Writing stage reviews is an adventure I have yet to tire of. This year, I sat in the dark and scribbled hieroglyphics into my notebook in a dark room over one hundred times as I watched opera, cabaret, dance, circus, comedy, clowns, musicals, concert films, lots of immersive shows and even some theatre.
Below are my headline victories from this year across various categories. Read what you like and, if you like what you read, feel free to subscribe to my feed here. All views expressed below are my own.
WEST END THEATRE
It wasn’t a perfect year by any means. It’s debatable who had the worst opening night: Kathy & Stella Solve A Murder! where the venue suffered from “a flood”, A Christmas Carol-Ish where the venue suffered “technical difficulties” or Ivo van Hove’s Opening Night where it was largely the audience that suffered.
Jamie Lloyd’s mission to get every famous Hollywood actor onto the London stage at some point continued with unashamed stunt casting and some predictable miscasting. In January, Radio 2-friendly comedy The Unfriend ran next door to the stunning transfer The Motive And The Cue and suggested that Mark Gatiss is perhaps better at playing a director than being one. Sarah Snook, a plethora of huge screens and an armada of on-stage technicians amply demonstrated in A Picture Of Dorian Gray that, no matter what happens with AI in the future, modern theatre can now be happily reduced to a night watching some fancy human-assisted tech wizardry.
Jez Butterworth’s new drama The Hills of California was underwhelming (I’ve seen more exciting hills in Holland) and any acclaim for Max Webster and David Haig’s pretty-but-pointless Minority Report was very much a minority view. Rebecca Frecknall’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof pulled a cunning bait-and-switch with a painfully static first act followed by an absolutely electric post-interval performance from Lennie James. Over at the Donmar, Fear Of 13 with an animated Adrien Brody should give Jamie Lloyd food for thought while Natasha, Pierre And The Comet Of 1812 turned out to be the perfect musical for people who don’t like musicals (and many who do).
There was comedy too in the West End, the best of it unintentional. January saw two new major productions of Oedipus announced within half an hour of each other to general amusement and bemusement. The first from Robert Icke debuted in October and had Mark Strong and Lesley Manville brilliantly take on the lead roles; I’ll never look at a stiletto heel in the same way but, then again, neither will Icke’s Oedipus. The second comes to the Old Vic in less than a month and will see Rami Malek’s King called upon to investigate his father’s murder. Bombastic choreographer Hofesh Shechter is on board as co-director and, as there are more dancers on the cast list than actors, I suspect this one will be very similar in style to Romain Rachline’s blistering Stories.
FAVOURITE: DR STRANGELOVE, Noël Coward theatre. Steve Coogan on stage went one better than Peter Sellers on film and brought four different characters to life thanks to some nifty directing and Armando Ianucci’s subtle but cutting updates to the script.
OFF-WEST END THEATRE
Once you step off Shaftesbury Avenue with its bevy of revivals, musicals and revived musicals, anything can happen. Fringe theatre had a decent year with some shows sadly closing early while others like Blind Summit’s The Sex Lives Of Puppets popped up with little fanfare to become beloved cult hits.
MIME Festival showed once again how much you can say without saying anything at all. My favourite was El Patio Teatro’s Entrañas which asked two simple connected questions: what does it mean to be a human, and what does it mean to be human? Mixing the biographical, biological and philosophical isn’t easy but the Spanish company blew me away with their fluent storytelling. Tickets for the 2025 festival are on sale now.
One-person shows were everywhere. Southwark Playhouse had two: Holocaust drama The Happiest Man On Earth was grim but glorious while You Are Going To Die married a great title to the most pretentious guff I’ve seen outside of a Stoppard play. An Actor Convalescing In Devon at Hampstead Theatre took thoughts around nostalgia and disability and turned them into a moving travelogue, Alexa Davies’ Lady Dealer at Bush Theatre was a poetic slide through a life of drugs and despair while Paul Higgins’s bravura turn in This Is Memorial Device at Riverside Studios saw him enact all the members of a Scottish post-punk band plus varied hangers-on.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan
FAVOURITE: THE FROGS, Kiln Theatre. Sometimes it takes the tears of a couple of clowns to create a magical tribute to a lost colleague. When Stefan Kreisse suddenly died after a short illness and Petra Massey departed for Las Vegas, the remaining two members of physical comedy specialists Spymonkey could have justifiably split up and moved on. Instead, they turned their pain into something quite astounding. In a town not exactly short on dramas based on ancient Greek stories (Oedipus, Elektra, Hadestown etc etc), Toby Park and Aitor Bassauri outdid them all by turning the original Aristophanes work into a heartbreaking play for the ages.
CIRCUS/CABARET
Pound for pound, there are few live events that provide as much pure jaw-dropping entertainment as variety shows and their associated art forms including circus, drag, musical comedy, burlesque and magic. Those who occasionally take to the rooftops of social media to shout about the ever-increasing cost of West End theatre should pop into a Spiegeltent sometime. In between the jaw-dropping acts, they may have time to ponder upon the appeal of sitting through another obvious Shakespeare rehash, no matter which Marvel superhero actor is in the lead role.
The biggest show of the year was Come Alive! which used The Greatest Showman film as a starting point, ditched the plot and characters, retained many of the songs and took over a venue near Earl’s Court. The internal design will appeal to Secret Cinema fans and, in some ways, it didn’t matter that the storyline had all the logic and sense of a Jackson Pollock painting. Producer Simon Hammerstein went all out to blow our minds with circus routines aplenty soundtracked by live renditions of the title song and other Showman numbers. It must be doing something right as it has now extended its run from March to September 2025 in a tough environment for new shows, even those with an IP as beloved as this one’s.
Soho Theatre was (again) packed with sublime cabaret acts from around the world. Winner of the Off West End Award for Cabaret, Reuben Kaye arrived from Down Under with new songs and more incisive political views than ever before. US imports were of a very high standard: Doctor Brown terrorised audiences with his unpredictable clowning, the statuesque Pierrot known as Puddles brought his Pity Party back after a decade and outlandish drag act Dina Martina arrived with Sub-Standards, one of their signature mashups which blended the songs of The Smiths with Mary Shelly’s seminal novel to create a superbly engaging perspective on Frankenstein.
The red light district’s other big cabaret joint Underbelly Boulevard continues to hold space for circus shows until big sister Madame Jojo’s return, whenever that is (the last I heard from Soho Estates was that it would re-open in “Spring 2024” and further requests for an update have gone unanswered). The Boulevard is doing well to attract international shows and formats like Batsu, even if the quality isn’t always there. A case in point is the mediocre Incredibly Human from Israeli-American magician Asi Wind which finishes its long run there next week. It will be followed by some free burlesque nights and the transfer of Flo & Joan’s comedic tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber One Man Musical.
FAVOURITE: SOPHIE’S SURPRISE 29TH, Underbelly Boulevard An immersive birthday party set in the 1990s is filled to the brim with fun audience games, dodgy acting and a few of the most innovative circus routines I’ve ever seen. I wasn’t the only one impressed: West End winter spectacular La Clique incorporated four of Sophie’s stars as well as some of the show’s acts.
OPERA/CLASSICAL
Whisper it quietly, but the English National Opera’s semi-departure from their massive Coliseum home may be a good thing for all concerned (including the ENO). Following some winter treats like Jonathan Miller’s Barber Of Seville, their usual summer break brought the magical Spirited Away to the West End’s biggest venue and enabled tens of thousands of people to see one of the theatre events of the year.
When the usual opera programme resumed, it was very much a curate’s egg. Despite a refreshing blast of Suor Angelica, there were disappointing sights like the comeback of Miller’s solid but aged Rigoletto and Mike Leigh’s exuberant Pirates Of Penzance with its every-expense-spared set design, both of which felt more like low-budget fillers than anything else. The new production of Donizetti’s romantic comedy The Elixir Of Love was amusingly styled as an old-school TV programme; many in the audience around me looked like they were happy to switch over to another channel by the interval.
Maybe a spell away will do the company good. The re-organisation imposed on them by ACE could lead to a higher quality schedule and the chance for shows of the calibre of Spirited Away delighting London audiences more often. The ENO’s plan to bring Philip Glass’ Einstein On A Beach to Manchester in 2027 – an abstract opera with no real beginning, middle or end that lasts five hours before accounting for intervals – could be a career high point for director Phelim McDermott (Akhnaten, My Neighbour Totoro), an act of petulant self-sabotage by the company or both.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner
Over in Covent Garden, I was blown away by what I saw both up in the Royal Ballet and Opera’s main hall and down in the studio. I came back to see Madama Butterfly twice – each with a different cast – and it still has that emotional power that many operas aspire to but few have. My reaction to Jan Philipp Gloger’s radical take on Così fan tutte was split along cultural lines: my innate Italianness cocked an eyebrow at how far this was from Mozart’s sublime opera buffa and longed for the traditional treatment meted out to (for example) Tosca while my English side revelled in the humour and ingenuity of it all. Like its name, Wayne McGregor’s Maddaddam made as much sense storywise going forwards as well as backwards but you can’t knock the awe-inspiring vision of one the UK’s top choreographers.
Downstairs, immersive ballet Dark With Excessive Bright gave a small audience a unique opportunity to see incredibly skilled dancers up close as they turned, lifted and walked within inches of us. The Christmas show Ruination was also dance, albeit of a different flavour, taking the Medea story and turning it every which way to examine the portrayal and role of women in this Ancient Greek tale.
FAVOURITE: Marriage Of Figaro, Royal Ballet and Opera. The last section is almost entirely superfluous but everything before it is comedy genius with a score that gets me every time.
This article is dedicated to Ray, Helen, Mysti, Erika, Chris, Mary, Catherine, Santi, Mikkel, Nick, Carmen, Neil, Katy and Pete for all their insights (thank you) and to Johnny Fox wherever that scoundrel is.
Main Photo credit: Craig Sugden for Sophie’s Surprise 29th
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