Culture

After nearly 40 years, Withnail has arrived on stage. Sean Foley directs Bruce Robinson’s adaptation, which starts with a live rock-band thumping out a few 1960s hits. The musicians take cameo roles as maids and coppers. The show needs a larger cast especially for the tea-room scene – ‘We want the finest wines available to

Fawlty Towers at the Apollo may be the best museum piece you’ll ever see. A full-length play has been carved out of three episodes: ‘The Hotel Inspectors’, ‘The Germans’, and ‘Communication Problems’ in which the deaf guest, Mrs Richards, made a nuisance of herself by refusing to switch on her hearing aid in case the

Minority Report is a plodding bit of sci-fi based on a Steven Spielberg movie made more than two decades ago. The setting is London, 2050, and every citizen has been implanted with an undetectably tiny neuroscanner which informs the cops about crimes before they’ve been committed. However, as the first scene reveals, the undetectably tiny

Agathe by Angela J. Davis follows the early phases of the Rwanda genocide 30 years ago. The subject, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, became prime minister on 18 July 1993 but her tenure ended abruptly when she was assassinated by a rioting mob which surrounded the UN compound where she was sheltering on 7 April 1994. She saved

Our Mutual Friend has been turned into a musical with a new title, London Tide, which sounds duller and more forgettable than the original. Why change the name? To confuse fans of Dickens, presumably, and to keep the theatre half-empty while heaps of tickets are sold at a discount. At the end of Act One,

Play-goers, beware. Director Robert Icke is back in town, and that means a turgid four-hour revival of a heavyweight classic with every actor screaming, bawling, weeping, howling and generally overdoing it. But here’s a surprise. Player Kings, Icke’s new version of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is a dazzling piece of entertainment and the

The Divine Mrs S is a backstage satire set in the year 1800, when flouncy costumes and elaborate English prose were common cultural ornaments. On press night the venue was full of resting actors and theatrical hangers-on who adored the show’s in-jokes and rehearsal-room wisecracks. Titus Andronicus is ‘an experimental play about a pie’, says

If you’ve heard good reports about MJ the Musical, believe them all and multiply everything by a hundred. As a music-and-dance spectacular, the show is as exhilarating as any Jackson produced while he was alive. The sets, the costumes, the choreography and the live band deliver an amazing collective punch. When he removes his black

Faith Healer is a classic Oirish wrist-slasher about three sponging half-wits caught in a downward spiral of penury, booze, squalor, sexual repression, bad healthcare, murderous violence and non-stop drizzle. The mood of grinding despair never lets up for a second as the healer, Frank Hardy, along with his moaning wife and their Cockney sidekick, motors

Ben and Imo are composer Benjamin Britten and his musical assistant, Imogen Holst. But those cosy pet names tell us where we stand – or at least, where we think we do. The illusion of being inside an artistic clique is at the heart of Mark Ravenhill’s new two-hander, which began life as a BBC

Set in 1948, The Human Body is about four heroic women fighting to create the NHS despite opposition from right-wing extremists led by the ‘snob’ and ‘warmonger’ Winston Churchill. One of these heroic women is a Labour councillor, another is a physician on a bike, the third works at Westminster for a socialist MP and

Double Feature is a new play by John Logan, whose credits include Skyfall. The subject is movie-making, and the action is set in 1964 in a Hollywood cottage where Alfred Hitchcock is preparing Tippi Hedren for a nude scene in Marnie. The great director, who made a star of the unknown Hedren by casting her

Sarah Snook, who appeared in Succession, takes centre stage in Kip Williams’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s only novel. The best thing about The Picture of Dorian Gray is the narrative premise: a young aristocrat commissions a portrait of himself and the image grows old while he retains his youthful good looks. It’s a ghost story,

Big budget, huge stage, massive temptation. The Lyttelton is a notorious elephant-trap for designers who feel obliged to fill every inch of space with effortful proof of their brilliance. Frankie Bradshaw, designer of Dear Octopus, avoids these snares and instead creates a modest playing area, smaller than the actual stage, which is bookended by a

Fifteen years after penning his mega-hit Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth has knocked out a new drama. The slightly baffling title, The Hills of California, refers to a hit by Johnny Mercer (the US songwriter not the MP for Plymouth) and it suggests American themes and locations. But the show is set in a knackered old Blackpool

Till the Stars Come Down is a raucous, high-energy melodrama set at a wedding in Hull. The writer, Beth Steel, focuses on three female characters and virtually ignores the men in her story which is just as well because her male characters all talk and act like planks. Her women are full of courage, craziness

Plaza Suite is a sketch show by Neil Simon set in a luxury New York hotel in 1968. The play is rarely revived and it’s never been staged in the West End before. Simon’s idea (which Noël Coward accused him of stealing from his play Suite in Three Keys) is to place a trio of

Don’t Destroy Me is the rather breathless title of Michael Hastings’s first play which he wrote when he was just 18. The material draws on his adolescent years in a south London boarding house and the action opens with an elderly husband, Leo, and his unfaithful young wife, Shani, preparing for a visit from their

The Enfield Haunting is a good old-fashioned horror show that wants to be a documentary as well. It’s based on a hocus-pocus yarn that made the front page of the Daily Mirror in 1977 and was swiftly forgotten. The play opens in an Enfield terrace that resembles a bomb site, complete with charred plasterwork, missing

Many of today’s theatre directors seem to believe that Shakespeare’s work was a huge mistake which they have a duty to correct. According to Max Webster, the director of Macbeth at the Donmar, Shakespeare’s error was to write scripts for the stage which would work better as radio plays. His amended version is set in

Pandemonium is a new satire about the Covid nightmare that uses the quaint style of the Elizabethan masque. Armando Iannucci’s play opens with Paul Chahidi as Shakespeare introducing a troupe of players who all speak in rhyming couplets. A golden wig descends like a signal from on high and Shakespeare transforms himself into the ‘World

Infinite Life is about five American women, all dumpling-shaped, who sit in a hotel garden observing a hunger strike. Some of them haven’t touched food for days, some for weeks. ‘Don’t be afraid to puke,’ counsels one of the dumplings. ‘Puking is good.’ They pass their afternoons wittering inanely about nothing at all. One dumpling

Green, green, green. Everything on stage is the same shade of eau de Nil in the NT’s version of Federico García Lorca’s classic, The House of Bernarda Alba. All the furniture and props are green. The mirrors, the walls, the crucifixes, the clocks and even the bucket and the knife-rack bear the same queasy pigment.

Theatres outside London like to produce shows that appeal to their local communities. Inside London, where cultural attitudes are strangely warped, theatres are happy to disregard the neighbourhoods they serve, and they show little interest in the lives of their customers. But the Royal Court Theatre and Hampstead Theatre have both chosen to stage shows

In Stratford-upon-Avon, the wolves are running. And if you’re old enough to feel a little thrill of wintery excitement at those words, you’ll have questions of your own about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Box of Delights. Questions about talking rats and flying cars, and whether time and tide and buttered eggs still wait for