National Theatre

‘Little fish, big fish/swimming in the water/come back here man/gimme my daughter’ hissed a demonic 25-year-old Polly Jean Harvey in her 1995 hit ‘Down By the Water’.  That was a long time ago. But where so many middle-aged pop stars’ forays into musical theatre feel like bored attempts to crack new markets, the cycle of 13 songs Harvey has written for the National Theatre’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’ slot seamlessly into her body of work.  The imagery of water and drowning that flows through Ian Rickson’s production of Ben Power’s adaptation of Dickens’s final finished novel feels of a piece with ‘Down by the Water’ and its iconic video. And where Harvey’s most successful album, ‘Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea’ concerns itself with the Atlantic and with modern, gleaming New York, ‘London Tide’ is almost its negative, steeped in the mud of the Thames and the grime of old London, which is referenced again and again in the lyrics. ‘This is a story of London, death and resurrection’ howl the cast in the opening ‘London Song’. ‘London, forgive me’ they keen in the closing ‘Homecoming’.  The show is billed as a play with songs: the tune count is a bit low for actual musical status, and there’s a conspicuous lack of razzle-dazzle. Anna Morrissey’s stylised movement peps up the numbers, but there’s nothing like actual dancing here. Musically, the keyboard-led songs feel like a hybrid of the Harvey’s eerie ‘White Chalk’ album and the most vocally

How do you adapt one of the all time great British TV series of the ‘80s for the ‘20s stage? ‘Very respectfully’ is the answer offered by James Graham’s version of Alan Bleasdale’s ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’. The prolific playwright was seen at the NT just last year with his supremely enjoyable Gareth Southgate drama ‘Dear England’, which was Graham writ large: the writer humorously but deftly synthesising vast amounts of data, facts and characters into one kinetic narrative.  ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ does not feel like a James Graham play. It feels an awful lot like Bleasdale’s landmark 1982 TV drama – even if the execution of the story is often relatively different, the same plot but chopped up, reformatted, at times made a splash more PC. Certainly it’s testimony to Graham’s skill at keeping multiple narrative balls in the air. Let’s assume you haven’t seen the TV show (you can stream it for free on iPlayer FYI). ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ concerns the titular group of male Liverpudlian labourers, who as the play begins have already lost their jobs laying tarmac (‘the blackstuff’) due to their ill-advised pursuit of an illicit side-project.  The ‘boys’ are now on the dole, unable to find legitimate work, though they are all proud men and desperate to get back to employment. Indeed, the show spawned a catchphrase to that effect – in the words of the clearly somewhat unhinged Yosser Hughes (played by the late Bernard Hill on TV and Barry Sloane here): ‘gissa job’. They hav

Even by Complicité’s lofty standards, 1999’s ‘Mnemonic’ is regarded as something truly exceptional. Devised by company founder Simon McBurney – and originally starring him –  it’s a wild ride show about humanity, memory and loss that starts as a jokey biochemistry lecture and ends up as something vast and transcendent involving an ancient body found in the ice and a woman searching for her vanished lover. You kind of jut have to see it, really, but if it lives up to the hype, it’ll change your life.  McBurney directs again, though it seems unlikely he’ll star this time: the only cast members confirmed so far are Richard Katz and Kostas Phillippoglou.  

The National Theatre’s River Stage returns to the South Bank for a month of outdoor live music, dance, performance, workshops and family fun. Weekend evenings will see a varied programme of entertainment take place in front of the theatre, with special take-over weekends from The Glory, Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, Rambert and the NT itself.  The takeover weekends will be…  July 5 - 8: The Glory, hosted by Jonny Woo and John Sizzle. They’ll be calling on all their top drag queens, kings alongside cabaret artists and DJs to help them pull-off a sparkling weekend of queer music.  July 12 - 14: Greenwich+Docklands International Festival will bring a cracking line-up of street theatre and circus performers.  July 19 - 21: Rambert. This London-based contemporary dance company’s teachers and artists are gracing the weekend with performances and tutorials.   July 26 - 28: National Theatre. The closing weekend looks set to be a family–friendly mish-mash of live music, theatre, dance and workshops with some tours of the iconic building being thrown in too.  See the National Theatre website for updates.

US playwright Katori Hall had her breakthrough in the UK when her play ‘The Mountaintop’ unexpectedly became a huge success, eventually beating Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’ to best play at the 2010 Oliviers. We’ve seen surprisingly little of her work since bar the smash musical ‘Tina: The Tina Turner Musical’ (which she wrote the book for), but here’s a major UK premiere as Hall makes her National Theatre debut with her 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner ‘The Hot Wing King’, which follows hero Cordell Crutchfield’s heroic attempt to reclaim the crown at Memphis, Tennessee’s hot wing festival. Roy Alexander Weise directs a cast that will be headed up by Kadiff Kirwan as Cordell.

John Steinbeck’s 1939 masterpiece about a desperate Oklahoma family forced to migrate to California to escape the ravages of the Dustbowl is one of the most famous books of the twentieth century. And Frank Galati’s award-winning 1990 adaptation is pretty much agreed upon as the definitive stage version. Throw in the great American actor Cherry Jones as the family matriarch Ma Joad and you have a very handsome summer blockbuster indeed for the NT, which will be directed by the reliable Carrie Cracknell. Further casting – including the central role of Tom Joad – is TBA.

The last major London production of Coriolanus was way back in 2013, when Tom Hiddleston took on the role at the intimate Donmar Warehouse. Eleven years on and here’s something a bit bigger in scale: screen star David Oyelowo makes his debut in the National Theatre’s huge Olivier to play the role of Shakespeare’s heroic Roman general turned embittered national foe after his distaste for the plebs becomes public knowledge. NT regular Lyndsey Turner will direct, her first shot at a Shakespeare play since her blockbuster Benedict Cumberbatch-starring Hamlet back in 2015.

Oscar Wilde’s drawing room comedy pretty much invented twentieth century British comedy, and as such it’s become something of a cliché. It’s not that ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is never staged – it was last seen in the West End in 2018 – so much as the major theatres tend not to touch it. The NT hasn’t tackled it since the early ’80s, but here, intriguingly it is, finally getting a splashy Christmas revival that’ll star newly-minted Timelord Ncuti Gatwa as lusty young idler Algenon, who alongside his BFF Jack (Hugh Skinner) must infiltrate the stately home of the formidable Lady Bracknell in order to go a-wooing.  It’s a great cast and Gatwa alone will ensure it sells out its relatively brief festive run. But is there anything new to be found in Wilde’s play? If there is, director Max Webster is the man to find it – with his extravagent visual style and innovative recent takes on Shakespeare (notably his binaural ‘Macbeth’ with fellow Doctor David Tennant) you can expect something more than period dress and wobbly country house sets.