Lyn Gardner's Weekly Picks

There are more shows closing over the next few weeks than there are opening. It’s always easy to miss out on some great work, so here are a few early warnings. Tom Stoppard’s brilliant, heart-breaking play, Arcadia, ends its run at the Duke of York’s on September 12, which is the same date that To Kill a Mockingbird has its final curtain at Wyndhams. Time too to say goodbye to The Truth at the Menier. One of its stars, Stephen Mangan, goes pretty well straight into The Cherry Orchard, playing opposite Kristin Scott Thomas in Ian Rickson’s revival, which opens at the Harold Pinter Theatre in October. 

When Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night transferred from the National Theatre to the Trafalgar Theatre in late 2018, it was the first time that a play by a Black British woman had been seen in the West End. That’s quite a statistic. And even more astonishingly since then there have only been two—Yasmin Joseph’s J’Ouvert and Benedict Lombe’s Shifters, recently seen in New York. So good to see Nine Night is being revived at the Kiln, a reminder of how far British theatre has come but also how far it has still got to go.  Taking its name from the Afro-Caribbean custom of nine days mourning for the dead, it is a raucously enjoyable comedy about grief, sibling rivalry and family relationships. A play which dances with life and has one laugh-out-loud line after another.