Mert Dilek

There is a kettle on stage for much of Robert Icke’s The Doctor. It is one of the few props in this loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 play Professor Bernhardi, which was first staged at the Almeida Theatre in 2019 and now receives its delayed revival in the West End. And the kettle’s conspicuousness is not for nothing: like the water boiling in it, Icke’s medical ethics drama gradually increases in heat and reaches a point of scorching intensity, leaving no one unscathed.

Forget the butter-churner and the lasso. This Oklahoma! has no need of them. Following a Broadway run and a U.S. tour, Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein’s Tony-winning production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical comes to London’s Young Vic like a hipster cowboy riding into town. In their audacious interpretation, the heart and soul of this American classic offer themselves up in a new, disturbing guise. For what comes into view at the end of its three hours is a vision of American communality forged not only in camaraderie, but also in conflict and blood.

The Trojan War is the stuff of countless myths and later retellings. But probably none of them could make you get physically lost in the labyrinthine worlds of Hecuba's Troy and Agamemnon's Mycenae. For that, you would need to head to One Cartridge Place, where the renowned immersive theatre company Punchdrunk has opened the gates to The Burnt City, marking their long-awaited return to London after an eight-year hiatus.

It's better late than never for a neglected classic to receive a major production. American dramatist Alice Childress's 1955 play Trouble in Mind is one such work with controversial beginnings and belated revivals. If Childress had agreed to revise her play in 1955-57 to make it more palatable for a predominantly white audience, then hers would have been the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway.

At long last, the Young Vic has unveiled Cush Jumbo and Greg Hersov's hugely anticipated and much delayed collaboration on Hamlet. Jumbo, familiar to many from the US series The Good Fight, joins the ranks of female actors who have tackled the gargantuan role of the Danish Prince in Shakespeare's great tragedy. In Hersov's abstracted - and often unwieldy - Elsinore, she portrays with charming confidence an increasingly charismatic Hamlet whose masculine pronouns are retained, but whose gender identity is left richly ambiguous.

What sells better than sex? In Anna X, the answer is clear: exclusivity. Inspired by the true story of the socialite scammer Anna Sorokin, Joseph Charlton’s play marks the conclusion of Sonia Friedman’s Re:Emerge season at the Harold Pinter Theatre with a boy-meets-girl tale on steroids. In Daniel Raggett’s hip, snappy staging, Emma Corrin and Nabhaan Rizwan — breakout stars of the TV hits The Crown and Industry, respectively — weave a contemporary romance of false façades and murky motives.

We have been to space; now it’s party time. Following Amy Berryman’s Walden, Sonia Friedman Productions’ RE:EMERGE season continues at the Harold Pinter Theatre with Yasmin Joseph’s J’Ouvert. Set in the annual Notting Hill Carnival in 2017, Joseph’s spirited debut play was first produced in 2019 at Theatre503, in a staging that also marked the directorial debut of actor Rebekah Murrell. In the play’s West End outing, Murrell is once again at the helm, and the result is a joyous, plucky work that thrusts us into a communal tradition as experienced by three young women.

It all begins, of course, with a tweet. When the news of Kylie Jenner’s status as the “youngest self-made billionaire ever” starts to make the rounds on Twitter, 21-year-old Cleo, despite the warnings of her close friend Kara, launches an online rampage with the hashtag #kyliejennerfidead. As Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner announces in its title, Cleo has come up with seven ways to get rid of this “con artist-cum-provocateur,” which she will lay out for the world to see.

The National Theatre kicks off its post-lockdown season with a brainteaser: what is the most meaningful or precious moment of your life? The question is central to After Life, Jack Thorne’s stage adaptation of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s acclaimed 1998 film, co-produced by Headlong, which unfolds in a purgatorial facility over the course of a single week.

A seven-hour piece of marathon theatre may not be everyone's cup of tea. But the demanding length of The Seven Streams of the River Ota brings with it such a dazzling array of perks that it's nearly impossible to resist the challenge of sitting through it. First performed in 1996, Robert Lepage's epic mosaic about the variegated aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima has long attained the position of a masterwork in the acclaimed Canadian auteur's oeuvre. The revival at the National Theatre reminds us with force and verve why this remains the case.

If every marriage is a duel, then those of Bluebeard are full-on battles. The trailblazing German choreographer Pina Bausch's Bluebeard takes us into a mental war zone where the serrated edges of conjugal life cut deep. Radiating Bausch's singular vision and stunning theatricality, the 1977 piece receives its UK premiere at Sadler's Wells in a haunting revival by her company Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Having premiered at the Almeida in 2017 to critical acclaim, Mike Bartlett's play Albion returns home with a spellbinding revival directed by Rupert Goold. Rightly billed as a play for our times, Albion appears to have grown in its resonance as a deliciously layered commentary on Britain's thorny relationship to its identity and history.

Hot on the heels of Trevor Nunn's recent production at Jermyn Street Theatre, Samuel Beckett's plays continue to grace London in all their bleak splendour. Starring Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe, Richard Jones' captivating production at the Old Vic brings together Endgame and Rough for Theatre II in a provocative diptych about the perils and pleasures of retrospection.    

When even a single play by Samuel Beckett might become a test of endurance for an audience, putting three of them together risks missing the mark. But as Trevor Nunn's superb Beckett Triple Bill at Jermyn Street Theatre confirms, it's a risk worth taking, and the results might be astounding. This potent line-up of three Beckett one-acts about memory and old age allows each play to clarify and enrich the other two, giving rise to an evening that is gloriously bigger than the sum of its parts.

Rags the Musical was a flop when it first opened on Broadway in 1986. Which is why, one suspects, it kept on receiving a series of revisions over the subsequent decades. The most recent of these is now on display in Bronagh Lagan's assured production at the Park Theatre, first performed at Manchester's Hope Mill Theatre in March 2019. David Thompson's revised book, Stephen Schwartz' poignant lyrics, and Charles Strouse's eclectic music (with echoes of ragtime and jazz) join forces to present a fluent rags-to-riches story, but even this reimagined version remains far too formulaic in its portrayal of a group of Jewish immigrants in the 1910's New York.

For those on stage, an opening night can be the stuff of nightmares. In Curtains a?" the acclaimed duo John Kander and Fred Ebb's 2006 musical a?" the nightmare turns real when a lead actor gets murdered right after curtain call. So begins a comedic, entertaining whodunit that is chock-full of showbiz intrigue and backstage drama.

Mary Poppins has descended once again into our midst, and she is as amiably mischievous as ever. Based on the stories of P. L. Travers and the iconic 1964 Disney film, the Sherman Brothers' 2004 musical (with a book by Julian Fellowes) is back in the West End with several new songs, a buzzing cast, and pitch-perfect choreography.

Following his acclaimed performance in The Hunt this summer, Danny Kirrane has returned to the Almeida Theatre for Mike Bartlett's adaptation of Maxim Gorky's Vassa, directed by Tinuke Craig. He spoke to BroadwayWorld about the play, his role, and the company's rehearsal process.

It's not been a long time since Clare Barron took both New York and London by storm with her 2018 play Dance Nation, whose portrayal of a group of teenage competitive dancers had gloriously ruptured into feminist fireworks. Her next work to appear on a London stage is not a new play, but an earlier piece titled Dirty Crusty. Directed by Jay Miller, this hyped-up production at The Yard thrusts itself upon the audience with a near-reckless openness, but consistently proves devoid of anything that could transform its daring, even subversive, spirit into meaningful substance.

How would one go about stealing a work of art from a gallery? Written and directed by Jack Bradfield, the Poltergeist Theatre's new play Art Heist a?" now in London after a sold-out run at Edinburgh Fringe a?" begins by contemplating this very question. And the answers seem obvious and ready to hand, at least for an unnamed authorial figure (played by Alice Boyd) intent on controlling the narratives of three art thieves who break into the same gallery at the same time.