Shann Sahota’s new play is a family drama, tying Southall to Westminster. Adeel Akhtar’s Angad Singh is a government minister, seizing the unexpected opportunity to stand for the party leadership. It quickly gets personal, and his relationship with his two sisters, Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and Malicka (Shelley Conn), and with his late father, become political collateral. Sahota’s writing is very sharp, and she explores themes somewhat outside general discourse – the equivocal position of south Asians within the British establishment, misogyny in Sikh families, and what families have to hide when society expects them to justify their existence by being better than everyone else.
The performances are excellent too. Adeel Akhtar brings his vulnerability and the underlying menace he can produced, which is all the more disturbing for being so expected. He is thoroughly compelling, although it is a little hard to believe that someone quite as self-abasing has made it up the political ladder. His sisters are equally well-played. Thusitha Jayasundera superb, as always, as the motherly older sister ground down by Angad’s refusal to share his inheritance equally with his sisters, against their domineering father’s wishes. Shelley Conn is impressively combustible as the furious, younger sibling. The spiky atmosphere of a minister’s office is amusingly embodied by advisers Petra (Helena Wilson) and Isaac (Fode Simbo). The power of establishment is represented by the towering, besuited figure of Ralph (Humphrey Ker).
Daniel Raggett’s production is thoroughly enjoyable. He stages the play as a drawing room drama on a set that could double for a Noël Coward, complete with sliding wooden panels by Chloe Lamford. The Dorfman is set out, unusually, in a proscenium configuration, playing on the expectations of traditional theatre by using a familiar form to tell stories about ‘brown’ people, as Angad puts it. The Estate is a straight show – a family drama that plays out in a linear fashion, which brings limitations too, but within her own parameters Sahota has done an excellent job.
Kjersti Horn’s production of Jon Fosse’s Einkvan, visiting The Coronet Theatre on tour, is a startlingly experimental piece of theatre. Horn is artistic director of the Det Norske Teatret in Oslo, and she is working with perhaps her country’s foremost writer in Fosse, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is unusual in being known equally for his novels and his plays, and the production provides a rare opportunity to see his work on the London stage. It does not disappoint, being both simultaneously dark and compassionate, with a staging that unpicks fundamental assumptions about the stage.
Both set and costumes are designed by Sven Haraldsson, but their main role is to obscure the action. The performers are concealed for the entire hour-long show behind an opaque plastic curtain which surrounds the stage. Only their faint dark outlines are visible as they perform the play. Instead, we see them through two large video screens hanging above the stage. The action is filmed with handheld cameras, with a single face shown in close-up on each screen. The video work, by Mads Sjøgård Pettersen, frames the audience’s perception of the entire show. The unseen camera operators are crucial performers, driving the mood with tighter, more disturbing close-ups as the tension slowly builds. Pettersen and Borgar Skjelstad, who together film the action, rightly take a bow at the end.
Einkvan is Norwegian for ‘uniqueness’. The play is performed in subtitle Norwegian by a cast of six, playing a mother, a father, a son and their apparent doppelgangers – characters who look similar although not identical but appear to live parallel lives. Only two characters ever appear at a time, one on each screen. The play consists of a series of first-hand accounts of meetings. Both the mothers and the fathers encounter the sons unexpectedly in the street, and are baffled when they refuse to reply to their enquiries about why it’s been so long since they met, or their invitations to supper.
These encounters use ritualised repetition, but are also naturalistic. Fosse strips language back to its hidden core, using no superfluous words. This directness, which seems very Norwegian to a UK audience, is also strangely moving. The failure of people to connect – parents with children, but also friends with one another and people with themselves – seems a highly apt social metaphor for the 21st century. It may be even more than that. At times it feels as though Fosse has traced the source of all our social ills, and is shining a spotlight on it.
The performers – Laila Goody and Marianne Krogh as the two mothers, Jon Bleiklie Devik and Per Schaanning as the fathers, Vetle Bergan and Preben Hodneland as the sons – are very effective at delivering performances in close-up, a technique which is undoubtedly much harder than they make it look. The performances to a camera on stage is reminiscent of Andrew Scott’s breakthrough stage appearance twenty years ago, filming himself on the Royal Court stage in ‘A Girl in a Car with a Man’, but this takes the challenge to a whole new level. Characters are constantly interacting with one another across cameras, and at one point even staging a fight in a bath. All the actors are compelling throughout. In fact, the whole play holds the audience rapt, a remarkable achievement for a show in which the actors only appear in the flesh at the curtain call. When they do, the dissonance is sharp as we emerge from what feels like a dream, suffused with sadness and loss, tenderness and a powerful endorsement of the need for humans to support and love one another.
With the pre-announcement of not one, but two future productions of Krapp’s Last Tape scheduled for the mid-2030s (when Sam West and Richard Dormer reach 69, the age of Beckett’s main character), it’s reasonable to ask what makes actors want to play this role so much. To some extent, it could be that recording the lines for younger Krapp at 39 represents a solid investment in future work. But there is also a clear sense that this is one of the big roles, a defining part, and one that suits unconventional actors better than classic leads. Stephen Rea is very much the kind of performer suited to Krapp. Actually 78, although he very much does not look it, Rea bring a hangdog comedy and a deep sadness to a role others have approached with more rage and less stillness. He also met Beckett himself, who attended rehearsals for the Royal Court’s 1976 production of ‘Endgame’ with Rea in the cast.
Vicky Featherstone’s production is designed by Jamie Vartan, who places Krapp’s desk in a square of light beyond which lies only darkness. A path of light leads from the desk to a door, beyond which lies smoke, the drink which Krapp retires periodically to consume, with a comic sloshing sound, and who knows what else. The set also aids the silent comedy at the heart of Beckett’s play, in the form of a ludicrously long desk drawer which Krapp pulls out further and further to reach his hidden bananas. Rea plays the sad clown very well, dialling down the slipping on banana skins but emphasising the shambling walk, which looks both exaggerated and weirdly familiar. The inevitable comedy of decay is inseparable from the sadness, loneliness and failure that haunts Krapp, in the form of his naive 39-year old self, still seeking and possibly expecting happiness. His writing, unlike that of Beckett, faded away despite his epiphany in a storm, which he can not longer bear to hear about.
Stephen Rea recorded the Krapp tapes in his 60s, but they sound like the work of a younger man. The weighted precision of his delivery makes very word matter a great deal, to Krapp and to Beckett as writers and to us as an audience. His performance is heartbreaking without ever needing to fully express the emotions we know he is feeling. This play, so slight, remains a work of remarkable power that can bind the entire audience of a large theatre into the unravelling existence of one man.
New York performance duo Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice are fringe stars, winners of Edinburgh Fringe First Awards for each of their three shows: What If the Rodeo Burned Down, A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God, and What If They Ate the Baby. Their success has brought them to bigger audiences at the Soho Theatre, where they are currently performing the latter two shows. Their distinctive performance style combines funny, experimental writing with surreal physical techniques, and is both highly entertaining and brilliantly strange. They pick at the tropes of American, as seen in film and music, until they become something both familiar and disturbing.
Natasha and Xhloe play suburban American housewives in 1950s dresses inhabiting an unsettling neon interior. A house call to return a casserole dish is all conventional social niceties, in which everything is unsaid. The script becomes a cycle of repetition, carrying shifting meanings as the never-ending visits plays out again and again. Physical gestures are stylised to the point of absurdity, and underlying social and sexual tensions spill to the surface. The two characters want one another, and intercut scenes show them indulging their fantasies. It is also clear that what they are doing is unacceptable in the society of the time, and there are also disturbing suggestions that normal is in fact very strange. There are bodies literally under the patio, and hints at dark deeds reveal a queer rebellion that is constantly bubbling to the surface.
What If They Ate the Baby plays with different sources which have set our expectations of the, brittle post-war suburban USA. The atmosphere is David Lynch crossed with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, as deep tensions play out between the pair as both insist everything is ok with their husbands, the neighbours and their homemaking lives. The show is very funny, and very tightly scripted and performed. The insistent repetition of actions, the meanings of which shift every time, is reminiscent of Forced Entertainment, while the combination of silliness and rigour is worthy of Sh!t Theatre. Natasha and Xhloe use music to great effect, from 1950s popular song ‘Music! Music! Music!’ to hip hop, such as ‘Punk Tactics’ by Joey Valence & Brae. Angelo Sagnelli’s work as Lighting Designer and Technical Manager is essential to creating a world with a handful of props. Finely coordinated interplay makes the show a mini-masterpiece of physical theatre. The pair are original, imaginative and highly entertaining performers, and the show is a sophisticated treat which fully justifies their growing reputation.
More Lifeby Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman – Royal Court Theatre, London
With the tech-enabled delusions of the super rich now the central driving force in global politics, there could not be a more opportune moment to examine the reality behind fantasy bundled as product. Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman, who together are Kandinsky, have devised a chilling and remarkable play for our times. ‘More Life’ imagines what it would actually be like to live forever, and the unequivocal conclusion is… absolutely terrible. Corporate scientist Victor (Marc Elliott) is working to impact the consciousness of dead people, digitally stored half a century earlier, into living bodies – bringing the dead back to life. After many failed experiments, with people ‘turned off’ when they fail to react positively to the discovery, firstly, that they have died, and then that they have been brought back to life, he succeeds with Bridget, whose new body is played by Alison Halstead. She also appears in her original form as a ghost, played by a Danusia Samal, observing her inexplicable resurrection
‘More Life’ focuses on the emotional impact on Bridget, and her husband (Tim McMullan) and his second wife (Helen Schlesinger), of meeting someone who died 50 years ago. Mooney and Yeatman’s writing teases apart the sheer horror of living in a world where you no longer have a place, and of having your life ripped from its moorings. This is not an advert for AI. A quality cast delivers focused, persuasive performances: McMullan’s blank features crumbling under pressure, Schlesinger’s amenability stretched and torn, and Halstead’s understated performance carrying an emotional heft that builds and builds. Elliott is quixotically driven, while Lewis Mackinnon’s fellow scientist is a counterweight with a conscience.
‘More Life’ is partly an updating of ‘Frankenstein’ – it is bookended with the 1802 electrification of a corpse that inspired Mary Shelley – and partly an echo of Caryl Churchill’s hyper-prescient play ‘A Number’, but very distinctly its own self. Kandinsky’s style is low-key and highly inventive, honed over the course of several productions at the New Diorama Theatre, under now-Royal Court director David Byrne. They present complete, enthralling theatre. The orange cubicles of Shankho Chaudhuri’s set conjure a distant future without cliché; lighting from Ryan Joseph Stafford, sound and music from Zac Gvirtman, and sound from Dan Balfour delineate constantly shifting time periods with complete clarity. James Yeatman’s direction takes an apparently setting and uses the cast in multiple ways, as chorus, narrators, physical presence, and participants in a way that appears seamless, and is very difficult to achieve.
There is an entirely unexpected, devastating scene in which the whole cast sings David Byrne’s ‘Glass, Concrete and Stone’ – a sly tribute to the man who brought Kandinsky to the Royal Court perhaps, and a song of social disconnection. The lyric “Everything’s possible when you’re an animal” takes new on new poignancy in the context of the directions we are choosing to take as a species, or that are being chosen for us. ‘More Life’ is an intelligent and troubling critique, with a fabulous cast – a production enthrals from start to finish. It exemplifies the role of drama as a social mirror which shows us the things we would prefer to ignore.
The significance of Khawla Ibraheem’s one-woman play about life in Gaza has only intensified since its runs at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe and off-Broadway. A Knock on the Roof is one of the starkest, most politically urgent pieces the Royal Court has staged for some time. The war in Gaza has put UK theatre in the spotlight, and not to its advantage. The cancellation by the Royal Exchange in Manchester of Stef O’Driscoll’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream over what have been described as ‘pro-Palestinian’ messages revealed a cultural fault line. It has fed into disputes involving leading industry figures and the Culture Secretary about theatre’s freedom to make political statements, especially on the Israel-Hamas conflict. The brutal events in Gaza have been notable by their absence from our stages, even as they dominate political discourse. In the midst of this, Khawla Ibraheem delivers a masterclass in political theatre. She communicates, with honesty, commitment, humour and self-awareness, the truth of life under siege in a war zone, where politics is not a choice but an all-consuming, everyday reality.
A Knock on the Roof, is both written and performed by Ibraheem. It is named after the tactic, adopted by the Israeli Defense Forces, of dropping a ‘small’ bomb on residential buildings as a five-minute warning to residents that a rocket is coming. Ibraheem plays Maryam, who has a young son, Noor, an aging mother and a husband studying abroad. Her daily existence includes keeping Noor out of the polluted sea, dealing with her mother’s nagging, and negotiating with an absent partner. It also involves escape drills. Maryam becomes obsessed with how far she can run in five minutes, and who or what she can carry, if the knock comes. She practices in the middle of the night, carrying a weighted bag to represent her son, hoping to get fitter, trying to create a scenario in which her family survives.
The constant, never-ending fear that attends Gazan life is both mesmerising and terrible. The concept of being on the alert 24 hours a day for a signal that death is imminent is a deeply distressing scenario, and also farcical. What would you really bring if you had just one bag? Would you choose clothes, or things that really matter to you? How far do you imagine you can run in 5 minutes? Which way would you go? And what if you miss the ‘knock’? The combination of the ordinary and extraordinary is excruciating, but Ibraheem also makes it funny. Her performance, committed, nuanced and physical, is a real success. She appears relaxed, hugging friends before the play starts, engaging in audience interaction, but she is laser-focused. Her writing is multi-layered, acknowledging absurdity as well as terror. We are entirely convinced as she describes what on the surface seems unrelatable, describing an extreme situation entirely in terms of human experience.
The play is also about more than the war, or the many previous wars – even Noor has already lived through two. Ibraheem writes about the frustration of being a woman in Gaza, with a child and husband neither of whom she really wanted, her studies and future curtailed. Her mother reinforces the social expectations that weigh her down, insisting she showers in a dress so she is not pulled naked from the rubble if the building is bombed. The focus is entirely on her performance. The stage is bare apart from a single chair, and settings are shown through light-touch back projections on the bare brick of the back wall – set designs by Frank J Oliva, and projection design by Hana S Kim. Director Oliver Butler developed the piece with Ibraheem, and together they conjure a place we find hard to comprehend from nothing with enormous skill. Ibraheem uses her body to communicate the sheer physical demands of survival in a war zone.
A Knock on the Roof is a significant show for a number of reasons. Staging such a stripped-back piece in the Royal Court’s main auditorium is a big and bold statement. Khawla Ibraheem is not only a significant talent, but a performer we need to hear from right now. And she blows away the fog of political argument and disinformation by showing what it is like to live in Gaza – something that, despite many months of press coverage, we still do not really know. The message she communicates is undeniable, that what happens to people is the only thing that matters. Away from slogans, this is surely the most meaningful lesson we can learn from disastrous conflict. If theatre cannot communicate this, it has no role; but by staging this show Artistic Director, David Byrne, makes it clear that he understands where the Royal Court’s power lies.
The set for A Good House starts empty, a bare stage surrounded by a strip of light which looks like an arena designed for combat. The set, by Ultz, transforms into a series of interiors over the course of the evening, as the living rooms of three different homes. Each scene is changed by the cast as they build their own interiors, carefully constructed to build or hide racial and social identity. These houses, it turns out, are battlegrounds.
Amy Jeptha’s tense, funny satire is set on a new-build estate called Stillwater, somewhere in South Africa. In an echo of Harold Pinter’s ‘A Slight Ache’, a mute but menacing presence is enough to explode the conventions holding a fragile social consensus together. With Pinter it was a matchseller in the street outside; in ‘A Good House’ it is a shack, erected overnight on waste ground by unseen hands. It is visible from the sitting room belonging to young couple Chris (Scott Sparrow) and Jess (Robyn Rainsford), and seems to them to jeopardise their entire way of life. Attempts to form a ‘neighbourhood watch’ to deal with the perceived threat strips the covers off everyone’s assumptions about race, threat and social status – and about their most intimate relationships.
Jeptha’s writing is highly skilled and very funny, even as it lays middle-class South African society open. The young couple and the shack become a catalyst for an excruciatingly polite war of words between white couple Andrew (Kair Luke Brummer) and Lynette (Olivia Darnley) and black couple Bonolo (Mimî M Khayisa) and Sihle (Sifiso Mazibuko). The cast give highly entertainingly, finely calibrated performances. Brummer is hilariously tense as he tries to avoid saying the wrong thing, while sounding like a racist every time he opens his mouth. Darnley is equally amusing as a social manipulator not nearly as clever as she imagines. Jeptha mercilessly caricatures white hypocrisy, but also insecurity: Rainsford’s Jess quivers with the effort of maintaining her place on the social ladder, and Sparrow, as her partner Chris, descends into meltdown over his perceived social inferiority.
However, the focus of the play in on Bonolo and Sihle. A financially successful black couple, they find themselves forced to choose between defending middle-class privilege, or the rights of the unseen shack dwellers. This opens up rifts in their relationship. Bonolo openly questions Andrew and Lynette’s motives, while besuited executive Sihle tries to keep the peace, and not make trouble: yet it is Sihle who grew up in poverty while, as he puts it, the activist Bonolo was always ‘bouji as fuck’. Khayisa and Mazibuko give excellent performances as a couple who love one another, but whose personal lives cannot be separated from the political choices engulfing them. There are a couple of remarkable cut-away scenes, as the tensely polite living room chat pauses and the pair give way to their real feelings about their neighbours, rolling around on the carpet helpless with laughter.
‘A Good House’ is a quality drama, directed with vision and control by Nancy Medina. Jeptha’s writing is honed and precise, exposing the tensions of a society where everything that matters goes unsaid. Her drama involves an intruder disrupting a supposedly cosy social setting, a classic theatrical scenario, but the play feels right up to the minute. The cosiness is superficial, and the self-interest entirely transparent, with characters such as Andrew principally concerned about ‘optics’. Everything and everybody feels closer to the edge than ever before, but ‘A Good House’ is also riotously funny. It is a fine production on every level.
In Max Webster’s new production intentions clear are from the opening moments. The play begins with a dance sequence. Ncuti Gatwa, playing Algernon, drapes himself over a grand piano wearing a shocking pink ballgown, split to reveal boxer shorts underneath. It sends an unambiguous message that this will not be The Importance of Being Earnest we have become familiar with, but a high camp, high glitter entertainment… and much more beside. Webster opens the play up to a much-need re-examination. One of the best known and loved – and overquoted – plays in the repertoire is reclaimed as the brutal social critique it has been all along.
For the National Theatre to stage Oscar Wilde’s best known play is a balancing act. It’s a sure audience pleaser, which is why every amateur group in the country has done it at some point, but there needs to be a reason to give it a major new production. Webster delivers this triumphantly, and his show is a revelation. The play has an excellent, highly entertainingly and disruptive cast. Gatwa is suave, shameless and very funny, with a commanding stage presence and a knack for comedy. He is matched with Hugh Skinner’s apparently more vulnerable Jack Worthing, constantly struggling to match his mental self image. The ingenue Cecily Cardew is played by Eliza Scanlen who channels Miranda Richardson to fine effect. And the excellent Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ is very funny as Gwendolen, teetering throughout between comic social propriety and crotch-grabbing sexual meltdown. Richard Cant and Amanda Lawrence, as Canon Chasuble and Miss Prism, deliver supporting performances of an exceptionally high calibre, while Julian Bleach has fun as two butlers: the scary Merriman and his derelict country counterpart, Lane.
However, every production of ‘…Earnest’ pivots on its Lady Bracknell. The part has become an old-fashioned star turn, somewhat divorced from the play itself. It is mystifying that Wilde has become so cosy, as though his annihilation by the society who had fêted him happened to someone else. ‘…Earnest’ is packed with bitter social recrimination fed to the audience in sugared pills. Sharon D Clarke’s Lady Bracknell undoes all that. Casting actors of colour in the key roles challenges some assumptions, and Clarke’s forbidding, stereotypical Caribbean matriarch works perfectly for the part. Wearing dramatic costumes combining western and Afro-Caribbean styles, by Rae Smith, she puts up a fierce resistance to her daughter’s wishes, but we gradually realise that this a façade relates directly to her origins. The key moments in the play are when she reveals that she had no money before she married Lord Bracknell; and when she discovers that Jack is very wealthy, and becomes suddenly supportive of his marriage to Gwendolen. She knows what it means to have nothing, and what it takes to stay afloat when you don’t belong. She can compete with any of the great Lady Bracknells, but her performance reinvents the part.
The entire play is explicitly about dissembling and façades. Nobody says what they mean, while revealing what they really think. We see clearly from Webster’s production that no-one can afford to be who they actually are. Wilde certainly couldn’t. But he devised a way to say things in a way that allowed his plays to become accepted and mainstream, all the while presenting an unequivocal condemnation of the British social order. Gatwa’s Algernon is certainly not a straightforwardly heterosexual character, but neither is anyone else. Algernon and Jack seem as interested in each other as their fiancees, and so do Celia and Gwendolen. Webster stages a spectacular pile-on in which they all seem on the brink of engaging in a foursome. On Rae Smith’s slightly psychedelic sets, reality is heightened and pushed to the brink of absurdity, which is where the truth lies. The show is as funny and entertaining as any production of the play, but it shows us what’s been lying in plain sight. Wilde deserves to be fully understood, and his work given the freedom of interpretation it could never receive at the time, and that has eluded it since. The evening ends with a masque dance, with all the characters in feathers and frills. It is a moment of joy, releasing us from the terrifying constraints of a world that forces everyone to pretend in order to survive.
Steve Coogan and Giles Terera. Photo by Manuel Harlan.
Dr. Strangelove by Armando Ianucci and Sean Foley – Noël Coward Theatre, London
Sean Foley and Armando Ianucci have adapted Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 satire, Dr. Strangelove, for the stage, powered by the willingness of Steve Coogan to go one better than Peter Sellers, and play four parts (Sellers bailed on Major TJ Kong, who was played instead by Slim Pickens). The concept of staging the film is attention-grabbing, and the issues it satirising more current than they’ve been for decades. However, it is not ultimately clear why this story needs to be on the stage. The adaptation, , and Sean Foley’s direction, are very faithful to the film apart than the odd update such as a acknowledgment that the cast is almost entirely male, which does not change the fact it is still almost entirely male. Part of the problem is that it is less a story than a series of set-piece scenes, which work well on film and less well on stage. The film is oddly set-bound, which may have made it seem suited for theatre, but somehow the show never quite takes off.
Coogan is accomplished and highly professional in all four roles: frightfully posh English officer Captain Mandrake; US President Muffley, trying to be reasonable in the face of insanity; Major TJ Kong, perhaps his best role, the gung-ho, bomb-riding B52 pilot with a strange attitude to women; and Dr. Strangelove, wheelchair-bound not-very-ex-Nazi scientist. The play is, inevitably, mostly focussed on him – and the substitution of lookalikes with their backs to the audience while Coogan changes into another costume quickly become distracting. There is also the sense that Coogan never really lets it all out. His performances seem controlled and script-bound, and the moment when he unleashes the madness never arrives.
There is limited space for other cast members to shine, and indeed there appear to be several senior military figures who spend much of the show sitting around the War Room table, never speaking. However, John Hopkins has a lot of fun cast, slightly surprisingly, as the mad General Ripper, who launches a nuclear assault on Russia without permission. His performance has an unpredictable edge to it that is lacking elsewhere, and his conspiracy-theory fuelled spiral seems alarming current. Giles Terrera has fun as General Turgidson, cheerleader for ‘pretaliation’ against the Soviets, but he can’t animate the War Room scenes on his own.
Hildegard Bechtler’s set recreates the look of the film very well, but inevitable involves filling the stage with large immovable objects, notably the giant oval War Room table, and the cockpit of a B52. This does not aid the production’s fluidity. Nor does the fact that the large back-projection is invisible to the substantial section of the audience in the balcony, and has to be replicated on very small tv screens. In fact, the Noël Coward Theatre seems the wrong place for this show, which is too constrained on its tight proscenium stage. It would have worked much better in the Olivier.
The characters, conversations and events of Dr. Strangelove are terrifying close to real life. Much of the film is a documentary in disguise, dramatising the insane thinking of senior US military figures such as Curtis Le May and Thomas Powers, who actively encouraged a nuclear conflict in which they were quite willing, as General Turgison says, for 20 million American to die, as long as even more Russians were killed. The revived nuclear threat following the invasion of Ukraine makes this satire both timely, and as important now as it was then. It is just a shame that the stage version delivers more of a tribute show than a rebirth.
Tom Bolton 