The Oliviers; and three separate mentions of James Graham
In This Edition:
Reviews of Punch, Kyoto and The Habits
More starry casts coming to the West End
Oliver Awards 2025
A big Substack recommendation- Exeunt for guest pieces on theatre, brilliant analysis and interviews:
Things I’ve Read this Week
Racheal Healy writing about the Soho Theatre and its importance for talent breaking out.
I loved Holly Williams writing about what makes a good Theatre Poster
Olivier Awards Roundup
Giant was the big winner - John Lithgow took home the best actor prize for his performance as Dahl, Elliot Levey won best supporting actor (for playing publisher Tom Maschler) and Mark Rosenblatt received the award for best new play.
Romola Garai achieved the unusual feat of beating herself to win the award for best actress in a supporting role. She had been nominated twice in that category, recognising her performances in Giant and The Years. The latter brought her victory. Based on Nobel prize-winner Annie Ernaux’s memoir, The Years (at the Almeida theatre originally and now in the West End) also received the best director prize, with Norwegian theatre-maker Eline Arbo becoming the sixth woman to win that award at the Oliviers.
To Book
All My Sons at The Wyndham’s Theatre
A new production from Ivo Van Hove (A View from the Bridge, A Little Life), who reunites with Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) after they did Network together at the National. Also in the cast are Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths, The Amen Corner) and Paapa Essiedu (I May Destroy You) who has just been announced as Snape in the HBO Harry Potter remake. This cast is obviously incredible and I am confident it’ll be great. It starts previews at Wyndham’s Theatre on November 14, and runs to February 7. Arthur Miller skewers the dishonest promise of the American Dream in this disturbingly prescient play.
Born With Teeth at The Wyndham’s Theatre
Daniel Evans directs Ncuti Gatwa as Christopher Marlowe and Edward Bluemel as William Shakespeare in a thrilling imagining of the relationship between two literary icons at odds with their time. Begins in Stratford before moving to London in August
Make It Happen at Edinburgh International Festival
Brian Cox stars in this biting satire on the Scottish banking ambition that shattered the global economy. At the helm is Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin, armed with an unshakeable belief in the wisdom of the ‘founder of modern capitalism’, Adam Smith. The once prudent RBS soars and then plummets, placing Scotland at the heart of the global financial crash of 2008. Written by everyone’s favourite ‘Wiki’ playwright, James Graham (Punch, Dear England, Best of Enemies).
Reflections
Kyoto at Soho Place
What sane playwright tackles the minutes of a UN 1995 climate conference? Yet Kyoto proves that sanity is overrated when theatrical dynamite is the result. Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, fresh from the necessary grit of The Jungle, have bypassed predictable piety and aimed straight for the jugular. Their masterstroke: ditching the earnest eco-warriors to unleash the devil himself – Don Pearlman, oil lobbyist extraordinaire, a creature of terrifying influence brilliantly summoned from the historical fog.
Stephen Kunken offers a finely judged performance as Pearlman. Introduced around the time of George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, this former Reagan administration lawyer finds his plans for an extended sabbatical with his wife, Shirley (Jenna Augen), interrupted by emissaries from the major oil conglomerates – the so-called ‘Seven Sisters’. Their warning of an impending environmentalist challenge to their industry initially meets Pearlman’s scepticism. Yet, his attendance at the soporific climate conferences of the late 1980s convinces him of the threat’s reality, and crucially, of his own capacity to counteract it.
The play lifts the lid off the squalid process of global agreement, revealing the grubby compromises beneath the polished rhetoric. If the style owes a debt to James Graham’s recently popular histories, it pays it back with interest, crackling with its own urgent energy. Does Pearlman occasionally seem less a man than a snarling embodiment of obstruction and oil greed? Perhaps. Is the final sentimental glance at his domestic life a bit of a clichéd misstep? Almost certainly – but it’s a rare failure of nerve in a play that otherwise stares unflinchingly at the mechanisms of power. Wordy but worth it if conferences are your thing.
The Habits at The Hampstead Theatre
Jack Bradfield’s The Habits grasps the nettle of fantasy make-believe, plunging us headfirst into a Dungeons & Dragons marathon in a Bromley backwater café – a crucible cunningly disguised as escapism. Adolescent Dungeon Master Jess (Ruby Stokes, who is magnificent) wields her dead brother’s cryptic notebook like a map, desperate to keep the game – and his ghost – alive indefinitely. She marshals a wizard and warrior princess against the Nightmare King. But the real world knocks, hard: café owner Dennis (Paul Thornley), scarred by his own gaming past, wants out, wants to sell up, egged on by his pragmatic police officer partner (Debra Baker). It’s a battle, then: Jess’s compulsive fantasy clinging to life versus Dennis’s urgent need to exorcise his own ghosts and flee.
Jack Bradfield’s often fiercely funny script grapples with this, alive to fantasy’s solace and its narcotic danger. The dice roll, the goblins gibber, but the true drama sparks between these exposed souls. Stokes is the raw, compelling centre – adolescent grief channelled into ferocious control. Ed Madden directs with whip-crack energy on a simple set, proving acting itself is the ultimate game.It’s rare that we feel starved of action after 90 minutes - just as we lean in, intrigued by nascent romances or sharp political barbs, the lights fade for the curtain call. We glimpse fascinating territories in the supporting characters, only to have the map snatched away. It’s funny, fiercely felt and asks biting questions about the shelters we build against sorrow. It leaves you buzzing, imagining not just other lives, but a longer, richer, braver version. A great piece of studio theatre.
Punch at The Young Vic
James Graham, who has already been mentioned three times in this newsletter, swaps Parliament for the punch-drunk provinces. Punch, moving soon to the Apollo in the West End, arrives in London freighted with the true, grim tale of Jacob Dunne. It depicts a world defined by youthful swagger and recreational violence, where a single, fatal blow shatters lives in Nottingham. David Shields lends Jacob an apt, angsty animation, driven by Adam Penton’s propulsive staging. But Graham, eschewing cheap sensation, steers towards the harder terrain of restorative justice – the devastating encounter between Dunne and his victim's parents. Here lies the play's noble intent - and its slight dramatic shortfall. While commendably empathetic, refusing to aggrandise its protagonist, the piece occasionally drifts towards the overly didactic. One might wish for less literal transcription of feeling - and how to feel - and instead a touch more theatrical invention. Yet, its power resides in charting genuine transformation that makes up the rarest of dramatic virtues. A serious, moving, if sometimes overly explicit, reckoning with violence and the difficult grace of forgiveness.
