Exeunt recommends... for 2025
Our writers look ahead at some of the most tantalising new and returning shows of 2025 - and a spotlight on Maureen Beattie
From spaceship dystopias and an AI afterlife to regional revivals of modern classics, Exeunt critics truffle-hunt through 2025
Alexander Cohen: Revenge: After The Levoyah – The Yard, London
Revenge: After The Levoyah is the first show I have seen that drags my generation’s unique grasp on British Jewish identity kicking and screaming into the spotlight. No ethnic community is a monolith, something that a lot of Jewish orientated plays fail to understand likely because they are pitched to an older, more pearl-clutchingly sentimental audience. I ain’t that kind of Jew. A lot of my friends ain’t that kind of Jew. Revenge: After The Levoyah is about an Ocean’s 11 style plot to kidnap Jeremy Corbyn, that rightly left Edinburgh garlanded with awards and is now transferring to The Yard. 9 to 25 January
Natasha Tripney: The Employees – Southbank Centre, London
One of the most exciting shows of 2025 opens right after the post-panto slump. Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski makes category-defying work, like Respublika, a mash-up of documentary and installation about an imagined rave utopia, and his similarly form-bending 2022 show Rotkho has generated a huge buzz on the European festival circuit. Now UK audiences get a chance to see him in action, in a work based on Danish author Olga Ravn’s epic dystopian novel set in the near future on a spaceship. Promising to blend the cinematic and the immersive, it’s a chance to get acquainted with one of the most interesting theatre artists working today. 16 to 19 January
Debbie Zhou: AiTopia – Young Vic, London
At the Young Vic, The Collective – consisting of 50 multi-disciplinary artists from Southwark and Lambeth – are putting on their inaugural show, AiTopia, aimed at dismantling traditional conventions of theatre-making through its community approach. Set in a dystopian future where police have been defunded, the emergence of an AI After Life threatens the relationships of five families as they grapple with the cost of this innovation on their humanity. With the steadfast rise of AI, this production (described as a “thriller”) looks to incite real-world, hair-raising questions about the personal implications of technology, through The Collective’s unique model of collaborative theatre-making. 25 January to 1 February
Isobel Lewis: Doubt – Theatre Royal Bath
After a decade spent asserting Manchester – primarily the city’s Royal Exchange – as a premiere theatre destination, Maxine Peake is making her way south west. She’ll be bringing that same magic to a new production of DOUBT: A Parable at Theatre Royal Bath’s Ustinov Studio, appearing opposite Ben Daniels in this gripping story of belief and betrayal within the Catholic Church. 7 February to 8 March
Matt Barton: Girls & Boys – Nottingham Playhouse
The Royal Court’s production of Girls & Boys, Dennis Kelly’s 2018 monologue, with Carey Mulligan is right up there on my list of shows I most regret missing. Even just reading it, the play floored me: it’s totally devastating, but ambushes you slowly. So it’s great to get the chance to see a proper production of it – and for northern theatres to transfer less obvious London hits. I have every suspicion Aisling Loftus will be brilliant. 8 February to 1 March
Tracey Sinclair: Champion – Live Theatre, Newcastle
Live Theatre has a track record of using sport as a Trojan Horse that gets audiences through the door then presenting them with a play tackling much broader subjects (sometimes, admittedly, to their ire: I am still haunted by the face of my friend’s partner as he bitterly condemned the lack of any actual football in The Bounds). Following this trend is Ishy Din’s Champion, which uses Muhammad Ali’s visit to the North East in the summer of 1977 as a lens through which to examine the relationships in one mixed race South Shields family. Din is a playwright I’ve long heard good things about, so despite my knowing almost nothing about boxing and caring even less, this premiere is my first must-see of 2025. 13 February to 8 March
Catherine Love: The Intrusion – Leeds Playhouse, and touring
Can extinction be funny? If there’s anyone I trust to bring belly laughs to the unlikely topic of climate catastrophe, it’s anarchic clowns Told by an Idiot. In collaboration with associate company Bric à Brac Theatre, this new production tells a Kafka-inspired tale of a community of survivors in the aftermath of a disaster. As stories about the climate and ecological crisis become ever more urgent, I’m intrigued to see how The Intrusion uses comedy as a response to the terrifying situation we find ourselves in. Touring 1 to 20 March
Anya Ryan: 4.48 Psychosis – Royal Court, London; The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon
Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis is one of the most legendary in Royal Court history. First performed in 2000, less than two years after her death, it was famously described by Michael Billington as “75-minute suicide note”. All of the original cast and creative team are back for this 25 year anniversary revival that the Court has programmed in partnership with the RSC, including director James Macdonald. Written as a sequence of fragmented thoughts and feelings, the play plunges the audience into the mind of someone deep in the throes of depression – with this production set to be as moving and damning as before. 12 June to 27 July.
Holly Williams: Intimate Apparel – Donmar, London
OK so I’m not exactly going out on a limb with this one – this could be the safest bet in theatre-going in 2025. But I’ve never seen Lynn Nottage’s 2003 play, about an African-American seamstress in 1905 who sews exquisitely beautiful lingerie for other people’s wedding nights, and it sounds utterly gorgeous. And this is a holy-trinity production: an already much-acclaimed play by Nottage, one of our all-time greats, directed by Lynette Linton – never more brilliant than when directing Nottage’s work – starring Samira Wiley, a seriously tempting casting choice. Yet somehow, there are still plenty of tickets left, even at this appropriately intimate venue. Snap ‘em up while you can. 20 June to 9 August
Fergus Morgan: Small Acts Of Kindness – Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre has been closed since 2018 for a long-delayed, eye-wateringly expensive redevelopment. It will finally reopen in September with a new play-with-songs about the Lockerbie bombing and its aftermath from playwright Frances Poet, Deacon Blue frontman Ricky Ross, and director Dominic Hill. The show sounds deeply moving – and the prospect of having the Citz back up and running is thrilling. It has been much missed over the last six years. September, dates tba
Second chances…
If you felt glum looking all the great shows you missed on the end-of-year lists – well, chances are they might just be coming back in 2025. Three shows I’ve loved are returning: Tim Price’s glorious tribute to Aneurin Bevan, Nye, is back at both the National and the Wales Millennium Centre in July and August; James Graham’s hugely entertaining Dear England is also back in the Olivier from March to May, while a highlight from Sheffield Theatres this year, Jack Holden’s tour-de-force one-man-show Kenrex, transfers to Southwark Playhouse in February.
But there are many more plays I wish I’d caught, and hope to get to this year. More James Graham, with the well-received Punch moving from Nottingham Playhouse to the Young Vic in March; Dominic Maxwell’s lovely review in The Times made a particularly persuasive case for its energy and empathy.
Paul Mescal reprising his turn in A Streetcar Named Desire in February is obviously a hot ticket in all senses of the word, but I’m just as psyched for another Almeida transfer in January – the stage version of Annie Ernaux’s The Years lands at the Harold Pinter Theatre; check out Isobel Lewis’s five-star rave. And the Royal Court’s sell-out smash about Roald Dahl, Giant, follows in the same theatre: our Tim Bano gave Mark Rosenblatt’s “spectacularly good” debut play a five-star review in the Evening Standard…
Giant is not the only acclaimed debut going on to further life: I’m particularly looking forward to Azuka Oforka’s The Women of Llanrumney, a play exploring Wales’s colonial past, when it’s back at Cardiff’s Sherman theatre as well as at Theatre Royal Stratford East in March. And that theatre is bringing back another must-see, for me: their 2023 production of Dave Harris’s Tambo and Bones, which also happily tours from March to May. Anya Ryan called its final scene one of the “most affecting I have seen on stage” in her Guardian review, so this demands to be watched.
Highlights from Summerhall
No doubt Exeunt readers have been watching with horror the news unfolding around beloved Edinburgh venue Summerhall recently – in particular, the revelation that artists who had work on in August still hadn’t been paid. This was going to be a small segment with a practical plea for how to help: buy tickets for their upcoming shows!
Thankfully, just before Christmas it was announced that their payments would be honoured – but these shows are bangers and so you should book them anyway… Laura Horton’s Lynn Faces features a middle-aged punk band formed in tribute to Alan Partridge’s put-upon assistant, and is “guaranteed to make you smile”, according to Lyn Gardner’s review in The Stage. It’s at Norwich Theatre, The Drum in Plymouth, and New Diorama in London between January and March.
James Rowland Dies at the End of the Show – the third of Rowland’s much-loved storytelling trilogy – tours the country between January and May. Anna Morris’s twisty debut play Son of a Bitch, about a mother who goes viral after calling her four-year-old a cunt, won a Fringe First and transfers to Southwark Playhouse in February. And a hit the last two summers, Eva O’Connor and Hildegard Ryan’s Chicken lands at the Jermyn Street Theatre in May. About a celebrity actor and activist who is also a rooster, Fergus Morgan called Chicken “clucking clever stuff”.
Sh!t Theatre are, frankly, always a highlight of any fringe – and by all accounts, their latest show Or What’s Left of Us is a profoundly moving exploration of grief; Natasha Tripney’s five-star response in The Stage can be read here. Luckily, it’s having another run at Soho Theatre in February.
by Holly Williams
Spotlight on… Maureen Beattie
By Matt Barton
It was heartening to see the theatre community recently toasting the dependable but undersung brilliance of June Watson – and it made me think of another name equally deserving of the same recognition. Maureen Beattie is also one of those familiar faces who reliably turns in unshowy but impeccable supporting performances. The first I remember seeing was her Linda Loman, the quixotic wife and mother in the Royal Exchange’s 2018 production of Death of a Salesman. She was like a balloon that slowly deflated throughout the play, sat slightly hunched over on the edge of the in-the-round stage, crumpled.
She brought a similar weary and withering quality to Simon Stone’s Yerma: Beattie played a mother trying to steer her daughter away from imploding by the extreme lengths she went to to meet the demands of careerism and motherhood. It was a striking display of her deadpan incredulity as well as her watchfulness, able to silently suggest that she knew it would all end catastrophically for her daughter. She had the wide eyes of a hare watching rapidly approaching headlights but finding themselves unable to get out of the way. There’s often a helplessness to her characters, showing the wisdom of age isn’t always enough to save the young from calamitous mistakes.
Her theatre credits form a catalogue of theatre’s iconic tragic women, from Medea to The Deep Blue Sea’s Hester Collyer. Excitingly, she’s soon to take on Caryl Churchill’s work in the Sarah Frankcom-directed upcoming double bill: Escaped Alone and What If If Only. These plays should prove the perfect showcase for Beattie’s skill at fraying naturalism – a steel and lucidity that dissolves into inscrutability under emotional strain. She can go from deceptively benign quiet to roaring indignation. It will be fascinating to see her harness her flair for capturing fraught characters in a more abstract form, in what should be one of the highlights of the theatrical year.
Escaped Alone and What If If Only are at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, 7 February to 9 March