Seldom, if ever, have I looked ahead to a year in theatre with a greater sense of foreboding. There are undoubtedly some exciting productions opening in London’s West End, but, with the economy and consumer confidence both faltering, I worry about how they will fare. I know of a number of shows that have opened in recent months to rapturous first-night audiences and rave reviews, and yet, even when the runs are relatively short, a lot of them have been struggling to fill auditoriums.
Nothing has been quite the same in theatre since the pandemic – investors are risk-averse and a lot of money has been lost – but this is the first time I have heard some of the most respected and admired theatre professionals talking in apocalyptic terms about the future of the industry.
Still, the West End is in no mood to give up without a fight. The show that I am most looking forward to is Brian Cox starring as James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night at Wyndham’s Theatre from March 19 – June 8. The story of a dysfunctional family and an ailing if tyrannical patriarch won’t be such a change of pace for Cox after playing the Rupert Murdoch-like character Logan Roy in Succession. Patricia Clarkson plays his wife, Mary, and Alex Lawther and Daryl McCormack his sons, Edmund and James Jr, respectively. Jeremy Herrin directs.
If it’s something a little lighter you are after then Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite at the Savoy Theatre from January 15 – March 31 sounds a lot of fun with Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker reprising their Broadway roles in John Benjamin Hickey’s revival, playing three different couples occupying the same New York hotel suite.
Darker humour is in store in the first-ever stage adaptation of the Stanley Kubrick film Dr Strangelove at the Noël Coward Theatre from October 8 – December 21. Steve Coogan stars, Armando Iannucci is the writer and Sean Foley directs. It is sure to go off with a bang.
The genius of Jez Butterworth has always escaped me, but there will undoubtedly be a buzz around his show The Hills of California when it opens at the Harold Pinter Theatre (January 27 – June 15), not least because Sam Mendes is directing. It is set in a Blackpool guest house in 1976 and sounds, I have to say, less than scintillating.
Many New European readers will doubtless have the long weekend of May 10 – 12 already entered in their calendars. That’s when Isabelle Huppert, the French screen great, appears at the Barbican as Mary, Queen of Scots in Mary Said What She Said.
Directed by another legend, the American Robert Wilson, and with a classical score by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi, it will mark Huppert’s first return to the London stage since 2016 and is performed in French with English subtitles. Let’s hope it proves less gruelling than Huppert’s Phaedra(s) eight years ago – a production even the Guardian found “close to insufferable.. a punitive piece of theatre”. Here’s to fewer of those in 2024.
