Andrzej Lukowski — Theater Critic

While I’m sure Cotton has done his homework, he’s surely betting that the average British audience is unlikely to have any real opinion on Frederick. His play contents itself with an antagonist who is a sort of vague mish mash of biographical exposition, Blackadder-style toff-isms, and bits where Frederick’s warmongering is unsubtly paralleled with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m not saying there’s any need to be totally historically accurate in a work of fiction. But Cotton’s king feels like a half-hearted collection of tyrant tropes rather than a credible character. It’s hard not to see The Score as a distant relative of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but it’s simply not in the same league in terms of characterisation.

There are those who have become cynical about Lloyd ever since his career went into overdrive with his smash 2023 revival of Sunset Boulevard. And to be fair, those that moaned about the casting of Sigourney Weaver in The Tempest – which preceded Much Ado at Drury Lane, and shares much of the same cast – were basically right, though one celebrity miscasting hardly ruins a career. But accusations that he relies too much on live video (he’s used it in two shows), the same monochrome palette (okay, there has been a lot of black) and relentless tasteful moodiness are all but trolled by this none-more-pink symphony of a production, that totally abandons conventional cool in favour of Tom Hiddleston’s dad dancing.

But despite a committed performance from Bailey, I struggled to get my head around some of the details. Richard returning from Ireland with his crown in a placcy bag is perhaps a droll illustration of his smallness as a man, but it left me struggling to see the exact point. He’s still the king of England – doing a version of the play where he is just an in-over-his-head executive would be interesting, but it never quite feels like that’s what Hytner is pushing.

The biggest flaw, though, is one that’s haunted the show for decades: Olivier himself is just pretty bland. I’m not going to single out the child actor who was on when I saw it, because I think the problem lies firstly with Bart and secondly with the direction. But our hero is a wide eyed, improbably well-spoken young man who travels through life with such monumental innocence that it’s never even clear here that he’s aware Fagin et al are criminals. It’s a demanding role to give a tween, but the amount resting on his small shoulders has always been a weakness of the show. And clearly it’s not something Mackintosh is desperately bothered about fixing. And why would he? Now booking until next March, the West End’s most successful producer has a hit on his hands with Oliver! Again.

Bagging the UK stage debut of movie icon Sigourney Weaver feels like a coup on paper, but maybe not so much in practice. She’s not embarrassingly bad or anything, but the role of exiled magician Prospero simply feels beyond her – this is a giant theatre, a tricky role, and she’s not done any Shakespeare since the ’80s. She’s not a good verse speaker, delivering everything in a sort of concerned mom monotone that fails to hold this big, weird play together. Having her on stage constantly – usually seated in a chair, observing the action – feels like a sop to her celebrity that isn’t really borne out by her ability.

The Producers is a bit dated, a bit slow in getting going, and is bereft of the exciting hype that fizzed and crackled through it last time. But its pillorying of fascist iconography remains hysterically funny and steely sharp – perhaps sharper than it was before.

What Daniel Bailey’s production captures really well is the energy, enthusiasm and underlying societal disaffection of the two puppyish young leads – after directing West End transfer smash Red Pitch, Bailey feels like the absolute go to guy for depicting young Black male camaraderie on stage. Tessema’s dialogue fizzes and pops a treat, but he’s as good at portraying Manny’s flaws as his charm. However, it’s lacking in incisiveness on its subject – ultimately cryptocurrency and its 2021 crash feels more like the backdrop to a story about two pals than what the play is actually about.

The company – doubled in size since the original Southwark run – all sing and play musical instruments and the walls of sea shanty-inflected choral song are a truly beautiful thing, surging and crashing like waves off the Cornish coast. This is as much the show’s USP as the reverse ageing story. Although unquestionably Compton’s project through and through, he wouldn’t have been able to realise it nearly as well without Darren Clake’s music.

Arguably the circus is mostly there as something to look at to accompany the songs, although rather than just random setpieces, Hammerstein’s show attempts to extrapolate a plot from the tunes. Which is a bit peculiar when you consider they’re already part of the plot of The Greatest Showman, but Come Alive is attempting to extrapolate a different plot from them. Admittedly a lot of the appeal of the film’s soundtrack is down to the fact the songs aren’t very specific, lyrically speaking. Nonetheless, it’s often bizarre to hear them rearranged into a wafer-thin, bordering-on-incoherent story that has nothing to do with PT Barnum, but rather something about a young woman named Max who visits the circus with her boyfriend, takes on the mantle of The Greatest Showman from the previous holder, and then possibly feels a bit guilty about the whole thing.

It’s a show of two halves. The first details Rhodes’s rise, and it’s entertaining but somewhat ponderous. Although Ruhl’s script largely mirrors the film, it leaves out details that foreshadow the path Rhodes will take – going into the interval it feels like the worst he’ll do is disappoint his fans with a bit of light philandering.

And frankly it’s a lot of fun. In truly spectacular costumes from Gabriella Slade, the cast is kind of dressed like Warhammer 40K Space Marines given a Drag Race makeover. Nobody looks even slightly like a train. But it is a tremendous thrill to have these prodigies whistle past you at high velocity. Obviously it’s a silly idea for a show.. But a lot of very skilled things are silly if you think about them too much. Skating around an amphitheatre while singing, acting and wearing what looks like about half a tonne of costume is frankly incredible (shout out to skate coordinator Luke Zammit). And I haven’t even got on to how sensational everybody’s hair looks (respect to wig designer Campbell Young).

Where ‘The Constituent’ unfortunately goes off the rails is in the introduction of a third character. At first Zachary Hart’s paranoid Brummie police officer Mellor seems like a reasonable addition to the story: Monica is getting increasingly worried about Alec’s obsessive behaviour, but doesn’t qualify for proper ministerial protection. But eventually Mellor’s ludicrous behaviour blows up the whole play and unbalances the carefully wrought clash between Monica and Alec. Even when Mellor is out of the equation, Matthew Warchus’s hitherto finely-balanced production feels trivialised and diminished. Penhall perhaps makes a couple of valid points about the British police. But really it feels like he wasn’t sure where to take the story so decided to throw in Mellor as a very crude curveball.

I’d like to see a bit more daring than a tweak to the acting next time this play is revived. This is the third ‘Long Day’s Journey’ to hit the West End in 12 years, and none have exactly been formally wild. There’s some nifty sound design here from Tom Gibbons – sepulchral fog horns, and subtler ambient sounds – but mostly this is a very straight production.

There are no dance numbers, power ballads, lavish sets, or cute romantic storylines. By entering the West End, ‘Opening Night’ is almost inevitably inviting an audience that will be confused by it. And yet: there’s a palpable warmth to it. Maybe it’s a musical, maybe it isn’t, but under all the avant-garde bells and whistles, it unquestionably has a heart – a buoyancy and belief in humanity that’s lacking in the original film.

The performances are uniformly tremendous, notably Lovibond’s quicksilver Ruby and Best’s pained, angry Gloria. There is first-rate accent work: enormous respect to dialect coach Danièle Lydon for thoroughly indoctrinating her largely non-Lancastrian cast. And there’s stunning work from designer Rob Howell: the main set is simply the living room of the guesthouse, but there is something profoundly haunting about the towering, almost Escher-like set of stairs that erupts from it, a conduit from the humdrum downstairs to the unseen realm of death that hovers in the wings.

Sure, it’s notionally aimed at families. But the National Theatre’s Roald Dahl adaptation ‘The Witches’ really is for everyone, (everyone over eight anyway). Because it’s quite easily the funniest new musical London has seen since at least ‘The Book of Mormon’.

I know it’s rude to draw attention to a person’s age, but the fact Ian McKellen has racked up five major stage performances in the four years since he turned 80 – ‘Hamlet’, ‘The Cherry Orchard’, ‘Hamlet’ (again), ‘Mother Goose’ and now ‘Frank and Percy’ – is nothing short of astonishing. The erstwhile Gandalf is the David Attenborough of the theatre world, seemingly exempt from the usual rules of ageing. And despite the fact that he seems most comfortable working with his regular director Sean Mathias, there’s something mightily impressive about his willingness to put his vast cultural capital to use in a new play.

To his credit, Van Hove never makes it feel pulpy or trashily exploitative, more of a meditative treatise on how life is unutterably cruel and shit. But in doing so it becomes a sort of experiment in terror, an attempt to see how an audience will react to seeing unimaginable horrors piled upon a single character with almost nothing in the way of relief. There’s some seating at the back of the stage and I wonder if its main purpose is so we can see the shocked faces of our fellow audience members' faces.

Coleman is cold and brittle as lawyer Bernadette, who is insecure and irritated that her musician boyfriend takes a dim view of her profession and seeks out the company of his more political friends, including his ex. And Olivier – while admirably socially engaged – is just a bit of a self-absorbed prick. We never really get to enjoy their relationship at any point: it’s always tense. Not that the play is one note, and it’s fascinating how the pair change after the hush law is enforced: before they probably yakked away too much, endlessly dancing around their actual feelings; after they’re stressed and miserable, unhappy with their brutally limited means of expressing themselves.

Moffat is an accomplished TV writer, and while not best known for comedy these days, he did mastermind enjoyable early ’00s sitcom ‘Coupling’. But clearly most playwrights don’t go straight into the West End with their first play. ‘The Unfriend’ is relatively short, but also waffly, unfocused and above all, bland. It’s easy to fantasise about what a playwright specialising in dark comedy like Richard Bean might have got out of the premise. But it’s doubly frustrating that as writers, both Gatiss and Shearsmith have such good form for the domestic grotesque; after a while, the cheeky little detail of Peter and Debbie’s house being number nine feels like it’s taunting us.

If Hellman’s message about the foolishness of American isolationism – both politically and practically – feels perennially relevant, then there’s no denying ‘Watch on the Rhine’ was written for a specific time. It must have been incendiary in its day. It’s not now. But its shift from bourgeoise cosiness to shocking violence remains bravura stuff.