Critics' Choice: Gary Naylor's Best Theatre of 2025

Theatre is, of course, a window on another world, often glitzier and brighter than our own, sometimes a reflection that can comfort or discomfit us and sometimes a portal into what it is to be human at all. It is an escape - and who can deny that we need such refuges more than ever - but it can be so much more than mere escapism. The best theatre of 2025 made those lofty promises - and kept them.

None more so than West Side Story at Copenhagen Opera, approached on a silent ferry, staged in a magnificent house, a delightful evening in a city, a country, seemingly at ease with itself. London can sometimes feel that way too and a Glasgow trip was also a tonic, but Denmark enjoys a lower collective blood pressure than many countries and that makes its art shine ever brighter. 

Europe was at the heart of another evening (play is, perhaps, too small a word) that proved a unique experience. In Lacrima, visionary French director, Caroline Guiela Nguyen, traces the production of a couture wedding dress across three riveting hours as the story circumnavigates the world taking in the opportunities attendant on the global economy and the costs that come with them. Beautiful and harrowing in turn, the production is a dazzling example of what theatre can do. 

Opera has always come with a punch, but seldom one that left me shaking long after the curtain has come down. Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking at the London Coliseum may be based on a story familiar from its Academy Award winning film, but on stage, its impact was visceral, led by two devastating central performances by Christine Rice and Michael Mayes. With judicial and quasi-judicial murders a hot button topic in the USA (and, as sure as night follows day, likely to be so here), its message could hardly be more timely.

The only performance I saw that could rival those two singers was Sean Hayes’ turn as the 1950s TV personality, Oscar Levant, in Good Night, Oscar. Inserting big name stars of the screen into the playbill can drive box office (which it not to be sniffed at) but the theatrical impact can be minimal or, as when the audience paused to applaud the entrance of Cate Blanchett in The Seagull, actually detrimental. But Hayes has the receipts - well, the Tony and a few more baubles - and he inhabits the fragile and funny piano man with an extraordinary vulnerability and virtuosity. Maybe you can act better than that, but I’m going to take some convincing.

Beyond London, Chichester Festival Theatre once more delivered West End quality productions at prices far more affordable even after the train fare. An imperious Natalie Dormer played the eponymous doomed heroine in Anna Karenina, an epic novel distilled into three hours, extraordinarily handsome to behold and with a kick to break your heart.

In dance, my personal highlight was seeing Natalia Osipova from a close vantage point in three short pieces in the Linbury Theatre, a close-up view of her scarcely credible physicality and presence and revealing of an unexpected wit and comic timing. 

At the simply wonderful Sadler’s Wells East, balletLORENT’s Snow White: The Sacrifice prove a visually ravishing version of the well known story that got right to the dark heart that sits at the centre of so many fairytales. To see dance, perhaps the most opaque medium for storytelling on stage, used to its full potential without clouding the narrative for a moment, was a privilege. It picked up similar themes, but with more impactful staging than the somewhat disappointing Into The Woods at the Bridge Theatre.   

The comedy that provoked the most laughs (surely the hard currency of that genre) was When We Are Married at The Donmar Warehouse, a play nearly 90 years old, but illuminated by old-fashioned acting, directing and staging that simply, boldly allowed the script to shine. Another nostalgic show, The Last Laugh, focusing on comic titans, Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and Bob Monkhouse, also cranked up the laughter quota while never mistaking sentimentality for poignancy.

If Sean Hayes’s take on Oscar Levant was the most extraordinary acting I saw, Jack Holden in KENREX, portraying another real person, the slain criminal, Ken Rex McElroy, was technically accomplished and utterly compelling, terrifying yet never inhuman. Holden is a name to watch.  

Reimaginings are gaining in popularity, perhaps, and I don’t mean this churlishly, in order to save costs and yet still produce a monument of theatre, with the best I saw Hedda at The Orange Tree. Taking Ibsen’s celebrated anti-heroine from 19th century Oslo to post-war Chelsea and adding an undercurrent of post-colonialism context, proved inspired. Another successful reimagined Ibsen, Ghosts at the Lyric Hammersmith, proved just how malleable the great Norwegian’s work can be.

You see Shakespeare done in so many ways over a year, from black boxes above pubs, even within a stage pub, but the best of The Bard this year was at the RSC, Emily Burns’s electric Measure for Measure taking a problem play and making it as thrilling as it was clear, much improved by the director’s cuts and focus. Luke Thallon’s Hamlet, set on a literally tilting ship of state, was not far behind, its slightly clumsy shoehorning of the text to fit the concept more than outweighed by the spectacle and beautiful line readings.

The best work at another Shakespeare-focused venue, The Globe, was a funny and traditional Three Sisters, Chekhov’s masterpiece telling us plenty about Russia, the Bear having loomed over the news all year long. 

Having started with a musical, I’ll finish with one, The Harder They Come at Stratford East proved a magnificent night out that, alas, now doubles as a tribute to Jimmy Cliff, whom we lost this year.

If that, and the chimes that ring in 2026 and signal another shuffle towards one’s own demise, remind us of our mortality, theatre reminds us of art’s immortality, of the legacies, big and small, that are left behind for future generations to enjoy. Recalling so many marvellous productions over the course of 2025, I’ll finish close to where this column started, with Stephen Sondheim’s lyric from “The Miller’s Son” in A Little Night Music - 

“And a person should celebrate

Everything passing by”

You should, you really should.

Main Photo Credit: Good Night, Oscar: Johan Persson