2019 Wrap-Up: Best London Shows of the Year

Arthur Miller may have been ubiquitous on the London stage this year, but there was no shortage of homegrown British talent—from that fearless octogenarian Caryl Churchill at the Royal Court to Mike Bartlett’s Brexit-themed Snowflake at north London’s Kiln. Among a steady stream of quality, five productions stood out. They are listed below, in alphabetical order.

Betrayal
Harold Pinter’s endlessly revealing play has never seen its delicate text better served than at (yes!) the Harold Pinter Theatre. Director Jamie Lloyd led an incandescent cast headed by Tom Hiddleston as the cuckolded publisher Robert who, we learn near the outset, may be conducting affairs of his own. What has actually happened is filtered through a shifting prism as the action moves backwards; Lloyd also makes the genius choice to fill the stage where appropriate with the third, unspoken witness to every encounter. Zawe Ashton and the electric Charlie Cox completed a love triangle that then traveled to Broadway and will linger in this theatergoer’s memories for a long time to come.

Downstate
Is humankind ever truly monstrous? That sizable question hovered over every electrifying scene of the latest play from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Bruce Norris. Downstate took us inside a group home shared by four pedophiles in downstate Illinois (hence the title). At every turn, Norris and his on-point director Pam MacKinnon saw these deeply flawed men from the inside out, utilizing that Chekhovian gift of seeing people whole as opposed to the ready vilification often preferred by society. This great play has now been seen in Chicago and London, let’s hope New York City is next!

Fairview
Don’t give away the ending! Such was the urgent entreaty surrounding the British premiere at the Young Vic of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, although it’s difficult to believe by now that most theater folk aren’t aware of the tricks the extravagantly clever Drury has up her sleeve (hint: there’s audience participation). Suffice to say, director Nadia Latif and a pitch-perfect cast—including musical star Nicola Hughes and the protean Matthew Needham—navigated every swerve of this intricately woven study in racial optics that asks us to step back and look afresh at the world in which we live. If, that is, we are clear-eyed and brave enough to do so.

Ghost Quartet
This year, London’s Soho got a new playhouse—the instantly appealing Boulevard Theatre—and a production worthy of its own fanfare: American composer Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet, a gorgeous fantasia of a show first seen in Brooklyn in 2014 and marking one of two London premieres for Malloy this fall (the other was Preludes, his freewheeling riff on Rachmaninoff). Drawing from an abundance of sources and requiring an eclectic range of instruments—when did you last seen an erhu on stage?—director Bill Buckhurst and his cast of four created a mesmerizing puzzle that was the London musical theater event of the year.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
London boasted five competing versions of this play in one year, but Nicholas Hytner’s version for the Bridge, where he is artistic director, existed a league apart. It was a promenade-style production that referenced The Handmaid’s Tale one minute, Cirque du Soleil the next. Complete with beds rising from beneath the stage floor (thanks to amazing designer Bunny Christie) and David Moorst’s mesmerizing Puck dangling in midair, Hytner honored all aspects of a giddy play that contains within it the stuff of nightmare. One shan’t soon forget the sight of Gwendoline Christie, who played the otherworldly Titania, encased in a glass box awaiting liberation. Simultaneously magical and earthly, this was an era-defining Dream.