Best of 2024: Theatre

It's the images that linger in the mind as I think back on a bustling theatre year just gone. Sure, the year fielded excellent productions (and some duds, too), but as often as not it's a particular sight that sticks in the mind.

I shan't soon forget Patricia Clarkson (pictured below in rehearsals by Johan Persson) descending at play's end on the men in her family in Jeremy Herrin's West End revival of Long Day's Journey Into Night, a ghostly relic almost passive-aggressive in her anguish. Or the astonishing Lesley Manville clambering across the body of Mark Strong in Robert Icke's dazzling reclamation of Oedipus, as if laying claim to him on multiple fronts - as is of course borne out in Sophocles' text.

Justine Mitchell turned her solo turn in Faith Healer back in the spring into as scorching a portrait of lovesickness and grief as I can recall, a thematic picked up toward the end of the year by the astonishing double-act of Matthew Tennyson and Simon Russell Beale playing younger and older versions of the same psychically forlorn poet-classicist, A E Housman, in a rare sighting of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love. Both plays found these characters sitting and staring directly at the audience, laying bare an emotional landscape that was at once psychically enervating and theatrically enlightening. 

Entrances weren't always matched by what followed. Vanessa Williams made a grand first appearance in The Devil Wears Prada, only for the Elton John-Shaina Taub musical to suggest that the creative cupboard was otherwise largely bare, while one's gratitude at once again seeing Mark Rylance back on the boards, this time in Juno and the Paycock, quickly gave way to the thickly cut slab of theatrical ham on view before us, a rewritten ending included. (Was Sean O'Casey's original not good enough?)

Steve Coogan boldly took on four roles in a rare West End sighting in Sean Foley's version of Dr Strangelove, but his manic occupancy of the title role was the only one of the quartet that fully hit home. The astonishing Romola Garai, meanwhile, went from the faint-inducing realm of the Almeida's superb production of Annie Ernaux's quasi-memoir The Years (transferring imminently to the West End) to the rhetorical cut-and-thrust of Giant at the Royal Court, a venue further enlivened by the energising presence in the Theatre Upstairs of Oli Forsyth's Brace Brace - that last title the year's most bizarrely undervalued. 

The Court, with David Byrne newly at the helm, seemed once more a place to be even if other venues (the Young Vic, for one) seemed simply to mark time. Over the river, the Donmar had an especially good year, between their scorching West End transfer of Next to Normal - how did Caissie Levy manage so seismic a performance 8 times a week? - and the back-to-back firepower of Adrien Brody's London stage debut in The Fear of 13, his signature eyes roaming the auditiorium as if in search of a home, and that building's new artistic director Tim Sheader's wonderful UK premiere of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812: you may not follow every single moment of this Pussy Riot-adjacent rave, but when did that ever keep people from beating a path to Les Mis? 

Further delight on the musical front came from Andy Nyman and Marc Antolin managing to sideswipe memories of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in The Producers - in itself no easy feat - while I returned four times during the year to check in on Guys and Dolls and can report that Nicholas Hytner's surpassingly joyful production didn't one disappoint. Can't screenings of it be available on the NHS as a cure for SAD? Star wattage came from an unexpectedly touching Sarah Jessica Parker on loan from Broadway in the gorgeously designed revival of Plaza Suite, to the incomparable double-act of Tosin Cole and Heather Agyepong in Benedict Lombe's Shifters, a production improved in its commercial transfer where its fractured portrait of love and friendship across the decades landed with even greater force. 

I thrilled to the acrobatics on view on the South Bank at Duck Pond, on view next door to the National Theatre's premiere of Ballet Shoes, the latter representing the sort of all-stops-out production this theatre does uniquely well. Shakespeare outings ranged from a beautifully designed, if rather stolid, Coriolanus, also at the National, to a fresh sighting of the Globe's lovely take on The Comedy of Errors, which managed to be funny (as is unsurprising) but unusually moving, too. 

New musicals had a tougher time. Why Am I So Single? proved the value of trying shows out along the way before bringing them into what is so quaintly referred to in London as theatreland. Circling the commercial prize before going in to nab it was the canny path taken by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which arrived recast for a West End run that I have seen wring tears from seemingly the most sombre of playgoers - "A Matter of Time" the instant earworm among Darren Clark and Jethro Compton's score, by turns exuberant and mournful. (And the casting upgrade of this or any year must be the move taken by this show's previously leading lady, Molly Osborne, who will be playing Desdemona in Othello on Broadway any minute now, opposite Jake Gyllenhall and Denzel Washington.) 

It was thrilling to see the great Sharon D Clarke landing every laugh and then some in the National's giddy (and gay) revamp of The Importance of Being Earnest, a production from the seemingly tireless Max Webster of which Oscar Wilde would surely have been, well, proud: and all credit to the wonderful Hugh Skinner for scoring every emotional beat within a play that is far more than an epigram-filled romp. And if Sigourney Weaver looked stranded in her London stage debut as a weirdly recessive Prospero in The Tempest, along came Mason Alexander Park's Ariel to soar over the production, literally as well as figuratively. On the local stage debut front, happier notes were ringingly sounded by Broadway veteran Stephanie J Block, who led the Barbican's summer revival of Kiss Me, Kate with delicacy when required before going in for the coloratura kill. 

Benedict Andrews gave us his bravest Chekhov reimagining yet in a wild Cherry Orchard for the Donmar (Daniel Monks and Sadie Soverall pictured above, photo c. Johan Persson) that kept the houselights up and an often emotionally remote text in our hearts. (Lucky playgoers got invited to join the cast for a post-interval dance.) And The Duchess of Malfi appeared before us quite specifically in a superb revival at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Webster's knotty text unfolding throughout the performance until it, too, started to unravel, in keeping with the thwarted affections of the play's fearsome, frightened characters. 

And James Macdonald's near-definitive Waiting for Godot made something lastingly agile and alive of Beckett's tragicomedy of inaction, its mantra, "nothing to be done", chiming tragically with an American election in which many of us (myself included) were tempted, like Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati's superlative Didi and Gogo, to lose all hope - except that, as they do, one does go on. 

I would be remiss if I did not close by paying due respect to two theatrical titans cut from very different cloths whom we lost this year. The shocking death in September of Tony and Olivier winner Gavin Creel, age just 48, cut grievously short the career of one of the kindest people in show business, not to mention the most talented (and socially engaged). A four-time visitor to the West End, he is missed both sides of the Atlantic.

So, too, is the inimitable Dame Maggie Smith, whose like we genuinely will never see again: a four-time visitor over the years to Broadway, Dame Maggie returned several years ago to the London stage in a solo show at the Bridge, A German Life, in which she played a real-life woman, Goebbels's personal secretary Brunhilde Pomsel, who lived to be 106. Smith herself made it to 89, and I shall count myself forever fortunate to have been around to watch her onstage for the last 40 years or more, a timeless presence possessed of both a singular wit and - less often heralded - a unique capacity to lay waste to the heart. 

Below, in alphabetical order, are 10 productions from 2025 that I shall take with me through the next year and beyond.

The Cherry Orchard, Donmar

The Duchess of Malfi, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Faith Healer, Lyric Hammersmith

The Invention of Love, Hampstead

Next to Normal (in its West End transfer), Wyndham's 

Oedipus, Wyndham's 

The Producers, Menier Chocolate Factory

Shifters (in its West End transfer), Duke of York's

Waiting for Godot, Haymarket 

The Years, Almeida 

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