Category Archives: Play

The Truth

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  • The Truth

6/27/26 (Sat), West End

The truth can be a slippery thing in Florian Zeller’s ever-adroit hands, nowhere more hilariously as in this four-person farce of betrayal, cross-betrayal, suspicion, guilt, and lies of little-white and other varieties. Zeller is at the top of his game in this early (2016) work, translated expertly as always by Christopher Hampton.

A man has been having an affair with his best friend’s wife, unbeknownst to either his own wife or his friend – or so he believes. The lies he tells to hide his misbehavior, the lies others tell to spare each other’s feelings, the lies we tell to fool ourselves – all come crashing down as one storyline undercuts the previous one right until the final seconds.

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Springwood

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  • Springwood

6/27/26 (Sat), London

An historical drama by Richard Nelson reimagining the visit of newly crowned King George IV and his wife to FDR’s home in upstate New York in 1938. That, the first US visit ever by a British monarch, was intended as an extension of the king’s coronation tour to Canada, but as war loomed in Europe, he was tasked with winning FDR’s sympathy for England’s cause – a delicate task he was neither mentally nor diplomatically prepared for.

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Grace Pervades

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  • Grace Pervades

6/25/26 (Thurs), West End

There was little fanfare over David Hare’s latest show despite the presence of Ralph Fiennes (who I last saw years ago on a train in Harajuku just an hour before his Coriolanus in Akasaka). The reviews were more respectful than inspiring, and the clumsy title was no help. But the timing worked for me, so I went for it.

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Cyrano (West End)

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  • Cyrano

6/24/26 (Wed), West End

This is one of my favorite plays of all time and features one of my favorite actors, Adrian Lester, so it was high on my list of shows to see on this trip. Sadly it fell victim to all the bad habits that London theater has fallen into. I had assumed when Lester was announced that Cyrano’s issue would be not with his nose but with his black skin. That is, I could imagine lily-white France being scandalized by a black soldier at the time à la Othello, and Cyrano, for all his bluster, being super self-conscious about his skin, convinced that Roxanne could never accept him as he is. That would have been a trenchant comment on our times and given the show an entirely new relevance. The scene where the rude man comments unwisely on Cyrano’s nose could have been transformed into something more shocking – and imagine the quips that Cyrano could have come up with. (Peter Dinklage did something similar in the role with his diminutive size.)

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The Price

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  • The Price

6/14/26 (Sun), London

I caught this acclaimed London revival of Arthur Miller’s 1967 work on its final day. Victor, who gave up his scientist dreams to take care of his late father, is selling off the father’s furniture. The father was once wealthy, employing chauffeurs and rowing, but fell into hard times with the Depression and never recovered. Their prior wealth is symbolized by a large harp that hovers in the back, which their long-gone mother used to play. A furniture broker, an elderly Jewish man from the old country fittingly named Solomon, agrees to buy the entire lot for a fixed price. Just as he is about to pay Victor, the latter’s estranged younger brother Walter enters. Walter abandoned the father and family and became a successful doctor. He has not seen his elder brother in 18 years. Fireworks emerge as the brothers challenge each other over the paths that they have taken, the lies that have sustained them – and the price that each has paid.

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Hana Yori Tango (花よりタンゴ)

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  • 花よりタンゴ (Hana Yori Tango)

5/26/26 (Tues)

The late Inoue Hisashi’s 1987 comedy was being performed by his theater group Komatsuza for the first time in 22 years. It’s another of his plays obliquely criticizing events surrounding the war. He said in a program note that for all the patriotic cheering from all sides during the war, he could find no one afterwards who would admit responsibility for it. The title is a pun on the Japanese idiom hana yori dango (rice cakes before flowers), that is, prioritizing the practical over the aesthetic. The substitution of tango for dango rice cakes suggests that he sees culture or spirit as necessary sustenance to make it through the war-driven devastation.

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Giant

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  • Giant

5/8/26 (Fri), Broadway

Mark Rosenblatt’s play is set around the time of Israel’s incursion into Beirut in 1982. Roald Dahl, the British author of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and Matilda fame, has made some extreme anti-Israel comments in a book review that border uncomfortably on anti-Semitism. (The real-life situation was even worse: it appears that editors of the actual review substituted “Israelis” for “Jews” in some cases to tone down the hate.) His UK and US publishers, both Jewish, are afraid that the ensuing brouhaha will affect sales of his new book, and the latter, the fictional Jessie Stone, who Dahl insists pointedly on calling “Stein”, has flown in from New York to convince him to retract, modify or apologize for the remarks. She objects to his blaming the entire Jewish people for the actions of a government over which they have no control.

Dahl, however, is unrepentant, insisting conversely that she apologize for the brutality of a regime that claims to represent the Jewish “race”. The UK publisher, a Holocaust survivor, considers himself more British than Jewish and tries to avoid conflict, only to be accused by Dahl of being a “house Jew”, while Dahl’s long-time girlfriend does her best to keep his temper in line. Dahl appears to become more sympathetic when he learns that the US publisher, like himself, has a mentally challenged child. But his nice side doesn’t last long, his hatred of the Jews (“Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason” – a real-life quote) overwhelming even his feelings for his girlfriend in a horrific final-curtain betrayal.

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The Fifth Step (NT Live)

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·       The Fifth Step (NT Live)

  • 4/11/26 (Sat)

A National Theatre Live film of a two-man stage show of 2025. The title refers to Alcoholic Anonymous’ 12 steps toward recovery.

A nervous young Scottish man works with his older mentor at AA to overcome his addiction to drink. They are going through the 12 steps, approaching the fifth, which demands admitting your flaws to someone as well as yourself. He claims to be incel (involuntarily celibate, i.e., can’t get laid – they need a word for this?). He is generally obsessive, claiming to masturbate dozens of times per day and fixated over women. His calmer mentor appears to have his life under control: married, children, no drink in decades. The young man expresses envy, comparing marriage memorably to “pussy on tap”. (The mentor assures him that it’s not that easy.)

The young man seeks solace in religion, but the more skeptical mentor says that you can find God anywhere if that’s what you want to believe, even in a paper cup. At one point, the young man is hallucinating that his mentor is a rabbit. As their relationship evolves, the mentor becomes more controlling. When the young man develops a relationship with a woman, the mentor warns him that he is just exchanging one fixation for another and says he must wait until he is cured before venturing into romance. The young man is understandably peeved since it was the mentor who was encouraging him to find spiritual comfort in the first place. It then emerges that the woman who the young man is sleeping with might be the mentor’s wife. The men’s relationship begins to change as we discover that the mentor has not been entirely honest with the man – or himself.

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Crooked Cross

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  • Crooked Cross

2/18/26 (Wed)

A stunningly prescient UK drama from 1935, making its US debut (and its first production anywhere since 1937). The invaluable Mint Theater, which specializes in unearthing forgotten dramas, had made it available for streaming through this weekend, and I happened to read about it just in time. Having coincidentally just watched The City Without Jews from the same era, I find it pretty clear that no one could be ignorant of what was going on in Germany at the time, though there was presumably still a September 10th mentality that left the genocidal murders beyond imagination.

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Madame de Sade (サド侯爵夫人)

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  • サド侯爵夫人 (Madame de Sade)

1/18/26 (Sun), Tokyo

Mishima Yukio’s typically talky drama has its fans: it was selected by Japanese critics back in 1994 as the nation’s best play of the postwar era. (Mishima tied as best writer with the equally prolific Inoue Hisashi of Living With Father fame.) It was written in 1965, just five years before the author’s shocking seppuku – which I mention only because director Miyamoto Amon has decided to include this irrelevant fact as the first line in this production, spoken portentously by the actor who will play the servant (after he has stood facing us on the dark stage for several minutes of utter silence). A starry West End production some years back put critics to sleep, though a Swedish rendering by Ingmar Bergman, available on YouTube, is held in some esteem.

This production had two selling points. One, the six-woman show is played by an all-male cast, a technique that Japanese directors turn to occasionally. Second, the lead, Narimiya Hiroki, is making his comeback after abruptly quitting show business several years earlier over horrific media bullying regarding his private life. (As it happens, Higashide Masahiro, who plays the horny countess, is himself coming off an adultery scandal, which somehow feels appropriate for this piece.)

The author based the work on the historical fact that the Marquise de Sade waited devotedly for 12 years for her famously demented husband to be released from prison, only to refuse to see him ever again once he was finally out. The play examines this through the lives of six women, each representing a different side of French society (wifely devotion, social status, religion, etc). Continue reading →

Shoulderpads

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  • Shoulderpads

12/7/25 (Sun)

A spoofy retelling of the classic Night on the Galactic Railroad by children’s writer Miyazawa Kenji. The selling point here, as seen in the eye-catching poster, is the unusual costume design, nothing but a shoulder pad covering the performers’ neither regions. I’m always suspicious of shows relying on a gimmick, but it had strong reviews at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival (not necessarily in itself the best indicator of quality) and, even better, was only an hour long. Continue reading →

Suddenly Last Summer (1959 film), Suddenly Last Summer (1993 BBC)

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  • Suddenly, Last Summer (1959 film), 7/2/25 (Wed)
  • Suddenly Last Summer (1993 BBC), 7/3/25 (Thurs)

I learned after watching Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s wild and starry movie version of Tennessee Williams’ one-act play, filmed only a year after its off Broadway debut, that the stage show itself was presented more or less unchanged on the BBC many years later. That comparison was too tempting to pass up.

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