Exeunt recommends...
From chunky classics to John Waters adaptations, our critics pick their top shows on in March. Plus news, reviews, and a spotlight on Frankie Monroe
Alexander Cohen: The Seagull – Barbican, London
Some Seagulls soar over London and some nosedive. Helmed by German auteur Thomas Ostermeier and adapted by Duncan Macmillan with all-star cast of thespian heavyweights including Cate Blanchett, Tom Burke and Emma Corrin, this Seagull certainly has the dramatic wingspan to reach new heights. Chekhov’s characters’ melancholy-tinged humanity echoes throughout specific times and places, pliable to rigorous reinterpretation. Ostermeier will no doubt take full advantage. I’m eager to see what they deliver. 26 February to 5 April
JN Benjamin: Pig Heart Boy – Playhouse, Sheffield, and touring
I am always excited by a new Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu production. His latest is a Winsome Pinnock adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s YA novel Pig Heart Boy. It’s full of his trademark 90s nostalgia and features an incredible (and impossibly energetic) cast. And I gotta tell you, I laughed like a drain! Having opened at the Unicorn Theatre in London, it’s off on a welcome tour: playing twelve other venues until June. Playhouse, 27 February to 15 March, then touring England to 14 June
Matt Barton: A Streetcar Named Desire – Crucible, Sheffield
Sheffield Crucible has given themselves the unenviable task of reviving one of the greatest plays ever written, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, on the back of the Almeida’s tremendous and starry production (which has just finished its second West End run). In their favour, they have director Josh Seymour, who's making sizeable waves having helmed the Royal Exchange's Christmas show Spend Spend Spend, as well as a revival of Polly Stenham’s That Face at the Orange Tree. Plus, they can depend on the greatness of two ever-excellent designers: set from Frankie Bradshaw; sound and music from Alexandra Faye Braithwaite. 1 to 29 March.
Tracey Sinclair: Rupture – Live Theatre, Newcastle, and touring
With its motto of ‘changing the world one play at a time’, Open Clasp theatre company has a tradition of focusing on the stories of women and girls who are rarely centred on the stage – whether this is sex workers, incarcerated women, or those caught up in the care system (expressly inclusive – it feels important to say these days – of trans women and non-binary people). Stories created with those individuals, not just about them, making sure their lives are handled with veracity, care and respect. Rupture looks to be no exception. Written by Open Clasp’s founder Catrina McHugh, directed by Rachel Glover and co-created with the women from HMP Low Newton, this looks at what it’s like to be a mother in prison. In-keeping with its inclusive ethos, the production will also visit several prisons on its tour. Live Theatre, 5 to 8 March, and touring theatres and prisons in the North East to 15 March
Maddy Costa: Cry-Baby, The Musical – Arcola Theatre, London
I’m excited about this with such deep ambivalence it tips into anxiety. A John Waters classic, Cry-Baby is a loving pastiche of 1950s teen movies with broken teeth, ample bazooms and Iggy Pop naked in a tin bath. It was a defining art work of my teenage years (who am I kidding: my entire life), and now it’s a musical and... what will the theatre people do to my baby???? Yes, its story of square girl meets juvenile delinquent boy, organises a prison break AND has her skirt ripped off by a motorbike screams why the hell not put this on stage. But if it’s bad (by which I don’t mean the good-bad of the juvenile delinquent heart-throb variety but your standard issue bad-bad that results in thinking about shopping lists/what’s for dinner/that piece that was supposed to have been written last week and sneaking out in the interval), that is many minutes of my life when I could have been watching the movie again and saved myself a score to boot. Dilemmas, friends, dilemmas. 6 March to 12 April
Frank Peschier: Retrograde – Apollo Theatre, London
If you missed Ryan Calais Cameron’s acutely smart thriller Retrograde at the Kiln in 2023, well the theatre gods (aka Nica Burns) for it finally getting a West End transfer. Directed by Kiln AD, Amit Sharma, this hot house of a play is the perfect vehicle for the consistently excellent Ivanno Jeremiah who embodies rather than impersonates Sidney Poitier in a moment where the Hollywood legend is poised between integrity and personal ambition. Plus Stanley Townsend? PLUS Oliver Johnstone? PLUS 90 mins straight through? Proper delicious, grown-up sexy theatre, and out in time for a drink and dissect. Lovely stuff. 8 March to 14 June
Lily Levinson: Joint – The Pit, Barbican, London
Jay Bernard writes with incandescent lyricism, across disciplines and media, about the politics and history of racist injustice in Britain. Their debut poetry collection Surge explored the fire that killed thirteen young black people at a New Cross house party in 1981. Joint addresses the legal doctrine of Joint Enterprise, which was designed to enable convictions for ‘encouraging or assisting’ a criminal, but disproportionately affects people who are young, black, male and working-class. The three performances as part of FuelFest are billed as work-in-progress, but I think it will be (or soon become) an incisive, intricate and powerful piece of work, worth seeing early. 17 to 19 March
Holly Williams: Rhinoceros – Almeida Theatre, London
Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist classic about a French town whose inhabitants are steadily turning into rhinoceroses is probably the sort of play that can always be claimed as ‘relevant’. Still, as a metaphor for the improbable, and then unstoppable, rise of Fascism… well, let’s just observe that the current timing is as pointed as a rhino horn. And this production is also absolutely packed (pachydermed?) with talent: Omar Elerian, who staged Ionesco’s The Chairs at the same theatre, translates and directs, and has assembled a ridiculously talented cast, of John Biddle, Hayley Carmichael, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, Paul Hunter, Anoushka Lucas, Joshua McGuire, Sophie Steer and Alan Williams. 25 March to 26 April
Oh the drama
It seems that the great gleeful ‘star casting is the scourge of modern theatre’ bonfire of 2025, fuelled by endless newspaper articles and the reputations of numerous inadequate A-listers, only burns ever hotter. I particularly enjoyed the latest fuel on the fire: journalists now asking celebrities about to appear in plays if they think there are too many celebrities in plays, as put (bravely!) by Arifa Akbar to Cate Blanchett in The Guardian. Funnily enough, Cate is broadly ok with it.
Thought a nerdy theatre Substack was a safe haven from news about Trump? Soz – it turns out he even has an impact on your favourite names in lights. Quite literally. While we have every faith that Operation Mincemeat will become our brightest cultural export as it opens on Broadway, they aren’t lit quite yet: the shipment of special yellow LED bulbs that will spell the show’s title above the John Golden Theatre are, um, currently stuck in China… held by customs thanks to Trump’s the recently imposed tariffs.
Grimmest self-own of the week goes to Brian Cox, who used an interview in The i, in which he was meant to be promoting his play The Score, to mount a seemingly impromptu and un-asked-for defence of his old mate Kevin Spacey, along the classic ‘well he was never abusive to me’ line. He couldn’t have chosen a worse moment, really: between Cox doing the interview with Alexandra Pollard and it being published, it was announced that another law suit is being brought against Spacey by actor Ruari Cannon, who first went public with his allegations… in The i paper. Meanwhile, Guy Pearce has just done a frank podcast interview about the upsetting experience of being aggressively “targeted” by Spacey.
Four stars good, two stars bad: recent openings and reviews
Happy birthday to George Orwell’s Animal Farm – 80 years old, and still painfully timeless. The book’s place as a much-studied classic may mean stage versions are fairly frequent, by Tatty Hennessy’s production at Theatre Royal Stratford East sounds like a sharp, stylish outing, that’s now heading to Leeds and Nottingham. “Every generation deserves a defining production of this school-syllabus favourite: one that kindles a rage in new audiences, and reignites it in returning viewers. Surely this is it,” says Holly O’Mahony in a glow in The Stage.
Mark Fisher in The Guardian asks “Could any play be more timely than Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, with its apocalyptic visions of raging fires, a God who punishes gender dysphoria and a wind that ‘turned heads inside out’?” To which I might reply well hey what about Rhinoceros or Animal Farm? (see above!) But it’s a fair point, made within one of several enthused reviews of Churchill’s eerily prescient play, on in a double-bill at Manchester Royal Exchange until 8 March.
Not to end on an exactly a cheery note, but Three Sisters at the Sam Wanamaker does at least reportedly have an unusually high volume of laughs in it. Dominic Maxwell praises it as both amusing and tender in The Times, and wonders at how Chekhov manages to paint “a whole world of longings and fears in such vivid colours?” If you like the sound of that, why not check out Exeunt’s recent piece on the play with its adaptor, Rory Mullarkey… or catch the show until 19 April.
Holly Williams
Spotlight on… Frankie Monroe
By Anya Ryan
He was the big, stand-out hit of this year’s Fringe, leaving with the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer trophy in his pocket (and he arrived having already netted a BBC New Comedy Award and Best Show at the Leicester Comedy Festival). But Joe Kent-Walters’s Sudocrem face-painted Frankie Monroe – billing himself as “Yorkshire’s biggest bastard” – has to be seen to be believed.
This month, he’s off on a wide tour – with dates stretching from Leeds to Brighton, Glasgow to Machynlleth. And every venue he visits will be transformed into Frankie's paradise: a working men’s club in Rotherham, The Misty Moon, where audiences will be treated to a peculiar night of fun, games, and even a deal with the devil.
Expect perversely funny impersonations, bad magic tricks, and laughs galore. And, with echoes of Johnny Vegas and The League of Gentleman, Kent-Walters is on his way to becoming one the greats. Catch him now or you just might regret it.
Frankie Monroe is on tour 5 March to 23 May