignancy. It has integrity.

Alas, many of the strong actors in the cast seem either miscast or uncertain of the production’s vibe. Performances are uneven. Alistair Petrie’s Claudius has cool patrician cunning but zero menace. Ayesha Dharker’s Gertrude feels oddly muted. Geoffrey Streatfeild delivers a comic, earnest Polonius, dispatched absurdly by gunshot. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are well-pitched as interchangeable lackeys, and Ryan Ellsworth makes an effective, spectral Ghost. The “play-within-the-play,” with its microphones and splattered paint, rib Jamie Lloyd’s attempts at minimalism.

There are flashes of insight. The production is alert to the play’s themes of theatre itself: Hamlet dons a ruff, a player sports a wry Blockbuster Video Store tee, the staging toys with blurring performance and reality. Abeysekera’s sardonic humour gives Hamlet a wry awareness of his place in history, even nodding to the National’s own 1963 Hamlet. Yet these meta-theatrical gestures substitute cleverness for emotional connection.

Anyway. Abeysekera’s opportunity to play Hamlet matters—he is the first Asian actor to portray the Danish prince at the National – it’s the role every young actor dreams of, the benchmark against which they are measured. But this Hamlet enters a crowded field: in just the past few years, Luke Thallon, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Sir Ian McKellen, and, only weeks ago, Giles Terera have each donned the black suit, each bringing weight and definition. We have also had Fat Ham in Stratford Upon Avon.

By contrast, Hastie’s production feels oddly underpowered and uneven. What it lacks, above all, is weight. Shakespeare’s tragedy is shadowed by death, driven by grief, alive with existential terror. Here, the questions are raised but skimmed over; the grief muffled. We are intrigued, but rarely moved.

Francesca Mills alone provides the deep emotional tremor the production so sorely needs. Too often, what’s missing is a sense of emotional and psychological depth.

Hamlet runs at the National Theatre until November 25.

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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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The Years

LAST night, I saw The Years.

I didn’t faint.

The 115-minute show (no interval), now transferred from The Almeida to the West End, has reportedly been paused repeatedly due to audience members (men) fainting and requiring removal.

There is, of course, a trigger warning: graphic depictions of abortion, blood, a coerced sexual encounter and sexual content. 

According to Director Eline Arbo, the Dutch-language premiere at The Hague in 2022 did not elicit the same reactions.

At the performance I attended, there was a 15-minute stoppage; Romola Garai stood motionless, arms and legs covered in blood. The hypersensitive ushers, scuttling through the stalls in anticipation, and the creaking floorboards of the Harold Pinter Theatre added to the tension.

My reservation is that it seems suspiciously convenient for the play’s political message that men are collapsing nightly during the pivotal backstreet abortion scene.

Anyway. The Years follows the lives of women across the decades, beginning in the Second World War, and is based on the quasi-memoir “Les Années” by French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux.

Five formidable actresses—Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindra, and Harmony Rose-Bremner—collaborate to portray and narrate the life of a single woman. Born in 1940, her story unfolds against the backdrop of post-war France, navigating the era’s tumultuous social upheavals: the Algerian colonial crisis, the burgeoning sexual revolution, the student protests of 1968, and the rise of free-market capitalism.

It opened as a stage play in Amsterdam in 2022 before its UK premiere on July 31.

Arbo’s direction is undeniably skillful—cinematic and beautiful, maintaining a compelling pace. Her production is put together with considerable skill but it lives in a claustrophobic world of its own.

At the outset of each scene, a photograph of Annie is projected onto a white sheet backdrop, setting the stage for a stark evening. The stage is minimalist, with a central table and a brick wall backdrop.

Young Annie observes the conversations of older relatives, who reminisce about the war years. As the story unfolds, a poignant arc culminates in older Annie’s bewildered gaze at the modern world. The circular rail on the floor visually reinforces the cyclical nature of this woman’s life.

But of course, the cast is excellent, tightly managed, and smoothly juxtaposed under a surging score.

Yes, this is another major production with no set. But it is clear eyed and austerely balanced, along with being magnificently acted.

I left thinking about my mother and her mother – gains we take for granted that were hard-won. The evening had a psychological effect on me; it will stay with me.

And as any number of women can attest, the future, though uncertain, can still be shaped. 

The Years runs until April 19, Harold Pinter Theatre, London

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Elektra

ANOTHER disappointing production has hit the West End, with Daniel Fish’s reimagining of the ancient play short-circuiting.

Sophocles is currently in vogue in London, due to the unflinching exploration of war and revenge. According to classicist Edith Hall, more Greek tragedies have been performed in the last half-century than at any time since 5th-century Athens.

Sophocles’ ability to distill profound wisdom, sophisticated plotting, and emotional complexity into a 90-minute play is nothing short of remarkable, offering a stark contrast to the often meandering narratives of modern dramas. 

This feat serves as a timely reminder to contemporary playwrights of the value of concise, tightly wound storytelling.

Unfortunately, Elektra starring Brie Larson is a misfire – a production so underwhelming that it may deter first-time theatergoers for life. 

Look, I won a £1 ticket through the Pay What You Can Lottery, and that felt like a rip off.

Despite the long queues, which are due to Oscar winner Larson making her UK stage debut, the show fails to impress.

Larson, sporting a shaven head and Bikini Kill T-shirt, brings a manic energy to the title role, but her cries of “No. NO. No!” come across as more desperate and annoying than dramatic.

Without Larson’s star power, it’s unlikely this tedious and poorly directed work would have seen the light of day.

The boring production’s swanky set, designed by Jeremy Herbert, features a revolving stage and various tech equipment against a white cyclorama.

However, the overall effect is mechanical and gripping only in an unpleasant way. 

Larson’s delivery, with its odd stress patterns (she sings ‘no’ at every opportunity) and often-crushed sentences, suffocates the drama. Even the capable chorus, wielding mic stands and rock-star physicality, can’t salvage the wreckage of Anne Carson’s 2001 translation.

The storytelling is as baggy as an old T shirt, desperately in need of dramaturgical support to provide focus.

This modern adaptation is pretentious and lacking in substance. As Orestes, Patrick Vaill is bafflingly dressed as a rally driver, with a vocal delivery reminiscent of a racing commentator.

The only exception to this hot mess is Stockard Channing (in firs), who brings elegance to proceedings as Clytemnestra. She is the sole actor to humanise a role, making her the production’s one redeeming feature.

After admiring Fish’s Oklahoma!, I was disappointed to find that this production – complete with voice-distorting microphones, jets of black ink, and a blimp that represents Apollo – felt more like an experimental fringe show than a West End production.

The show is most effective in its silent moments, but unfortunately, these are few and far between.

Ultimately, the question remains: does any of it work? Alas, the answer is: No. No. No!

Elektra Duke of York’s theatre, London, until 12 April

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The Importance of Being Earnest

SHORTLY before the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895, Oscar Wilde was asked if he thought the play would be a success.

“The play is a success,” he answered. “The only question is whether the first-night audience will be one.”

As radicals and iconoclasts go, Wilde’s courage outshines today’s, and he paid a heavier price for it than most do.

Max Webster’s enchanting production at the National Theatre (I’m still pissed off that ticket prices for this are up to £110) preserves the play’s perfect illusion of innocence, even as it’s fashionable to interpret the text—featuring male characters living double lives. 

Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo and Eliza Scanlan are delightfully sexy as Gwendolen and Cecily, while Ncuti Gatwa embodies the right mix of infuriating smugness as Algernon. I thought Hugh Skinner brought wiry earnestness as Jack, and Amanda Lawrence and Richard Cant add both touch and humour as Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble.

Gatwa radiates star quality on stage in hot pink socks, complemented by Sharon D. Clarke’s sharp wit as Lady Bracknell, a role she seems destined to play.

Her face seems to have been designed to express distaste, and her voice booms with hauteur and disdain.

Gatwa’s flamboyant portrayal of Algernon brings high-camp mischief to Wilde’s beloved comedy, (“being Earnest in town and Jack in the country”) highlighting the subversive Victorian queerness.

Julian Bleach’s butler Merriman interrupts country house luncheons with increasingly expanding gongs, while designer Rae Smith creates glamorous interiors that provide a traditional backdrop for the fabulous costumes.

But what stays with you is Clarke’s imperious Lady Bracknell, with an incongruous Caribbean lilt and understated delivery—half-growling “A handbag?”—she allows Wilde’s epigrams to detonate hearty laughter.

And as Gwendolen says, “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” This interpretation navigates that with memorable panache.

The sense of occasion extends to the curtain call, with a lavish costume parade. 

A friend thought it silly. I think that makes it all the more accessible. Granted, the knowing winks, smut and contemporary references do occasionally veer into the annoying. 

The joy of writing about theatre lies in capturing the complex amalgamation of images, sound, gesture, and utterances—especially in great physical comedy. It is here in spades. 

Wilde described the play as “a delicate bubble of fancy,” but he added, “It has its philosophy.” The key to the 1895 script is to be seriously funny. The slightly amended text even includes a nod to modern queer nightlife with a reference to “Dalston Superstore.”

Still, it is a tremendous play that was ahead of its time on LGBTQ+ issues and, in some ways, is ahead of ours.

The Importance of Being Earnest is at the National Theatre, London, 21 Nov -25 Jan, and in cinemas worldwide from 20 Feb. 

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For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy

For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy writer and Director Ryan Calais Cameron’s vision is bold and unapologetic, weaving together a tapestry of vignettes that oscillate between introspection and explosive catharsis. 

Inspired by Ntozake Shange’s 1976 work For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Calais Cameron’s play opens with six young men: Tobi King Bakare, Shakeel Haakim making his professional debut, Fela Lufadeju, Albert Magashi, Mohammed Mansaray and Posi Morakinyo. 

This is a memorable piece about Black masculinity and Black life in Britain, the wounds and crises of class conditioned by the background weather of race and identity. The nature of manhood is one of Mr. Calais Cameron’s chief concerns.

It’s an entirely unique vision and wrongfoots us from the start. Exhilarating and emotionally rich exploration of masculinity, mental health and the six men’s relationship with black history. The production’s emotional intensity is all the greater for the fierce restraint that the actors—and the characters—display.

One is passed over by the girls playing kiss-chase. Another is subjected to a “routine check” by police in Hackney. There’s the one who accuses his educated friend of being “whitewashed” as he tries to fit in. This was exciting, unnerving, bristling with youth and volume. 

The crucial thing is that this play – now on its second West End run – is urging people to look hard at these profound issues around human behaviour, and really think about what makes people who they are. 

Here, too, the entire ensemble’s acting is elegant, emotional, and superb in all its impacted pain and ongoing struggles. The combination of artistry and emotional directness in this play is overwhelming to me.

Anna Reid’s fluorescent playground set and costume design is terrific. The music — hip-hop, R&B, astute classical sound design and composition by Nicola T. Chang — is both surprising and perfect. 

Lighting wise, Rory Beaton paints the stage not in the gritty, neorealist tones expected of such streetwise stories, but with the rich textures and saturated colours of a waking dream that uniquely mixes music, movement, storytelling, and verse.

Overall, this is a provocative piece of theatre that delves deep into the complexities of the black male experience. With raw honesty and poetic flair, the production navigates themes of identity, mental health, and systemic oppression with an unflinching gaze. 

Red Pitch, a piece about three Black teenagers first seen at the Bush, is running up the road at the new Soho Place theatre. Watching this at the Garrick Theatre I noticed how racially and socially mixed the audience was compared with nearly every other West End show. 

But we’re starved of these narratives in the West End and Calais Cameron’s raw drama showcases why they are so hugely important.

Considering this started life at the 80-seater New Diorama in 2021, it’s a stunning achievement but also proves theatre can flourish on the small scale, by commissioning fresh, interesting work that doesn’t rely on expensive production.

Late to the party, I know. Alas, I doubt that I will see a better play in the West End this year.

For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy is at the Garrick theatre, London until 4 May

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Faith Healer

Faith Healer at Lyric Hammersmith is a poignant exploration of faith, deception, and the blurred lines between reality and illusion. Rachel O’Riordan’s immaculate production transcends the stage to deliver an emotionally stirring evening, both competently staged and beautifully spoken.

A lost showbusiness world is conjured through stirring monologues, hauntingly delivered by Declan Conlon, Justine Mitchell and Nick Holder

Thematically, Faith Healer grapples with weighty existential questions, exploring the knotty nature of faith, the limits of human empathy, and the search for meaning. Brian Friel’s bleak 1979 play unfolds through four simmering monologues delivered by three characters: Frank, the travelling faith healer; his shellshocked wife (or mistress), Grace; and his chatty manager, Teddy. (The only thing that all three characters agree on is what route they took into Ireland).

What to make of Frank? On good nights, he is a saviour. On bad nights, he’s a fraud.

At the heart of this luminescent production is the exceptional cast, who breathe life into Friel’s richly drawn characters. “As a young man I chanced to flirt with it and it possessed me,” Declan Conlon’s Hardy says, warm, lilting, direct, eyes widening theatrically at that word ‘possessed’. Grace, played with boozy raw emotion by Justine Mitchell, captures the heartache and resilience of a woman grappling with love and loss. And Teddy, brought brilliantly to vaudevillian life with wit by an excellent cockney ‘dear heart’-ing Nick Holder.

It’s all about the story that demands the total attention of the audience and gets the performance of their lives from the actors. Elsewhere, Grace allows herself to let in certain memories of Frank, “like a patient returning to solids”.

Colin Richmond’s smoky cracked earth set and costume design and evocative lighting by Paul Keogan creates an atmosphere of introspection, the non-linear structure of the play is handled with attention to detail, with each overlapping monologue building to create a complex narrative. A test of our faith in what we see and hear.


Through the lens of Frank’s dubious gift and the characters’ fractured relationships, the play invites us to ponder the ways in which we construct our own realities and the lengths we will go to hold onto our beliefs. The riveting play struck me as a masterpiece: one in which Friel wrestles with the artist’s dependence on the unpredictability of inspiration, and at its deepest level the play seems to be exploring the mystery of creativity itself, as if Friel were attempting to come to terms with his own unreliable genius.

While I have your attention, I want to pick up on Kate Kellaway’s Guardian review of Faith Healer. 

“Nick Holder is a terrific comic turn as Teddy, Frank’s cockney manager. He is a drab, drunk, Humpty Dumpty of a man in a slovenly waistcoat, but never more than a belly laugh away from pathos.”

The thing that really irked me was Kellaway cruelly comparing a performer to ‘Humpty Dumpty’. 

Yeah, wow. I think an apology is in order, Kate. 

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Opening Night

THE joy and the pain of writing about theatre is that, after a while, you realise you’ve seen almost everything theatre has to offer.

Please forgive any sense of over-indulgence, exaggeration or deja-vu that accompanies the following announcement, but I think I may just have watched the best worst musical of all time.

“I’ve been in the theatre all my life and I still don’t know anything about it,” cries one character. Well, quite.

After a few minutes of Opening Night, I began to get that depressed feeling, and, after a half hour, felt rather offended. 

In the West End, cynicism and pessimism are natural bedfellows. Do we really need another piece of musical theatre about sad actresses?

The show includes an immersive segment in which Sheridan Smith’s character, Myrtle, collapses in a drunken state outside the stage door with the scenes projected onto screens inside.

There’s so much going on – flashbacks and crosscutting – that you’re never allowed any peace. Why? To keep you from getting bored. It succeeds in that, but the effect is nerve jangling.

Something odd happened during Opening Night, which is based on the 1977 film of the same name, with music and lyrics by Rufus Wainwright, on Shaftesbury Avenue, London.

One minute the star Smith was quietly contemplating how to ‘make magic out of tragic’.

The next, a dubstep backing track had kicked in and Smith was murdering ghost girl Nancy (Shira Haas), – who doesn’t exist – with a lamp. 

At which point — and I make no apology for this reaction — I exploded, with laughter, not just because the scene itself was unintentionally very funny, but I’d also noticed the entire row in front of me had left during the interval. 

Admittedly, it could’ve been even more mortifying if Cameron Mackintosh had popped out from behind one of the doors and joined in on backing vocals.

You could also describe it as “so bad it’s good”, but that would underestimate the scale of this one massively. 

I hated act 1. I left the Theatre delirious. 

Van Hove sets up promising situations and then the pay offs are out of step. The show is full of bits of dialogue that have lost what they connected with, character relations that have become disjointed, scenes that dribble off, so after the first 30 minutes or so the production loses momentum.

In the story, Myrtle, played by Smith, is having a nervous breakdown after the death of one of her fans, the very image of her younger self.

Various men letch over her. And so, it continues. A visual atrocity with an unnerving use of creepy physical intimacy, and a tired use of video footage. 

And, no, technically it’s not actually a musical, it’s a very po-faced play with jazzy music. Smith’s work doesn’t hold together here, but how could it? 

Opening Night is so epically, wonderfully, bloody awful it’s occasionally brilliant. 

Still, the cast are seriously talented, and they saw it right through to the bitter end and then, like trained psychopaths, carried on the curtain call as if nothing untoward had happened, cheerfully clapping along with no coordination and telling us: “You gotta make magic out of tragic.” 

This is clearly not just my opinion. Because I want to make it clear I am laughing at this show, not with it. One can have a fairly good time laughing at Act 2, but it doesn’t sit too well as a joke because the people on stage are being humiliated and underused. (I didn’t really enjoy seeing Sheridan Smith making a fool of herself)

The 16 credited producers clearly haven’t noticed what they’re doing, though, as they’ve spent the preview period chopping and changing this from an incoherent shambles into a dystopian Funny Girl. 

Without Smith the piece is extinct.

Someone really should’ve had a word here and said: “Ivo, darling, loved your A Little Life, but Sunset Boulevard did all this with more style.” But they didn’t.

This is not to deny that the actors do a good job. I thought Hadley Fraser tried his best. 

Yet, for all its skill, I found myself admiring Jan Versweyveld’s lighting more than relishing drama.

But look, when Van Hove goes wrong, he goes laboriously, painfully wrong.

Anyway, Opening Night is, at least itself: and has become more like a weird cross between Zorro – The Musical and Merrily We Roll Along — with zero joy or musicality. 2.5 wretched hours of dissonant play-within-the-play madness. 

Opening Night is at the Gielgud theatre, London, until 27 July

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God, Lyonesse

The title of Penelope Skinner’s play refers to a mythical lost kingdom in Cornwall buried under the sea. Yet the themes are wide-ranging: #MeToo, cancel culture, the oppression of women and more.

Lily James

I’d have had a lot less room to moan, though, if it had a couple of 3D characters and just one moment of tension to fill the West End in these bleak winter months. 

The cast look like they’ve been forced into positions by a cattle prod and would welcome the sweet release of a stun gun rather than endure one more second of this.

Speaking to the Guardian, Skinner, who shot to fame in 2011 when The Village Bike opened at the Royal Court, said she began writing Lyonesse in 2019 and ended up with a first script that was four hours long and ‘a little crazy’, in her own words.

‘It was not a play that anyone would want to watch,’ she admitted, before adding she went back to the drawing board to rewrite the whole thing. The only element she retained was Scott-Thomas’s character Elaine.

It’s mostly dreadful, in fact, and lacks even enough skill and subtlety to pace itself. 

The plot? Kate (Lily James) is an ambitious film executive and high achieving north London mother sent to draw Elaine’s life story out of her to re-fashion it for a film. But she is misunderstood by her husband (James Corrigan); considered irrational for abandoning her child; and humiliated; driven to melancholia spending time in the Cornish dump. She breezes through most of this.

Kristin Scott Thomas

Early on, Kristin Scott Thomas delivers a stand-up monologue that culminates in her jumping around to Ultra Nate’s You’re Free with her lesbian poet neighbour Chris (Sara Powell).

I want to be specific about my grounds, because so many people – and male reviewers especially – have been falling back on narrow or simply savage criticisms of virtue signalling. Lyonesse is short on characters, detail, activity, proper dialogue, even music.

Alas, it would be easy to be able to say that Ian Rickson’s 3-hour production of Lyonesse is bad strictly on formal and technical grounds, but that would, I think, be fundamentally a lie. It is very poor technically but that’s not all that makes it bad.

The play is full of bits of dialogue that have lost what they coupled with, character dynamics that have become rambling, scenes that trickle off. And I am certain it would be 20 minutes shorter if Scott Thomas had a grasp of irony and natural timing for comedy.

Despite all the activity, or perhaps because of it, the main characters are rather flat. Like many of us, it tries to be a success and unpack the implications of patriarchy and inevitably fails on both counts. This a play so obviously engineered that you can’t help seeing its form, maybe the writing accounted for the quality as much as the directing did.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James

“It is time for me to step into the light,” Elaine (Kristin Scott Thomas) announces, a former star actress who disappeared without trace three decades previously.

In the most ludicrous single sequence, James plays a scene of comic female incompetence; she’s unable to light a house fire – that would be a historical low point on the Harold Pinter stage if the character didn’t later accidentally do it in an out of pace slapstick sequence. 

For me, the real kicker arrives, though, in Act 2, which was rushed, confused, and barely raised a laugh, it is difficult to know why it is so badly structured and edited. 

Elsewhere, alpha female boss Sue (Doon Mackichan) whose company specialises in “female driven narratives”, forgot her lines (it happens) the line was “Do you know what I think?”. 

Mackichan yelled frantically off stage: “Yes, Janine?” as if we were supposed to think her office door had been knocked on. 

The off-stage prompt came “do you know what I think?” this was Doon’s line.

Unfortunately, Doon has had to withdraw from Lyonesse due to a ‘private family matter.’

Doon Mackichan and Lily James

Do you know what I think?

New writing needs development, it needs space and it needs investment. Why is it 3 hours? Why are there stuffed parrots? Why is the set so lame? Why did nobody in dramaturgy intervene? Why demonise the entire male sex? 

This could have been brilliant. 

Still, as far as bold new writing on a West End stage, though? Lyonesse makes for lousy viewing.

Lyonesse plays at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 23 December

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Mesmerising Sweeney Todd got me by the throat

Sweeney and Mrs Lovett (image with him sat on chair)

Lots to love about Nick Bagnall’s stripped-back Sweeney Todd in Liverpool, including the cast, acting, and absorbing scenes between Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett and the decision to set it in a time of Brexhaustion. Everything seems fresh minted. 

Bagnall’s wickedly heartfelt production with just four musicians and nine actors is something very special indeed. The marriage of humour and horror is expertly done and never gimmicky. 

Liam Tobin is a grounded Demon Barber of Fleet Street, who “shaved the faces of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard of again.” His ghoulish demeanour is always striking.  

‘Demons are prowling everywhere, nowadays,’ observes young street orphan Tobias, here played brilliantly by Shiv Rabheru, in ‘Not While I’m Around’. This sequence shines through the prism of social poverty, environmental apocalypse and Brexit Britain. 

It’s a lot more earnest, prescient as well.

You can see why Everyman programmed Sondheim’s musical thriller: it’s a genuinely political piece about austerity, the underdog and the lengths that desperate people will go to for survival. 

The thing that’s really been obsessing me though, is everything about the muted design and brilliant cast who prove truly inventive – interacting with the audience with verve and wrapping their brains around Sondheim’s complex score with a knowing wink.

Michael Vale’s design envelopes the stage with simple effects and minimal props – the staging is in the round and the action takes place on a metallic disc that is often lit from below in tones of blood red and spooky green. 

There is real invention: the cast take turns to rotate the central action manually using their hands or a stick. 

The most surprising thing about this Sweeney Todd, however, is Kacey Ainsworth as nonchalant Mrs Lovett – the criminal mastermind behind all this human pie-making; dressed in a white vest and wearing trainers Ainsworth has the audience in the palm of her hands from the start and this Mrs Lovett is a creation of true genius.

Ainsworth is very good throughout, especially in extended dream sequence ‘By The Sea’, which may be the happiest few minutes of regional theatre that you will see all year. 

In short, this is the food of love: get on a train and play on.

Sweeney Todd is at Everyman, Liverpool, until 18 May.

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