Cindy Marcolina

All in all, Two Strangers is a pleasant night out for the rom-com lovers: it romanticises The City That Never Sleeps and leaves the audience with a delightful ending that solves very little of the plot. It won’t change the world of musical theatre, but it’s nice and fuzzy. Like a good pair of comfy Christmas socks.

Nineteen Gardens is one of those layered pieces. Some will see a callous attempt at arbitrary retaliation, others will find an extremely detailed representation of English society. An excellent chance for discussion.

Nouveau Riche and Jessica Hagan reunite after Queens of Sheba for a new comedy that explores the absurd pressures thrust upon women by society. A bad breakup and her family’s constant comparisons to her happily wedded younger sister push Ama to look into having a baby on her own. It’s nothing short of an odyssey. There’s plenty to like in Hagan’s writing, but this play is, unfortunately, incohesive and inconclusive. 

An alleged hit at the Fringe in 2022, it disappears on a bigger stage and sadly becomes a steady trudge.

While this version of the bestseller isn’t as consistently shocking as its original material, it’s sharp, entertaining, vicious, thrilling, morbid, uncomfortable, and alarmingly irresistible. It's one for the feminists who want to be challenged and the gender-studies-TikTok-girlies who love to forensically dissect human nature. Definitely one to see. 

I, Daniel Blake was the film on everybody’s lips in 2016. Written by Paul Laverty and directed by Ken Loach, it saw a man from Newcastle having to fight the system tooth and nail to receive Employment and Support Allowance after a heart attack. It’s a political, heartbreaking, life-affirming movie that angered politicians and validated the common people. Adapted by Dave Johns - who played Daniel Blake on screen - the stage show is equally powerful, but imperfect.

An accomplished, evocative solo project, the piece sits between a play with songs and a straight drama infused with socio-politics: much like its creator, it’s impossible to pigeonhole it. She is casually funny between candid reflections that are strong in their stance. While these are sanitised and skittish most of the time, they culminate in an invigorating, rightfully angry invective against the typically English refusal of acknowledging a past of imperialism, colonisation, and the scars that we still bear. This climax puts the whole story into perspective, tying it into the ongoing social discourse.

Marina Carr’s award-winning play returns to London directed by Carrie Cracknell and starring Conversations with Friends starlet Alison Oliver (who trod the same boards earlier this year in Women, Beware the Devil). A compelling analysis of toxic dysfunction and female pain, Portia Coughlan is a jarring family drama shackled by tragedy. It propels Oliver into theatre stardom. 

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet explores grief and loss through the lens of Elizabethan society, reimagining the family life of the most celebrated playwright in England. Lolita Chakrabarti’s play enjoyed a fairly successful run in Stratford-upon-Avon and immediately promised a West End transfer. Under Erica Whyman, the production is a good-looking exercise in speculative history.

Three boys meet at Chunkyz to gossip, swap stories, and grow up against the backdrop of a society that’s not made for Muslim men. Blue Mist is staged with unfaltering energy across all areas of the production. Directed by Milli Bhatia, the strongly conversational dialogues have a snappy pace manipulated by dynamically stark lighting (Elliot Griggs) and alluring sound design (Elena Peña). 

When toxic tradition clashes with inevitable progress, the very structure of the crème de la crème of higher education comes into question. Matt Parvin’s Gentlemen is the cerebral lovechild of Laura Wade’s Posh and Alan Bennett’s The History Boys whose third cousin once removed is Mamet’s Oleanna. Directed by Richard Speir, it’s a cynical glance at the unhealthy microcosmos of the Oxbridge lot.

Seventeen projects and nearly four decades of artistic alliance have produced beloved classics like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, Sleepy Hollow, and Edward Scissorhands. Ten years after the first musical celebration, Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton returns to the Royal Albert Hall. John Mauceri conducted the BBC Concert Orchestra alongside the Crouch End Festival Chorus in a concert full of surprises.

Benjamin’s study of Victor’s mental health is exceptionally refreshing, but ends up feeling a tad apocryphal in the context, especially when considering the major changes to Shelley’s narrative. All in all, it’s a decently eerie night out in the lead-up to Halloween, but it isn't the must-see version of Frankenstein it could be yet. 

Rachel Garnet’s new play is the chance to explore workers’ rights and mortality. It’s a tense black comedy, jam-packed with philosophical arguments and tied together by Natasha Rickman’s controlled vision. It’s, however, in spite of the pair of razor-sharp performances, a tad too lengthy to hit right.

The verbatim script is thoroughly chilling. Rough poetry and arresting repetition guide the audience in a world of state-mandated violence, carried out not by the criminals but by the officers and staff who are meant to keep them safe. The fear, desperation, and frustration of those involved in the case are personified in voiceless figures ruled and restrained by the invisible force of music. It pushes them around and turns them into puppets; it slays them into zombie-like non-humans and makes them into the perpetrators themselves. A brilliant allegory.

The show is generally delightful, but one can’t shake the feeling that there’s so much more to explore. Simpson-Pike crafts a beautiful revival that ends with an adorable moment that ties the community together, but the script seems to forget the main reason the two boys connected in the first place.

Directed by Roy Alexander Weise, the project is structurally disruptive but ultimately too meandering and overlong. A narrator (Rochelle Rose) lays the tropes bare with bitter observations. She amplifies the intentional faux pas, but the framework gets a bit stodgy by the second round of narrative repetition.

There are vanity projects, and then there are Vanity Projects. This is a Vanyaty Project of exquisite substance that reconfirms Andrew Scott is one of the finest performers of his generation. A production years in the making, Simon Stephens’s one-man adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s human tragedy Uncle Vanya has landed in the West End in the safe hands of Scott.

It’s tough humour, not always politically correct nor consistently hilarious. All aspects of their personal lives and careers are ammunition. On-set misdemeanours, past scuffles, sexual escapades - everything. It’s somewhat of a potboiler for the easily pleased punters and industry professionals: it’s funny, but far from a knee-slapper and insulated in its type of jokes. Their punches are ruthless and the piece is deliciously self-referential, though its real strength is its unexploited dark side.

The project has been a top hit in its native Austria since it opened in 2006, garnering a steady following across the world and subsequent runs in Asia and Europe. The original is fabled to feature incredible sets and a sumptuous staging - it’s a shame those elements haven’t transferred.