2025 in review: Theatre

The Assembled Parties

The Hampstead Theatre UK’s premiere of Richard Greenberg’s 2013 play delivered a piece of theatre that was as impressively constructed as it was acted. Set in a New York Jewish apartment on two Christmas Days as many decades apart, it casually conveyed the way in which time fractures families.

Rising like cream to the top of a production brimful of terrific performances was Tracy-Ann Oberman. Her coiffured and bejewelled Faye had the look and street smarts of a moll who would not have been out of place in a Jewish version of The Sopranos. Yet Faye’s repeating refrain that she has no interest in politics, always said after astutely skewering whichever Republican leader ran the country at the time, revealed a formidable intelligence.

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Stereophonic

Though saturated with some of the best new music heard on stage this year (and most other years too) David Adjmi’s play was just that – a play, not a musical. With a huge mixing stage dominating the stage, the setting was a Californian recording studio in 1976 where a rock band is recording their tricky second album.

Fleetwood Mac fans revelled in the music and recognised some of the band’s creative and personal frictions that formed Adjmi’s plot. Yet the score by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler’s was its own beautiful thing. And you came away from Daniel Aukin’s production understanding the process by which great albums are made.

Evita

After starring in Disney’s remake of Snow White and then crashing the film’s publicity campaign with pro-Palestinian comments about the Gaza war, which forced her Israeli co-star Gal Gadot into a dignified distancing, a reminder was needed about why Steven Spielberg cast Rachel Zegler in the role of Maria in his brilliant remake of West Side Story.

Cue Jamie Lloyd’s muscular production of the Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice classic. To use a lyric in the song Buenos Aires, Zegler and her astonishing voice were pure star quality.

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Ghosts

This was Henrik Ibsen, but not as we know him. Playwright Gary Owen’s version was set in 20th-century Norway, a place realised by Rachel O’Riordan’s production with an ice-cool minimalist chic.

The production replaced the oppression of reactionary Christian values with today’s “cancel culture”. Helena (Victoria Smurfit) must agree to remove her late husband’s name from the children’s hospital his money is funding because of his past sexual indiscretions.

This neat pivot cleverly reflected the 21st-century tyranny of virtue signalling. But all ghosts ultimately depend on Oswald, the returning son. Callum Scott Howells’ mercurial, self-ironising Oz was the best I’ve seen.

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The Fifth Step

David Ireland has become an expert at highly charged comedy in which the laughs are pitch-dark and the dramatic stakes are high. In this two-hander Jack Lowden’s working-class Luka is coiled and bitter about the raw deal life has dealt him. Salvation may lie in tackling his alcoholism.

To help him he has James, played by Martin Freeman, his “sponsor”.

Though James too is an alcoholic he has not touched a drop in years. He also represents everything that seems beyond Luka’s reach: marriage, a liberal middle-class world view and, most coveted of all, control of his life. Ireland subverts every expectation one might have about these archetypes. Lowden was pitch-perfect and you can never tire of the way Freeman seems to want to escape every conversation.

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The Seagull

Thomas Ostermeier’s production of Chekhov’s 1895 classic was everything event theatre should be. It had a self-ironising Cate Blanchett as the ceaselessly flamboyant actor star Irina. Her budding dramatist son Konstantin (Kody Smit-McPhee) had a hatred of conventional theatre that was so deep he subjected his family and friends to a production for which everyone had to wear VR headsets.

Ostermeier, who has a similar disdain for theatrical convention, allowed Duncan McMillan’s translation the freedom to set a 19th-century play in our world. Tom Burke’s lament about its state climaxed with mention of Zelensky as a beacon of hope and triggered spontaneous applause.

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The Last Laugh

Writer and director Paul Hendy deserved to see his play about British comedy greats transfer to the West End

The three-hander resurrected Tommy Cooper (Damian Williams), Eric Morecambe (Bob Golding) and Bob Monkouse (Simon Cartwright) and placed them all in the same dressing room where their dialogue bounced off each other like a pinball.

If, like me, you think Monkhouse does not quite deserve to be seen in the same light as the other two, well, Monkhouse agreed. However his presence in the play is well earned as he served as a sort of straight man to the comedy genius of Cooper and Morecambe.

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Revenge: After the Lavoyah

Nick Cassenbaum’s comic revenge fantasy about the kidnap of Jeremy Corbyn by a motley crew of Jews fed up with the rise of antisemitism, channels the spirit of Steven Berkoff.

East End gangster Malcolm ropes twins Lauren (Gemma Barnett) and Dan (Dylan Corbett-Bader) into his plan while their family is sitting shivah for their grandfather. The careening plot reminds us that Jews were not shy about tackling anti-Jewish hatred with a bit of direct action.The play was also a great cathartic antidote to the rising anxiety that goes with being Jewish.