Remember when the omicron variant seemed poised to send us back into lockdown? Back in January, British theatres were still enduring frequent closures and long-term uncertainty. Twelve months later, the outlook is better, but the theatre year has still been unsettled and programming subjected to late rescheduling.
One casualty of instability in the theatre calendar has been the ability of critics to plan a completist schedule—and see “everything”. In my case, this is reflected in the fact that this list consists entirely of shows I saw in London; a serious flaw, I acknowledge, and one I hope never to repeat.
Here’s to a revival of theatre in 2023, as it continues to crawl out of the Covid-slump. The impact of the Arts Council cuts, however, following theatre’s worst economic crisis since the Second World War, will surely limit the possibilities.
Spring Awakening (Almeida Theatre)
Spring Awakening started life in 1891 as a nihilist coming-of-age drama by the German playwright Frank Wedekind. In 2007, I saw Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater debut their rock musical adaptation in New York; the American critics raved, but the Broadway razzmatazz and perma-smiles felt an odd fit to me with grunge anthems about abortion and teenage suicide. Fifteen years later, Rupert Goold’s production at the Almeida theatre (which technically opened late last December) reimagined Sheikh and Sater’s musical in line with Wedekind’s original darkness. Surely, this is was how it was always meant to be: gothy, angsty and delicious. It was a delight to give it the Best Musical gong at the Critic’s Circle Theatre Awards, which I hosted in April. Debut performer Stuart Thompson was a standout.
Wuthering Heights (National Theatre and regional tour)
This boisterous adaptation saw Emma Rice playing to all her strengths. This was a production that showed off the hallmarks of her company, Wise Children: childlike storytelling; a distinct sense of place; and earthy folk music underpinning a story told in both song and dance. Lucy McCormick is best known as a solo performer and cabaret artist—here, with Ash Hunter as Heathcliff, she showed she’s more than capable of leading a National Theatre ensemble.
Henry V (Donmar Warehouse)
Shortly before Max Webster’s production opened in March, Game of Thrones star Kit Harington gave an interview about his struggles with alcohol addiction. It was a revelatory insight into his Henry: no longer an adolescent simply growing into kingship, this was an angry addict struggling to go sober. Never has the execution of French prisoners been more clearly staged as a war crime, happening within a cycle of trauma. The coercion implicit in Henry’s marriage to the French princess Katherine was deftly handled, too, with a painful performance from Anoushka Lucas.
Dogs of Europe (Belarus Free Theatre at the Barbican Centre)
Long before the West woke up to the threat of Vladimir Putin, the Belarus Free Theatre were staging dissident art in Belarus, the puppet dictatorship controlled by Putin’s proxy Alexander Lukashenko. What makes them extraordinary, however, is the imaginative reach of their creative talents.
Dogs of Europe is the title of a novel by the banned Belarussian novelist Alhierd Bacharevi, which imagines literary resistance in a dystopic empire. Just artistically, this adaptation—staged by artists in exile whose less fortunate colleagues remain abused in Lukashenko’s prisons—is a major achievement in epic storytelling. But watching the company unveil a Ukrainian flag, the night when Lukashenko’s forces rallied to Putin’s invasion, was a reminder of the enduring power of hope and solidarity.
For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy (Royal Court Theatre)
Ryan Calais Cameron’s title echoes a 1976 series of monologues by Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Shange called her work a “choreopoem”, a dramatic monologue in which the performer’s dance is as expressive as her language. For Black Boys… is a male response in the same format, with six actors giving body and voice to subtle experiences of black masculinity.
Joyous and painful, For Black Boys… was a reminder that the troubled Royal Court Theatre still creates some of this country’s most important work. (In the same month, I also revelled in the venue’s staged reading of Simon Armitage’s earthy translation of The Owl and the Nightingale, with Meera Syal and Maxine Peake.) Kudos also to the smaller New Diorama company for developing this project.
The Father and the Assassin (National Theatre)
We’ve all heard of Mahatma Gandhi, but how many British people know the name Nathuram Godse? Anupama Chandrasekhar’s thoughtful play told the story of the man who killed Gandhi, a 39-year-old Hindu nationalist who had blamed him for supposed concessions to Muslims during the Partition of India. (Parallels to a more recent assassination, that of Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin, felt loud and clear.) Playing the antihero, Shubham Saraf gave us a brash, unreliable narrator whose internal division blurred with wild fantasy. Rajha Shakiry provided one of the most striking stage sets of the year, dominated by the unravelling threads of a massive textile backdrop.
Straight Line Crazy (Bridge Theatre)
David Hare hasn’t produced a nuanced piece of writing for years. Or so received wisdom went. Straight Line Crazy makes this list because it proved us all wrong. A good old-fashioned political biopic, Hare’s new play took us to mid-century New York State and the career of Robert Moses, the urban planner responsible for democratising access to the beaches of Long Island—at the cost of entrenching the East Coast’s dependence on the car. For a playwright of the left, it was a remarkably honest look at the dangers ignored by central planners when they are fixated on a greater good.
I’d have liked to see more development for the character of Jane Jacobs, the author and community activist who rose to oppose his slum clearances, though we were treated to a sparkling cameo from Danny Webb as State Governor Al Smith. But it was Ralph Fiennes’ leading performance that made Straight Line Crazy unmissable. Is there anything the man can’t do?
Eureka Day (Old Vic)
A small parental committee tries to micromanage a primary school using only consensus politics and the power of inclusivity. A Zoom meeting with the entire community descends into a riotous slanging match. Jonathan Spector’s 2019 play is a viciously on-point depiction of progressive parenting gone wrong, examining a schooling collective that struggles to cohere around an ideal of the common good when a case of mumps breaks out.
In the Old Vic’s new production, battle was pitched between anti-vaxxer Suzanne (Helen Hunt), mansplaining ultra-liberal Eli (Ben Schnetzer), and practically minded Carina (Susan Kelechi Watson), the only black woman and a lesbian, ruthlessly patronised by her fellow progressives. The play is all the more remarkable for having been written before Covid-19 pushed these issues to the fore.
Othello (National Theatre)
In November, Clint Dyer became the first black person to direct Othello at the National Theatre. He gave us a landmark interpretation, foregrounding race and mental illness. We watched Giles Terera’s Othello driven to madness not by Iago alone but by the sheer exhaustion of living in a society that daily undermines him as a black man. Paul Hilton’s Oswald Moseley-esque Iago delivered his soliloquys to a black-shirted crowd whose reactions he controlled like a puppet-master.
Exceptionally, we also met a believable, confident Desdemona in Rosy McEwen. McEwen’s intelligent reading of Shakespeare’s language exemplified the nuanced sense of text that radiated through Dyer’s cast.
As You Like It (@sohoplace)
A very late entry on this list, Josie Rourke’s As You Like It is the first original production to open at @sohoplace, the beautiful new Charing Cross theatre opened this year by theatre developer Nica Burns. Much of the pre-publicity focused on the casting of Rose Ayling-Ellis, the deaf actress and Strictly Come Dancing winner, but the ensemble also includes the never-missable Alfie Enoch as an insecure, immature Orlando and Martha Plimpton as a wistful, knowing Jaques, all too believable when reimagined as a middle-aged woman.
Ayling-Ellis, meanwhile, is a revelation as a stage actress. She isn’t the first actress to play Celia using British Sign Language: Nadia Nadarajah did so at the Globe in 2018 and signed throughout. But where Nadarajah’s constrained signing reminded us how often Celia’s speech is ignored in this play, Ayling-Ellis showed us a Celia full of impact and emotion, thanks to a combination of BSL, mime and rehearsal-developed signing techniques.
Rourke’s production is a superb testament to how far theatre has travelled in recent years to improve deaf inclusion. It’s the perfect way to celebrate the different ways in which language is understood and undermined in this Shakespeare comedy: as song, as poetry, as secret code. You can still catch it until 28th January.
