Welcome to today’s edition of ShentonSTAGE Daily, in which I look back on the last seven days of theatre news and reviews (including my own).

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 17

Three shows in, Nica Burns’s wonderful new performance space @sohoplace — the West End’s first substantial new build theatre (over 500 seats) in more than half a century — has finally found its groove with an austere but impressive MEDEA, starring a blistering Sophie Okonedo in the title role, with Ben Daniels doing triple duty as all the male leads.

It is as good as anything you’d find at the Donmar or Almeida, two of London’s best producing houses that specialise in the classics as well as new writing that it might plausibly now challenge with its own programming (and both of which coincidentally have their own first nights on Monday and Wednesday respectively; see Monday below for my commentary on the Donmar show).

It also has the advantage of more than double the seating capacity of either, so it is potentially less of an exclusive ‘club’; though it is also significantly pricier on the ticketing front, so perhaps not.

Medea is also the second from Dominic Cooke’s new company Fictionhouse that he recently founded as a producer to promote his own work, like Michael Grandage, Jeremy Herrin, Jonathan Church and Jamie Lloyd also, now have.

I went directly from the first night of Medea to a late night show at Soho Theatre, across Soho Square, to finally catch last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe sensation Jordan Gray, whose show Is It a Bird? was the first solo transgender act to be shortlisted for the Edinburgh Comedy Awards.

This frank and fearless show — which ends with the performer totally in the buff — entirely disarms you with its charm and easy embrace of alternative ways of being herself. It’s the sort of provocation that could soon get her arrested in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, with legislation that seeks to make trans people completely invisible; but actually she’s just trying to get on with her life — and showing us what it looks like, in every sense, but mostly through comedy.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 18

Sam Mendes’s extraordinary National Theatre production of THE LEHMAN TRILOGY has previously played a West End season, pre-pandemic, at the PIccadilly Theatre in 2019, after returning from its New York premiere at the Park Avenue Armory, with its original cast of Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles.

It was then due to transfer back to Broadway in the spring of 2020, but the pandemic interrupted those plans; it finally managed to get there after Broadway reopened in the fall of 2021, but Ben Miles — by then leading the company of his own adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT for the RSC — was replaced by Adrian Lester.

Now it has returned, in turn, back to the West End, with a stunning all-new trio of actors — Michael Balogun, Hadley Fraser and Nigel Lindsay — bringing it to riveting life again.

It was thrilling to sit in a packed Gillian Lynne Theatre at today’s matinee watching it cast its spell over a West End audience, who gave it their full and undivided attention.

The National have also announced plans to bring last year’s revival of THE CRUCIBLE to the West End — see Shows Ahead below.

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 19

I wrote here before of the case of the German choreographer Marco Goecke who was recently so incensed by a review he’d received for one of his ballets that he smeared dog faeces from his aging dachshund over the face of dance critic Wiebke Hüster. He has since departed from his post as dance director of the Hannover State Ballet “by mutual agreement.”

In a story in the New York Times earlier this week, it was reported that he’d commented he’s “had so much applause” during his career, but “If it’s over, it’s over.”

For the critic who was affected, said the New York Times, “that moment has come. ‘I will never attend any Goecke show again,’ she said in an email. ‘He is not that relevant.”

And that is exactly how to deal with it: no longer give his work any attention whatsoever. I’ve done exactly the same thing with those that have sought to block me on social media or have been openly hostile towards me. I’m done!

And it’s a relief, I’m sure, for both of us: they don’t want me to be there, and I don’t want to go. It’s a win-win. (And where a performer that has sought to diminish or cancel me appears in a show that I do see, I simply do not mention them in anything I write)

MONDAY FEBRUARY 20

Tonight I attended the first night of Diana Nneka Atuona’s TROUBLE IN BUTOWN at the Donmar Warehouse.

My review for PLAYS INTERNATIONAL is here: https://playsinternational.org.uk/trouble-in-butetown-donmar-warehouse/

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 21

The last show I saw before the first big theatre lockdown of 2020 was THE LAST 5 YEARS at Southwark Playhouse on Monday March 16, 2020.  The West End had already closed its doors earlier that evening, after Boris Johnson’s statement in the Commons telling people to avoid ““non-essential” contact, including trips to pubs and clubs, and an end to all mass gatherings. Southwark gave one last performance that night before closing after it.

The first show back after the first lockdown was also THE LAST 5 YEARS before that run, too, was curtailed by the arrival of another lockdown.

A couple of weeks short of exactly three years later, it’s good to be back in Southwark with Oli Higginson, one of the two co-stars of that Jason Robert Brown musical, in another two-hander, also from New York, but this time a play, not a musical: Kim Davies’s SMOKE, appearing with Meaghan Martin.

Thank God they are a couple offstage as well as on: performing it would be intrusive if not. As it is, it’s still uncomfortable to watch. But they are both so good, you can’t take your eyes off them, either.

During the lockdown, the National migrated a planned production of Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET into a film version; now, they are premiering Gary Owen’s new play inspired by Shakespeare’s play, ROMEO AND JULIE, that opened tonight at the Dorfman starring Callum Scott Howells and Rosie Sheehy (pictured above) in the title roles. My full review for PLAYS INTERNATIONAL is here: https://playsinternational.org.uk/romeo-and-julie-national-theatre-dorfman/

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 22

Hampstead Theatre’s executive producer Greg Ripley-Duggan told The Stage today that the theatre has to pivot to producing “like they do in the West End” with a bigger onus on star names, following the loss of the entirety of their ACE funding.  

As playwright David Eldridge has said in a thread on Twitter, “much here is depressing and worrying.”

As long-established theatre photographer Bob Workman (who has direct experience of working at the theatre) asked in response,

“I have wondered for years if Ripley-Duggan is the problem behind Hampstead? An independent producer, in post unchallenged through 2 or 3 artistic directors. I worked there freelance. Strange decisions going on.”

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 23

In a wonderful defence of opera, the Guardian’s chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins earlier this week wrote of recently travelling on the Paris Metro, and seeing the names of British composers George Benjamin and Philip Venables on posters for new productions at the Aix-en-Provence opera festival. “Both premieres are actually co-productions, with the Royal Opera House and Manchester international festival respectively, so they will wend their way to the UK in due course. But it is hard to imagine they’ll get quite as much fanfare on British mass transportation systems.”

As she goes on to remark, “I am used to the massive disparity in standing of opera, in particular, and classical music, in general, between the UK and our neighbours. But the sight of Venables’ and Benjamin’s names pasted to the walls of the Paris Métro, just at a time when England seems to be doing its best to dismantle what little it comparatively has of operatic infrastructure, struck me peculiarly painfully.”

Not least because it is something we do so very well. Charlotte went last weekend to the opening of ENO’s new production of THE RHINEGOLD (pictured above) at the London Coliseum, which she calls “devastatingly brilliant” and “so powerful it left me speechless and in tears”.

I caught up with it tonight — and even if its 2 hours 40 minutes running time, with no interval, was a challenge to my 60-year-old bladder, I too was held spellbound.

ENO is truly one of our most precious theatrical resources — and the cultural vandalism that saw Arts Council recently attempt to de-fund it to fulfill the previous culture secretary Nadine Dorries’s desire to send more of the little money the Arts Council has to places beyond London is, once again, shown to be stunningly ill thought out.

As HIggins also writes, “Of course, if you starve something, run it down constantly, gradually reduce the provision of it so that few can afford it, it becomes “elitist”: it’s a closed loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if opera in the form that its creators imagine it becomes for toffs, that is nothing to do with opera itself. It is absolutely extrinsic to the art form, and precisely the result of neglect, and underfunding, and starving of resources, and shame, and embarrassment, and lack of care.

Which is what we’ve been drifting towards in Britain for years – and is how you end up with the names of great British operatic creators, while we still have them, plastered proudly over the Paris Métro, but barely recognised here.'”

SHOWS AHEAD IN LONDON, SELECTED REGIONAL THEATRES AND ON BROADWAY

My regularly updated feature on shows in London, selected regional theatres and on Broadway is here: https://shentonstage.com/theatre-openings-from-w-c-february-20/

New entries added this week include:

• BROADWAY: GREY HOUSE — the first new Broadway production of the 2023-24 season is Levi Holloway’s thriller with a cast led by Laurie Metcalf, Tatiana Maslany and Paul Sparks, running from April 29 prior to an official opening May 30 at the Lyceum Theatre.
• LONDON: DEAR ENGLAND — the now seemingly ubiquitous James Graham returns to the NT, where his play THIS HOUSE premiered a decade ago, with a new play starring Joseph Fiennes as English football manager Gareth Southgate, directed by Rupert Goold, from June 10, press night June 20.
• LONDON: THE CRUCIBLE — Lyndsey Turner’s revival of Arthur Miller’s play, first seen at the National last year, returns for a West End season at the Gielgud, from June 7, press night June 15 — the same theatre where an RSC revival with Iain Glen transferred to back in 2006.
• REGIONAL: THE EMPRESS — The RSC’s summer season at Stratford-upon-Avon includes a new play by Tanika Gupta, prior to a season at the Lyric Hammersmith in October, that runs from July 7 in the Swan, prior to a press night on July 18.

• LONDON: SONDHEIM’S OLD FRIENDS — Cameron Mackintosh’s celebration of Sondheim that he presented last year as a one-night gala returns for a theatre run from September 16 at the Gielgud Theatre, with a cast headlined by Sondheim Broadway veteran Bernadette Peters (in her West End debut) and Lea Salonga.

See you here on Monday

I will be back on Monday. If you can’t wait that long, I may also be found on Twitter (for the moment) here: https://twitter.com/ShentonStage/ (though not as regularly on weekends)