Arifa Akbar

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.

If the idea of watching a Victorian farce by a less frequently staged playwright seems like peculiarly old-fashioned entertainment, this production is a startling reminder of how our own world can be deliciously sent up by the past. In the right hands, of course. Nancy Carroll, better known as an actor, brings an adaptation of Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1890 comedy that is as sparkling as they come – springy, silly and full of satirical sting.

As debut plays go, Giant has some very experienced hands behind it. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, who runs the Bridge Theatre, and written by Mark Rosenblatt, a director for more than two decades, it sounds like cheating to call it a debut although it is indeed Rosenblatt’s first foray into writing for the stage. You would not know it from a slowly brilliant first act, stupendously performed by its cast, which mixes fact with fiction in its dramatisation of a scandalous moment in the life of the children’s writer Roald Dahl.

That we are supposed to see Trump in him is spelled out repeatedly. Directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, this musical has the seeds of a brilliant show for our times which never quite flowers, and ironically appears old-fashioned despite the contemporary resonance. Much of this is down to Sarah Ruhl’s simplistic book, which trades on one-dimensional characters and thudding lines. There is talk of immigrants for good measure. We are just short of being told Lonesome wants to Make America Great Again.

Moss and Marlow are without doubt the most talented musical songwriters out there. I look forward to a long and illustrious partnership now that this difficult second album is out of the way and they are released from the burden of having to write what they know. Long live their friendship.

The gaps are, to some degree, filled by excellent performances from a cast that doubles up with agility as convicts and officers. Jack Bardoe gives a convincing turn as Harry Brewer, haunted by the dead man whose hanging he ordered, and smothering Duckling (Aliyah Odoffin, just as potent in her smaller part) with his controlling love.

Artfully directed by Max Webster, with wonderful long-shadowed lighting by Richard Howell and a poppy soundtrack, the drama’s artifice is playfully exposed, maybe even sent up, with dancing stagehands bringing choreographed comedy and a light meta touch.

The cast juggle between multiple characters deftly but the tone is too screamy for the tension to build, and some deliveries are so fast that lines are swallowed. Several of the high moments of the play are lost to this, including Carly’s bombshell social-media rant. You glimpse a stronger, more searing play in a few scenes, such as Denise’s sabre-sharp diatribe on King Charles’s coronation (“A 74-year-old man is being showered with a billion quid’s worth of stolen bling”). But these are individual vignettes that do not gel as a whole, the action too hectic yet too long and loose.

The world has changed since Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ sweary, swaggery, dysfunctional near-family first railed about their lives, shaped by Brexit Britain, in fast, fulminating dramatic monologue. As a trilogy of plays, it began with Michael, the son of a racist flower-seller, originally played by Rafe Spall, who told his lairy story at his father’s funeral. Then, a monologue by his Black British best friend, Delroy, about police profiling and his mixed-race relationship with Michael’s sister, Carly. These revivals are updated to reflect our world, post-Covid and post-Boris so we recognise the antagonised politics of class, masculine identity and race hate currently coursing through our society, from far-right violence (Southport is not named but it may as well be) to Nigel Farage.

Staunton masters singing with feeling, never overacting or sentimentalising Dolly. Andy Nyman as Horace is wryly Scroogey, while Jenna Russell, as the story’s other humanely portrayed widow, hat-shop owner Irene Molloy, sings one of the most moving numbers of the night, Ribbons Down My Back. It is filled with the yearning of a woman who has not quite given up on romance, poetic without being schmaltzy.

It feels distinctly like an American play, confronting plantation slavery, although the therapy section brings a more generalised trauma for Black characters. It feels of a specific moment, too, and seems to predict BLM anger with language used in the resurgence of the 2020 movement (from likening racism to a “virus” to the acknowledgment of white supremacy).

Directed and choreographed by Nick Winston, characters are Japanese but Americanised and schematic. Kōsei and Kaori are played with immense verve but there is little room for them to breathe and they are smothered by flat characterisation. Alongside them is a self-parodying high-school hunk (Dean John-Wilson) and Kōsei’s quietly tormented best friend (Rachel Clare Chan), both hastily sketched and overfamiliar.

Richard Stilgoe’s lyrics are ridiculous yet enjoyable (“freight is great”, sings one train, “I’m the hero of net zero,” sings another, the latter proof that the show has been updated to reflect our world) and the songs are superb, carrying the chug or hiss of trains and crossing genres from glam-rock to blues to hip-hop, country and musical ballad. They are masterfully sung all round, alongside the athletic feats of the cast.