To watch Deep Azure is to feel a double loss. The death of Prince Jones, the black student who was shot dead by a police officer in a case of mistaken identity, and the death of his friend, Chadwick Boseman, who wrote the play to commemorate him. Boseman, of course, would become world-famous as Marvel’s first black superhero, Black Panther’s King T’Challa, before dying of colon cancer aged 43. Yet the exuberance, inventiveness and giddy lyricism on display in this piece of hip-hop theatre – written by Boseman in his late twenties – is so bracingly original, it makes you grieve to wonder what Read more ...

It's nearly eight years since Kåre Conradi first appeared at the Coronet in a revelatory, visceral Norwegian production of Ibsen's Little Eyolf. He's in his middle years, like Peer the temporarily successful entrepreneur of Ibsen's tricky middle act, and in a good position to run the gamut from youthful tale-teller to old man in search of salvation for his ill-tended soul, too weak to go to heaven or hell. These 70 minutes are no "lecture", as advertised, but a spellbinding summary, take, interpretation, as you like it, of the massive drama.True, we get some background right at the beginning Read more ...

Backstories of famous writers are fascinating: where did they come from? What were their inspirations? What obstacles did they overcome? Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new historical family drama, Bird Grove, looks at the early years of Mary Ann Evans, long before she became a novelist who published under the name of George Eliot. Yes, time to dust down your copies of Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda and so on. Produced on Hampstead Theatre’s main stage, the play stars Elizabeth Dulau, best known as Kleya Marki in the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, alongside Owen Teale, Ser Alliser Read more ...

Settling into my seat in this most intimate of houses, I realised that I had never seen a play written by Nobel Laureate and Academy Award winner, George Bernard Shaw. Nor did I know what his very own adjective, Shavian, connoted with any certainty. Nor did I know why an actress chose to go by the distracting stage name, Mrs Patrick Campbell.Partly that speaks to the limitations of my own experience (though when lines were read from the proto-script of Pygmalion, I was word-perfect, albeit from My Fair Lady) but it also speaks to the fact that Shaw has long fallen out of favour. His outspoken Read more ...

If heart were art, there would be no stopping The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the 2012 Rachel Joyce novel that became a film and then a stage musical, seen first at Chichester last summer before arriving on the West End. As it is, I'm afraid I stumbled at the first hurdle of plausibility. Let's just say that if I had someone important in my life dying of cancer - as in fact has happened - I would do everything I could to get there as fast as I can.That is decidedly not the route taken by Devon's own Harold Fry (Mark Addy, inheriting Jim Broadbent's screen role) who embarks upon the Read more ...

To watch Cynthia Erivo delivering her stunning, technically complex one-woman performance of Dracula is not unlike watching a top athlete gunning for gold at the Winter Olympics – with the exception that this is infinitely more exciting. Over the last week, dissatisfied audience whispers led to headlines that the Oscar-nominated actress was struggling with the lines needed to play the 23 characters. Yet in a virtuoso press night performance she slayed doubters like a vampire hunter administering a stake to the heart.Kip Williams’ adaptation is the third in his gothic cine-theatre trilogy that Read more ...

In our society, old people are everywhere, but they are everywhere ignored. For while culture loves youth, it often scorns maturity. So the first thing to say is that I really welcome Karim Khan’s Sweetmeats, currently at the Bush Theatre, a kind of serious comedy about South-Asian oldies which explores deep feelings in a calmly compelling way. Khan’s other writing credits include Brown Boys Swim and, for television, All Creatures Great and Small. While not perfect, this show – a co-production with Tara Theatre – does have a beguiling mixture of melancholy and meditation.It’s a two-hander set Read more ...

William Nicholson’s drama about the short-lived love between the academic and writer CS Lewis and the American poet who initiated a lengthy correspondence with him in the 1950s, Joy Davidman, can be a devastating tearjerker, especially at close quarters such as a cinema or an intimately scaled auditorium. In the boxy vastness of the Aldwych Theatre, once home to the RSC and Tina: The Musical, its strongest points can struggle to be appreciated, however.Key to the piece is its portrait of the slow dissolution of the writer’s strong Christian certainties. It opens with Lewis (Hugh Bonneville) Read more ...

In prehistoric Britain, life was full of Hs. It was hard. It was horribly hard. It was hardly happy. And, according to Jack Nicholls, whose debut play has a typically noisy Royal Court title, The Shitheads, it was also hilarious and heartless. Performed in the venue’s upstairs studio space, this tale of life some tens of thousands of years ago is co-directed by David Byrne, the venue’s artistic director, and Aneesha Srinivasan. But although they take the opportunity of the Court’s 70th anniversary to nod to its heritage of horrid horrors by staging a story full of hideous and hateful events, Read more ...

Jonathan Lynn has resurrected the two characters he and the late Antony Jay created in the 1970s, billing his new play the “final chapter of Yes, Minister”. It’s an amiable workout for the former political allies, both a boost to their old conniving skills and a crash course in modern life. And some of its teeth still bite.We meet Jim Hacker, now over 80 but once the PM, in the handsome but untidy Georgian master’s lodge of the Oxford college named after him, built on the funding he secured from a Russian oligarch. Griff Rhys Jones plays him with a little too much gurning and an over-emphatic Read more ...

Some 16 or so years ago, I recall hearing what sounded like fireworks from my hotel room in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. I was aware of the Russian-occupied, unrecognised state of Transnistria, but thought that it was very distant, It wasn’t – and I still think they were fireworks, but I can't be sure.In Tbilisi, I heard stories of Russian tanks lined up just 40 kms or so from the Georgian capital; in Yerevan, Armenia and Baku, Azerbaijan, I was told quiet understated cases for both countries’ longstanding claims to Nagorno-Karabakh. That crash course in the poitical turmoil of the Read more ...

An infamous international financier, with a contacts book that includes presidents and dictators, a dark dossier on everyone he’ll ever need to bribe or blackmail, and a cold, ruthless heart, spends a long night in downtown New York trying to save his business. And he’ll go to any lengths to do it, including pimping his own son.  Terence Rattigan wrote Man and Boy in the Sixties and set it in the Thirties, his evil protagonist partly based on a crooked Swedish businessman finally undone by the Great Depression. But it screams of the here and now, of Robert Maxwell, Bernie Madoff and Read more ...