Midlands
Andrew Cowie (West Midlands)
2024 was my first year reviewing for the British Theatre Guide so I saw a lot more shows in a much wider variety of venues than I did in 2023. My favourite venue is The Old Joint Stock, a proper room-above-a-pub performance space right in the middle of Birmingham run by a brilliant team who either attract, or are doing an excellent job getting out and finding, some terrific up-and-coming theatre companies, as well as putting on their own superb in-house musical productions.
The Birmingham Rep still struggles to programme shows in that huge, barn-like main house, but they are bringing a lot of excellent small-scale touring shows into their studio space, The Door. I find the Belgrade a difficult theatre to love, but fair play to them, they are doing some good stuff too.
Katherine & Pierre, TalkSmall, Old Joint Stock
It’s that expectation vs. reality thing. Who knew that a lip-synch, drag-inspired love story based on the songs of Katy Perry would be one of the best things I would see all year? It was smart and funny, dazzling in conception and flawless in execution. At the time I said TalkSmall were the real thing, and I stand by it.
No More Mr Nice Guy, Nouveau Riche, The Birmingham Rep
This was proper gig theatre and a proper play, written and performed by Cal-I Jonel. The music is integral to the story of a music teacher who takes one last shot at the professional music career he always dreamed of. But it’s more than that; it’s about masculinity, it’s about black identity, it’s about growing older and coming to terms with the fact that the life you have is not the life you promised yourself in your teens. Great music, great performer, great show.
The Boy At The Back Of The Class, Children’s Theatre Partnership and Rose Theatre, Wolverhampton Grand
Some of the best theatre-makers I know make work for a young audience, and this was very good indeed. It was a big show which easily filled the Grand with a sweet story about a frightened Syrian refugee making friends and finding a home in England. I seemed to be the only person in the audience who didn’t already know the story, so the audience’s collective “Hallo Ahmet” when he appeared on stage caught me off guard and utterly disarmed me. We might be raising a generation of young people who would rather watch TikTok videos than go out to the theatre, but as long as there are shows as good as this, then there will be an audience for them.
Othello, RSC
It’s a pretty reliable rule of thumb that anything in The Swan at Stratford will be worth seeing but you can safely skip the school syllabus fodder in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s main house. And what are you supposed to do with Othello anyway? Racism aside, it’s misogynistic—there are only three female characters in it, two of whom are murdered by their husbands and the other is a prostitute who is treated horribly by Cassio. I mean, WTF?
Tim Carroll’s production rose above all that and presented the play as what it is: an exquisitely beautiful piece of Renaissance art. As a representation of women and black identity, it’s rubbish, but so is the Sistine Chapel, and that’s still worth looking at. If this is a taste of things to come under the new artistic directors of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, I might have to reconsider my Swan=good / Main House=bad rule.
Sawdust Symphony, Michael Zandl, David Eisele, Kolja Huneck, Zoo (Edinburgh Fringe)
Circus has always been a thing at the Edinburgh Fringe, but it is normally confined to the big tents down on the Meadows. Sawdust Symphony was a small-scale circus piece performed by a cast of three with lots of woodworking tools on an intricately constructed platform with trapdoors everywhere. I had no idea what I was watching for most of it, but whatever it was, it was brilliant, and this is the show I always mentioned when anyone asked me for recommendations.
Sally Jack (Midlands)
A quick recap of the shows I’ve seen this year gives a roughly two-thirds split in favour of musicals, a slightly lower margin than last year. Of the non-musical productions, I particularly enjoyed the topical satire Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening!, a great transfer from TV to stage with many of the original cast in the production. It was good to see co-writer Andy Hamilton watching appreciatively in the audience, and who appeared happy to sign autographs as he enjoyed a drink in Curve’s café beforehand.
Originally Curve’s Christmas production of 2021, Nikolai Foster, Sadler’s Wells and Jonathan Church Theatre reassembled for a UK touring production of A Chorus Line during the summer. I think I got more out of the show second time around; the cast’s different stories seemed more crisply told. Similarly, with the UK tour of Hairspray—I must have seen this show about ten times but still got something new out of it, so all credit to directors Paul Kerryson and Brenda Edwards for adding further lift and bounce to this already great musical.
If there is a ‘please leave your pre-conceptions at home’ award, then I will happily and humbly award it to Curve’s Christmas production of My Fair Lady. I am no fan of the film or the story, so I feared the worst; however, the vocal performances, relationship dynamics, set, costumes and emotional gut punch in the final scenes totally won me over.
A big day out in London in August to see Cabaret was another theatrical high point for me, with Layton Williams as the shapeshifting Emcee, a role he was born to play (and he slayed).
My favourite show of the year, though, has to be the parody musical Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch. I described it in April as “bawdy, brash and quite frankly, bonkers” and I would love to see it again. It is brilliant too that Unfortunate’s creators (writers Robyn Grant and Daniel Foxx with music by Tim Gilvin) have been able to take their fringe hit on a UK tour.
I resolve to broaden my horizons in 2025 and explore venues a little further afield to my usual haunts, and am looking forward to seeing where that takes me.
Colin Davison (Midlands and South West)
2024 was a great year in this part of the country, with 14 new shows at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, and another 26 live shows reviewed locally.
The RSC programme was equally divided between its in-house writer and others, with an infectiously funny Twelfth Night the pick of the former. Three contemporary works made an impact, including David Edgar’s The New Real, a parable on the marginalised and ‘alternative truths’, and English by Sanaz Toossi about colonialism and cultural identity.
But best of the lot was Kyoto by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson about the 1997 COP3 conference, which friends found as serious, funny, uplifting, poignant and shocking as I did.
Excellent in-house productions elsewhere included The Weir by Here to There Productions and a splendid Stones in his Pockets by the Barn, Cirencester, now touring. That almost wins my vote in the category, just ahead of Twelve Angry Men from the company of the late Bill Kenwright, but of all touring shows, the one that hit me hardest was The Kite Runner by UK and Kilimanjaro Productions, familiar but still profoundly moving.
New opera DVDs were a mixed bunch in 2024, including many rarities from smaller houses. Of nearly 30 reviewed on British Theatre Guide, inevitably those from the main companies were the best, including Aida and The Marriage of Figaro from the Royal Opera House, and The Greek Passion by Martinu from Salzburg. But my top choice would be Rameau’s 1745 satire Platée from Paris about the water nymph who thinks herself irresistible. With its hilarious chorus of frogs, it’s one for amphibian lovers everywhere.
But the overall winner must be the magnificent Ring staged at Longborough. It was the first time I had attended the entire cycle, and while not a committed Wagnerian, unlike those who attended from all over the world, it was an overwhelming experience that anyone interested in opera should enjoy at least once in a lifetime.
Steve Orme (Midlands)
Choosing a top five in any year is usually not too onerous a task—but there have been so many excellent productions either produced in the East Midlands or visiting the area in 2024 that it is difficult to pick out the best.
Nottingham Playhouse has had an exceptional year, so selecting its top work has been particularly problematic. Despite that, leading the way was Nottinghamshire’s own James Graham’s play Punch, “possibly his most powerful, poignant piece yet”.
The play is based on the book Right from Wrong by Jacob Dunne, a true-life account of how as a teenager Jacob threw a single punch in an unprovoked attack on a Nottingham street. James Hodgkinson fell, hit his head and died.
The combination of Graham, who brings the story to life with “realism, tension, pathos and potency”, Nottingham Playhouse artistic director Adam Penford, whose direction is “masterful”, and a superb cast have earned the play a transfer to London’s Young Vic in March 2025.
Penford will look back on his year with fondness as he had another huge hit with Dear Evan Hansen, a slightly revamped version of the show which won several awards for best musical. Theatregoers around the UK will be able to experience the production, which will tour until June 2025.
Nottingham is clearly one of the best places to go for excellent theatre. The city’s Theatre Royal as usual staged a commendable Classic Thriller Season in 2024. The highlight for me was Ira Levin’s Veronica’s Room, a “gripping” presentation directed by Karen Henson of Tabs Productions which had “some astonishingly good performances” and was “one of the most powerful pieces of theatre I’ve seen in a long time”.
Over the border, Derby Theatre commissioned British-Armenian playwright Abi Zakarian to write a play about the Derbyshire Miners’ Holiday Camp in Skegness where miners and their families could take a week off by the sea. Welfare is the type of show that Derby Theatre does so well: an expansive piece with a cast of ten, a large community company and the Derwent Brass band providing appropriate music. It was directed by the theatre’s artistic director Sarah Brigham and totally deserved a standing ovation on press night.
Although it is not in the East Midlands, the New Vic at Newcastle-under-Lyme is a theatre I always look forward to visiting. Not only are the staff welcoming, you can usually see an engrossing production which makes a lasting impression on you.
Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves was one such show. Some people thought it would be impossible to stage as it calls for an actor to transform into a werewolf and back without CGI. But the New Vic rose to the challenge and came up with a “sensational” spectacle.
Artistic director Theresa Heskins called it “theatre meets circus meets spoken word”. Four international circus artists were “little short of incredible” as they contorted their lithe bodies around Chinese poles and silks. I sat on the edge of my seat, excited and sometimes dazzled by what I was seeing.
The new year promises more delights, such as Nottinghamshire actress Aisling Loftus in Dennis Kelly's Girls & Boys at Nottingham Playhouse, while Derby Theatre will be offering F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. They sound promising—but they will have to be exceptional if they are to be as good as the productions I saw in 2024.