Lyn Gardner's Weekly Picks
Published on 27 July 2026
In 1998 Tyisha Miller, a 19-year-old African-American woman, was lying unconscious in a car at a Californian gas station when she was shot by police officers called to the scene. She was hit by 12 bullets. In Rickerby Hands’ acclaimed poetic Dreamscape, first seen in Edinburgh last summer and now transferring to the Arcola, each of those bullets becomes a memory. It is an effective device in a show which mixes choreography and spoken word to good effect to tell the story of a life cut short. It’s done with grace and gravity.
Matthew Bourne’s dance drama The Car Man turns up the heat at Sadler’s Wells as it relocates Bizet’s opera, Carmen, from a 19th-century cigarette factory in Spain to a garage and diner in early 1960s small-town America. There is sex, jealousy, murder, betrayal and revenge aplenty. You’ll both recognise some of the score and the characters, but Bourne gives both a twist in an evening of full-throttle emotion.
The wonderful Roger Allam, an actor worth seeing in any role, stars with Dorothy Atkinson at the Old Vic in Philip Breen’s revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s classic How the Other Half Loves. It is an early Ayckbourn dating from 1969, and the playwright’s comic scheming delivers via a clever technical coup de theatre which allows two dinner parties—taking place on successive nights—to be depicted simultaneously. It was his first big hit in both London and New York and has something in common with The Truth (currently in the West End) in the way an affair and its evasions lead to deeper truths. Farcical misunderstandings too.
London theatre’s love affair with all things Japanese, from My Neighbour Totoro to Spirited Away, continues with Death Note opening at the Barbican this week, a musical based on the best-selling Japanese manga about Light Yagami, a high school student who discovers he can play god when a mysterious notebook falls into his hands which has the power to bring instant death to any person whose name he writes in it. Stephen Whitson, who directed the UK production of Hamilton, is at the helm for a morally complex story about how justice should be administered and who should do it.
By Lyn Gardner
Lyn Gardner is an acclaimed theatre journalist and former critic with decades of experience covering British theatre, from off-West End and fringe theatre to major West End productions.