Clementine Scott

In another world, Jimmy Cliff’s ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ would have made a barnstorming musical theatre ‘I Want’ song. This musical adaptation of the late reggae pioneer's 1972 film – which premiered here in Stratford in 2005, and was reworked in New York in 2023 – makes that world a reality.

Despite her relative unpopularity within her lifetime, Barbara Pym always excelled at plumbing the depths in the lives of desperately ordinary people. In her 1977 novel Quartet in Autumn, she is concerned with those who live their lives waiting for something to happen, and what happens when that something never comes.

Rosanna Vize’s set for the world premiere of Care is sterile, harshly lit and unromantic. Like Alexander Zeldin’s script, it is almost mundane in its naturalism, yet unflinching in how it approaches its subject: life in a care home, both for the elderly residents and for those who care for them.

It’s clear before the curtain rises – before you’ve even set foot in the theatre – that The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals is about more than the sum of its parts. Several audience members are in costume, and need to be reminded via the pre-show voiceover not to sing along, even if they know every line.

In many ways, @sohoplace is the perfect venue for The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind: the intimate thrust staging is perfect for elaborate ensemble choreography and carousing the audience. This new musical, based on the memoir and film of the same name, is at its heart a story about community, and it works if we feel as immersed in that community as possible.

The Anti “Yogi” (heavy on the quotation marks) is one of those shows where the tagline tells you everything you need to know: “liberation, not Lululemon”. This is less a play than a call to arms, reminding the audience emphatically that the yoga classes they attend are not just another fitness fad, but a commodified form of an ancient practice.

Shakespeare veteran Dame Harriet Walter talks about the Bard in a reverent tone, but she doesn’t let him off the hook. After all, the Succession and Killing Eve star has built her latest book – She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said – around the idea that despite being a great observer of what makes us human, Shakespeare never gave his women the same depth and attention as his men.

A few scenes into Emily Lim’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Globe stage undergoes a transformation. Austere statuary gets wheeled away, the columns are swathed in plastic flowers, and Michael Grady-Hall as Puck blows bubbles to make more flowers emerge from the floorboards. The effect is colourful, tacky, and gloriously synthetic.

For a play ostensibly about wildlife photography, we don’t actually see too many photographs in Firewing. Instead, this is a story about truth: our relationship to it, how we represent it, and what it can cost us.

Much like All My Sons, the virtuosic Arthur Miller tragedy revived in the West End earlier this year, Miller’s lesser-known 1967 play The Price holds a mirror up to the American Dream and finds people varying degrees of broken by their desire to succeed. “I want money,” declares a character early on. “Congratulations,” another drily replies.

Virginia Woolf isn’t the easiest author to adapt for the stage, and her lesser-known 1931 experimental novel The Waves presents a particularly interesting dramaturgical challenge. Six friends meet at school, and undergo the typical trials of a bildungsroman, all within an ambitious stream of multiple consciousnesses, where characters hop in and out of each other’s minds.

The set for This Is Not About Me initially resembles the bottom of a particularly untidy knitting drawer: strewn with red thread and abandoned crochet projects. The stage is thus set for a show all about unearthing our deepest memories, and making those memories into art.

There is a moment in TWO where you could hear a pin drop: the affable 1980s soundtrack shuts off, and a glass shatters on the floor behind the bar. A stranger has said something out-of-turn in the pub, and threatened to reveal whatever heartache is lurking beneath the surface of the rough-and-ready bonhomie.

In Prima Facie, former lawyer and playwright Suzie Miller wrote about a lawyer whose faith in her profession is shaken by an experience of sexual assault. Now in Inter Alia, which transfers to the West End after an acclaimed National Theatre run, she exposes the limits of the justice system when it comes to sexual violence through a different lens: that of a mother of a son immersed in the manosphere.

Lifeline is the kind of play that feels as though it was composed with the help of a mindmap with one word circled in the centre, around which all parts of the drama must orbit. In this case, that word – or phrase, in fact – was ‘antibiotic resistance’.

In a staging device that feels made for the cavernous Wilton’s Music Hall, Bibi Simpson as convicted murderer Ruth Ellis addresses the audience with aristocratic authority, a tiny figure within an isolated prison cell. We are instantly drawn into her world, witnesses and voyeurs to her version of events, and active participants in the birth of her notoriety.

In the much-cited 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score, the Dutch psychotherapist Bessel van der Kolk wrote of how the human body can be undone and rewired by traumatic experiences. In Iron Fantasy, comedy duo She-Goat have absorbed this idea into their musical comedy, and explored if and how one can regain control over one’s body.

Sarah McGuinness is best known for her work producing whimsical indie documentaries about the standup comedian Eddie Izzard; in her one-woman show, though, there are only passing references to this. To put a finger on what the show is about is no easy task, because it’s a confused jumble of autofiction, metatheatre and campy musical comedy, which rarely elevates itself beyond an extended therapy session.

Park Theatre’s latest double bill presents two recent works from an emerging writer, both centring average queer London lives, and the lengths we’ll go to to present the versions of ourselves we want the world to see. Both are somewhat overblown in their execution, but at their best they are imaginatively conceived, wryly observational slices of life.

When it premiered at Soho Theatre in 2012, Blink was a whimsical oddity, an ode to two eccentric loners falling in love. In 2026, it takes on a darker tone, with the subtitle “a parasocial love story” foreshadowing things to come.