Lyn Gardner's Weekly Picks
Published on 9 November 2026
Disco meets the Welsh choral tradition and power ballads in Pride, the transfer from the National Theatre to the Bridge which takes back to the early 1980s when both Margaret Thatcher and AIDS were on the rise and tells of a group of gay and lesbian activists who raise money for the striking miners in a small Welsh mining community. It is a musical inspired by the movie of the same name. The movie is great, but this stage version is better still because it plays with ideas about community and solidarity, and it constantly breaks the fourth wall. It’s a joyous and heart-breaking evening which brilliantly walks the tightrope between the very camp and the totally sincere. There will be tears. And tap dancing.
Over at the Kiln in Kilburn, Nine Night is the return of Natasha Gordon’s hit comedy first seen at the NT in 2018 and subsequently the West End. Death has seldom been so funny. Gloria, the matriarch of a British-Jamaican family has died. The clan has gathered for the traditional wake, which will only end on the ninth night when the soul of the departed will leave the house. The rum flows freely, and so too do the family resentments, but Gordon has the deftest of comic touches, and this lively evening is both very funny and also on the nose about the complexities of straddling two cultures.
I didn’t adore Club NVRLND ****(The Vaults) when I saw it at the Edinburgh fringe a couple of years back. But plenty did, returning more than once for the high of nostalgia and adrenaline it delivers, mostly through a string of Noughties hits from Avril Lavigne’s Sk8er Boi and Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl to Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life. But I could see the show had promise, and with more development, it might really sprinkle some star dust, as it tells of a runaway bride, Wendy (played here by Diana Vickers), who comes in search of Peter, the boy who just wants to keep dancing and never grow up, who first showed her the joys of the club called NVRLND. But time has passed, and NVRLND is showing its age.
Coming to Wyndham’s early next year and richly recommended is Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain, which takes place in a Georgia classroom where teenage hormones, outrage and high spirits are high. When the class are assigned Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as their next read, some in the class reconsider the play based on their own experience. It turns out to be trenchant literary criticism. A transfer from the sold-out run at the Royal Court, this is a play—which, like the recent 1536—neatly questions the narratives handed down as the young women view Miller’s play through the lens of their own small-town lives but also #MeToo. It’s a riot of an evening, unashamedly girly but steely too, and it is delivered with joyful irreverence alongside Taylor Swift and Lorde hits.
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.