The best plays of 2021: London's theatre highlights

Cabaret, The Kit Kat Club at the Playhouse Theatre ★★★★★

Director Rebecca Frecknall (Summer and Smoke, and plenty more at the Almeida Theatre) revives Joe Masteroff, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1966 musical Cabaret in an immersive production that invites its audience into the glitzy, sordid debauchery of Berlin’s Kit Kat Club. A starry cast comprising Eddie Redmayne, Jessie Buckley and Omari Douglas make it soar.

Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), Criterion Theatre ★★★★★

Writer, director and actor Isobel McArthur delivers a thoroughly modern retelling of Jane Austen’s celebrated 1813 novel, complete with sparky storytelling, gutsy humour, feisty feminism and impassioned outbursts of karaoke.

Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare’s Globe ★★★★★

Trailblazing director Ola Ince delivered a contemporary take on Romeo & Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe, marrying scenes with stats on a broad range of social justice issues.

The Tragedy of Macbeth, Almeida Theatre ★★★★★

Celebrated director Yaël Farber returned to London with one of the most eagerly anticipated adaptations of the year: an elemental production of Macbeth, starring Saoirse Ronan and James McArdle as the ruthlessly ambitious couple.

Anything Goes, Barbican Theatre ★★★★★

Director-cum-choreographer Kathleen Marshall’s show-stopping revival of Anything Goes glided across the Atlantic to perk up the spirits of a London recovering from pandemic blues.

Best of Enemies, Young Vic Theatre ★★★★★

Reviewer Natasha Sutton Williams says: 'James Graham’s Best of Enemies, currently showing at the Young Vic, is dexterous and perfectly balanced play on political debate. It's a play for our fractured times, and it just so happens to be set in 1968, the year when arch-conservative William F Buckley and razor-sharp liberal Gore Vidal went head to head live on television in the battle to embody America’s soul through their intellectualism, articulation and wit.'

After Life, National Theatre ★★★★★

Writer Jack Thorne, director Jeremy Herrin and designer Bunny Christie joined forces to bring Hirokazu Kore-eda’s tender movie After Life to the National Theatre’s Dorfman stage. It was this moving production that reopened the theatre for the first time in six months following the winter lockdown.

and breathe... Almeida theatre ★★★★★

Reviewer Natasha Sutton Williams says: 'Writer Yomi Ṣode, Olivier award-winning director Miranda Cromwell and BBC/HBO’s Industry star David Jonsson tap into the universality of grief in and breathe…. The one-man show centres on Junior (Jonsson), a 23-year-old black British man who is deeply affected by the long-held secret of Big Mummy, a much-loved matriarch of his extended Nigerian family.'

The Book of Dust – La Belle Sauvage, Bridge Theatre ★★★★★

Theatre critic Lucy Brooks says: 'A fantasy Oxford, catastrophic floods and a menagerie of daemons come to the Bridge Theatre as Nicholas Hytner brings Philip Pullman's magic to the stage. La Belle Sauvage the play arrives more than a decade after Hytner enchanted audiences with his National Theatre production based on Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.'

Hymn, Almeida Theatre online ★★★★★

Exquisitely written and emotionally charged: Lolita Chakrabarti’s Hymn at the Almeida Theatre, starring Adrian Lester and Danny Sapani, was the online theatre highlight of the long winter lockdown. A creative team led by director Blanche McIntyre (The Writer, A Winter's Tale) successfully reimagined the show for the screen and a virtual audience, but it did, thankfully, receive a subsequent in-person run at the theatre over the summer.

A HIGHLY COMMENDED 'ONE TO WATCH'…

Operation Mincemeat, Southwark Playhouse ★★★★★

SpitLip's musical comedy Operation Mincemeat first had London audiences guffawing in 2019, but the company – a collaboration between Fringe favourites Kill the Beast and composer Felix Hagan – used the pandemic to re-write the show into something sharper, tighter and even funnier. Based on a real WWII operation that helped the Brits deceive Hitler and successfully invade Sicily, this smart, high-speed, song-filled remake is a wickedly entertaining riot. Catch it while you can at Southwark Playhouse next year.

BEST REVIVAL...

Constellations, Vaudeville Theatre ★★★★★

While aesthetically a carbon copy of the 2012 original, 2021's revival of Nick Payne's celebrated two-hander Constellations broke free from its former casting restrictions, offering audiences the chance to see one of four alternating duos – of differing ages, ethnicities and sexualities – play the focal couple.

Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who) and Zoë Wannamaker (Harry Potter, My Family); Omari Douglas (It’s a Sin) and Russell Tovey (Being Human, Years & Years); Anna Maxwell Martin (Line of Duty) and Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids); and Shelia Atim (Les Blancs, Twelfth Night) and Ivanno Jeremiah (Humans) each lent slightly different eccentricities to the pair – a clever reminder of the universality of the story.