Nick Curtis

All of the characters become at some point unconvincing as they contort to move the debate forward, but Mimî M Khayisa and Sifiso Mazibuko are impressive in the tricky roles of Bonolo and Sihle. Robyn Rainsford is very funny as Jess, constantly trying to rebalance her chakras in the face of excruciating social embarrassment. Scott Sparrow is an irredeemably boorish Boer as Christopher. This isn’t perfect but it’s perceptive, provoking fun.

The most prominent insertion though is Drew’s hilarious Dion. Dressed in a sparkling, slash-thighed frock and matching pants, she hunkers down to a succession of the singer’s power ballads like a prop entering a scrum. Her expert pastiche of the singer’s lung-busting stylings and yodelling arpeggios are laced with whoops, squawks and mock-sincere, glutinously-accented asides about how much she “lurves” us.

Lloyd’s production has an incantatory, dream-like quality. The cast wear headset mics and speak the verse with great clarity but little passion, their movements stylised and stiff: on the first of two press nights, Weaver lost her words a couple of times. An interesting thematic suggestion that Prospero’s island is a place of rebirth gets lost amid the sonorous intonation and tedious comic relief. For all its stark visual boldness, this is a curiously old-fashioned take.

There’s a reason Hellman is rarely done. Her plays can look overwrought and dated. The extended Alabama clan featured here make Tennessee Williams’s unhappy families look like the Waltons. But there’s a brutal internal logic to this 1939 work and a timeliness to Turner’s revival. A fine ensemble is anchored by a standout performance from Duff. She mines pathos and empathy from the character of Regina Giddens (nee Hubbard), who could be a monster.

The incidental detail is wonderful: the Zimmer-frame chorus line of Bialystok’s conquests is balanced by a Fiddler-style onslaught of capering shtetl inhabitants earlier on. Some throwaway lines are built up into full-scale Vaudevillian “bits”. Paul Farnsworth’s costumes, including hotpants and giant spangled Bratwurst and Bier-stein headgear for the dancers, Swastika-clad pigeons and a living statue with outsized genitalia, are hilarious.

By far the strongest moment in the play is the electric rap battle between her and Nancy, which sums up the play’s tangled ideas. It’s a contest meticulously scripted by a white male writer to sound improvised, between a white and a Hispanic woman, who are otherwise marginalised by older men, two black and one white, who all think they should own the narrative. The Purists is ungoverned and sprawling and never resolves its thorny questions about identity and authenticity, but it generates much enjoyment as well as much head-scratching along the way.

Tessema’s first produced play, House of Ife, also at the Bush, was a close family drama also set among the Ethiopian diaspora in Britain. Its plot was wayward while its characters and their melting-pot London argot felt blisteringly authentic. Here, Tessema has clearly set out to understand the arcane world of cryptocurrency and you can feel his research sitting in the play like silt, weighing down his sparky dialogue.

The script has been tweaked and the production recast since I saw and loved it at Southwark Playhouse last July: the sketched-in supporting characters feel more winsome and cartoonish, and the cast’s artfully dishevelled clothes and smeared faces make them look like extras from Oliver! but it remains a sweet love story that carries a powerful, almost mystical musing on the nature of existence. Plus you’ve got to love a show that rhymes “cup and saucer” with “divorce her”.

What’s keeping these two people in this room apart from the playwright’s need to generate conflict? There’s some confusion too over their ages. The doll-like Collins looks deliberately young, though actually playing her age: Manuel should surely be older. Again, weird. I think there’s a subtextual strand about the way large-scale, domestic terror atrocities have changed America, but I didn’t buy it.

Strong has superb pacing and physical awareness, his lithe, shaven-headed form switching from loose daddish warmth to vulpine alertness and stricken anguish in a heartbeat. And surely there is no finer actress working today than Manville, who’s excelled at the Royal Court, National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, and conquered Hollywood (The Phantom Thread), British sitcom (Mum) and lockdown binge-watch (Sherwood).

Tulley and Foster’s voices initially lack body but mature and grow movingly throughout the evening. Noah Thomas exhibits easy charm and loose-limbed grace as their friend Art Fulldodger (groan). It’d be impossible to replicate the alchemy of Six and it’s wise of Marlow and Moss not to try. This zesty, in-jokey, crackerjack entertainment proves they’re certainly not one-hit wonders.

Some moments are deftly done: the chase across the Scottish moors is performed in silhouette, with human shadows, miniature 2D-cutouts, and 3D models of biplanes providing a delicious mishmash of scale and perspective. The comic-erotic scene where Pamela removes her stockings while handcuffed to Hannay retains its edgy power. But we’ve now seen the other stuff – the ironic sidelong glances into the auditorium, the deliberately botched physical gags, the mood-puncturing jokes – done a million times in the last two decades, and often better. This is a reminder that even solid-gold hits tarnish with time.

Staunton is all brightness and bounce in the introductory Just Leave Everything to Me. She’s wry and tart in the witty Motherhood March and Dancing, quietly touching in the solo Look, Love in My Window. Then she unleashes the full-on, mind-altering force of her voice in the anthemic Before the Parade Passes By, in the title song, and in the swaggeringly flippant So Long, Dearie.

It’s not an easy watch, not just because of the racist language and discomfiting power-dynamics. The role-playing leads to long sessions where the couples and their therapists (who are also in a racially mixed lesbian relationship) angrily express their feelings. Clint Ramos’s echoey mirrored set – enabling the mostly white audience to watch themselves voyeuristically watching – also makes it hard to hear at times.

Zheng Xi Yong’s classical piano playing in the lead role of Kо̄sei provides subtlety and real feeling in a welter of phony sentiment. Both he and Mia Kobayashi, making a bold debut as his inamorata Kaori though still at drama school, sing strongly. But the acting in Nick Winston’s production – the first West End musical with a cast entirely of South East Asian heritage – is relentlessly cartoonish.

As the titular, dysfunctional best friends who host a weekly murder podcast from a garage near Hull, Bronté Barbé and Rebekah Hinds sell the songs and the broad jokes better than they deserve. The whole thing has a rough and robust zest that doubtless helped it rise above the dross on the Edinburgh Fringe. But in the more rarefied atmosphere of the West End the constant barrage of gurning and caterwauling is a major turn-off.

Hell is other family members, just as it was for the Roys. I promised myself I wouldn’t make too many comparisons between Cox’s sublime turn in the best TV show in recent years, and his towering performance here. But, you know, f**k it: this is O’Neill for the Succession generation.

A rivetingly assertive central performance from Laura Donnelly sets the tone for a strong ensemble cast and the play more than earns its three-hour running time, at least until the garbled ending. Mendes told me last year Butterworth originally handed him “half a play”. It’s now nine-tenths of a superb one.

Equally, you can enjoy this immersive, overwhelming experience, which has a love for live performance at its very core, without having seen a second of the TV show. Daldry, the consummate showman of British culture, has done it again.

The play is lazy, the characters forced into absurd and improbable positions by the writer’s agenda. And behind the subjects it ostensibly confronts – misogyny, sexual violence, identity politics, cancellation by social media – I think it’s also about how awful it is to be a writer and have your work mutilated and misunderstood by idiot actors, directors and critics.

Designer Lizzie Clachan gives us overarching talons, nightmare fantasies and box-of-tricks physical sets, but the show’s muted colour palette gets a bit boring. Standout songs include Luke’s Ready to Go, the Grand Witch’s insinuating hymn to childlessness Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Gran’s When I Was Young and the irresistible clap-along Get up, sung by Helga (Jersey Blu Georgia on opening night) and the younger cast members. There are occasional lacunae here but this is a polished, witty, crisply sardonic serving of Dahl. And if the other child actors sharing the central roles are as good as the ones I saw, they deserve all the plaudits.

There’s undeniable emotional force in seeing such experienced interpreters of Sondheim pay tribute, but it’s refreshing too when newcomers like the charismatic Bradley Jaden and the captivating Beatrice Penny-Touré take the focus.

Bertie Carvel’s transformative turn as her mentor and tormentor Henry Higgins will, I suspect, be a bit more Marmite for audiences. He’s an effete, manic demon with a Mr Punch leer and a strangulated (but perfectly enunciated) voice, hips jutting and shoulders slumped like a half-strung marionette. A play that’s ostensibly about speech involves an awful lot of body language.

The creators’ experience in crafting three-minute hits and their relative ignorance of musical theatre convention prove liberating. Several numbers, particularly those involving the bros, sound like superior boyband ballads: I mean that as a compliment. There are party tunes as Henry goes out drinking both pre- and post-accident. OK, it’s a little obvious to give Parris, the only black woman in a lead role, a gospel-inflected tune: but the lyrics communicate both the stress and the passion of a doctor’s life.

Believe the hype. Daniel Fish’s radical staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Western musical from 1943 is utterly thrilling. Though the music is as gorgeous as ever, this version strips away many of the folksy, hokey accretions the show has acquired over the years and finds something much darker and more powerful.