Arifa Akbar — Theater Critic

It feels abidingly faithful but moves stiffly at times, carrying the sense of a dusted down drama despite Chloe Lamford’s shining set, an island of flora and fauna bobbing like an eternally fragrant English garden against a bare black backdrop, before being stripped of its naturalism. The period dress strangely mutes the play’s shocks while, in an awkward touch, lugubrious ghostly figures in undergarments (Victorian sex workers?) crowd around the edges and act as stagehands.

It feels abidingly faithful but moves stiffly at times, carrying the sense of a dusted down drama despite Chloe Lamford’s shining set, an island of flora and fauna bobbing like an eternally fragrant English garden against a bare black backdrop, before being stripped of its naturalism. The period dress strangely mutes the play’s shocks while, in an awkward touch, lugubrious ghostly figures in undergarments (Victorian sex workers?) crowd around the edges and act as stagehands.

The actors are vibrant nonetheless, though some are wobbly singers. Paulo Szot, as ambassador of the imaginary South American nation Miranda, has an impressive operatic depth to his voice and Chumisa Dornford-May, who plays the revolutionary Fritz ­– a trustafarian who is given an unconvincing romance with a soldier – is a strong singer, too, while Rory Kinnear is fun as the arrogant Leo Brink.

The play is full of plot, especially in Elena’s many machinations. There are moments of great intensity, mostly in the scenes featuring Fleetwood, and real candescence to the writing at its best. The focus on the women is interesting and intriguing, even though it means Henry feels rather spare to the drama. This is a story not of genius men building castles in the air for their princesses but of what destruction they wreak in their homes in so doing. Really, it is the drama of The Master Builder’s Wife.

Fresh from Broadway, this production encapsulates the worst of peacockingly splashy entertainment – the kind whose soul has been suctioned out in the making.

The five-strong cast juggle multiple roles with particularly fast work by Dianne Pilkington as various characters including Lucy’s father. The performances are superb all round, full of fun and mischief, but the low-hanging jokes of the script short-change the actors’ talents. This comedy needs sharper fangs.

The five-strong cast juggle multiple roles with particularly fast work by Dianne Pilkington as various characters including Lucy’s father. The performances are superb all round, full of fun and mischief, but the low-hanging jokes of the script short-change the actors’ talents. This comedy needs sharper fangs.

The songs, composed by KT Tunstall, are disappointingly flat-footed except for two belters accompanied by comically energised choreography. Reasonable Doubts, sung by Josh and the ensemble, is a magnificent ode to teen jealousy, while I’m Keeping an Eye on You, performed when Josh turns up to a dance to watch over Cher, is as winning. If the score could fizz with more numbers like these then what a blast this show might be. But the lyrics by Glenn Slater too often serve as exposition rather than raising the emotional drama.

As a period piece, it is entirely dusted down and stands gleaming. Oliver Fenwick’s lighting design suffuses the stage in sepia as characters recount memories, or it spotlights them in emotional ways – a sentimental technique yet it works. For all its clunkier moments, this is undefinably winning drama. Perhaps it is down to the truth of the characters, so tender, hopeful, determined and unbeaten despite everything. A retro gem.

The switch from light to dark, when Hero is falsely accused of unfaithfulness on her wedding day by Claudio, is orchestrated with a masterful precision of tone. It brings dangerous anger, and where the scene ordinarily shows up the play’s dated gender politics – a man questioning the virtue of a woman and condemning her to metaphoric death – Hero never loses her power and the couple’s reunion seems genuine and joyful.

A play with abundant beauty to its verse (“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,” sighs the ailing Gaunt, played efficiently by Martin Carroll), its lyricism becomes slightly muted, though never by Bailey, whose words glitter with feeling. Royce Pierreson’s Bullingbrook is a man of action but you do not get beneath his skin. Phoenix Di Sebastiani, as the allegedly traitorous Mowbray, is spirited, while Christopher Osikanlu Colquhoun as the Earl of Northumberland bears gravitas.

The performances lift it, somewhat. There is a natural ease between Walker and Mangan: she is volubly frustrated, he is hangdog. They are best when the laughter drops off and the intensity is raised but this is not often enough. Doherty brings spirit and comedy. But their relationships are peculiarly devoid of passion, too declarative of their desires. However intimate the conversation becomes, the chemistry in this throuple never quite ignites.

The attempts to hit more serious notes are not always as successful as the humour. But the delivery of the box is the starting gun for an existential unravelling, and then a reset, for Colin. The production loses some of its potency in the last half hour, and the final act ties too neat a bow, as if keen to stave off Colin’s darkness. But it does not matter when the script is so entertaining and the actors hit all the comic beats. It is silly and strangely warming stuff.

Amy Jephta’s play carries shades of A Raisin in the Sun, and several other community-clash dramas (including Eureka Day). But what makes it fresh is its sophisticated treatment of race and gentrification.

There are exuberant twists on character and plot: Rose is bullied by her uber-camp mother and the ship’s captain takes ecstasy and is looking forward to clubbing on the LGBTQ+ friendly Fire Island. There are also wonderful renditions of All By Myself and I Drove All Night. Ronney is an especially strong singer and Drew’s Dion is full of comic harmonising and mischief, calling the audience her “best friends in the whole world”.

There is plenty of dazzle here but sadly it all emanates from the rhinestones on Dolly’s dresses. There is little spark to the production itself, which has been authorised by the real-life Dolly. Directed by Gabriel Barre, it might have gathered traction if the script were stronger, but the plot segues into Parton’s best known songs in strained ways. All the oldies but goodies are there, including Jolene, 9 to 5, Islands in the Stream, I Will Always Love You, and on.

You might call it a space opera, for all its music and song. Or sci-fi Shakespeare, for its mix of poetry and next-level theatrical showmanship. The swirling black emptiness around the set looks fathomless, blasts of light bring tremendous visual drama, and sheer silken sheets spanning the length of the stage are used in simple but sensational ways. The production creates its own dark magic with large-scale grandeur.

But it is too slow and static, turning Hellman’s masterpiece into a workman-like production. You do not feel a change of emotional temperature, only the turning cogs of the plot. The scheming around financial percentages and investments is like a business meeting that goes on for too long, and the human drama beneath – the jostling for power and advantage-seeking between siblings – does not quite find its footing.

Still so original, and delightfully – daringly – funny, it is revived by director Patrick Marber with such vigour, sparkle and controlled wildness that it renders itself the London show of the festival season – funnier, camper and more outre than pantomime, although it pulls back from the full freight of the danger in its political satire.

Miranda rises from below the stage, as if from an underworld, and is too flat a devil, Williams channelling her Ugly Betty character’s vibes. Her famous “cerulean” speech, which cuts through Andy’s snobbish attitude towards fashion, is not felt for its sharp intelligence. Buckland’s Andy has little personality, Amy Di Bartolomeo’s snippy assistant, Emily, sounds as if she is channelling Emily Blunt’s voice from the film, and Andy’s boyfriend, Nate (Rhys Whitfield), is too much of a cypher to care about, although his voice has strains of John’s in songs like I Mean Business and The Old You.

The plotline around Mr Bugz’s sexuality chugs on but is never taken very far. Ultimately, this seems like a play that wants to take on many things without going far enough with any one of them. It tries not to get too angry, despite its explosive subject matter. The actors carry it, though, oozing charm alongside quiet anguish. It is no surprise that McCabe is working on adapting the script for a screenplay. There is a moreish Netflix series energy to it all. It is clear there is talent to the writing, too – if only there was more follow-through.

The script sometimes glints with the humorous intelligence of Iannucci’s The Thick of It (there is great war jargon with words like “pre-taliate”). At other times, however, it is pedestrian or soft in its satire. This might be because the adaptation follows the film so faithfully that it feels dated, the stakes low. In the 1960s, the Cuban missile crisis had terrified the world and the film exposed the lunacy of the mutually assured destruction theory. This story’s absurdist slide into nuclear war contains a historic fear for a present world in which warfare seems surreptitiously conducted through AI and social media disinformatio

There are peculiarities, such as the set, which is a confusion of stairs and an ascending mound of pastel paper that represents a mountain in Malia’s fictional story. Overall it makes for a rather un-British experience, but it creeps into its own brilliance, in spite of the heavy doses of sentimentality. You can’t but be affected by the story, and blown away by the songs.

A stop-clock counts the hours and minutes to the election results but also marks the inevitable forward movement to terrible self-knowledge. Foreshadowing is tucked into family exchanges, perhaps a little heavy-handedly: when one son playfully covers Oedipus’s eyes, he jokes about being blinded in a fleeting reference to the gouging of his eyes at the end. “Did you cook this, Mum?” he asks at the dining table, and it is his wife who answers (later turning out to be his mother).

Director Matthew Warchus has gathered a talented cast, from Smith-Cameron as a formidably watchable presence to Rylance as her peacocking husband. They are never less than entertaining but the show does not stretch them, and the drama of the first two acts is a little too ambling and creaky, with the broad Irish accents and comic dissolution.