Theatre 2025

This wasn’t the greatest year in theatre for me. But I still haven’t quite returned to my pre-Covid rate of theatregoing and, in part because of changed teaching, the profile of what I’ve been to see has slightly shifted. There were probably many good new plays that I missed; I think I generally didn’t pick great musicals to see; and I saw a lot of revivals but I Have Grumpy Views About Them. I’ll divide what I saw into categories, and New Plays.

Musicals

I wasn’t completely bowled over by anything I saw this year. The musical theatre event of 2025 was surely the premiere of Sondheim’s final musical, Here We Are, at the National. At least, it was half a musical. The first half — based loosely on Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie showed ample evidence of Sondheim’s genius, his wit, his invention. The production was slick and matched the fluency of the score and book; the cast were wonderful, But then the second half — based loosely on Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel — was a libretto with no songs and a fairly lumpy adaptation at that. I’m not sure why they didn’t just find a way of filling out the first half and leave it there. Shucked (Regents Park Open Air Theatre) was enjoyable hokum with a great cast (good to see Steven Webb prized away from the Mormons) but forgettable. I was less delighted by Brigadoon at the same venue which had a clever rewrite but remained a little drab. Hercules has its moments, though they’re mostly those from the Disney film, and it felt a little like it was trying too hard. It’s not new but the Pirates of Penzance at the Coliseum was superb, a great revival that focused attention on just how brilliant the original is. The other contender for musical theatre event was probably Evita (Palladium), which gained a lot of (spurious and obviously planted) publicity for the moment where Rachel Zegler sings ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ from the theatre balcony to the crowd outside, the spectacle shown to the theatregoers on live video. Supposedly paying punters had complained, but I don’t believe they really did; it was the most interesting moment in an otherwise terrible production that staged the whole thing like it was the Taylor Swift Eras tour, rendered the plot pretty well incomprehensible, and sacrificed all characterisation and narrative to belting and endless, ultimately shapeless choreography. Rachel Zegler was, I grant you, excellent, but this was the triumph of hype. Probably the most exhilarating time I had in a musical this year was The Harder They Come at Stratford East.

Revivals

There were a lot of revivals, many of them excellent. From early in the year, I loved Men’s Business (Finborough) rendered in English by Simon Stephens from the play by Franz Xavier Kroetz and given a formidably committed production by Dublin’s Glass Mask Theatre. It was brutal, unflinching, and it never lost it grip on our throats. At the Nottingham Playhouse, Aisling Loftus gave us a similarly committed and daring performance of Girls & Boys by Dennis Kelly that damn near erased the memory of Carey Mulligan in the premiere. I’m shocked this hasn’t seemed to travel; it deserved a wide audience. I saw Mike Bartlett’s Cock (settle down at the back there) in a touring production at the Cockpit (Cock squared) and admired the play anew. There was an immersively site-responsive production (by a colleague and friend) of Caryl Churchill’s masterpiece Far Away at Ambika P3 that found sharp new resonances in this titanic play. I was grateful of the chance to see Michael Abbensetts’s Alterations at the Lyttelton, though it had already been opened out by the author for its New York premiere and here was opened out again with some unnecessary additional non-speaking appearances, I suppose to give some historical context to the play but distorting it in places; maybe the 1978 original would have been a better source? It was enjoyable to re-experience Three Sisters in the unlikely surroundings of the Sam Wanamaker but the play held up elegantly. I will always see a Terence Rattigan and there were three to enjoy this year. There was a staid coupling of half of Separate Tables with The Browning Version that I saw at Richmond Theatre; they were fine but I’ve seen better productions of both. The Bath Theatre Royal brought their Deep Blue Sea to the Haymarket, in Lindsay Posner’s fine production, led by Tamsin Greig’s ferociously good, intelligent, yearning performance as Hester. Running at the same time was the Orange Tree’s superb revival of In Praise of Love, which just hit every note right and was emotionally devastating. These were two productions that further cemented the status of these plays at twentieth-century classics. The Donmar’s revival of Priestley’s When We Are Married was an unexpected delight; a faultless cast and a beautifully-paced production yielded a play that felt surprisingly contemporary and was sensationally funny: a beautiful rediscovery.

Versions

But quite a lot of old plays were seen in the guise of strong rewrites by contemporary writers. Now, I have no objection to those in principle; every translation is a kind of rewrite. At their best, ‘versions’ are in thoughtful, challenging dialogue with an old play. But this year, it felt less about dialogue and more about writers being scared of the complexity of old plays and giving them impoverishing ‘updates’ that simplified and cheapened the original. We saw Ghosts at the Lyric Hammersmith, which threw out Ibsen’s crystalline structure, retaining only some aspects of the plot, replacing his dramaturgy with an implausible modern setting and some artless contemporary dialogue. Gary Owen was the man responsible: a fine playwright, so I don’t really know what he can have been thinking. Ibsen suffered quite a lot of that this year with a pointless updating of The Master Builder as My Master Builder in the West End, which added nothing of value, but lost quite a lot. And then there was Simon Stone’s The Lady From the Sea at the Bridge, which dragged the play into our century, seeming to miss that all the things the productions tried to bring out were already there in the original. (I felt the same about the National’s decision to do a ‘queer’ version of The Importance of Being Earnest; I’ve got news for you, we’ve already got a queer version of The Importance of Being Earnest — it’s called The Importance of Being Earnest). The Bacchae at the National was saddled with a horribly lumpy script. The Maids at the Donmar was an absolute fucking mess, one of the ugliest, stupidest, crassest productions of the year. (And when I came to work on the British Theatre Before & After Covid report, I was startled to find that my perception of the trend is borne out by the data: versions are gaining on revivals, which leads me to wonder whether Ibsen may disappear from our stages for a while, at least in anything resembling his actual plays. And then how will we do versions if no one knows the plays these versions are in dialogue with?)

In none of these productions do I believe the writers or directors understood or respected the originals. In many cases they struck through good dialogue and replaced it with bad, tin-eared dialogue (Kip Williams, I am looking at you) bagging these plays out of shape, making what was subtle into something obvious and banal. It was, all in all, a depressing year for anyone with a taste for subtlety. So it was with some relief that I can report one triumphantly good ‘version’ which was Tanika Gupta’s Hedda (Orange Tree), a sensitive, clever, respectful but radical transplant of Ibsen’s original to the postwar British film industry with Hedda an Indian actress who passes as white. This was a loving and meticulous rethinking of the play.

New Plays

This was another year of lacklustre new plays, though my perspective is not comprehensive because there were several plays that interested me so little that I didn’t go. There were several disappointments for me, including Robert Icke’s Manhunt (this appear to have been a year of directors assuming that writing a play is easy and falling flat on their faces), which was a boring mess. Mike Bartlett’s Juniper Blood had a superb production and a glorious cast (who should get all the acting prizes going) but the play seemed to get away from its author.I like James Graham’s writing very much but I found Punch a little earnest and lacked the playfulness that I like in Graham at his best. I saw Giant this year which was a fascinating piece of work for the first half: it genuinely seemed to electrify the air as the characters on stage wrestle with what you can and can’t say about Israel. But because it was tied to real events, when it ended with Roald Dahl making those grotesque antisemitic remarks to a reporter, it felt like the play had decided the answer to its question in a bit of tendentious sleight of hand (oh, it turns out criticising Israel is antisemitic). I was stirred by Nick Payne’s The Unbelievers (Royal Court) and thought Sophia Chetin-Leuner Porn Play (Royal Court) was wonderfully bracing and challenging, if maybe a bit overly schematic about its debates. A quiet piece of joy was the London transfer of Mark Ravenhill’s Ben & Imo for the RSC, an old-fashioned play in the best sense, rich with character, subtlety, made for wonderful actors to act wonderfully. It was entrancing and shows once again that Ravenhill sees no boundaries to his art. I was delighted with Bryony Kimmings’s return to the stage in Bog Witch, a wildly funny but fundamentally totally serious play about our connection to nature, our obligations to the planet and ourselves, and the difficulties of meeting those if we are lazy and selfish. The plays improved in the second half of the year for me: David Eldridge’s End (Dorfman) was captivating, deeply moving, truthful, and daring, in a quiet, unflashy way. Although it’s by no means perfect, Sam Grabiner — author of Boys on the Verge of Tears, my favourite new play of 2024 - wrote Christmas Day (Almeida), about a Jewish family meeting for lunch on Christmas Day in a disused industrial building and seeing all their faultiness springing into action. I don’t think Grabiner quite figured out how to end it, but, dear God, he writes wonderful characters and wonderful dialogue. All the live rails of our culture fizzed and crackled through the show.

But I think the play that most excited me this year was Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel Again, not perfect, but I wasn’t looking for perfect this year. In some ways, I worry that our theatre has got too cautious, tidy-minded, worried about offence. So it was a joy to see a mad, sprawling, messy, experimental, ill-disciplined play that seemed at the beginning to be predictable (what makes men violent?) but became something much broader, looser, funnier, entirely unpredictable. It had a curious and winning mixture of seriousness and satire, heaviness and froth. I never knew where it would go next, which made me sit up and work a bit. Eventually, in some ways, it seemed, for a feminist play, surprisingly admiring of men, seeing some weird aspects of contemporary masculinity as a yearning for something important we’ve all lost. And why that subtitle? Well part of me wonders if it’s a French joke (it would be Romains: Un Roman), but also it’s about novels and it has that grand scale that recalls Dickens and Anthony Powell and The Forstye Saga and the Rougon-Macquart. It was nuts but nothing thrilled me more in the theatre this year than that play.