Nick Curtis — Theater Critic

A cracking melodrama about race and the media in America, Tracey Scott Wilson’s 2003 play has the pace and punch of a superior streaming drama, and twists into intriguing directions. Clint Dyer’s production features bracing, full-throated performances from the British Black Panther star Letitia Wright and US stage and screen veteran Lorraine Toussaint. It’s funny and provocative and goes places a British play might not.

None of which takes away from the quality of the acting from Blanchett and Hoss. Or their bold, shared willingness to give themselves over to radical directors. Hoss has worked many times with Thomas Ostermeier, who directed Blanchett in a stupendous Seagull at the Barbican in 2025. Both have worked before with Andrews, who is one of three auteurs from Blanchett’s native Australia shaking up international theatre. His previous shows in London have been revelatory. This one is a misstep.

Now, though, Walthamstow and stiff gins are fashionable again, and Peter McKintosh’s set and costume design looks cool rather than naff. The orange block-print curtains, room dividers and the kitschy painting over which Beverley and Laurence fall out (Stephen Pearson’s Wings of Love - a naked fantasy couple framed by a giant swan’s wings) are covetably retro. Even Demis Roussos, cheese and pineapple hedgehogs and Beverley’s green eye shadow have come through the irony timewarp.

It makes sense, kind of, for the paternalistic Frank to try to mend the Featherstones’ fictitious rupture over during a dinner party. There’s no reason on earth that Teresa would invite them – two people she barely knows – the following night. Except that this is required for the central conceit where the Featherstones simultaneously inhabit two buttock-clenchingly awkward suppers on consecutive evenings, swivelling between crossed dining tables like goalies in a game of table hockey.

What’s that dull, sickening thud? Oh, it’s the sound of a dead horse being flogged. Since Irvine Welsh’s nonlinear novel about losers and addicts in Edinburgh’s impoverished Leith went from underground cult to breakout hit in 1993 it’s spawned plays, films, sequels and one of the finest soundtrack albums ever.

There’s a fascinating but not entirely new thesis voiced here, that gay culture had to be cloaked in camp or self-aware irony, that outrageousness was less shocking than sincerity. More interesting still is the suggestion that Arthur’s commitment to his art leads him to sacrifice his emotional life and betray Trevor. I wonder with which character Sonnenblick, who wrote the music and the witty book and lyrics, most sympathises?

It’s both hilarious and liberating to see goggle-eyed, gape-grinning puppets drinking, swearing and shagging. The pitch-perfect, genre-mocking songs (Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx) and the book (Jeff Whitty) gleefully demolish taboos in a way that should leave the “you-can’t say-anything-these-days” crowd sputtering over their keyboards. The numbers Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist, Schadenfreude and the closing For Now are standouts. Lopez went on to co-create Book of Mormon and co-write the songs in the Frozen movies, while Mark has penned songs for Scrubs and Glee: astonishingly Avenue Q was the first completed work for both.

Onstage throughout, Pike is in constant motion, slipping in and out of outfits, catching a casually flung lemon, and keeping up a sometimes amused, sometimes emotionally frayed commentary for the audience on how her gender affects her life. The role plays to her dramatic skills but also a flair for physical comedy, as when a clothes iron spurting steam becomes a stand-in for her bumptious barrister husband.

But oh dear, what are we to make of Matt Cardle, winner of the X Factor back in 2010, in the underwritten role of reluctant factory owner Charlie Price? The singer has done stints in musicals (Memphis, Jesus Christ Superstar, & Juliet) alongside his recording career but doesn’t seem to have picked up much technique or showmanship in the process. In terms of impact, he’s the opposite of Radebe, exhibiting what Terry Pratchett called “charisn’tma”. When Charlie’s employee Lauren (Courtney Bowman) suddenly gets the hots for her morose, seedy-looking boss you think: what, him?

Gorky’s script has been given an idiosyncratic and often ribald updating by siblings Nina Raine and Moses Raine that will be divisive but which I found hugely entertaining. A play about inaction brings its own problems, however: as domestic spats and doomed flirtations play out, you wait in vain for something significant to happen. Perhaps it’s best to approach Summerfolk as a mood.

Kavanaugh wisely doesn’t try to revamp things. Her production, clad in shades of brown, black and grey, unfolds in measured fashion against Peter McKintosh’s set of lofty library shelves. Bonneville, who seems always to be putting on or taking off a raincoat or a dressing gown here, is a perfect fit for Nicholson’s avuncular, slightly pompous Lewis. Siff is similarly right for the beady-eyed, passionate Joy. Their relationship convinced but never quite moved me. This feels like a piece of heritage theatre, albeit one mounted with star power and skill.

Elsewhere the score, like the plot, defaults to the sort of generic you-can-do-it, anything-is-possible platitudes you might find on a motivational poster. I feel like a heel for gently putting the boot into this ambulant odyssey, but Harold Fry left me admiring rather than genuinely moved.

Alex Eales’s revolving, circular set deftly illustrates the idea that time cannot be unwound, or jam unstirred from rice pudding, and features two glowing ellipses and a host of celestial spheres above. Cracknell’s production is almost seamless and she has assembled probably the finest cast you’ll see on stage this year. Dillane is a saturnine and amused Septimus, while Hainsworth utterly convinces as a prodigy aged 13 and then 17. (The flirtation between the two could be deeply icky in this Epstein-filed era, but manifests as a chaste, and rebuffed, teenage crush.) Puwanarajah is resplendent as the swaggeringly cocksure, grizzle-maned Nightingale, whose opportunistic priapism – also somewhat jarring in a post #MeToo world - mirrors Septimus’s.

I’m not sure why veteran screenwriter Roth, who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump, thought the world needed this onstage horse opera, here and now. Nor why he and director Thea Sharrock stud the action with snatches of songs by Bruce Springsteen and others, plus occasional bits of square dancing. It shows how far we’ve gone through the political looking glass, though, that a hymn to American individualism, starring the ferociously right-wing Cooper, here becomes an anti-Trump parable. Miller is a lying demagogue as well as a criminal and the townsfolk’s reluctance to support Kane is a failure of collective action.

The play puts Susan through the physical and mental wringer and it works thanks to Smith. She has a uniquely vivid physical presence, and her emotions are shimmeringly close to the surface. It’s great to see her back on stage again after the unfortunate debacle of 2024’s Opening Night, where she was again required to fall apart. Maybe next time she could play a character who isn’t – to quote the Patsy Cline song played before curtain-up – Crazy.

Park is a force of nature, whisking around the teasingly basic set (by the “multi-disciplinary design collective” dots), hooped skirt flying, in a desperate search for liquor and attention. She addresses a portrait of George Washington (or as we should probably call him, “the Man who did Mary’s Husband’s Job In The Past”) as “Mother”. Induced to try oil painting, Mary guzzles a bucket of paint thinner, sicks it up, and drinks it down again.

Park is a force of nature, whisking around the teasingly basic set (by the “multi-disciplinary design collective” dots), hooped skirt flying, in a desperate search for liquor and attention. She addresses a portrait of George Washington (or as we should probably call him, “the Man who did Mary’s Husband’s Job In The Past”) as “Mother”. Induced to try oil painting, Mary guzzles a bucket of paint thinner, sicks it up, and drinks it down again.

Throughout, the slapstick is expertly handled. Tannahill’s Jonathan, as Jacob Marley, ends up dragging a chair, a bed and the hapless Trevor across the stage in his chains. Later, Trevor plays a top-heavy version of the spectre he calls The Ghost of Christmas Who’s About to Come, and demolishes the graveyard set. “Who cares about the review?” the cast ask after the curtain has come down on their amateur shambles, and it must be said that Mischief are probably critic proof by now. But for what it’s worth, I’m a convert.

God can’t exist in this hellscape and humans (and tigers) are hunted through it by conscience, even after death. The biblical exhortation “if thy hand offends thee, cut it off” is taken literally. This is heavy stuff, often handled by Joseph with acrid wit. There is a wickedly funny scene where Tom reveals the worst thing about having a state-of-the-art prosthetic (“like Robocop”) replace his right hand. Musa tries to understand the idiosyncrasies of American English through “knock knock” jokes.

As is customary, Oliver Savile doubles the role of Cinderella’s prince with that of the wolf salivating over Gracie McGonigal’s wonderfully bratty Red Ridinghood. His pervy song Hello Little Girl has not dated so well. After various shenanigans, including the Grimm-faithful mutilation and blinding of Cinderella’s wicked sisters, the first half ends in marriage and pregnancy. The songs “So Happy” and “Ever After” ironically foreshadow the darkness to come.

There’s a lack of dynamism and propulsion to the direction. There’s also an uncertainty of tone: the endless assertions of Iago’s honesty come across as absurd rather than ironic. Multiple scenarios provoke titters rather than horror, including Iago’s invented account of Cassio (an unremarkable Luke Treadaway) sleepily snogging him in bed while dreaming of Desdemona, and Desdemona’s cry of “kill me tomorrow” on the point of her death.

There’s a lack of dynamism and propulsion to the direction. There’s also an uncertainty of tone: the endless assertions of Iago’s honesty come across as absurd rather than ironic. Multiple scenarios provoke titters rather than horror, including Iago’s invented account of Cassio (an unremarkable Luke Treadaway) sleepily snogging him in bed while dreaming of Desdemona, and Desdemona’s cry of “kill me tomorrow” on the point of her death.

Each of its eleven scenes stand alone as dramatic snapshots of a life, but each informs the others. We connect threads, yet we’ll only ever have a partial picture of Mary Page, as we do of pretty much everyone. “Things are not what they appear to be,” says a fellow student, casting her tarot. Telling a palliative care nurse about her job, Sarandon’s final version of Mary Page says it’s rare for all the numbers to add up. Even a woman who considers herself “unexceptional” will have unknowable depths.

Once again, I was hugely entertained by the well-endowed living statue, the latex-masked gimp and the sexy Jesus in De Bris’s apartment. There are brilliant touches I don’t remember from the Menier: the close relationship between Franz and one of his antisemitic pigeons, dancers emulating the Reichstag fire, a backdrop of swastikas picked out in pastel roses for the show-within-a-show’s titular anthem. In that number, as has become traditional, Mel Brooks’s recorded voice delivers the line: “Don’t be stoopid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party!”

Glossy back-projections take us from Iowa to Manhattan. There’s a nod towards body positivity and trans inclusion among the lithe calves and twinkling buttocks. The costumes include a pair of cocktail-olive brassieres for the lissom twins performing a number called Dirty Martini, and a corset adorned with wing mirrors and protruding whips for Folley. Lights strafe and confetti cannons eventually ejaculate. This enjoyably absurd musical based on an enjoyably humdrum film is far better than I could have anticipated.