(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 1/2/26; Photo:  Ruthlessness … David Suchet as the rogue financier Gregor Antonescu and Helen Grace as his wife, Countess Florence, in Man and Boy at the Tricycle (now Kiln theatre), London, in 2005. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian)

Rattigan hoped his 1954 tale about a swindler who exploits his son’s sexual allure would prove him a serious dramatist. Its scandalous story reveals much about the playwright and resonates freshly

I hear on the grapevine that plans to name a London West End theatre after Terence Rattigan have temporarily stalled. An even better way to honour Rattigan is to revive his plays and the latest such revival is the rarely seen Man and Boy, which opens at the National’s Dorfman theatre at the end of this month. The play had brief runs on Broadway and in London in 1963 with Charles Boyer in the lead and another outing in 2005 with David Suchet giving a mesmerising performance as “the man” of the title, a beleaguered Romanian financier, but to all intents and purposes this is an unknown Rattigan.

I would suggest that it reveals a surprising amount about its author. The first thing to hit one is how much the play’s success or failure mattered to Rattigan himself. It was sparked by a book about the swindling Swedish financier Ivar Kreuger, whose business empire collapsed at the height of the Great Depression. Setting the action in 1934, Rattigan shows his hero, Gregor Antonescu, hiding out in his estranged son’s Greenwich Village apartment to which he lures the chair of American Electric in the hope of securing a life-saving merger. What is shocking is the ruthlessness with which Gregor exploits his son’s sexual charms.

Equally astonishing is the normally diplomatic Rattigan’s belief that the play should be performed on his own terms or not at all. To him Gregor is “as evil as Iago” and when the play’s intended star, Rex Harrison, and director, Glen Byam Shaw, sought to soften the text and Laurence Olivier rejected the play for his opening Chichester season, Rattigan dug his heels in. The play mattered hugely to Rattigan because, with his theatrical reputation at its lowest ebbb thanks to the rise of a new Royal Court generation, he felt it was his last chance to prove he was a serious dramatist.

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(Mark Lawson’s article appeared in the Guardian 10/22/25; Photo: Sinister sisters … Irene Macdougall, Eilidh Fisher and Alison Peebles. Photograph: Helen Murra)

The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon
Daniel Raggett’s audacious RSC production sets the play in a Glaswegian pub full of thugs and has a Landlady Macbeth running the show

Audiences arriving to find the RSC’s studio stage fitted out with bar stools may worry they have accidentally booked for Conor McPherson’s The Weir or Roddy Doyle’s Two Pints, plays set in Irish pubs.

This one, though, is Scottish and run by Macbeth, a Glaswegian gangster, and his wife who might be called, in this reading, Landlady Macbeth. The hostelry is unnamed, though we might guess the King’s Head as the action of Shakespeare’s tragedy is largely unchanged by relocation. Duncan, a camel-coated drug kingpin with a cheek scar like chain mail, stays in one of the rooms available but wouldn’t post a good review on TripAdvisor.

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(Anya Ryan’s article appeared in the Guardian 10/5/25; Photo: Roaring from a place of isolation … Lizzy Watts in (the) Woman at Park theatre, London. Photograph: Charlie Flint.)

Park theatre, London
A writer tries capturing the messiness of new parenting in Jane Upton’s gut-punching play – every scene of which chips away at the myth that motherhood should come naturally

Want a crash course in the reality of motherhood? Head to Jane Upton’s panoramic and boundlessly imaginative, Bruntwood prize-shortlisted play. It zips through scenes from M’s life after the birth of her first child – an old school flame tells her he “expected more” from her; she bickers with her husband about not wanting sex anymore – but (the) Woman is much more than an ordered presentation of ideas. M (a gut-punching Lizzy Watts) is a writer, and what we’re watching is her attempt to create a play that captures motherhood with all its messy, unvarnished edges.

Angharad Jones’s production weaves M’s writing process into the action. The title of each scene is typed, deleted and rewritten across the back wall of the stage. There are glitches and line repetitions, as M’s artistic vision struggles into shape. In a boardroom scene, she meets two commissioners who agree she can write a play about motherhood – so long as it involves crime, a possessed baby and a few musical numbers.

It is metatheatre at its finest, with the play feeling as if it’s being written live. “Wait, am I in the play right now?” asks M’s friend, gazing out at the audience in recognition of the blurred line between performance and reality. Structurally, the play is an unpredictable explosion – just as motherhood is too.

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(Mark Lawson’s Review appeared in the Guardian, 9/14/25; Photo: The Guardian.)

Orange Tree theatre, London
Director Tom Littler finds the comedy in the Swedish tragedian’s play about how people use each other up in love and art

In an interview before his production of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, the director Michael Blakemore reported telling the cast to aim for “Strindberg with laughs”. The line suggests a gulf between the Swedish dark tragedian and English light comedian but the dramatists have a curious affinity.

August Strindberg’s Creditors (1889) and Coward’s Private Lives (1930) both start in hotels where a troubled couple is haunted by a former marriage. It’s unclear if the influence was conscious but, if so, would have been apposite. Strindberg identified his drama as a “tragicomedy”, the genre in which, as Blakemore recognised, Coward is increasingly seen to belong.

This revival by Tom Littler (an accomplished Coward and Strindberg director) finds both the gasps and guffaws in Creditors, through a darkly sardonic version (from a literal translation by Agnes Broomé) by Howard Brenton, himself a tragicomic playwright, whose superb Churchill in Moscow was recently directed by Littler at this cramped but dynamic Orange Tree theatre.

Adolf, a twitchy artist exhibiting signs of physical and mental illness, is working on a clay model of a naked woman in the hotel parlour when interrupted by Gustaf, a fellow guest who has become a rather coercive mentor, having, through a fierce critique, turned Adolf from painting to sculpture. Gustaf also encourages the other man to talk about his wife, Tekla, a novelist who wrote a book fictionalising her “idiot” ex-husband and has taken a holiday from the holiday after a row over her alleged flirtations. She will soon return and Gustaf coaches Adolf in what to do and say. We sense that, as smoothly and ruthlessly as the Marquise in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Gustaf is setting traps and, by the time Tekla comes in, suspect Gustaf’s identity and mission.

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(Mark Lawson’s article appeared in the Guardian 4/17. Either hiding or have hidden … Victoria Smurfit as Helena and Rhashan Stone as Anderson in Ghosts. Photograph: Helen Murray)

Lyric Hammersmith, London
Gary Owen’s update changes the names and themes from the original, but retains the toxic power as a stellar cast negotiate the myriad secrets and suspicions

When Henrik Ibsen published Ghosts in 1881 – plays then were often released as texts with no production scheduled – the content (sexual transgression, venereal disease, suicide) so shocked many booksellers that they banned it. The book was reviewed in newspapers but with such fury that no Norwegian theatre would stage it; Chicago hosted the world premiere the following year. The playwright was so shaken that he wrote a great drama about ostracism, An Enemy of the People.

Almost a century and a half later, and with anything going in most areas of life, it’s tough for a modern production to still deliver a Ghosts spooked by taboos. But Rachel O’Riordan’s staging of Gary Owen’s new version achieves it.

“Complete silence would, in our opinion, be the most fitting reception for this work,” said one late 19th-century media critique. Turning this into a compliment, the 2025 theatre was filled with intense attention, broken by loud gasps at plot twists and laughter for dark jokes implicit in the original but spoken louder here.

Owen and O’Riordan memorably relocated Euripides to modern Cardiff in Iphigenia in Splott and similarly update Ghosts. Helen Alving becomes Helena, still the guilt-haunted widow of a local hero, though honouring him not with an orphanage but a hospital funded by private equity. Her troubled artist son, Oswald, turns into Oz, an actor short on auditions. The Alving’s maid, Regina, and carpenter father, Jacob, retain their relationship and roles, though she goes by Reggie. In the most striking modernisation, Pastor Manders, the creepy priest, becomes an agnostic management consultant, Andersen, whose church is Zoom and his bible workplace guidelines.

The original contains (1881 plot-spoiler) a strand about assisted dying that is hotly topical now. Owen boldly jettisons that and the VD theme but still constructs a shocking plot around guilt, consent and, drawing audible shock, a plot line overlapping with season three of HBO’s The White Lotus. The play’s theme of terrible familial and social inheritance survives in jagged dialogue that gives “home” and “safe” dark new meanings.

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(Arifa Akbar’s article appeared in the Guardian, 10/16; From left: Jordan Scowen (Eteocles), Mark Strong (Oedipus), and Lesley Manville (Jocasta) in Oedipus. Photograph: Manuel Harlan. West End.) 

Wyndham’s theatre, London
Opening in a campaign room on election night, Robert Icke’s modern retelling is riveting from beginning to end, the formidable leads supported by a stellar ensemble cast

It begins with a birth certificate. A politician standing for election promises to prove his origins to the nation after his opponent has questioned them (a dig at Donald Trump in relation to Barack Obama’s heritage?). Even so, he questions the nativist idea that birth is crucial to belonging.

Of course, the ancient Greek drama on which Robert Icke’s play is based is all about origins and the tragedy of Oedipus’s cursed birth. Icke has modernised Sophocles’ story but kept the ancient names. The statesman, Oedipus, is intent on truth-telling and full disclosure but it is just this that leads to his downfall.

Icke, who directs too, has form with modernising Greek drama from his 2015 adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. This play has already been performed in Dutch in 2018 and at the Edinburgh international festival in 2019. However far-fetched (even preposterous) this ancient story seems, and however creaky Freud’s theory of unconscious desires, its transformation into a political thriller-cum-family tragedy is riveting from beginning to end.

The stage opens to a campaign room on election night, with the clean-cut, soon-to-be prime minister having a celebratory dinner with his family (it looks like a landslide victory). Mark Strong as the upstanding, self-righteous Oedipus opposite Lesley Manville as a breezy and dynamic Jocasta, first set us on the edge of our seats and then set the stage on fire. They have a stellar ensemble around them, from their upstart daughter, Antigone (Phia Saban), and Oedipus’s slippery brother-in-law, Creon (Michael Gould), to his boisterous sons (Jordan Scowen and James Wilbraham) and crotchety mother, Merope (June Watson, grand and tragic). But it really is Manville and Strong who make this production electric; rarely has a show had two such formidable leads who become stronger with every scene.

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(Arifa Akbar’s article appeared in the Guardian, 6/3; Photo: Teenage kicks … an audience member in Viola’s Room. 

Photograph: Julian Abrams.)

One Cartridge Place, London
Helena Bonham Carter narrates as a bare-footed audience explore exquisite rooms in this unsettling, grief-soaked journey into the night

The immersive adventure begins with a sleep. We are invited to lie down as the lights fade and the story begins, narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. Her voice pours into our ears through binaural headphones, sometimes velvety and playful, other times a scratching whisper.

She tells a tangled tale, written by Booker-nominated novelist Daisy Johnson and featuring the parallel lives of a modern-day teenager alongside a princess. A re-imagining of Barry Pain’s 1901 short story The Moon-Slave, it is steeped in Victorian gothic, featuring Dionysian femininity, but also a prince, a disappearance and a grief-soaked journey into the night.

There is unfinished business to the concept: the company’s first show in 2000 was an interpretation of Pain’s story, only seen by four people due to cost constraints. Two decades on, the story is squeezed into a winding series of unlit corridors through which we travel wearing our headsets, and in which the everyday intersects with the otherworldly, from the teenager’s sparkly, poster-clad bedroom to a castle’s gothic interior and glittering forests. Johnson’s parallel worlds hold shades of Narnia – we wander through children’s dens and wardrobes to find fantasy realms nestling within the quotidian.

Conceived by Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett who co-directs with Hector Harkness, it is a darkly alluring production which plays with well-worn tropes but spins them in unfamiliar ways. “It’s all a dream, surely?” says the narrator as the tale takes strange twists and it feels like a beautiful, enveloping one that hovers delicately between bedtime story, fairytale, children’s game and nightmare.

Where The Burnt City, the company’s inaugural show in their sprawling new south-east London home, left you stranded in its depths, this is its polar opposite. It is tightly story-lined with only one way to go: towards the lights winking a path ahead of us.

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