Top 5 Theatre Productions of 2025

I didn't love an awful lot of the theatre I saw in 2025, and some of the most hyped UK shows turned out to be least favourites: between the witless Ghosts at Lyric Hammersmith and Simon Stone's even-worse The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge, I won't be signing up for any more "contemporary versions of Ibsen" any time soon. Some flawed plays benefitted from the  magic of great actors, whether Susan Sarandon's touching, graceful work in Mary Page Marlowe or Sheridan Smith's open-hearted, protean turn in Alan Ayckbourn's attempt to convey a disordered mental state in Woman in Mind.

Still, now's the time to accentuate the positive and here are five shows I loved from those I saw in the UK and Poland this year.

Angels in Warsaw (Teatr Dramatyczny, Warsaw)

A variant on Angels in America transplanted to an '80s Warsaw context didn't sound at all promising but Julia Holewińska and Wojciech Faruga made a wonderfully immersive combination of documentary and phantasmagoria here, boosted by a crack ensemble cast and the director's visionary stage-craft. 

Glory Game  (Te­atr Ko­mu­na War­sza­wa/Sticky Fingers Club at Retroperspektywy Festival)

A slo-mo sporting satire no-one could take their eyes off. 

Creditors (Orange Tree) 

The fine Jewel-in-the-Crown-reunion trio of Charles Dance, Geraldine James and Nicholas Farrell found a bit of tenderness and plenty of fresh bite in Tom Littler's gripping production of Strindberg's drama. 

Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) (Teatr Jaracza, Łódź)

Agnieszka Holland's Pokot (2017) remains my favourite adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk's novel but Lena Frankiewicz's more hallucinatory staging (from Sandra Szwarc's adaptation) brought plenty that's fresh to the table. Hopefully, after some shaky years, this confident production marks the opening of a strong new era for Teatr Jaracza. 

When We Are Married (Donmar) 

All the single ladies!  Very much in the spirit of the Orange Tree's recent Christmas revivals, a dose of happiness to end a turbulent year from the Donmar in Tim Sheader's delightful production of Priestley's warm and sharp marital comedy.

 

Theatre Review: Last Easter (Orange Tree)

 

Part of the great delight of Lindsey Turner's current take on Under Milk Wood at the National Theatre is the production's staging in-the-round, which helps to make its care home setting an environment that the audience can feel fully immersed in. With Turner's radiant production fresh in the mind, returning to one of our smallest but most vital in-the-round spaces - the mighty Orange Tree - for Tinuke Craig's revival of Bryony Lavery's 2004 play Last Easter felt like a particularly exciting prospect. Unfortunately, though, where Under Milk Wood was an exceptionally warm, sensitive and embracing experience, Last Easter proves forced, obvious and off-putting from the start. 

Told via the tiresome, self-conscious mix of narration, audience address and dialogue that seems to have become a default mode for contemporary dramatists who can't always be bothered to dramatise, Lavery's play focuses on four friends - lighting designer June, performers Gash and Joy, and prop-maker Leah - as they navigate the news of June's diagnosis with secondary cancer. The first half trivialises Lourdes, as the foursome take a trip there in the tentative hope of getting the atheist June healed. And the second half trivialises euthanasia, as June, her condition deteriorating, asks her friends to carry out an assisted suicide. Throughout, bad jokes and banter are meant to serve as a shield covering the protagonists' pain at the prospective loss of their friend. 

I say "meant to" because that's what the play, extremely frugal with honest emotion, never makes us feel, in fact. And Craig's production - staged with a spase, casual set by Hannah Wolfe that mostly consists of four chairs and a keyboard, but at least boasting a brilliant, expressive lighting design by the great Elliot Griggs (Pomona, An Octoroon) - only exacerbates the writing's trivializing tendencies. Compared to an intelligent film like Jessica Hausner's Lourdes (2009)  Last Easter could be a cartoon. Barring a few attempts at poetic flourishes, a fatally larky tone dominates, and leads, in a couple of cases, to an over-emphatic performance style that's too much for the small space. 

Since the characters lack context and depth, it's probably not the actors' fault that the four never even convince as a group of friends: in particular, Peter Caulfield 's quipping, cruising, Garland-loving Gash (he's GAY, ok), and Ellie Piercy's Joy, a highly-strung party girl haunted by a boyfriend who committed suicide, don't develop much beyond stereotype. Both play and production feel at once antic and hollow, with the status of the four protagonists as "theatre people" leading to several half-baked meta moments, some of which result in ironies that can't always have been intended. "This is undramatic," notes Gash at a few points. Well, yes, when a playwright insists on telling the audience instead of showing or evoking things to them, it is. "The best thing about religion is the lighting," Naana Agyei-Ampadu's June remarks early on. It's by far the best thing about this production, too.  

 Last Easter is booking at the Orange Tree until 7 August. 

Theatre Review: Cougar (Orange Tree Theatre)

Charlotte Randle and Mike Noble in Cougar
 (Photo: The Other Richard)

Benefiting from a whip-smart production by Chelsea Walker, Rose Lewenstein's Cougar brings a nervy, sometimes feral intensity to the Orange Tree stage. I only saw one play by Lewenstein so far - her elegant and touching drama about three generations of Jewish women, Now This is Not the End - but that didn't prepare me for Cougar which is an altogether wilder, weirder beast. 

A series of short hotel room-set scenes, presented in jumbled chronology, constitute the piece. All of the scenes involve Leila and John, a couple who hook up during a conference. He's a barman and she's a leading figure in corporate sustainability who jets around the world, promoting the "Green Agenda" to international companies. As their affair develops, Leila takes John on her trips, paying his way, and warning him not to fall in love with her. This arrangement gets tested by various factors, not least the ever-deteriorating condition of the world itself. 

With its hotel rooms setting, and focus on sex and power plays therein, Cougar superficially evokes John Donelley's The Pass. But Lewenstein's more surprising play has grander thematic designs, and ambitions that are hearteningly big. The play touches on a range of fashionable interrelated topics - #MeToo, Trump, climate change - but only occasionally (such as Leila asking John: "Are you consenting?") do those elements feel too calculated. Consumption, at both macro and micro levels, is the governing idea, and feminist sloganeering of the "Burn it all down" variety is avoided for something knottier and ultimately more provocative.

Charlotte Randle and Mike Noble in Cougar

 (Photo: The Other Richard)

The characterisation of Leila is particularly intriguing in this regard. An "impenetrable" compartmentalist, unwilling to say "Me Too" and with a desire to be "bought" by a man (imagine the outcry if David Hare had come up with this!), she comes close to "dysfunctional career woman" cliche. But Charlotte Randle's intelligent, carefully modulated performance - which shifts from sensuality to icy contempt in a hair's breadth - creates a fascinating, credible character. Mike Noble is equally compelling, as he shows John grappling with his place in this dynamic, pointing out the paradoxes in Leila's position as "a climate-change celebrity" and attempting to orientate himself via the Lonely Planet app before the cities that the couple find themselves in begin to blur. 

Indeed, as Rosanna Vize's set gets progressively trashed, Cougar takes on a hallucinatory quality, its "snapshot" structure, repetitions and mirrorings complemented by a subtly unsettling sound design by Alexandra Faye Braithwaite and superb lighting by Jess Bernberg (who did such an exquisite job on Jonathan Humphrey's 2017 production of The Death of Ivan Ilyich). Bernberg's work, in particular, contributes powerfully to the story-telling here, as it skillfully delineates temporal and location shifts as well as providing a few moments of startling exposure. Walker keeps the rhythm tight, sharp and coiled throughout, with scenes snapping off and resuming in unexpected places.

Overall, Cougar memorably conveys the hothouse atmosphere of a fraught affair while gesturing at the wider resonances beyond its claustrophobic parameters. This take on relationship upheaval and pending apocalypse will probably polarise people, but Walker's haunting production deserves to be a big success.  

Cougar is at the Orange Tree until 2 March. Further information here. 

Theatre Review: Humble Boy (Orange Tree)

Jonathan Broadbent in Humble Boy (Credit: Manuel Harlan)

In The Full Room, his combative and deliciously partisan “A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting,” Dominic Dromgoole speculates that the work of Charlotte Jones “may represent the future of a form of populist theatre.” Praising her plays for their “magic realism that reflects life,” their “pervasive warping of the world, practised with heartfelt affection,” Dromgoole states that “Jones is naturally a public writer, and the theatre desperately needs talent like hers. Writers who can talk to an audience, engage them without begging for favour, and gently change their perceptions.”

Dromgoole’s loving appraisal was written with reference to two Jones plays – In Flame and Martha, Josie and the Teenage Elvis, which won her the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2000 – and just before the premiere of the work that would prove her biggest hit (so far): Humble Boy. Staged at the National Theatre in 2001, before a West End transfer the following year, Humble Boy offers a distinctive, appealing mix of sitcom humour, poetic flourish, family conflict, science and bee-lore, as it focuses on the return of a depressed Oxford research fellow, Felix Humble, to his family home in the Cotswolds following the death of his father, where he finds his mother already contemplating marriage to another man. The play’s ghostly intertext is, of course, Hamlet, and John Caird’s original production came complete with several cast members from the NT’s contemporaneous staging of Shakespeare’s play, most notably Simon Russell Beale, whom Jones had in mind when writing the lead role.

Inevitably, Paul Miller’s new production of the play, its first UK revival, doesn’t have the associations of Caird’s original staging. But it makes a great, fresh case for the play anyway - and a welcome one, since, contrary to Dromgoole’s prediction, Jones’s post-Humble work, such as 2004’s chilly The Dark, proved less immediately accessible to audiences. Here Simon Daw’s lovely garden set – with ivy up the pillars, and flowers planted into the stage - provides the cosy entry point for a play that cleverly mobilises the mode of pastoral English comedy for its own cheeky and sometimes subversive ends.    

Belinda Lang in Humble Boy (Credit: Manuel Harlan)

Jones is a whiz at writing characters with distinctive, individual voices and those voices come through vividly here in a memorable set of performances. The mother/son conflict is brought out particularly sharply from the off, with Jonathan Broadbent’s terrific Felix stuttering in his cricket whites as he observes his Ma’s removal of the bees that were his deceased entomologist father’s passion, pride and joy. By turns smart-alecky and achingly vulnerable, Broadbent makes the role his own, bringing both humour and real poignancy to Felix’s intellectual questioning and his confrontation with the limits of his own theorising. He’s exceedingly well-matched by Belinda Lang as the brittle matriarch Flora; elegant in sunglasses and Jean Muir, Lang shows no concern for likeability as she relishes the character’s waspish ripostes yet also suggests the crushed hopes that motivate Flora’s cruelty and vanity.  

As Rosie, the girlfriend whom Felix unceremoniously ditched when he left for Oxford, Rebekah Hinds makes the character a wry, resilient anti-Ophelia, while Selina Cadell’s befuddled, self-effacing hanger-on Mercy coverts a lunchtime grace – where conversation has already shifted from accusation to revelation to the best way to kill yourself – into a tragicomic showstopper.  

Selina Cadell and Christopher Ravenscroft in Humble Boy
(Credit: Manuel Harlan) 

Randy and ruddy-faced, a prosthetic penis poking out of his pants during the infamous urination scene, Paul Bradley brings a bullish, vulgarian’s vitality to the proceedings as Flora’s would-be fiancé. The spirit to Bradley’s flesh, Christopher Ravenscroft is as glorious here as he’s been in all his Orange Tree roles (Alison’s House, The Promise, The Conspirators, The Man Who Pays the Piper, The Stepmother), his gorgeous voice – a honeyed tone, indeed – employed to perfect effect as Jim, the gardener with a secret.  

Beautifully lit by Mark Doubleday to conjure summer's days and evenings, Miller’s production is perfectly attuned to the tonal shits in Jones’s writing. As farcical set-ups give way to philosophical speculation, the production builds to a transcendent, redemptive final sequence that re-purposes Ophelia’s mad scene to create one of the most beautiful and moving finales in contemporary British drama. Absent from UK stages for far too long, it’s good news that Jones has a new play, The Meeting, coming up at Chichester Festival Theatre from July, a complement to this richly enjoyable revival.     

Booking until 14 April. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: Jess and Joe Forever (Orange Tree)

It surprising to realise that it’s already been two years since Paul Miller began his tenure as Artistic Director of the Orange Tree. With a mixture of revivals and new writing that’s encompassed everything from sterling Shaws (Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer) to hipster-friendly hype-fests (Alistair MacDowall's Pomona) unforgettably powerful dramas (Chris Urch’s The Rolling Stone) to possibly the most delightful French Without Tears ever, Miller’s programming has showed continuity with his predecessor Sam Walters’s while also branching out in some new directions, especially through an emphasis on co-productions.     

Time, continuity and change, are among the concerns of the play – a premiere – which opens Miller’s third year as OT Artistic Director. Commissioned by Old Vic New Voices, and co-produced with Farnham Maltings, Zoe Cooper’s  Jess and Joe Forever centres on two young people as they grow up, spanning several summers in Norfolk, that take our protagonists from ages 9 to 15. Jess is a tubby little girl who, neglected by her parents, holidays in the village with her au pair, while Norfolk-born Joe helps on his father’s farm. As the two gradually edge into friendship, a portrait emerges of two outsiders challenged with making their way in the world against the sometimes harsh judgements of the community.

With its rural setting, a running time of just an hour and ten minutes, and its intimate focus on two characters, Jess and Joe Forever  is a modest work but it’s one whose themes run deeper than many pushier, ostensibly more “ambitious” plays.  The premise may suggest the low-key naturalism of Robert Holman (whose German Skerries was revived at the Orange Tree earlier this year) but what makes the play distinctive is its structure and narrative approach. Jess and Joe Forever mobilises narration and audience address to become a play that’s very much about the construction of a story, as Jess and Joe take us through their impressions and experiences, and, sometimes, debate how best to present those shared memories. 

Rather like Jess, who earnestly declares herself a vegetarian while eagerly consuming a scotch egg, it’s an odd combination of archness and innocence that Cooper achieves here. Initially the archness seems to be winning out in Derek Bond’s production and James Perkins’s spare design, with its representative small pile of sand, and two microphones through which the protagonists speak when they morph into (their versions of) other characters.

But while the self-consciousness about storytelling has some drawbacks (resulting in some sketchy characterisations and underdramatised moments), it becomes more beguiling as the evening progresses, adding up to a mischievous (yet mature) spirit of play that feels appropriate for a work concerned with imagination, transition and transformation. One particular surprise reveal will be the play’s main talking point but what’s admirable is the scrupulous way in which Cooper avoids an “issue-led” approach to the material, opting instead for a more quirky, personal and poetic perspective. Her dialogue is lively and characterful, with great attention to detail that sparks the characters to life.

Bond’s production succeeds in keeping the transitions fluid, with great help from Sally Ferguson’s lighting and from Nicola Coughlan and Rhys Isaac-Jones’s terrific performances, which make the evening a beautifully textured duet. Coughlan is particularly adorable, as she reveals the neediness and vulnerability underpinning Jess’s penchant for showing off. Quietly subversive, not without pain, Jess and Joe Forever truly earns its final joyous flourish. It’s a lovely, loving work that makes you eager to see what Cooper will do next.

Jess and Joe Forever is booking at the Orange Tree until 8 October.   The production then tours until November. Further information here.  

Theatre Review: The Rolling Stone (Orange Tree)

Fiston Barek and Faith Alabi in The Rolling Stone (Photo: Manuel Harlan)

Winner of the 2013 Bruntwood Prize Judges Award, Chris Urch’s The Rolling Stone debuted last year at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, where the production was cross-cast with a new version of Anna Karenina. An exploration of gay desire in the repressive context of contemporary Uganda, Urch’s play gained mostly favourable responses, though some critics suggested that Ellen McDougall’s production would have benefited from a smaller space.

It gets it here. Transferred to the Orange Tree, as the first production in Paul Miller’s second year as Artistic Director, The Rolling Stone reveals itself, in the right-there intimacy of this auditorium, to be a nuanced, thought-provoking and – finally – blazingly intense piece that demonstrates an Ibsen-esque attention to the problematic intersection of public and private lives.

The title alludes to a Ugandan newspaper, a scurrilous rag which, in 2010, began publishing pictures of homosexuals and urging people to "out" any such deviants who are believed to be threatening the moral life of the nation. (The publications led to arrests, assaults and murders.) Church elder Mama (Jo Martin) sees the scare as the opportunity for some crowd-pleasing (and lucrative) fire-and-brimstone preaching on the part of the newly installed pastor Joe (Sule Rimi). What she – and Joe – are unaware of is that Joe’s brother Dembe (Fiston Barek) is gay, and involved in a relationship with Sam (Julian Moore-Cook), a doctor of Ugandan and Northern Irish parentage.  

Scooping a Bruntwood Prize hasn’t always been a firm guarantee of a play’s quality, but The Rolling Stone certainly proves its worth. While some of the banter between Dembe and Sam feels a little bit calculated in striving for crowd-pleasing comic effects, Urch’s writing is adroit where it counts, with the protagonists' attitudes to religion and sexuality conveyed through rich and robust language and cliché-defying characterisation. 

The play is undoubtedly a melodrama in terms of its construction. But it shows how impactful that form can be when approached with truth and sensibility, the drama building to a shattering finale that’s worthy of Arthur Miller at his finest. (In its concern with whistle-blowing and its presentation of the "outing" as a witch-hunt motivated in part by personal score-settling, Miller’s The Crucible is an evident intertext here.)  

 Fiston Barek and Sule Rimi in The Rolling Stone (Photo Manuel Harlan)

McDougall delivered a rather wonky production of The Glass Menagerie last year but shows total assurance in this venture. Staged simply and prop-free, with slightly overlapping scenes, and punctuated by stirring singing of spirituals, the production has pace and rhythm, and is boosted by terrific, heart-grabbing performances.

Jo Martin’s superb Mama blends manipulation and maternal concern to compelling effect, locating a strangely valiant and vulnerable core at the heart of a character whose actions and rhetoric are often reprehensible. Charismatic Sule Rimi brings heat to Joe’s preaching, implicating the audience as his congregation. Fiston Barek insightfully conveys Dembe’s oscillations between self-denial and self-belief. And Faith Omole and Faith Alabi maximise their opportunities as Dembe’s sister Wummie and his proposed paramour Naome, the former forced to make her own sacrifice, the latter seeking refuge in silence.

As potent as the play’s elements of social critique undoubtedly are, The Rolling Stone is generous and mature in its avoidance of finger-pointing, and in its refusal to demonise any of its own characters. The torn-from-the-headlines element charges the drama with an electric current of urgency. But Urch’s play finally transcends mere topicality, expanding into a more universal exploration of the complexities of family, loyalty and love. Not to be missed.  

Booking until 20^th February. Further details here. 

Theatre Review: French Without Tears (Orange Tree)

Genevieve Gaunt in French Without Tears (Photo: Richard Davenport)

With his sparkling, affectionate revival of French Without Tears, Paul Miller delivers one of the year’s most purely pleasurable productions. Terence Rattigan’s 1936 comedy, about the romantic complications among a group of English youth at a French summer school, was the playwright’s first big stage success. The play was also one of the primary targets for the anti-Rattigan brigade of the 1950s.

French Without Tears, which has some affinities with Rattigan’s 1943 While the Sun Shines (revived at Pentameters back in 2011 [review]), clearly belongs to Rattigan’s early period, and, while there are some subterranean links to his later dramas, it would be a mistake to look for too much depth under the play's shiny, epigram-strewn surface.  Still, if French Without Tears is essentially a trifle, it’s a well-constructed and fairly substantial one that’s not without some insight in its gleeful exploration of the machinations and the madnesses of love.

As usual, Miller very much takes the text on its own terms, refusing to place it in knowing quotation marks, or to dress it up with contemporary nudges and winks.  The result is the kind of blissfully confident production in which every element feels in sync. And the evening has one undeniable asset: the brightest (and hottest) young cast to currently be seen on a UK stage.

There are several star-making turns: from Genevieve Gaunt as Diana, the cooing, sulky, ever-manipulating seductress who’s recognised that her only talent is to make men fall for her, and who intends  to exploit that gift to the full; from Joe Eyre and William Belchambers as her current love rivals, Kit and Rogers (Eyre spends most of the second half in one of the year’s most memorable costumes, while Belchambers allows his hilariously awkward, deadpan Commander to lighten up by just the right degree); and from Tom Hanson, who’s adorable as the marvellously uncomplicated, French-mangling and tart-loving Brian. 

Tom Hanson in French Without Tears (Photo: Richard Davenport) 

As Alan, vacillating between submitting to his father’s plans for his career and pursuing his own writerly ambitions, Alex Bhat makes a sensational professional stage debut, moving from shrewd, smug observer to befuddled participant as Diana turns her attentions his way. Veteran David Whitworth is priceless as the school’s Prof Maingot, demanding that French be spoken at all times and forever entering the scene just when the tensions between the men are about to get physical. And Sarah Winter (who made a minor role in the Finborough’s 2012 revival of Hindle Wakes truly memorable) is appealing as Maingot's daughter, who’s nursing her own unspoken crush on Kit.  

In short, the production has a wonderfully generous sense of ensemble, and, throughout, one feels the entire cast’s sheer pleasure in the rhythms and wit of Rattigan’s dialogue, and the funny lines they get to deliver. Our own current toff-bashing cultural moment might make French Without Tears a hard sell to some. But leave any such prejudices at the door and it’s impossible not to get swept up in the beguiling effervescence of Miller’s perfectly charming revival.

Booking until 21^st November. Further information at the Orange Tree website. 

Theatre Review: Directors Showcase (Squirrels/The After-Dinner Joke) (Orange Tree)

I always particularly look forward to the Orange Tree’s annual Directors Showcase. These short Spring seasons of plays selected and directed by the theatre’s resident trainee directors have, over the years, yielded some terrific work: the marvellously confounding 2012 triple-bill which mixed up St. John Hankin’s warm proto-Home Alone  Edwardian escapade, The Burglar Who Failed, Omar El-Khairy’s chilling Hanekian home invasion drama  Return To Sender and Amiri Baraka’s still-searing Dutchman remains one of my all-time favourite OT evenings.  In his programme note for this year’s presentation – sadly the last of such seasons under his aegis following his retirement in a couple of months - Artistic Director Sam Walters gently reminds us of the importance and the innovation of this scheme, which has given an early start to more than fifty aspiring directors, many of whom have gone on to have auspicious careers.        

This year’s trainees, Lewis Gray and Sophie Boyce, have chosen to present obscure-ish 1970s work by two major playwrights, pairing David Mamet’s 1974 three-hander Squirrels with Caryl Churchill’s 1978 The After-Dinner Joke, a piece originally commissioned for the BBC’s (late and very much-lamented) Play for Today series. The double-bill adds up to a provocative, engaging evening, and offers a valuable opportunity to see these rarely-performed works in such an intimate setting.          

Mamet’s piece is a highly mannered, Absurdist-inflected musing on the creative process, in which a writer and his amanuensis tussle over the composition of a narrative. Arthur, an egotistical author who has been working on the opening line of a story involving a man's encounter with a squirrel for fifteen years, has hired Edmond, a fledgling writer, as his secretary/collaborator. The two men’s styles predictably clash, and the stage would seem to be set for a prototypical Mametian male locking-of-horns -  were the two men not frequently joined by Arthur's cleaning lady, also an aspiring writer, who chips in with her own observations and suggestions, as the play shows snatches of stories getting written, adapted, tossed away, recycled and reclaimed.   

Peter McGovern in Squirrels (Photo: Robert Day)

I'm not sure that the super-arch Squirrels is much more than a curiosity, ultimately, and some may find its writerly wrangling tedious. But, despite an occasional staticism, Lewis Gray’s polished production proves entertaining thanks to well-honed  interplay from David Mallinson and Peter McGovern as Arthur and Edmond, and to  Janet Spencer-Turner whose wily gem of a turn as the Cleaning Lady (possibly the most hardboiled of the trio), provides almost all of the funniest moments here.   

Churchill’s piece is an obviously livelier proposition. The After-Dinner Joke is a broad, often cartoonish, Python-esque satire  that, rather like the playwright’s recent Love and Information, whips through over sixty scenes – most of them skits and sketches - as it anatomises and satirises the politics of charity. A through-line of sorts is provided by the experiences of Selby, an eager young woman (“I’m not a Christian. But I feel just as guilty as if I was”) who gives up her job as a personal secretary and takes up a post as one of her company’s charity campaign organisers, discovering along the way the ethical complications involved in the raising and distribution of charity funds.  

The play’s theses – that charities are businesses deeply implicated in capitalism; that money should actually be given to “peasant rebellions" which would bring about real change; and that, yeah, everything is political, OK?  - are glib, transparent and delivered without much shading; this is certainly a play to make those who don’t give to charity feel a whole lot better about themselves.

Ben Onwukwe and Lydia Larson in The After-Dinner Joke (Photo: Robert Day) 

But the piece boasts so much cheeky theatrical brio that it’s hard not to succumb, even if you find yourself objecting to the triteness of most of Churchill’s conclusions here. There’s speech-making; slapstick; some inspired silent movie, advertising and rock-star parodies; and a whole host of gags. Boyce’s carnivalesque production is impeccable in its zest and its attention to tone, while its marvellous quintet of a cast – Lydia Larson, Ben Onwukwe, Jonathan Christie, David Gooderson and Rebecca Pownall - share over forty roles and inhabit them with supreme inventiveness. (Onwukwe playing a baby is truly something to behold.)  If the scattershot approach leads to a certain shallowness of argument, at the heart of the shenanigans and spoofery is a radiant performance from Larson that brings genuine poignancy to Selby’s discovery of the politics, perils and compromises involved in “doing good.” This excellent production deserves a longer life.

The Directors Showcase is booking until 7 June. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: The Breadwinner (Orange Tree)



Cate Debenham-Taylor in The Breadwinner (Photo: Robert Day)



"Well, I’m dished!" The Orange Tree’s mini-season of plays on the subject of breadwinners and providers concludes with a spry final offering: Auriol Smith’s enjoyable revival of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1930 comedy. There’s been a pleasingly radical streak to each of the early 20th C plays presented in this season, especially in their engagement with issues of gender and economics. Githa Sowerby’s The Stepmother critiqued patriarchal control of the purse-strings by showing the hard-working efforts of its enterprising heroine being systematically undermined by a no-good spouse. And GB Stern’s intriguingly conflicted The Man Who Pays The Piper advanced the proposition that a woman’s ultimate fulfillment might lie in the business world rather than in the domestic sphere. Though consistently lighter in tone than those texts, and much more condensed in its time-frame, Maugham’s play also offers a bracingly oppositional perspective on the way in which “money matters” in familial relationships - and on much else besides. That the play intersects beautifully with the two previous productions in the season isn’t a surprise. But it also proves a neat complement to Matthew Dunster’s creamy revival of Rodney Ackland’s Before The Party, currently at the Almeida and based, of course, on a Maugham short story.

Like Before The Party, The Breadwinner also skewers the shallow, status-obsessed mind-set of its spoilt middle-class protagonists and traces the fallout of one rebellious family member’s flouting of expectations. In this case, it’s the father of the family, one Charles Battle (Ian Targett), who stirs up his Golders Green clan when he announces that, following a serious spot of financial bother, he’s turning his back on the daily grind of the stock-broking world - and leaving the family, to boot. It’s a premise that might be played for hand-wringing melodrama. But as Charles’s wife Margery (Cate Debenham-Taylor) and his self-absorbed teenage kids Patrick (Joseph Radcliffe) and Judy (Nathalie Buscombe) register their objections it’s made clear that they’re more troubled by the possibility of scandal and the fact that Charles’s absence might deprive them of their creature comforts than by much emotional attachment to Daddy Dear.

Maugham can be a slyly subversive writer at the best of times (witness his euthanasia-endorsing The Sacred Flame, revived by Dunster for ETT last year) and in The Breadwinner he inserts a still-relevant critique of matrimony and materialism into an apparently well-behaved drawing-room comedy. Witheringly cynical about marriage, provocative on parent/child perceptions and insightful about the effects of WWI on gender roles and family relationships, the play’s jibes aren’t always subtle but they are well-aimed, and there’s a decidedly serious undertow to the demonstration that conventional family roles and the business world can stifle the spirit. Whether Maugham had been reading his Emerson when composing The Breadwinner I’m not sure but there’s surely a trace of Transcendentalism to the drama’s insistence that the individual must be allowed to develop beyond oppressive social contracts and conventions. In this way, Maugham’s Charles might be viewed as the more genteel English forebear of American Beauty’s Lester Burnham, as he espouses a philosophy of self-reliance and starts telling his loved ones some long-repressed home truths. And seldom can a male protagonist’s desire to abandon his family have been presented more sympathetically than it is here.



Nathalie Buscombe in The Breadwinner (Photo: Robert Day)



Designed with customary precision and economy by Sam Dowson, Smith’s production might benefit from a little tightening: a couple of performances still lack a bit of definition and not all of the lines generate the laughs they should. But the production is entertaining throughout and boasts several spiffing turns. Ian Targett warms up as Charles to give both poignancy and insight to his portrayal of an apparently humourless man’s bid for freedom. As the spoilt son who believes a hardcourt tennis court to be “one of the ordinary necessities of existence” Joseph Radcliffe puffs up with hilarious indignation at his father’s dismissal of him as “boring.” Cate Debenham-Taylor brings wonderfully subtle comic skill to her characterisation of the aesthete wife who’s contemplating extra-marital dalliances but is none-too-keen on the idea of being dumped. The Harriet Walter-esque Isla Carter gets a show-stopping vamp moment. And the appealing Nathalie Buscombe starts archly but softens into sympathy as the only family member to come round to the pater’s point-of-view.

Booking until 18th May. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: Sauce for the Goose (Orange Tree)



Photo: Robert Day



If it’s Christmas at the Orange Tree, then it must be (doorless!) farce. And if it’s farce, then it must be Feydeau. Well, not necessarily, in fact, for the OT have looked beyond the repertoire of France’s principal farceur in recent years, with Hennequin and Delacour’s Once Bitten in 2010 and – best of all – the English writer John Maddison Morton’s Three Farces in 2011. But for this year Sam Walters and company have returned to Feydeau and the playwright’s 1896 play Le Dindon (The Turkey/Sauce for the Goose), which the theatre first staged in 1987. Those of us who hold none-too-fond memories of Richard Eyre’s misbegotten revival of A Flea in Her Ear a couple of years ago might flinch at the prospect of more Feydeau even now. And I can’t say that Walters’s production entirely assuaged my doubts about the validity of the playwright’s eminence. Still, though overlong, it’s a considerably more attractive proposition than was Eyre’s Flea with a few comic high spots and some finely orchestrated moments of mania.

The plot centres - no surprise here - on frustrated philanderings. Pontagnac (David Antrobus) pursues Lucienne (Beth Cordingly) who turns out to be the wife of his old friend Vatelin (Stuart Fox). Lucienne has an admirer in the reprobate Redillon, but is refusing his advances as long as her husband is faithful to her. It turns out that he hasn’t been, though, and the arrival of Vatelin’s strident German lover Heidi (Rebecca Egan) and her effusive spouse Soldignac (Jonathan Tafler) gives the plot a much-needed fillip, with all of the characters ending up at the Hotel Ultimus, where the guests include an army doctor Pinchard (Vincent Brimble) and his deaf wife (Auriol Smith). A cup of strychnine and an alarmed bed add to the larks.

The structure of Sauce for the Goose adheres to what appears to be the Feydeau formula: a laboured set-up, a manic middle, a let-down end. As in Flea, the targets often seem questionable and those with a low tolerance for funny foreigner gags and disability-mocking (a speech impediment in Flea; deafness here) would be well advised to steer clear. But although Walters’s production would benefit from tightening and tweaking – at an hour and forty five minutes, the first half is way too long, for starters – it has enjoyable moments throughout. Indeed, it’s some of the least promising elements that actually prove the funniest: I laughed the hardest at the German characters and at the Pinchards’s exploits - with Egan and Tafler, Brimble and Smith, delivering perfectly pitched performances in each case.

Indeed, most of Walters’s cast – many of them fresh from Antrobus’s production of Ibsen’s Love's Comedy - acquit themselves well, and Peter Meyer’s translation is spry line by line (a quibble on “dogging” and “hounding” is especially choice). For me, though, Feydeau’s plays lack charm and insight and are never as intricately or cleverly worked out as their reputation would suggest. Sauce for the Goose proves a pleasant enough diversion and the audience certainly seemed to be having a good time throughout, but it’s not an evening to convert the farce averse.

Booking until 2nd February. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: Love's Comedy (Orange Tree)

Sarah Winter and Mark Arends in Love's Comedy. Photo: Robert Day

From the Rose’s The Lady from the Sea to the Young Vic’s A Doll’s House and the Old Vic’s Hedda Gabler, 2012 can’t be said to have stinted London theatregoers on (excellent) Ibsen productions. But - last year’s Emperor and Galilean at the NT notwithstanding - it’s fallen to our smallest fringe venues to alight upon (some may say “dredge up”) the playwright’s earlier, lesser-known work. First off the block was the Jermyn Street Theatre with its revival of St. John’s Night and now the Orange Tree are producing Love’s Comedy. Ibsen’s 1862 verse drama and “first play of modern life” wasn’t performed in the UK until 1963, and is only now receiving its first professional London production. The willingness of these venues to think outside the box and stage such seldom-seen plays is admirable, of course. But while David Antrobus’s production has some charming and engaging moments it doesn’t entirely assuage the suspicion that there’s a reason why this particular work - deemed “immoral” upon its Norwegian premiere - may subsequently have been left to languish. As Raymond Williams suggests in Drama From Ibsen to Brecht: “It is a play of considerable incidental talent, but it shows more clearly than ever the false position into which Ibsen had been driven by his acceptance of contemporary theatrical techniques.”

The setting is the country-house of the widowed Mrs. Halm, where two students, Falk and Lind, are staying, wooing their host’s two daughters, Anna and Svanhild. Falk, a passionate, guitar-wielding aesthete who criticises bourgeois values in his poetry, initially finds his proposal to the quiet but free-thinking Svanhild rejected on the grounds that she doesn’t want to be his muse, and that writing is no substitute for action. But when a discussion of love ends with Falk denouncing his apparently happily-hitched hosts as hypocrites Svanhild is favourably impressed, and she and Falk plan to defy the family and run off together.

Had Ibsen concluded proceedings here the play would have been a rather pleasing miniature. But a draggy third act tests the patience and the decision that Swanhild and Falk finally come to - spurred by the intervention of a rich businessman, Guldstad - seems more perverse than poignant. The play is, as Williams suggests, an odd hybrid of elements, and Don Carleton’s translation proves erratic in its rendering of the language: sometimes spry and witty, often clunky and obtrusive.

Boasting a fairly fetching Munch-inspired design by Sam Dowson, Antrobus's production strives for a musical rhythm and achieves it in a few scattered moments. The highlight comes at the end of the first half, with the discourse on love undertaken as a kind of symphony by the cast that’s then interrupted by Falk’s great denunciation of the group. But the final developments have a depressive sting, and the heavy-handed combination of mockery and melancholy makes for an unsatisfying conclusion. Clearly, at the time of Love’s Comedy’s composition, Ibsen still had some way to go in order to become the master of irony which so much of his later work would prove him.

Last seen rocking five roles at the Orange Tree in the superb Yours for the Asking, Antrobus does a creditable job of work in his first outing as director and gets some entertaining performances from the ensemble. In his effort to capture Falk’s high-strung passion Mark Arends over-pitches his turn a tad, but he has some effective moments. Stuart Fox is amusing as the pontificating pastor who started out as a revolutionary but now has settled into the establishment and the (seemingly endless) production of offspring, and there’s sharp work on the sidelines from James Joyce, from Amy Neilson Smith and Mark Oosterveen, and from Jonathan Tafler as Guldstad. And the appealing Sarah Winter - so good as the betrayed fiancée in the Finborough’s recent Hindle Wakes - once again brings a particular glowing candour to the stage as Svanhild. But none of that can quite make up for the fact that this is a play in which the heroine has to declare to her lover - straight-faced - “What strength there is in you, my magic oak!”

How you feel about a line like that will very much determine how you'll feel about Love’s Comedy, overall. Its primary interest lies in seeing Ibsen initiating the critique of conventional thinking, women’s position and marriage that would become central to his best work. But the patchiness of the piece makes Antrobus’s production a mildly intriguing curio rather than the great discovery one may have hoped for.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. The production is booking until 15th December. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: Mottled Lines (Orange Tree)

The latest addition to the growing canon of dramas inspired by last summer’s riots is Mottled Lines, the debut play by Archie W. Maddocks, which closes out this year’s Orange Tree season with a short (just eight performances) run at the theatre this week. A member of the Orange Tree’s recently-established writer’s group, Maddocks originally developed Mottled Lines as a “response” to the play that opened last year’s season, Václav Havel’s The Conspirators. But it’s clear that the piece has become very much its own, distinctive thing. What I find most admirable about Mottled Lines is its avoidance of fact-ratcheting, pseudo-journalistic, verbatim schtick. Eschewing mere reportage, Maddocks’s approach here is at once direct and oblique. His play takes the form of a series of monologues delivered to the audience by five “archetypal” figures who offer their viewpoints on the causes and the fallout of a set of events referred to simply as “the incidents.” Henry Bell’s production thus makes for a potent end to an Orange Tree season that’s dexterously whisked us from contemporary Muswell Hill to St. John Hankin’s England and Amiri Baraka’s America, via excursions into Crimp-land and the WWI trenches, only to land us back in our own present moment, with some pressing problems to face.

Maddocks’s thesis - that the riots developed from a breakdown in communication between social groups that lead to a pervasive (and still-spreading) climate of fear - is far from startling. And at times the characters’ endless eloquence (I don’t know about you, but I tend to flinch when terms like “ideology” and “hegemony” turn up in plays, somehow) becomes wearisome. But at its best, Maddocks’s writing has force, surprise and conviction. And, gaining from the intimacy of the Orange Tree space, the monologue form feels just right for a piece that’s deeply concerned with failures in communication and their results. The playwright has written some memorable arias of blame, accusation and self-vindication for his quintet of protagonists, who present their views in speeches that combine elements of harangue, confession, sermon and poetic reflection.

These soliloquies are vibrantly delivered by an accomplished cast who manage to bring some shades of particularity - and the odd subversive touch - to the archetypes that they’re embodying. Alert to the power of language and its abuses, The Fear (stunning Charles Mnene) articulates a pervasive and politicised sense of social disenfranchisement; for him, the desire to “take a little bit extra” is simply the natural consequence of many years of deprivation. Hipflask in his briefcase, Steven Elder catches precisely his politician’s mixture of insecurity and arrogant entitlement; for him, “taking a little bit extra” is a deserved benefit for a lifetime of hard work. As The Wolf, Gabeen Khan slickly and even sweetly spins utterly alarming theories regarding “those who are clogging up the gears of our country.” Akiya Henry imbues The Sparkle with her customary vibrancy and emotional transparency. (The play might benefit from a second female character, however.) And Michael Elkin’s aggressive, angry copper - big on animal analogies - gets some of the strongest moments here, especially an electric encounter with The Thug, in which he deconstructs the latter’s “urban ensemble” - trainers, baggy trousers, hoodie, scarf - as cultural signifier.

Bell’s intelligent, crisp production, which has the actors occasionally taking a pew to address specific audience members directly, keeps the mood charged, taut and urgent. The pessimism of the payoff feels pat, but there’s enough good stuff here to make Maddocks’s next work an exciting prospect. And to make you hope that Mottled Lines itself might have a further life.

Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: Directors Showcase - The Burglar Who Failed, Return to Sender, & Dutchman (Orange Tree)

The Orange Tree’s annual Directors Showcase double-bill turns out, this year (and to the evident confusion of some audience members), to be a triple-bill, and a rather diverse and challenging one, at that. Selected and directed by the theatre’s two resident trainees, Karima Setohy and Polina Kalinina, the three short plays whisk the viewer from a bedroom in Edwardian Wimbledon to a 1960s New York City subway car via an unexpected - and thoroughly unnerving - excursion into Funny Games territory.  It’s a varied programme, then, but one that proves surprisingly complementary. The plays are linked by a concern with identity, class, prejudice, power and communication, issues which are explored through a series of charged encounters that threaten to – and indeed sometimes do – erupt into violence.

The evening opens comfortably enough with its lightest piece, The Burglar Who Failed by St. John Hankin, the Edwardian playwright whose The Charity That Began At Home received a proficient production by Auriol Smith at the Orange Tree at the end of last year. The Burglar... starts out like a proto-Home Alone escapade, with a pint-sized vigilante – Jessica Clark’s eager, sporty Dolly Maxwell – fending off David Antrobus’s intruder Bill Bludgeon with a hockey stick when she finds him hiding under her bed. But rather than erupting into full-blown farce and slapstick, the play takes a surprising turn, as Bludgeon confesses his distaste for his profession and the practical-minded Dolly sets about offering him career advice.

As in The Charity That Began At Home, then, Hankin both celebrates and lightly satirises middle-class Edwardian philanthropic inclinations here, and Setohy’s low-key production – though perhaps a little more static than is necessary in the second half – has genuine charm.    It doesn’t add up to much, overall, but proves diverting  throughout, with lovely, affectionate performances from Clark and Antrobus, and from Paula Stockbridge as Dolly’s harried, anxious mother.       

Hankin’s wry brand of Edwardian empathy gets swapped for very contemporary unease in the second piece, Omar El-Khairy’s Return to Sender, a “response” to Hankin’s play that immerses the viewer in a considerably less cosy “home invasion” situation. Accomplished via a slow and superbly unsettling set-change segue, the production (also directed by Setohy) is effectively cross-cast with The Burglar Who Failed, and finds Clark brilliantly trading wholesomeness for menace as Rebecca, a teenager who’s holding hostage a well-to-do couple, Tom and Heather, for reasons that remain ambiguous to the end.

El-Khairy riffs cleverly on The Burglar... to produce a drama that touches upon a range of contemporary hot potatoes - the demonisation of youth, familial dysfunction, teenage sexuality and social inequality - while leaving plenty of space for audience interpretation. As Rebecca taunts Tom and Heather with threats of violence, accusations of infidelity and insinuations about their absent daughter Emma, the end result, as previously suggested, is more Haneke than Hankin, especially when Rebecca responds to Tom’s despairing “Why don’t you just kill us?” with the ineffably Funny Games-ish retort: “And deprive everyone of entertainment?” In addition, there’s more than a suggestion of Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake in the play’s use of a disruptive outsider figure to pick away at a middle-class family’s facade of respectability.

The writing isn’t always inspired (“You’re boring me!” shrieks Tom, unaccountably, to Rebecca at one point) and the pay-off lacks punch. But Setohy’s production retains a taut intensity, and is punctuated by nicely-judged moments of gallows humour. There are memorable jarring details, too - Rebecca’s knowledgability about classical music, for one - in a play that expresses a great deal of scepticism about how well we can know others, whether strangers or those allegedly “closest” to us.

 

A final disquieting encounter plays out in Kalinina’s expert production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman which, opening to the strains of “Sinnerman,” presents a provocative parable of American race relations. Written in the early '60s, at the height of its author’s embracing of Black Nationalism, and hailed by Norman Mailer as “the best play in America,” Baraka’s drama focuses on the meeting of a white woman, Lula (Sally Oliver), and a middle-class black man, Clay (Paapa Essiedu), on a subway car (nicely rendered in Sam Dowson’s clever design). It’s an encounter that moves from playful flirtation and sexual interest to a highly-charged exchange of racist invective (some of which elicited gasps of shock from certain audience members). “We’ll pretend that you’re free of your history... and I’m free of mine” suggests Lula. But the impossibility of such a pretence is Dutchman’s thesis, as the two protagonists find themselves unable to extricate themselves from the script of American race and gender roles.

Given that the play is, in Baraka’s terms, about “the difficulty of becoming a man in America [where] manhood – black or white – is not wanted” it’s not surprising that the characterisation of Lula is decidedly problematic. A flagrant sexual tease, neurotic liar and racist, the character doesn’t just represent “the spirit of America” she’s also Eve, and arrives bearing a whole bag full of apples as she attempts to tempt Clay out of his assimilationist stance. Oliver overcomes the crassness of the characterisation with a full-on physical performance that’s brave and striking, and she’s well-matched by Essiedu who brings wry humour and watchfulness to Clay as well as a captivating ferocity to the character’s explosive tirade at the end.

Brash and Beat-influenced, punchy and pushy (small wonder that this is a play that found favour with Norman Mailer!), Baraka’s highly mannered dialogue is American to the core – but there’s no disputing its charge and vigour in performance. The pessimism of the playwright’s vision in Dutchman – in which relationships between blacks and whites are presented as a cycle of acrimony and violence that’s destined to repeat itself, ad infinitum – is hard to take. But, buoyed by its vivid performances and boosted by the intimacy of the Orange Tree’s space, Kalinina’s production flies.

The Directors Showcase runs for 2 hrs, 15 minutes, with interval. It’s at the Orange Tree until 30th June. Further information at the Orange Tree website. Photos by Robert Day.