Alice Saville

A solo show should be a chance for an actor to show an audience what they can do – and who they are. Williams doesn’t always let Erivo do that. Instead, he subjects her to the theatrical equivalent of the beep test (the terror of school PE lessons), in service of an overly elaborate production that’s not satisfying either as a play or as a film. But there’s a lethal potency to the moments where she does make this Dracula her own: a Nigerian-accented, androgynous monster in a blood-red wig who knows that it’s when people love that they’re at their most vulnerable.

Stoppard shows us the power of learning so clearly here, in passionate, ahead-of-their-time speeches on algorithms or the nature of time. But he also shows us all the things that hold us back from it: lust, arrogance, and the sheer randomness of fate. Spending an evening at Arcadia is sometimes like being educated by a brilliant, modestly conservative lecturer who uses the hot sauce of sex to get us eating up material that could be stodgy in other hands. Then, gradually, this play starts to feel as well as think, building to a heartbreaking ending that shows how easily passion and knowledge can burn away to nothing.

Still, it feels that Ayckbourn is ultimately more interested in the creative possibilities of madness than in probing too deeply into its underlying causes. Susan eventually dreams up a whole wedding (which is assumed to be the summit of female happiness in this play) that descends into a nightmarish horse race, in a finale that canters away from exploring her inner world, rather than towards it.

If you think all this doesn’t exactly sound like classic family show fare, you’d be entirely right. But somehow this production’s edgier, darker touches only heighten the gorgeously bright palette that this story is working in. Sheppard’s staging abounds with warmth, eccentricity and ambition, from its huge-hearted musical numbers to costume designer Gabriella Slade’s cosy multicoloured knitted get-ups. Like a big game hunter, it aims at huge moving targets – and hits them, again and again.

there’s a certain chemistry missing from their interactions – it doesn’t feel like this cool Desdemona is so sexually entranced by Othello that she can’t flee him, even when her life’s at stake. Morris is good at the moments of physical violence here – the whole audience winces together as we hear a spine snap, sharp as celery. The moments of psychological violence, less so. As Iago, Jones is completely convincing without channelling the inner darkness you’d expect from this destructive force. Instead, an excellent Vinette Robinson becomes the emotional heart of the play as Desdemona’s maid Emilia. “Men are but stomachs: they eat us, then they belch us,” she says, bitterly, before becoming consumed by her own quest for justice.

A formidable army of female talent has gone into the Old Vic's staging of Mary Page Marlowe, a 2016 play by American writer Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) that's very loosely inspired by his late mother's life story. This enigmatic, hard drinking woman is played by no fewer than five actors, including both Andrea Riseborough (who brilliantly embodied another alcoholic in the 2022 film To Leslie) and a 79-year-old Susan Sarandon making her belated London stage debut. To be a woman is to play a part, we're told. And if all these bodies somehow fail to fit together into a single living, breathing portrait of an actual person, each still brings some brilliance of its own to this fractured story.

As Wright’s play emphasises, Levant’s worldview was ahead of its time – and so were the people who hired him, presaging an era of reality tv where uninhibited, unself-aware participants are wheeled on to scandalise viewers, with little thought given to the toll it takes on them. Still, this drama doesn’t feel quite as forward-looking in its perspective on mental illness. Levant’s madness here is romanticised, stylised: his hallucinations are used as a convenient way to flesh out his backstory. There’s something of a debt to Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus here, with its tale of an ageing composer haunted by his more successful rival Mozart. Levant sees visions of a sleekly suited George Gershwin, who taunts his loyal discipl, and imprisons him in an identity as a favoured interpreter of “Rhapsody in Blue”, nothing more.

Ultimately, Sing Street feels determinedly, exhaustingly brainless. It was originally aimed at Broadway, but its trajectory was cut short by the pandemic. Much like teenagers kept home from school, it doesn’t seem to have got much smarter in the interim. It feels like it’s pitched at secondary school kids, but you wouldn’t take teens to a show that chucks around homophobic slurs with gay abandon or is content to use child sexual abuse as no more than a little gritty retro flavour. Still, the performers give it their all, many of them making their professional debuts – and the songs are genuinely fun. Tune out the talking and you might just have a good time.

You know there’s something deeply twisted under that pretty shiny surface, but, like the audiences of Evita, you’re powerless to resist… This gorgeous sensory overload of a show is its own comment on the rising tide of fascism. Populism is sexy, captivating, overpowering – a way for weary people to escape the dull realities of right and wrong.

The film’s standout song, “Go the Distance” is fantastic here, full of pep and yearning. The muses are gorgeous, too – the show is lit up by this charismatic quintet’s sinuous harmonies, fabulous Motown party-worthy outfits and general clowning around.

Lowden explodes with half-suppressed energy as Luka, an unemployed, sex-obsessed alcoholic desperate to pummel his wayward life into shape. Help comes in the form of James, a fellow AA member who’s been sober for decades, but this middle-aged sad dad isn’t always the best advocate for his booze-free lifestyle. The everyguy authenticity that has made Freeman a telly regular is lost a little here, in a slightly underwhelming stage performance. Instead, this play’s appeal comes from the hilarious clashes between Luka’s blunt literal-mindedness and James’s patronising obfuscation. “Cultivate a relationship with yourself,” advises the older man. “I thought you said I wasn’t meant to do that any more!” says Luka, battling to beat his 20-a-day masturbation habit.

Tony Award-winning director Joe Mantello throws body, soul, and a huge amount of cash into making this oddity work – David Zinn’s astonishingly lavish set design magics up an array of rooms that ought to be preserved in the Met, gorgeously gilded and mirrored, melting into each other and then into the bright, blinking white of nothingness when these friends’ meaningless lives melt away. It’s flip, funny, and undeniably stylish. But essentially unsatisfying, too.

Lloyd's production bravely ditches the play's comic subplot and sidelines the younger nominal romantic leads Hero (Mara Huf) and Claudio (James Phoon) even more than is traditional, in favour of the more fun (and, here, far more famous) Beatrice and Benedick, who have a huge amount of fun with their banter-filled romance. Bendick declares himself "certain I am loved of all ladies", with Hiddleston teasingly holding an ear out to the audience so they can supply the whoops of approval Beatrice won't give him. He throws everything at the part, breakdancing, unbuttoning his shirt, and even delivering an appalling rendition of a Backstreet Boys song. It's an an oddly poignant expression of the desperation of unrequited love, touches of sadness under the self-depreciation.

And Regina is such a monster in this production that it’s hard to feel any kind of surprise or sympathy as she manipulates and is manipulated in turn. Like Hellman’s best-known play The Children’s Hour, Little Foxes is a compelling study of female nastiness, and the way that women become hard as polished fingernails under the brutal pressures of the patriarchy and capitalism. It’s undeniably powerful. Still, this production’s uneven performances and dour staging don’t make a particularly seductive case for revisiting it.

Tim Hatley’s set design frames the stage with arches of neon tubing that flash during John’s surprisingly unmemorable, generically jazzy musical numbers; perhaps to distract from Mitchell’s choreography, which mostly involves the chorus pointing in different directions, like air hostesses doing a safety briefing or the Spice Girls on an off day. Unlike Victoria Beckham, this musical theatre-trained cast is surely capable of more.

Comedy famously ages badly but the humour here is evergreen, prickling with ingenious wordplay and sickly surrealism. Still, Sean Foley’s overly efficient production stops short of full comic mayhem. Coogan is oh-so-good and oh-so-professional, but he’d be funnier if this show let us see some of the messy vulnerability that makes his creation Alan Partridge so lovable – if it let us glimpse the manic charging around and sweat and hectic costume changes behind the scenes, or revelled in the crowd’s glee at each successive reappearance.

Comedy famously ages badly but the humour here is evergreen, prickling with ingenious wordplay and sickly surrealism. Still, Sean Foley’s overly efficient production stops short of full comic mayhem. Coogan is oh-so-good and oh-so-professional, but he’d be funnier if this show let us see some of the messy vulnerability that makes his creation Alan Partridge so lovable – if it let us glimpse the manic charging around and sweat and hectic costume changes behind the scenes, or revelled in the crowd’s glee at each successive reappearance.

Director Dominic Cooke’s production is a lean mean entertainment machine – each half is a tight hour (a refreshing contrast to the more lumbering Barbra Streisand-starring 1969 movie version), kept moving by Rae Smith’s projection-filled set design and Bill Deamer’s appropriately high-spirited choreography. And although the show’s farcical climax in a hat shop feels less like a tight physical comedy set piece and more like a tipsy game of musical chairs, its larky approach can tumble away when required. When Staunton sits alone by lamplight to sing “Love, Look in My Window”, the whole story is illuminated by this insight into Dolly’s hidden loneliness.

Harris’s play is full of a sharp satirical intelligence that makes the right words fall from the wrong mouths, and resists pat conclusions. It’s never an easy watch – and its Black Out nights feel like an important gesture to Black audiences who don’t want white discomfort to define their experience of it. But it is a necessary one, showing how old power structures linger, covered over by messy, fleshy protuberances of desire.

Admittedly, the production doesn’t directly tackle the paedophilia accusations – two sexual abuse lawsuits against the musician are currently making their way, albeit very slowly, through the courts – and perhaps a musical could never tackle the legal and moral complexities of discussing them. But Nottage’s portrait of Jackson, which follows the singer in rehearsals for his wildly extravagant 1992 Dangerous tour, never depicts him as the superhero he dresses up as on stage, either.

Anyone who bought tickets to Opening Night in the hope of seeing its star Sheridan Smith treating us to a bit of thespy, Funny Girl-style razzle dazzle is in for a serious shock. Belgian avant-garde theatre director Ivo Van Hove’s musical, set backstage during a show, is determinedly unflashy and oblique, dimly illuminated by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright’s operatic torch songs. In fact, it feels a bit like the whole cast is trolling musical theatre fans: they linger like bedraggled pigeons in the corners of a vast unornamented stage, capturing the inertia, rather than the glamour, of backstage life. It’s flawed, but intermittently haunting.

Director Sam Mendes’s production brings out all the gentle humour in Butterworth’s play: some of the 1950s scenes feel like lost outtakes from a mid-century sitcom, as Veronica effortfully clings to a hotelier’s respectability in the face of bottom-pinching, pun-peddling rogues like Mr Halliwell (Shaun Dooley). The saucy jokes sail above the heads of most of her children but not older, worldlier Joan (Lara McDonnell), who internalises her mother’s sense that her body is just another tool to be used on the path to stardom.

With an opening scene that parks a hulking great Second World War battleship on stage, Stranger Things: The First Shadow wants to make one thing clear. This isn’t a quiet, quaint, self-consciously theatrical little play. It’s a massive all-out event calculated to thrill fans of the award-winning Netflix series with explosions, thrills, and jumpscares galore – plus a little taste of what’s coming in 2024’s fifth season of the show. But with writer Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot) on board, it’s also got a surprising level of proper theatre cred for anyone who doesn’t come to it intricately versed in Stranger Things lore.

It’s Dos Santos’s first West End play, but it doesn’t feel like it. Producer and director Michael Grandage has alighted upon a polished, one-liner-filled script and given it a lavish, pacy production that’s full of moments of delight, from set designer Christopher Oram’s extravagantly pink decor to the real live corgis that scuttle across the stage. The royal family never looked so camp, and that’s before Billy (Luke Evans) delivers his briefing to his newest junior footman: “There are two queens in this castle, and I suggest you pay attention to both equally,” he says, proudly introducing green young Gwydion (Iwan Davies) to the bed-hopping ways of backstairs life.

This King Lear feels like a curio, one that starts to imagine a different kind of way of presenting this time-honoured story of ageing and decline, without quite offering a complete reading. It feels like a first draft, polished to spearhead visual brightness, but not sharpened to a point. For that, we’ll have to wait for Branagh’s near-inevitable, and welcome, film adaptation.