What are the most important shows from the last 20 years of British theatre?
A big old group discussion
To celebrate 20 years of Latitude – a festival which has always included theatre, dance, comedy and literature alongside live music – Exeunt has been asked to consider the question of the best British theatre over the last two decades. What were the game-changing productions, the most exciting new writers, the leaps forward in form or technology that lit up that era...? Five of our critics – Tim Bano, Andrzej Lukowski, Alice Saville, Natasha Tripney and Holly Williams – have gathered to hash it out…
And then it’s up to you, dear reader, to vote for your favourite! (And to tell us what we missed.) The winner will be announced during the Latitude festival weekend, 23 to 26 July. This piece is a paid partnership, and so free for everyone to read; many thanks to Latitude for supporting Exeunt by inviting us to be the theatre partner in their 20th anniversary celebrations. Happy birthday!
Holly Williams: Twenty years of theatre is not exactly a small topic – so I’m glad you’re all here to help me sift through our collective theatre-going memories. I expect we’ll move into discussing major trends or the impact of certain particularly influential writers, directors, companies and buildings organically – but I thought maybe we could kick off by each suggesting a few shows that still blaze in our memories?
For me, my brain leaps to work that I remember having an almost physical impact on me – leaving the theatre fizzing, awe-struck, maybe a little shaky. I vividly remember having that with Complicité’s The Encounter in Edinburgh in 2015: I’m a sucker for a big, cosmic show, grappling with the myth and mystery of existence, as this did in its tale of a photographer who lived with a tribe deep in the Amazon jungle. But it also had pioneering use of binaural sound, and was a great example of cutting-edge tech being used in service of that most ancient of forms: storytelling. And I’m gonna sneak in a few honourable mentions I remember having that kind of stunned bodily reaction to: Kae Tempest’s Brand New Ancients (Battersea Arts Centre, 2012), Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott performed by Sophie Melville (Sherman Theatre, 2015), Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things with a staggering central performance from Denise Gough (National Theatre, 2015)...
I was also – like literally every critic in 2014 – struck by Ivo van Hove’s stripped-back, incredibly potent production of A View from the Bridge at the Young Vic (a theatre that had a run of really very influential work under artistic director David Lan). It was gripping and compelling, but I also mention here because I feel like it’s emblematic of a wave of crisp, intelligent, bracingly modern re-imagined classics during this time.
Third up, I’m making the case for Ella Hickson’s The Writer, at the Almeida in 2018 – a ridiculously strong year, which also included debbie tucker green’s incredible and incredibly powerful ear for eye, my beloved Summer and Smoke, John, Company, Sweat... But Hickson’s play is getting an early mention not only because its exploration of power dynamics within the theatre industry, and within relationships, was blazingly bold, but also because in its feminist fury, and its self-reflexive experiments with form, it feels like it really captured a particularly exciting, questioning theatrical moment. See also work from around the same time by Alice Birch, Arinzé Kene, RashDash, Branden Jacobs Jenkins...
Andrzej Lukowski: I feel like the normie default answer to this would be Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (Royal Court, 2009) – setting aside my personal feelings on it, I think it is the single production that comes closest to it being a truism that it’s ‘the best British production of the last 20 years’? Such a truism that maybe it’s a bit of a naff answer. But putting my feelings back in I do want to give it a shout as I think as with The Encounter – but without the technical wizardry – at its climax it almost feels like it breaks down the laws of physics right in front of you, like I think on some level Rooster absolutely does summon the giants. You can criticise it easily because it’s long and baggy and blah blah blah, but I do think as a pure OH MY GOD FUCK YES THEATRE it is definitely up there. Which of course is heavily down to Mark Rylance, but I suppose I am saying: yes it was very hyped but yes it was very good.
I have talked about this with Natasha a fair few times and I think it’s at that weird point where your appreciation of something you saw years ago sort of becomes a strange myth in your head, but I absolutely loved Ian Rickson’s relatively uncelebrated 2011 Young Vic production of Hamlet and I think I would probably genuinely call it my favourite theatre production of the last 20 years. Its basic thesis was that it was (kind of) set in an asylum and Michael Sheen’s Hamlet was definitely ‘mad’, but it was all incredibly beautiful, there were points where he recognised the destruction he’d wrought in his madness and was devastated by it.
I think A View from the Bridge is a great shout because as much as anything it’s emblematic of a shift towards embracing UK theatre culture that was probably just a wild dream during Exeunt’s earlier years. Like, you can moan about British theatre as much as you want but it is vastly more embracing of European auteurs and work than it was 20 years ago and A View from the Bridge feels like the turning point to me.
Some other misc shows: Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide, Lucy Prebble’s A Very Expensive Poison, Alistair McDowall’s Pomona, Emma Rice’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are all shows from the last ten years that make me think ‘British theatre is alright’. And I feel like this is pushing ‘British theatre’ but for me the three Annie Baker productions directed by James Macdonald – John, The Antipodes and Infinite Life – are basically perfect and clearly she has seen something in him as a collaborator here.
Natasha Tripney: Oh, God, yes, that Michael Sheen Cuckoo’s Nest Hamlet, which got pretty sniffy reviews at the time, remains one of my favourite things the Young Vic has ever done. To prevent this list from getting too London-y, may I also raise David Greig’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011), a gorgeous part-verse play about border ballads and the actual devil, that gave you whisky and finger sandwiches in the interval and had the audacity to end on a terrible/brilliant pun.
Other things that feel pivotal for me are Kneehigh’s Nights at the Circus, a beautifully imperfect, very Emma Rice-y take on Angela Carter’s novel in 2006; Rob Icke’s vice-like Oresteia at the Almeida (back in 2015 when his sleek, bleak style still felt revelatory) with its brutal use of the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’; Lucy Prebble’s Enron in 2009, both for its formal invention and for Sam West’s transformative performance as CEO Jeff Skilling. Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus at the Globe in 2006 and 2014 – notorious as the production that made everyone faint – also feels like a landmark production, a streak of dark humour running through the play, Douglas Hodge running around in a chef’s hat.
We should probably talk about Punchdrunk at some point…
AL: I love Punchdrunk a lot but picking a single show out of The Masque of the Red Death (2007) / The Drowned Man (2013) / The Burnt City (2022) feels odd as there’s such continuity… Masque of the Red Death at BAC probably has a reasonable claim to being one of their pivotal shows and was great for giving a lot of opportunities to that Forest Fringey crowd of live artists who were coming up at the time.
HW: Yes, I think it’s definitely worth including Punchdrunk as they’re just such a force in shaping immersive theatre, which was a big development of the era. Has any other immersive theatre lived up to its promise?
I love that you mention Strange Undoing – I didn’t see the original but very much enjoyed a revival at the Royal Exchange in Manchester a few years ago – and Andrzej, I totally agree with Jerusalem. It is the ‘obvious’ best British play choice, but it’s also amazing? I also was enormously invested in and moved by Butterworth’s The Ferryman when I saw that in 2017 – although the fact that any Northern Irish or Irish person I ever speak to seems to passionately hate it has maybe dimmed it a little...
And yes, I feel like if A View from the Bridge was a turning point, then Icke’s Oresteia was definitely a moment of a young British director who’d been taking notes very confidently making it his own. It’s still probably my favourite Icke show – although on the subject of Hamlet, he got a hugely moving, intelligent one out of Andrew Scott, also at the Almeida – and I also have a big soft spot for the bananas-ness of Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns there in 2014. Three post-apocalyptic re-tellings of the Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons, taken to ever-increasingly abstract places, it feels pretty different to the aesthetic I think of as Ickian (Ickey?) now, if my crumbling memory serves, but what a play, what a production.
Tim Bano: You lot have got in pretty quick and ticked off the big ones that come to mind immediately: Jerusalem as the ur-show, A View From the Bridge, Punchdrunk, The Encounter. Mr Burns remains my personal favourite both for the thing itself and for the reaction it provoked. That is still, for me, the high that I feel like I’m chasing when reviewing shows now.
I’d make a case for War Horse (2007). It can very credibly claim to have changed British theatre, popularising puppetry, enriching what theatre for young people could mean, but also setting a model for how subsidised theatre can pay itself through repeated West End runs and international tours. I wonder how many young people went to the theatre because of War Horse. Lots, is my guess. Interesting to note, too, that its development started exactly 20 years ago when the Labour government had just increased arts subsidy. Marianne Elliott followed it up a few years later with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which was similarly wholeheartedly theatrical, and was absolutely everywhere at one point, as was its adapter Simon Stephens.
I don’t know if I would single out a particular James Graham play, but his rise in the past 20 years (his first play premiered in 2005) has been significant. And didn’t some of you see the original Fleabag in Edinburgh?
AL: guys guys would it thrill you to know I saw Fleabag… at Latitude!!! (2014 I think.) It landed very differently to the Underbelly; in a big tent of hungover people it came across as a lot bleaker.
While we’re just lobbing in names and running off – Jamie Lloyd!
Alice Saville: Ah classic Exeunt dialogue vibe – you don’t get to your emails for less than 24 hours and suddenly there’s a novel’s worth of opinions to digest! But yeah, thanks for the nudge on Jamie Lloyd, Andrzej, because his 2022 The Seagull is really up there for me. As you said up top, Holly, it’s so interesting (and kind of heartening) that a decade ago we had David Hare carping about European-style director’s theatre ‘infecting’ the UK. And now it feels like Lloyd, among others, has really shifted our collective definition of what a ‘West End show’ looks like in a very welcome way – plywood and microphone wires aren’t just for the Barbican; bone-rattlingly intense sound levels aren’t just for The Yard, etc.
It feels like Arinzé Kene’s Misty was another turning point: the start of a spate of fantastic new plays by Black writers, often nurtured by the Bush Theatre, that went into the West End, including Tyrell Williams’ Red Pitch and Benedict Lombe’s Shifters. And as they transferred to Covent Garden, they brought whole new audiences and discussions to these white-dominated spaces. Kene was magnetic to watch, surreal as he trapped himself inside a giant orange balloon, and all too real as he explored the pressures on minority writers to tell a certain, imprisoning kind of story.
Otherwise, I’ve got to add big ‘YES’s to A Very Expensive Poison, The Writer, Hamlet, Iphigenia in Splott, and I will refrain from mentioning Annie Baker...
HW: Great point about the West End opening up – I feel like Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys… was a really key one in that list, too, going from the New Diorama Theatre in 2021 to the Royal Court to the Apollo and then finally to the Garrick in 2024. Quite a journey, and it felt electric in those commercial spaces.
TB: I feel like I should represent the musical theatre side of things: Matilda premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2010 but is still on in London and is still fantastic. It has a top-tier score from Tim Minchin, great direction from Matthew Warchus, and also became a vehicle for propping up a big, publicly subsidised institution (the RSC in this case – this seems to be a trend of the last two decades as public subsidy has shifted and shrunk).
I’ve got a huge fondness for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which I saw in its first iteration at Southwark Playhouse in 2019 when it still had puppets, and followed it through to another Southwark run and then the West End, as well as Operation Mincemeat – there was a little clique of critics there on press night at the New Diorama in May 2019 and we knew we’d seen something special. Then there’s Six, which started as a student production in Edinburgh in 2017, which has got to rank as one of the best British musicals of the last two decades. If I get my big-brushstroke brush out, I’d say that British musicals have got smaller because the money has, and the hits are fewer, but they do still come through occasionally in a spectacular way.
HW: Thanks for bringing up musicals, Tim! I agree, I feel like Matilda / Operation Mincemeat / Six have all been proper phenomenoms (I know the real word is phenomena, but it sounds wrong). I remember being totally delighted seeing Mincemeat as a scrappy little thing – although I don’t think I would ever have guessed quite how big it could go... And it’s another NDT-transcending hit: cap-doff to their former artistic director David Byrne, a man with great taste who also has a great ability to get money to talent at the start of their careers when they really need it...
I’d also shout out 2017’s Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, and 2019’s Standing at the Sky’s Edge, as two big new British musicals that really flew – and were both born under Robert Hastie’s reign at the Crucible in Sheffield, notably.
AS: On the new musicals front, Lee Hall’s Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour at the Traverse was a standout for me – it had this fantastic in-yer-face vigour which meant this Scottish choir girl story didn’t feel twee for a second, while its schlockier twists and turns were given transcendental magic by its intricately worked harmonies.
I’ve also massively loved the new freedom we’ve seen with classics that once felt irredeemably naff. Once, Jesus Christ Superstar was merely a cassette tape for me deployed on long family car journeys. Then I saw Timothy Sheader’s production on a rainy night at Regent’s Park and it felt spiritual, pretentious as it sounds: rough, muscular choreography reflected in pools of water on stage, silvery blood glistening through the drizzle. Jamie Lloyd’s Evita probably didn’t interrogate the actual story as hard as it could have done, but it felt so blazingly powerful and exciting, and the gesture of the balcony performance was just so much fun. And although very much not British, I loved how angry Jordan Fish’s ‘Sexy’ Oklahoma made everyone, terrifying an audience who’d hoped for corn-fed wholesomeness.
HW: Our Ladies! LOVED. Another strong show from Edinburgh 2015! And if we were choosing ‘moments’ from the last 20 years, the Evita balcony scene would be up there, right? I think Jamie Lloyd just has that rare, brilliant instinct for how to really make theatre reach outside of its usual audience, and just making things that could seem ‘difficult’, be that Pinter or Shakespeare, actually seem crisp and clear and fun. Hard to pick one show; I loved Betrayal, Sunset Boulevard...
I want to mention that significant wave during Dominic Cooke’s era at the Royal Court when the new writers groups under Simon Stephens and Leo Butler were churning out Polly Stenham, Anya Reiss, Laura Wade, Duncan Macmillan, Alice Birch, Mike Bartlett, Nick Payne... it’s kind of insane? Would you pick any of their plays as typifying that energetic moment? Payne’s 2012 play Constellations, perhaps, because it feels very of that era: sciencey ideas, formally playful, big heart, huge success. (Not fitting in this category but still of this Court era: I really loved having my mind blown by Tim Crouch’s Adler & Gibb in 2014.)
And I’d add Jack Thorne’s name to James Graham’s: two playwrights who have dominated the stage in recent years. And I’m happy for it! But there’s sustained quality there rather than one obvious era-defining show, maybe..?
NT: You’re right to flag Dominic Cooke’s run at the Royal Court, which was as influential in its way as David Lan’s at the Young Vic. Laura Wade’s Posh in 2012 stands out. Its depiction of the engrained entitlement of the men who will one day lead the world felt true then and still does. Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012), a play made of 57 often very short scenes, may not have spawned tote bags in the same way that Escaped Alone has, but James Macdonald’s production was an extraordinary piece of stagecraft.
And if we’re talking about Jamie (Lloyd), then his 2019 Cyrano de Bergerac is surely up there with his best, starring a jacked James McAvoy sans prosthetic schnozz but at his most radioactively charismatic (i.e. using his Scottish accent), and featuring a wonderful Martin Crimp script stuffed full of wordplay. We probably shouldn’t overlook his Pinter at the Pinter season the year before either, for the scale of the undertaking if nothing else, and for delivering an absolutely fucking terrifying performance from Antony Sher in One for the Road.
We should probably talk about the Bush Theatre’s role as an incubator for new writing. I remember seeing some memorable early stuff by James Graham, Jack Thorne and Lucy Kirkwood here. Though in terms of emotional impact, nothing quite matched Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall, written for Andrew Scott in 2008, before he achieved Sherlock/hot priest super-fame. A body blow of a monologue, it went on to become something of a phenomenon but never quite captured the power of the run at the old above-a-pub Bush Theatre with the windows open to the street (because a leaky roof made lighting a hazard) and the sun slowly setting as he spoke.
AL: I think it’s interesting to view things in terms of TWO DECADES because people like Jamie Lloyd and James Graham who have very long and very prolific careers are maybe harder to pull a single show out for, like if James Graham had made This House (2012) and then stopped doing plays then maybe I’d be like OMG THIS HOUSE MUST BE IN HERE, but actually he keeps churning out really great plays that do in their small way help us come to a greater understanding of our own recent-ish history.
The leading British artistic director of the era is surely Rupert Goold (for both Headlong and the Almeida). The leading British producer of the era is very obviously Sonia Friedman. The leading British playwrights of the era… probably Simon Stephens (but he’s really faded as a presence having once been ubiquitous), Jez Butterworth, Lucy Prebble, Lucy Kirkwood, James Graham.
Another single show to toss in – London Road (2011), a remarkable one-off, completely unlike any other musical made before or since and, like War Horse, a real ‘only the NT’ moment.
NT: It feels important to mention Sebastian Nübling’s Three Kingdoms, a co-production in 2012 with the Lyric Hammersmith, Munich Kammerspiele and Estonia’s amazing Theatre NO99 (seriously, look them up) and an exercise in smashing together theatre cultures and approaches to performance. It took Simon Stephens’ grim, noir-inflected detective story and turned it into something that pissed off most mainstream critics at the time, got the blogosphere – as it was then – hot under the collar and kick-started endless conversations about ‘director’s theatre.’ It seems to have influenced a whole generation of directors – it’s still regularly cited as a key influence by people who are now shaping the theatre scene.
AL: Ah ha ah ha Three Kingdoms! Of course! To the readers back home, Three Kingdoms was a sort of North Star of Exeunt 1.0, and its success in the face of allegedly bad newspaper reviews is kind of the one great triumph of the theatre blog era.
AS: I’ve found myself thinking about a few really spine-tingling productions that had a point of view and atmosphere all of their own. The Skriker at the Royal Exchange Manchester in 2015 felt like a terrible beautiful dream, full of dark faerie beings looming out of the nightclub-like darkness. Chekhov’s First Play by Dead Centre – first staged in Dublin in 2015, and first seen in the UK in Bristol in 2016 – was so subversive and powerfully, lingeringly strange. And Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner (2019) at the Royal Court had such an intimacy to its depiction of female friendship, so warm and so psychopathic at the same time.
And if I could teleport right now? Mr Burns, no question, which feels extra-pertinent at a time when culture is cannibalising itself faster than ever before.
TB: Looking at the next 20 years I wonder and worry if the subsidised sector will feature so heavily. Will we be talking about Paddington the Musical? What new films from the early 2000s will they turn into musicals? Maybe The Fast and the Furious? Or Inland Empire? Will Brooklyn Beckham make his stage debut in 2.22 A Ghost Story? Will there be a scorched-earth sexy production of Joseph and His Technicolor Dreamcoat? Will everything be immersive experiences? Will I be an immersive experience? Will AI have killed us all and the theatre industry is just a bunch of those terrifying dancing robots dancing and clapping and falling over?
Meanwhile let’s all get into our time machine, pop back to the Almeida’s Mr Burns in 2014 and feel that electric thrill as the flickering campfire light takes us into a different kind of dark, apocalyptic future from the one we are currently living in.
Latitude festival is at Henham Park, Suffolk, 23 to 26 July
And Exeunt’s top ten shows to cast your vote on are…
A View from the Bridge, 2014
The Encounter, 2015
Evita, 2025
Jerusalem, 2009
The Masque of the Red Death, 2007
Misty, 2018
Mr Burns, 2014
Posh, 2010
Three Kingdoms, 2012
War Horse, 2007
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Black Watch you clowns!
Table at the Shed at the National directed by Norris, brilliant. Of course Posh, Lloyd’s Cyrano, Enron, Lungs with Rafe Spall I think, Seawall, but best Hamlet Tennant’s stand in Ed Bennet, also amazing in Love story, don’t forget Frantic Assembly. And Jude Law’s Hamlet brilliant too, better than Scott or Cumberbatch. Essiedu in Death of England, Graham’s This House and Ink the best of all his great works…. And hated Jerusalem mostly for the ending first time around when we see him kissing the young girl which was changed 10 years later, it was just about nasty brutish and not short enough lives on the edge. And the first cast of Lehman Trilogy, the only play I’ve seen three times (apart from Hamlet).