London tube strikes and transport to theatre; new podcast episode: playwright Martin Sherman's memoir; what happened to political theatre?; Jack Thorne is new WGGB president
News, reviews, features and podcast on theatre across the UK
The British Theatre Guide Newsletter
No 1229: 14 September 2025
Editorial
Getting to the theatre was turned into a bit more of an adventure this week by the tube strike, as Philip Fisher explains in his feature this week.
Anyone with tickets for the theatre in London this week would probably have had a much longer journey than usual and possibly a more costly one as, even if they weren’t intending to travel by tube, the thousands of people who were would have had to find alternatives, putting additional pressure on the rail and bus services and more traffic on the roads. Some may have decided to cut their losses and stay at home, even though theatres would be unlikely to offer refunds when a performance does actually go ahead and you could, at least in theory, get there.
Those of us outside London may have escaped this particular chaos, but transport issues affect us all. Parking charges in Manchester priced me out of driving into the city centre some time ago, while trains and trams don’t come within a couple of miles of me and buses aren’t always reliable. When I drive further afield, there is always at least one motorway closure on my way home—I have been stuck on the M60 till gone 2AM before now, with the workmen who should be carrying out the works for which the road was closed stuck alongside me.
Some of our London reviewers were affected but did manage to contribute more than half of the reviews we have published this week, including the play we featured in the podcast episode released last week with the writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. We also have a review of a book that was written by our podcast guest in our latest episode.
Playwright Martin Sherman was born in Philadelphia in 1938 and grew up in New Jersey but has lived in London for more than forty years. His first major success as a writer was the play Bent, about the treatment of homosexuals in the Nazi concentration camps, which was produced at the Royal Court in London in 1979 starring Ian McKellen, who provides the foreword for his new memoir, On the Boardwalk, which is published later this month.
I spoke to Martin this week about the book, which covers the first half of his life up to that production of Bent, but he was quite adamant that there would not be a sequel—listen to the episode to discover why. But we spoke about his mother’s Huntington’s Disease which he feared inheriting, his father’s narcissistic personality disorder which he compares to Donald Trump, his time at Boston University and Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, his failed productions before his introduction to Gay Sweatshop in London and the O’Neill in Connecticut and being represented by the great Peggy Ramsey. In fact, he is still represented by Casarotto Ramsey, who arranged the interview.
We have another feature this week from Andrew Cowie in which he asks the question: whatever happened to political theatre? This may seem to be a thorough and well-argued piece, but Andrew himself has described it as an 800-word précis of his 16,000-word MA dissertation. My MA dissertation was serialised over three issues of the great but now defunct Scriptwriter Magazine.
Finally, I spent most of Friday at the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s AGM over Zoom, during which it was announced that our President, Sandi Toksvig, who had served the maximum term of six years and been a brilliant advocate for writers, will be replaced by playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne, who I’m sure will work hard to defend the rights of writers at a time when unimaginably wealthy tech companies are trying to persuade governments that they should be able to use our work without compensation or acknowledgement—and governments are listening to them.
Meet the Hatter (Joss Arnott Dance) - Stanley & Audrey Burton Theatre, Leeds,
Pride & Prejudice (Octagon Theatre Bolton, Theatre By The Lake And Stephen Joseph Theatre) - Hull Truck Theatre, Hull, –
Dancing At Lughnasa (Sheffield Theatres and Royal Exchange Theatre) - The Crucible / Lyceum Theatre / Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, Sheffield, –
Military Wives The Musical (York Theatre Royal in association with Everyman Theatre Cheltenham and Buxton Opera House) - York Theatre Royal, York, –
To Kill a Mockingbird (Jonathan Church Theatre Productions) - Leeds Playhouse, Leeds, –
Tina – The Tina Turner Musical (Stage Entertainment, Joop van den Ende and Tali Pelman, in association with Tina Turner) - The Crucible / Lyceum Theatre / Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, Sheffield, –
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Elliott & Harper Productions and Catherine Schreiber, based on the original Leeds Playhouse production) - Bristol Hippodrome Theatre, Bristol, –
Little Women (Lee Dean and Daniel Schumann, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, The Belgrave Coventry and Blackpool Grand Theatre) - Lighthouse, Poole, –
Dear England (National Theatre) - Theatre Royal, Plymouth, –
Emma (Theatre Royal Bath Productions) - Theatre Royal Bath / Ustinov Studio / the egg, Bath, –
