theatre

Are You Watching?

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Kosar Ali and Abby McCann. Photo by Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Are You Watching? by Georgie Dettmer – Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London

The most disturbing aspect of Georgie Dettmer’s play about internet horror, at the top of a long list, are the two teenage girls. Kosar Ali and Abby McCann watch in their pyjamas from their bunk beds, as the full capacity of online culture to sexualise society and victimise women plays out for their entertainment. It does so with the audience lined up facing one another, either side of Georgia Wilmot’s white-tiled swimming pool style stage, with its unsettling, clinical, wipe-clean implications.

Dettmer’s debut play is a cry of rage, which lives on in the minds of viewers after the curtain, not least because it is about the consequences of watching. Scenes play out as a series of unconnected but thematically linked vignettes, viewed by the two girls. Nothing protects them from seeing whatever they choose on their screens and, as they discuss the worst things they’ve ever watched, the darkness of the material they are exposed to becomes all too clear. The play is clearly inspired by real-life events. There is a Giselle Pelicot story about a women drugged by her husband, raped by his friends and filmed. A Hollywood actress has nude images grimly manipulated on the internet, as her fury with the tech bosses whose platforms host the material builds. A father makes child abuse AI videos of his son. A woman takes part in research monitoring her reactions to increasingly extreme material. A young man wins a competition to sleep with an actress. The police manipulate a mother whose daughter is missing, to get the same level of attention they did for Madeleine McCann.

The deluge of dark scenarios assaults our senses and challenges our understanding of the world we live in, powered by Jess Edwards’ sharp direction, a shutter sound clanging each scene to a close. Performances are excellent, including Nicholas Rowe as an authority figure legitimising exploitation, Lucy McCormick, barely able to hide her desperation, and Maimuna Memon and Billy Bolt as, among other characters, a couple filming one another having sex.

Dettmer’s anger is clear, and it gives the play a fierce energy. The vignette structure that provides this energy also muddies the wider message to some extent. The overall theme is to be that by acting as voyeurs we are enabling and creating abuse of women in lots of different ways, and that we dehumanise ourselves and others by imagining our lives as sexual content. However, the audience is left in some doubt about how every element of the play contributes to the play’s thesis. Nevertheless, it is an urgent piece of writing, a significant achievement for a first time writer, and the kind of work that made the Royal Court famous. If Caryl Churchill and Edward Bond got together, they might produce something rather like this.

The P Word

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Waleed Akhtar and Esh Alladi. Photo by Craig Fuller

The P Word by Waleed Akhtar – Bush Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

Waleed Akhtar’s two-hander, The P Word, returns to the Bush Theatre amid high expectations. Its first run resulted in the 2023 Olivier Award for Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre, placing author and performer Waleed Akhtar in some stellar company as one of four wins in a row for the Bush, including Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer. The production, by original director Anthony Simpson-Pike is more than capable of rising to the occasion, although it is salutary that a play about the mistreatment of gay men remains so current.

The P Word concerns two characters, Bilal or Billy, as he prefers to be known, played by Waleed Akhtar, and Zofar, played by Esh Alladi. Billy is a young, gay British Pakistani man struggling with his ethnic identity. Cycling through constant hook-ups, he starts to want the stable relationship he’s never found, while distancing himself from his family, who tolerate him only if he does not discuss the fact he is gay. Meanwhile, Zofar is stuck in an asylum holding pattern in grim accommodation in Hounslow. He fled Pakistan after his father had his lover murdered and threatened to kill him, when he discovered his son’s sexuality.

The play builds slowly. The two characters circle one another without meeting for a significant portion of the evening. A clever set, a raised, split revolve designed by Max Johns, facilitates this and later providing a series of places for the pair to sit and meet when they finally connect. Both actors give engaging performances. Akhtar is good at convincnig others than he is just in it for the sex and the good times, but becomes increasingly less good at convincing himself. He lashes out against Pakistanis – using the ‘p’ word of the title – and Muslims, but he is also funny and charming. It takes Alladi’s wiser but more damaged Zofar to let him see the value of his identity and the absurdity of his cultural assumptions. Alladi’s performance is full of character, enthusiasm and very believable desperation.

There is little doubt from the very start that the pair will get together, but it takes longer than it should for it to happen. However, once it does the play really comes alive, and delivers a series of increasingly moving encounters as the pair find out who they really are, and what they will risk to protect one another. From here on in, the audience is fully behind the couple as they experience the brutality of UK immigration, the random homophobia and random kindness of London, and the difficulty of being safe if you are gay, and especially if you are also from South Asia. Akhtar’s play is a powerful statement, highlighting experiences that are little known, and delivering a strong campaigning message about the cruel deportation of queer people from the UK, often to face death. It is an emotionally stretching, intellectually engaging evening which leaves you feeling you’ve experienced much more than a play.

Handle With Care

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Handle With Care by Ontoerend Goed – Camden People’s Theatre, London

Ontoerend Goed are masters and mistresses of theatre-making, maintaining an unerring focus on the question, generally overlooked, of why we – the audience – are there. In doing so, they are very willing to break through the boundaries of what we consider theatre to be. This reaches an apogee with Handle With Care, in which they do actually turn up. The entireity of the show is contained on a box delivered to the theatre and placed on the stage, alongside cards on each seat which read “The performance begins when someone opens the box”. It is a delightful and rather brilliant conceit. I don’t know whether anyone has ever failed to open the box, but on the night I attended someone got down to it straight away. Eventually wearing a cap, provided, reading ‘Not the director’ they initiated a train of instructions setting out the dramaturgy for the performance, and bringing various audience members into carry out tasks.

Without giving too much away, the point is that every performance will be different, as it made by audience content, engagement and attitudes. Of course, all theatre is different every time, but Handle With Care swings the focus away from the stage to the people who attend every night, who are the cause of what happens on stage, and also the difference. With subtle touches, Ontoerend Goed open up the potential for moments of deep reflection, startling emotion, unexpected exuberbance and spontaneous creativity. Can an audience fill an hour essentially entertaining itself? Handle With Care shows that yes, they emphatically can. Simply occupying a space with strangers is one of humanity’s most powerful and underutilised resources. Ontoerend Goed make most theatre seem shallow and naïve, cutting directly through to what matters with uncanny precision. In some ways, all of their cumulative experience and power as a company is contained in this magical box.

Krapp’s Last Tape / Godot’s To Do List

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Photo by Jack English

Godot’s To Do List by Leo Simpe-Asante / Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett / – Royal Court Theatre, London

The Royal Court’s production of Krapp’s Last Tape is generously prefaced by a new short play written by Leo Simpe-Asante, which won the inaugural Royal Court Young Playwrights Award last year. Shakeel Haakim plays a flustered, bowler-hatted Godot who is at the mercy of a recorded female voice highly reminiscent of Alexa, voiced by Flora Ashton. Directed by Aneesha Srinivasan, the show takes place in front of the chaotic set for Krapp’s Last Tape, piled with boxes. Godot is apparently unable to do anything other than peform the endless tasks set by the voice, many of which are ridiculous or ill-advised. Haakim has the engaging presence of a natural comic, although the play does not develop far beyond its basic premise, which is a good joke but perhaps doesn’t tell us much that we don’t expect to hear.

The main attraction is Gary Oldman’s Krapp. Oldman has directed and designed the production as well, of course, as playing 69-year old Krapp as he confronts his younger self, addressing him from Reel 3, Spool 5. Oldman begins in a good humour, which rapidly dissipates as he realises the extent of the changes that happen while we are looking elsewhere. Beckett’s work is masterfully focused, every word hitting home hard. It is one of the greatest male roles in theatre and, as such, there is doubtless a temptation for an actor to make it their own, and leave their mark. This is evident in Oldman’s production and performance. He is very good, and anyone seeing his interpretation as their first will have a very worthwhile evening, but it feels like a crowded performance.

The set is very literal – a hoarder’s cavern of piled boxes of junk and teetering shelves, which Krapp roots through to locate the relevant spool. Alongside, Oldman gives the impression of playing an old man. This is not necessary. Beckett, surely, intends the actor to play themself. It’s only through being entirely oneself, on the surface unaltered from the 39-year old on tape, that the true horror of passing time is revealed to the actor and the audience. Stephen Rea understood this better in his 2025 Barbican performance, which left space all around for the darkness and, perhaps, a little hope to seep in.

The Plough and the Stars

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Photo by Roz Kavanagh

The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey – Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Published at Plays International

Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play is a super-local drama, describing events that took place on the Abbey Theatre’s doorstep during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Set in a nearby tenement block around the corner from the General Post Office, as it is besieged by the British Army, it is a masterpiece with Shakespearian character and scale but, as a modern work, a more immediate impact. Tom Creed’s centenary production for the Abbey revisits a play which, at its première, upset sections of the audience so much they rioted. Theatrical riots can seem strange and archaic: it is hard to understand why the Abbey’s patrons got so hot under the collar at the Abbey première of A Playboy of the Western World twenty years earlier. However, it is entirely different with The Plough and the Stars. Creed’s riveting production reveals it to be provocative and iconoclastic one hundred years on, and relevant to an extent that should alarm us as a society.

In Dublin, where streets and stations are named after Easter Uprising leaders and 1916 is commemorated all over town, questioning the credentials of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers is close to heresy. Sean O’Casey tears the rebels to pieces, along with the British. He pulls idealisers to the ground, and elevates ordinary, fundamentally flawed people who do not live the lives politicians imagine for them. Snatches of Patrick Pearse’s speeches ahead of the uprising drift through the pub window during the play, his calls for a blood sacrifice to cleanse the soil sounding fascistic and unhinged. As we fail to learn the endlessly repeated lesson that violence brutalises and destroys, the play still has the capacity to upset the accepted view of history. 

O’Casey’s towering achievement is to craft a play built around such a large, complex, yet wholly convincing cast of characters. His tenement inhabitants reveal a society with an ease comparable to the Henry IV plays. There are many fine roles, but it is particularly notable how well he wrote the female characters, who are all complex, unidealised and alive – an achievement beyond most male playwrights of the time. The Abbey’s cast are fully immersed in the play’s world, and seem to emerge from the setting rather than imposing their performances on it. Kate Glimore’s tragic Nora Clitheroe puts everything she has into saving Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty’s doomed Jack, knows exactly what she has to lose, and fails. Her descent into madness is horrifying. Mary Murray’s Bessie Burgess is confrontational and aggressive, but also unexpectedly kind, with a tale as confounding as anyone. Kate Stanley Brennan is very funny as Mrs. Grogan, her lyricism and larking a terrible counterpoint to her hollow-eyed, dying daughter Mollser (Evie May O’Brien). O’Casey’s incorporation of humour into the dark events is a masterclass in dramatic writing. Caitríona Ennis’s Rosie is desperate, but achieves a moment of remarkable dignity when she, accused of being a prostitute, her silence speaks volumes. 

The men in the play do not understand what is coming, and what the consequences of war will be. Michael Glenn Murphy’s Peter Flynn is a comic braggart, perhaps the most ludicrous character in the play, from a Shakespearian lineage of old men who fancy themselves as soldiers. Thommas Kane Byrne’s Marxist Young Covey is smackably smug and very entertaining, but also the only man who lets his front fall apart at the end. Fluther is one of the great comic everyman roles, a man who survives despite his own best efforts, and Dan Monaghan delivers both entertainment and depth. Ash Rizi, Fintan Kinsella and Conor Wolfe O’Hara as the British soldiers who arrive on the scene to make things, inevitably, much worse are frightened and dangerous. 

Jamie Vartan’s sets are somewhat confrontational, consisting of unpainted, plywood flats and minimal decor, but they prove very effective. At times the characters feel like ghosts, inhabiting a place that is fading out around them, casting long shadows on the bare walls. The revolve is elegantly used to switch scenes, and seems to echo the transience of time and the lives it contains. The production is superbly powerful – in the commitment of the performers, the vivacity of the characters who live on, a century down the line, and the uncompromising message of the play – that war is madness. Creed’s production reaffirms O’Casey’s status as a great writer who still has much to teach, and whose work remains gripping from start to finish.

John Proctor is the Villain

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Photo by Camilla Greenwell

John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower

Kimberly Belflower’s play premièred in the US in 2022, and has been successfully revived twice already, most recently on Broadway last year directed by Danya Taymor. It’s UK première at the Royal Court is a recast version of her production,. Set in 2018, during the increasingly distant #metoo era, it re-examines the gender politics and in-built prejudice of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, as studied by a high school class of five girls, one of whom is absent for reasons that become apparent. The girls, questioning standard assessments of John Proctor as a hero of American drama, propose the formation of a school feminist club. Their teacher, Mr. Smith, who they admire and, in some cases, fancy deems it too controversial, but suggests bringing in two boys, after which it apparently flies under the local social radar. The relationships between the pupils and their teacher become complex in ways that, although not for revealing in a review, are hardly surprising.

This is the problem with the production. Nothing presented on stage feels unexpected or new, and there is a sense that the audience is having its world view confirmed. The most shocking aspect of the play, to a UK audience, is the idea that feminism is so controversial an idea that a school would stop pupils discussing it for fear of ‘what people might say’ – a truly terrifying bulletin from US conservatism. But the production itself displays a level of conservatism that makes it seem old-fashioned in comparison to the work the Royal Court is staging from British writers at the moment. The characters of the girls seem surprisingly formulaic, like types rather than individuals. There are some highlights among the performers. Sadie Soverall is excellent as the awkward but Shelby, who arrives like a ticking time bomb. Reece Braddock as the sweetly daft Mason is very funny – the two boys are both convincingly written as teenage idiots, but he has the better role. Dónal Finn is strong as the charming, untrustworthy teacher who is the analogue for John Proctor.

However, the heavily realistic classroom set by AMP featuring Teresa L. Williams, and Taymor’s direction, tie the action down, while the writing makes it difficult to believe that many of the characters are real people. The play is well-intentioned, and its John Proctor-cancelling is an intriguing, even exciting ideological position. Despite this, the production and performance-style seem leaden-footed. The climactic moment, with the girls taking over the classroom and dancing to Lorde’s ‘Green Light’, feels manufactured and fails to deliver the catharsis it insistently sells to the audience.

Henry V

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Alfred Enoch – photo by Johan Persson

Henry V by William Shakespeare – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Following their highly successful 2024 collaboration on Pericles, Joint Artistic Director Tamara Harvey and Alfred Enoch reunite for a Henry V that uses the same language of movement, from Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster and fight director Kate Waters. Lucy Osbourne’s costumes are medieval in inspiration, with a couture edge. Michael Elcock’s Dauphin wears silver trainers, but the foot soldiers on both sides are in dull colours, and one side is indistinguishable from the other. The mass of men suffer and die, regardless of allegiance. The glorification of war is constantly exposed in front of a wooden scaffolding set, also by Osbourne, against which attackers and defenders alike are slaughtered.

The war, which is the singular plot of what is an unusually simple play for Shakespeare, in terms of structure, cannot be escaped. Harvey brings in Henry IV’s deathbed speech to Hal, from Henry IV Part 2, at the start of the play in which the father advises the son “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, may waste the memory of the former days.” Alfred Enoch’s Henry V takes him at his word, and displays a messianic focus in pursuing what is revealed to be a tenuous claim to the French throne in the play’s opening exchange. There’s something of Tony Blair in Enoch’s smooth, polite and slightly innocent manner. He gives the impression that he is an entirely reasonable man, and his war is reasonable too, but the glint in his eye grows and, by the time he delivers the St. Crispin’s Day speech, he has morphed into a cult leader. Enoch is excellent, both likeable and unnerving in one of Shakespeare’s strangest roles.

The triumphalism traditionally read into the play seems very hollow in Harvey’s interpretation. Little of what Henry says that can be taken at face value and, when he alone, he gives a bitter, self-pitying pre-battle soliloquy in which he castigates his subjects for their lack of gratitude, bemoaning his position as “subject to the breath of every fool whose sense no more can feel but his own wringing.” At the end, the Chorus reveals the futility of achieved Henry did, explaining how his son will go on to lose it all.

Harvey’s production uses a coherent, well-cast ensemble, continuing a welcome trend under the new RSC leadership of powerful group dynamics on stage. There a no weak links, and the performers clearly fully understand the production’s direction, and are committed to it. Jamie Ballard plays the Archbishop of Canterbury, King of France and the soldier Williams in a tour de force of flexibility. Catrin Aaron is excellent and completely different as Mistress Quickly and the Queen of France. Micah Balfour’s Exeter is a lynchpin. Gender switched parts worked seamlessly, includoing Sophie McIntosh as the Duchess of Gloucester and Sarah Slimani as Mountjoy. Natalie Kimmerling’s Katherine is a strong presence, fully understanding the politics that sweep her into marriage. Emmanuel Olusanya as Bardolph, Ewan Wardrop as Nym and Tanvi Virmani as ‘The Girl’ (the Boy in the original) make a genuinely funny and seedy grouping with Paul Hunter’s Pistol. The latter is a joy to watch, setting an extremely high baseline for physical comedy, drawing other performers in his wake.

This Henry V is less obviously a response to current events than is sometimes the case in times of international crisis, but it provides a powerful, coherent warning against leaders who never doubt themselves, a lesson with wide application. Harvey continues to direct very high quality Shakespeare, and to build a broad company and a clear, fluid, modern performance style (with excellent verse speaking) which we can look forward to enjoying, all being well, for many years to come.

The Shitheads

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Jacoba Williams and Jonny Khan.

The Shitheads by Jack Nicholls – Royal Court Theatre, London

For starters, Jack Nicholls’ play The Shitheads is set in the Stone Age – specifically, the end of the Stone Age. I can only think of one other play with Stone Age scenes – Alistair McDowall’s The Glow, also staged at the Royal Court. It’s a bold and decisive approach from a writer who sent his work to the Royal Court on spec: they are staging submitted plays as part of their 70th anniversary season. Anna Reid has turned one end of the the Upstairs theatre into the interior of a cave with rock walls that are pretty convincing. It’s hard to make stage rocks that look real. But that’s only part of the setting. The play also uses puppets by Finn Caldwell, beginning with an elk hunting scene. The elk, real size, is operated War Horse style by two people, under puppetry captain Scarlet Wilderink. But this is definitely not War Horse. Nicholls creates a strange and thoroughly disturbing parable about inward-looking societies, fear of outsiders, resistance to change and violence which is entirely current.

The cast are all very watchable and convincing, at ease in their strange, compelling roles. The protagonist Clare is played by Jacoba Williams, a young woman venturing outside the cave where her father Adrian, played by Peter Clements, dictates the world view. Her sister Lisa, played by Annabel Smith, seems innocent but is capable of upending everything. Then a strange arrives – first a hunter, Greg (Jonny Khan), then his wife Danielle (Ami Tredera) who comes looking for him with their baby. The latter is the play’s other puppet, and possibly the most sinister thing in the whole evening. There’s competition for this: the cave is decorated with flesh and bones and the cave dwellers’ deceased mother is in a pit, along with discarded animal carcasses. Cannibalism features. Clare, asked why she lives in a cave, says “Because we’re very lucky” – but things are changing. The people they described as ‘Shitheads’ roam from place to place for better food and climate, and they’re leaving for good as the weather changes. The cave dwellers are doomed, but that may not convince them to change.

Directed by David Byrne, The Shitheads is a riot. The play, written in deliberately contemporary language, is very funny in a Martin MacDonagh, black comedy style. The idea of Stone Age characters called Adrian or Danielle is, in itself, very funny. The scenario also carries echoes of Enda Walsh – plays such as Walworth Road, where a closeted family group creates bizarre rituals to keep the outside world away. Nicholls is a clever and exciting writer, and this collaboration with a Royal Court on a high has all the excitement of the dramas that originally made the theatre’s name. It shows us ourselves in totally unexpected, entirely recognisabel ways, and providing gripping , unclassifiable entertainment while doing so.

Lost Atoms

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Anna Sinclair Robinson and Joe Layton. Photo by Tristram Kenton

Lost Atoms by Anna Jordan – Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Published at Plays International

Lost Atoms, written by Anna Jordan, is the 30th anniversary production for Frantic Assembly, who are a staple of the UK’s 21st century touring scene. Led throughout by Scott Graham, the company is known for making movement the core of their expression, and devising their own method entwining the text and the physical. The Frantic Method has been very influential, shaping a performance style that is very distinctively of our time. Frantic have achieved a great deal, applying their approach to classic text and new writing with equal success. It is all the more impressive that their world is smaller touring venues rather than the big commercial or subsidised theatres, where experimental work that challenges audiences is needed most. It is entirely appropriate that Lost Atoms is a co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, the Curve in Leicester and the Mayflower, Southampton.

For their anniversary tour they have chosen a new play by Jordan who, since her last play in 2018, has been working on television series such as One Day for Netflix. Lost Atoms is about ordinary living, and what that really entails. A couple meet, get together and go through experiences related to pregnancy which are both common, and unforgettably traumatic. There is a cast of just two: Joe Layton plays Robbie, and Anna Sinclair Robinson plays Jess. Their meeting involves coffee shop wifi, and they get together through a series of chances, gradually working out how much they like each other. They encounter each other’s families, and all they bring – cleverly staged through one-sided conversations. Then Jess gets pregnant. It is impossible to discuss the plot without giving too much away, but what follows tests their relationship to the limits.

There are remarkable similarities with Luke Norris’ play Guess How Much I Love You?, currently playing at the Royal Court, which also has a cast of two, and concerns a relationship beset by pregnancy trauma. However, under Scott Graham’s direction the style of Lost Atoms is very different. Layton and Sinclair Robinson use Andrezj Goulding’s set – a bank of filing cabinets – like a climbing wall. Drawers pull out to become seats, steps, even a toilet, but they also act as drawers, containing props but also memories. A massive slab, looking disturbingly like the door to an ancient tomb, flips up to form a bed, angling the couple towards the audience in mid-air. The physicality of the performers is, at times, mesmerising. They are frequently performing while horizontal, or suspended at gravity-defying angles. They move in relation to one another throughout, expressing the closeness and distance of an intimate relationship through their bodies as much as their words.

The story is told in flashback, as Jess and Robbie explain what happened to them for the benefit, it seems, of the audience. It takes time to get going and the first half, which shows us their developing relationship, tells us less than the second. The performers become more convincing as the stress mounts, and they move away from the sometimes exaggerated naivety of their initial personas. Lost Atoms truly draws the audience in when it starts to explore what happens to people behind closed doors, in cold NHS consulting rooms and tiny flats. We think we know what life is about, but human drama is at its most extreme in everyday settings, just out of sight. Frantic Assembly’s production showcases the strengths of their work, with complete physical commitment to storytelling. Actors do things you may never have seen on a stage before, but which seem strangely natural. Conventional theatre can seem static in comparison.