2023 was the year British theatre decided to entertain us. The year’s biggest hits were upbeat musicals, with feel-good tunes and choreography that made us want to dance all the way home.
There were tears behind the laughter. Most of the venues that programmed classic musicals, notably the Bridge Theatre’s long-running Guys and Dolls, did so in the desperate hunt for a sure-fire banker to stave off Covid-related bankruptcy. The impact of the pandemic still stalks the much-reduced theatre sector.
Elsewhere, too, many subsidised theatres seemed to be speaking a different language from the rest of the country—with programming built on unchallenged assumptions about the frameworks through which we should approach race, disability and sexuality. But the best productions to tackle these issues—such as A Strange Loop or Death of England: Closing Time—reminded us of theatre’s capacity for radical empathy, and placed that empathy at the heart of persuasive new models for inclusive storytelling.
Here are 10 theatre moments that tell the story of 2023:
Guys and Dolls, Bridge Theatre, opened March 2023
The show of the year. However much you may have loved previous versions of Frank Loesser’s 1950 musical, you’ll find more to love in this promenade production, which turned the pit of the Bridge Theatre into a bustling New York neighbourhood, new things happening whichever direction you look. As one colleague said to me, “at every beat of the music or twist of the lyrics, [director Nicholas] Hytner has thought: ‘how can I make this even more entertaining?’” Marisha Wallace has been justly lauded for her knock-out performance as cabaret singer Miss Adelaide; Wallace is a star who keeps shining brighter in each role. Of the two performers I saw in the other female lead role, it was understudy Charlotte Scott who most consistently captured missionary Sarah Brown’s combination of idealism and drive.
But, as Hytner told the Telegraph recently, the decision to book out the venue’s space with the same musical until August 2024 is heavily influenced by the need to repay the Bridge Theatre’s loan from the Culture Recovery Fund. The show’s success is our delight, but it seems a shame to have to wait this long to see what Hytner will do next at the Bridge.
Drive Your Plough Over The Bones of the Dead, Barbican Theatre, national and international tour, December 2022–November 2023
For 40 years, Complicité have been the theatre company we look to for excellence in non-naturalistic storytelling. Here, in 2023, they have lost none of their lustre, nor their radical hunger for new technologies and new modes of engaging audiences. This adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s cult Polish novel opened in Plymouth in December 2022, but spent most of 2023 touring the country and thus surely merits inclusion in this list.
It’s a timely story of ecocide and nature’s revenge, driven by the folklore and absurdist humour of Eastern Europe. Despite the illness of lead actress and co-creator Kathryn Hunter at the London press night in March, her trademark fluency in the vocabulary of mime was all over the show, both in the performances she returned to and those led by impressive understudy Amanda Hadingue.
All of It, Royal Court Theatre, London, June 2023
Three brief interconnected monologues written for the actress Kate O’Flynn by the playwright Alistair McDowall. The brevity of the run meant that these poetic explorations of womanhood didn’t get the attention they deserved, but McDowall revealed an uncanny ability to capture female isolation and emotional labour. O’Flynn’s immersion of herself into the poetry of his bleak vision will linger in my mind for many years to come.
A Strange Loop, Barbican Theatre, June–September 2023
You either loved or hated it. I loved it: Michael R Jackson’s irreverent and self-questioning musical about black and gay life in New York. Kyle Birch played Usher—who works, yes, as a theatre usher—an aspiring playwright who wants to wean his parents off Tyler Perry’s religious-themed movies and can’t see a black, gay stereotype without interrogating it. The title refers to Douglas Hofstadter’s concept of cyclical hierarchies within human consciousness and captures the show’s circular nature—I was reminded of James Joyce’s Ulysses. There is no assertion of identity in this inner monologue that does not wittily, gloriously, undercut itself.
Crazy For You, Gillian Lynne Theatre, opened June 2023
As I wrote at the time: “A salty critic might call Crazy For You the original jukebox musical. That would be to undersell the originality of this 1992 homage to George Gershwin, though it’s true that part of the delight is waiting for vivacious leads Charlie Stemp and Carly Anderson to break into familiar hits like ‘I Got Rhythm’ and ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’.” Instead, this show was first developed by Ken Ludwig as an update of Gershwin’s 1930 musical Girl Crazy, authorised by the Gershwin estate. The result is pure joy. This production was first seen last year at the Chichester Festival Theatre—and transferred to London in triumph.
After the Act, Traverse Theatre, August 2023
Breach Theatre’s verbatim musical about Section 28 drew on newspaper reports, interviews with activists, and debates in the House of Commons to find its lyrics and dialogue. It also sums up this year’s Edinburgh Festival: political, scrappy and a little disheartened. Like much of the hottest theatre around, it was originally developed by theatre-of-the-year New Diorama, whose leadership team has just departed to run the Royal Court theatre.
Elsewhere at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, as I told Prospect readers in our newsletter in August, the venue of the year was Summerhall. Amongst that arts centre’s best offerings were Gunther, which explored Jacobean witch trials, Woodhill, an expression in dance of scandalous horrors at the suicide-riven Woodhill prison in Milton Keynes, and Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz, a paean to young black life in Birmingham, which also transferred to London’s Royal Court in November.
Vanya, Duke of York’s Theatre, September–October 2023
Andrew Scott gave the performance of the year—rivalled only perhaps by David Tennant in Macbeth, below—in this one-man version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In Scott’s hands, Chekhov’s play about the inhabitants of a Russian rural estate became a dramatic monologue. Scott’s natural talent for shapeshifting gave us sharp distinctions between nine different characters, but he was helped by the ease with which long-term collaborator, playwright Simon Stephens, constructed a range of distinctive vocal rhythms for each member of this melancholic household. We watch them, watching each other. The real surprise, however, was Stephens’s transposition of Chekhov’s gloomy 1897 meditation on thwarted dreams to the desire-frustrated world of the present day. Director Sam Yates and designer Rosanna Vize were also credited as co-creators.
Death of England, National Theatre, September–November 2023
Clint Dyer and Roy Williams created the Death of England cycle of plays to tell the story of two working class families: one white, one black, both obsessed with Leyton Orient football club. The sequence has produced some of the best work seen at the National in a decade, but has been cursed by Covid lockdown cycles and other health emergencies. Closing Time finally introduced us to the women in this saga, played with vim and spittle by Hayley Squires and Jo Martin—only for Martin to be replaced during the run by the equally talented Sharon Duncan-Brewster. With either actress, still the most empathetic meditation on race in Britain on stage this year.
Cold War, Almeida Theatre & Rock ’n’ Roll, Hampstead Theatre, opened December 2023
Two shows that opened on the same night this December and together constitute a single significant event. At a time when the arts world seems ever more in thrall to abstract ideologies, two major theatres are nonetheless staging plays that examine the human harm they cause. Cold War is a brilliant new musical with songs by Elvis Costello; Rock ’n’ Roll a revival of Tom Stoppard’s last great play, which tackled the aftermath of the 1968 Prague Spring.
Cold War is perhaps the more complete production, an adaptation of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 film about two musicians employed by the Soviet state to recast Polish folk music as collectivist propaganda. It also features recent Olivier-award winner Elliot Levey, one of Britain’s best stage performers. But Rock ’n’ Roll, too, sparkles, not least thanks to Nathaniel Parker as a British academic stubbornly supporting the Soviets from the safety of Cambridge. Two shows that make a perfect pairing.
Macbeth, Donmar Warehouse, opened December 2023
David Tennant must be the greatest Shakespearian actor of his generation. His Hamlet was that rare thing: one quick enough in wit to think at the speed at which Shakespeare’s language for the character actually moves. He’s been Romeo, Benedict, and now is the darkest of Macbeths, breaking the necks of children with a shrug. No need for Cush Jumbo’s confident, feminine Lady Macbeth to corrupt him—although when she mesmerises him into shaking off his fear, we understand both the sexuality of their marriage and the depth of her disappointments (children, and the loss of them, haunt this play). Dressed in clarion white, she has an intensity of purpose and a strategic political goal; Tennant’s more cynical Macbeth, all clad in black, soon sinks into murderous nihilism.
The USP of this staging is sound-designer Gareth Fry’s use of binaural headsets, worn by each audience member, so that the sounds of characters whispering and scheming are layered up on each other. It conjures intimacy and an eerie sense of surveillance, complementing director Max Webster’s use of a glass box to show us ghosts or silently screaming spectators. (Webster has the resources to stage every supernatural suggestion in the text, but judiciously pulls back from showing us too much; Banquo’s ghost is empty air, no more than Macbeth’s fever dream.) But this would still be exceptional theatre with just Tennant and Jumbo on a bare stage. It’s still on—get hold of tickets if you can.
Three shows also worthy of note this year:
April. Josie Rourke’s production of Dancing at Lughnasa brought an ensemble of Ireland’s greatest actors to London’s National Theatre.
May. Seven years on from a very public breakdown during her run in Funny Girl, Sheridan Smith proved she can still carry a West End show in a hit production of Shirley Valentine.
September. James Graham’s adaptation of Boys from the Blackstuff played at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre, allowing the city to look back on its past.
3rd January 2024: The original version of this article contained a typo—“Cumbo”—in reference to the actor Cush Jumbo. This has since been corrected to “Jumbo”.
