Plays on in London

The first major West End revival of Edward Albee’s classic play in a decade has a cast to die for, as Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson play the iconically awful George and Martha, an acidic middle aged couple who invite George’s young colleague Nick and his wife Honey over for a bizarre evening of weird and problematic game playing. And @sohoplace is a wonderfully intimate venue to watch the horrors unfold. The catch is that the show is heavily sold out, though at time of writing there were a decent number of more expensive tickets available across the run. The great Marianne Elliott will direct a cast that’s rounded out by Josh Dylan as Nick, and Phoebe Horn as Honey.

Playwright James Graham made his breakthrough with This House, a drama about the hung Labour parliament of the 1970s and at this stage in his career we’ve more or less acceped that he can write about anything and make it interesting. Certainly a drama about influential economist John Maynard Keynes – he’s the guy who came up with the idea of spending your way out of a recession – doesn’t immediately sound gripping. But quite aside from the fact that his economic theories are ripe for Graham’s irrevent but factually compelling stardust, he was also a fasicinating figure, not a dry economist but a bisexual member of the boho Bloomsbury Set, who was married to the great Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Graham’s new play The Standard of Living joins Keynes as the Great Depression starts to bite and he attempts to fabricate a response. Rory Kinnear will play the protagonist, with Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova as Lopokova and Thomas Flynn as his lover Duncan Grant, in a production directed by the great Nicholas Hytner.

Almost a century on and I think we can be adult about the fact that 20th century American playwright Clifford Odets was never in the same league as the older Eugene O’Neill, or the younger Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller (who both clearly owed him a debt). Golden Boy, from 1937, is a fine play but clunkier than any of those writers at their best, with rougher-drawn characters and a somewhat on-the-nose consideration of art versus violence as embodied by protagonist Joe Bonaparte, a sensitive Italian-American violinist who throws himself into the world of boxing, with ultimately tragic results.  But it’s boring to quibble about the flaws of a worthwhile revival: not every US play from the middle of the last century can be A View from the Bridge. Though elements of Sam Yates’ stylish take will doubtless prove to be divisive, I thought it was great, a crack cast meeting a bold vision that seeks to do more than just squeeze Golden Boy into standard naturalist tragedy shapes. The story opens with Tom, a down-on-his-luck boxer manager in ‘30s New York. He’s played by Daniel Mays with a not entirely dissimilar note to his Nathan Detroit in the Bridge Theatre's recent Guys & Dolls: all comic bluster and goggling eyes. Like Nathan, he even has a girlfriend he won’t marry, although Hayley Squires' Lorna is a more intense character, and the chief impediment to their wedded bliss is that Tom already has a wife.  Business is bad, but then step into the ring – first metaphorically,...

Is getting a drink with an ex always a bad idea? If the aim to create the chaos and drama befitting a side-splitting one-act play, well: you might be onto something. Debuting in London after runs in New York and Los Angeles, Douglas Lyons’ Table 17 is dependent on people making bad, often unjustifiable, choices. Decisions are made and details revealed that elicit audible boos from the audience, some of whom sit on cabaret tables and have been actively encouraged in the pre-show to talk backand let rip. It’s all part of the fun.  Directed by Tony-winner Zhailon Levingston (he of Broadway’s acclaimed CATS The Jellicle Ball), Table 17 is unafraid to conjure these big emotions – and big sounds – from its crowd. Constantly wrongfooting the audience, the show flips from laugh-out-loud hilarity to genuine tragedy in minutes, changing costumes and switching timelines at equal pace. It’s a stylish and exhilarating theatrical experience, jolted forward by three powerful, emotive performances. The characters might be car crashes, but you won’t want to look away from a production this slick. The former couple in question are the confident Jada (Marisha Wallace) and kinda corny mechanic-cum-music-producer Dallas (the West End’s original Alexander Hamilton, Jamael Westman). We meet both individually, delivering respective monologues as they get ready for their date (or not-date?). The pair primp and preen, as Jada switches one bandage dress for another and Dallas opts for the corduroy...

This revival of Jay Presson Allen’s 1989 Truman Capote monologue was initially staged in the stunning House of the Redeemer in New York, the sort of opulent old Manhattan building of your wildest dreams. How would a London transfer work? Well, as the saying goes: if you can’t bring the mountain to Mohammed, then bring Mohammed to a lavishly detailed copy of the mountain. A huge part of the joy of the London Tru is how designer Paul Farnsworth has transformed the entire Menier space into what I’m going to call a faithful recreation of Capote’s New York apartment. Sure, if you look too hard at the panelled ceilings or the tapestry covered walls you’ll realise they’re just printouts on fabric. But one, well, yes, obviously; and two, it still looks incredible. While presumably Capote’s lounge didn’t look exactly like this (I’m sure it had less seating capacity for starters), the level of detail is astounding, from vintage rugs and sofas to shelves groaning with knickknacks, books and even handwritten letters. The actual play can’t really live up to the magnificence of the setting. That’s not the fault of performer Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who offers a funny, often very poignant channeling of the Alabama-raised author and socialite. That distinctive voice could so easily fall into parody – it was half a parody already. But Ferguson brings Capote to life, aided by the fact that the play is set at a very painful time in his life. It’s 1975, and he has recently published a chapter of...

TOWIE meets Blasted by way of the Iliad in this breezily provocative fourth play from rising star playwright Ava Pickett. Bloodsport is both fresh but also pleasingly of a piece with Pickett’s other work, insofar as like her previous plays – even breakthrough Tudor smash 1536 – it’s set in Essex. In fact it’s not even her first play set in a slightly vulgar Essex living room (although the decor here is a lot whiter than in her very funny adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma). Bloodsport takes place in the aftermath of a Trojan War of sorts, although there’s no Greece or Troy but rather some kind of civil unrest that’s gripped the UK. Smartly, Pickett never defines precisely what this is or exactly what has happened: it may have been a gang war, it may have been closer to the recent nationalist protests (it’s clear the Trojan equivalents were deemed to be ‘foreign’ on some level), it may have been a full-scale civil war. When Gerard Monaco’s terrifyingly toxic Agamemnon-proxy Mario comes back into the home he shares with his wife Cee (Laura Aikman), he talks about ‘New England’, as if the country has been remade wholesale. He’s joined by his malleable younger brother Marcus (Jay Taylor, in the Menelaus role) and a traumatised, blood-spattered Helen (Michelle Dockery), shivering in her nightwear, who everyone seems to be trying to ignore.  After an awkward homecoming defined by Mario’s triumphal belligerence, all signs - including the intro from Ethan Moorhouse’s poetic...

Coincidentally taking the number of OG Stranger Things cast members in a London play this month to two – Gaten Matarazzo is heading up the West End revival of Rent – Affluenza by Andy Sandberg stars Noah Schanpp (aka Will Byers) as a teen whose legal defence for the devastation he causesd on a drunken car drive is based upon notion that he was simply too affluent to understand the consequences of his actions. Shockingly, this is based upon the real case of Ethan Couch, a 16-year-old Texan who killed four people in a crash but whose defence rested on the notion he was so coddled by his parents he couldn’t tell right from wrong. Sandberg himself directs.

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s seminal works of magical realism are essentially unstageable but have – nonetheless – been staged occasionally, with adaptations of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and Kafka on the Shore having made it to the UK in relatively recent times. The latter had a run at the Barbican, and it’s there that this adaptation of Murakami’s early work Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World will run as part of an international tour. Adapted by Ako Takahashi, directed by Philippe Decouflé, and with Japanese movie star Tatsuya Fujiwara in the lead, the original story is set in two distinct worlds: one a dystopian future, the other mystical town populated by fantastical beasts. The book alternated chapters set in each, but one wonders if the reversal of the story’s name for this stage outing indicates that the dystopian End of the World will here be followed by the mystical Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Either way, it should be a thing of rare imagination.

The Cherry Orchard is, of course, one of Chekhov’s great plays, and follows an aiing aristocratic family as they contemplate the end of their beloved country estate and the sale of its beloved orchard. It was last seen in London a couple of years back in an absolutely bonkers production at the Donmar. Expect something less eccentric but powerfully poignant from the great director Ian Rickson, who turned in a fine Uncle Vanya on the cusp of the pandemic. This production will reunite him with Kristin Scott Thomas, who almost 20 years ago starred in his Royal Court production of The Seagull. She’ll play big hearted but finanically irresponsible aristocract Lyubov Ranevskaya, with Stephen Mangan co-starring as awkward noveux riche interloper Lopakhin.

Tracey Scott Wilson’s US newspaper drama The Story is definitely more red top than broadsheet in tone. But there’s always a place for some thrills in the theatre. Making its UK debut almost a quarter century after its 2003 US one, its roots stretch even further back in time: it’s inspired by the story of Janet Cooke, a promising young Black reporter for the Washington Post who was forced to return her Pulitzer Prize after her 1980 story about child heroin addicts on the streets of DC turned out to be largely fabricated.  Wilson has her mind on more ambitious stuff than that, however, as she takes us into the ‘Vanguard’ section of a Post-alike newspaper in an unspecified American city. Manned by a somewhat eccentric team of three reporters, all Black, Vanguard is nominally an ‘around town’ style gossip section that has been repurposed as a African American community news by Pat (Lorraine Toussaint), the steely Civil Rights veteran who rules over the section with an iron fist.  She is supported by Neil (Ashley Thomas), her chief underling and longterm mentee, who knows his place. And she enjoys a somewhat frosty relationship with newbie Yvonne (Letitia Wright), an impressive young reporter who has a less easy relationship with the Black community than her co-workers. Bullied by her Black peers as a child, stints in boarding school and Harvard have left her feeling like an outsider, and she is engaged in a clandestine relationship with the paper’s white head of news, nepo...