I won't soon forget, for instance, the first glimpse of the furry, pint-sized Peruvian otherwise known as Paddington bear in Paddington the Musical, that rare homegrown musical painstakingly nurtured over time that spoke to the effort paid in bringing Michael Bond's creation to the stage. Amidst the bouquets that have quite properly been thrown the direction of the show's creatives - Luke Sheppard (director), Tom Fletcher (composer-lyricist), and Jessica Swale (book writer) chief amongst them - one has to credit the astonishing care that was taken across six years or more by producers Sonia Friedman and Eliza Lumley to ensure that this bear truly was one worth playgoers taking to their hearts. Not many agents of renewal come defined by a duffle coat.
No less breathtaking was the reveal of the forest indicated in the title of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical Into the Woods, but never before shown in such detailed greenery as in Tom Scutt's design for the Bridge Theatre revival of that 1987 show - itself brought to the stage by Jordan Fein, whose forensically detailed Fiddler on the Roof, transferred from the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, to the Barbican, spoke volumes more about exile and dispossession than most headlines can manage. Amongst a name-heavy cast, a special shout out is due Jamie Parker's surpassingly moving turn as the Baker, a kindred spirit to the aggrieved husband he played no less memorably in Next to Normal, another Broadway musical seen not long ago in London
The wondrous Rosalie Craig (pictured above, photo c. Johan Persson) took the supporting role of Oscar Levant's wife, June, in the London transfer of the Broadway hit Good Night, Oscar and paid tremulous witness to the kind of damage that must be ruinous to live with. Her Tony-winning leading man Sean Hayes responded in turn by upping his game, though it's the final image of Craig alone onstage that I am revisiting in my mind still - a spouse all but done in by the cost to the soul of compassion. And the transfer from the Royal Court to the West End of Mark Rosenblatt's deservedly laureled Giant scored a casting coup in the addition to Nicholas Hytner's company of the American performer Aya Cash, whose pre-interval sparring match with John Lithgow's fierce but not entirely unforgiving Roald Dahl stunned the audience into silence.
So, too, did Felicity Kendal in the Hampstead's end-of-year revival of Indian Ink, the onetime muse of the late, hugely lamented Tom Stoppard required by the text to pay obeisance both to the grave of a character whom this very actress created 30 years ago and, by extension, to the play's own creator, a wordsmith whose passing truly exists in a realm beyond words.
More than one solo show made something momentous of the accretion of granular detail. Alaa Shehada's wonderful The Horse of Jenin, opening next month on the larger mainstage of the Bush following a run in its studio space, roped the audience into a quasi-improvisatory give-and-take, an unnamed New Yorker at my performance caught in the actor-comedian's crossfire. But the tone shifted for keeps once we got on to the reason for being of a play about what it's like to grow up amid the grim reality of a warzone. Insane Asylum Seekers, also at the Bush, made something artful out of anxiety in the jointly empathic hands of playwright Laith Elzubaidi and the show's lone performer, Tommy Sim'aan, himself British-Iraqi-Belgian.
Brian Watkins's brilliant Weather Girl, a vehicle for his girlfriend Julia McDermott seen at Soho Theatre and then Off Broadway, wrongfooted audiences with good cheer that gave way to a society, and psyche, on the verge of collapse. As regards onward lives for studio productions, hopes are high for a further airing of Sophia Chetin-Leuner's Royal Court debut, Porn Play, whose sexually suggestive set provided an apposite platform for leading lady Ambika Mod's freefall into the rampaging recesses of a mind in meltdown. Mod, meanwhile, was one of five performers who rotated in and out of the return engagement of Jonny Donahoe and Duncan Macmillan's Every Brilliant Thing, a solo play that dares to point a way forward from depression and that will have Daniel Radcliffe as its Broadway ringmaster before too long. A very different but no less dazzling ringmaster can still be found at the Gielgud Theatre in the brilliant form of a barnstorming Simon Lipkin's in Oliver! - his is the best Fagin I've seen, which at this point is saying a lot.
A so-so year for Shakespeare delivered two gems in dramatically contrasting spaces. Jennifer Tang's gender-flipped Cymbeline at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare's Globe foregrounded female solidarity amidst the whacked-out landscape of this sometimes preposterously wide-ranging play. Across the Thames, Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston stormed the vast reaches of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to land a Much Ado About Nothing that was frolicsome, to be sure, but also properly moving where it counted most - in this rending comedy's central partnership of Hiddleston's gallant Benedick with Atwell's wary but hugely winning Beatrice. Jamie Lloyd, the director, was at his most dynamic here.
A previous Benedick for the ages, Charles Edwards, made a welcome return to the stage in the Almeida's quietly devastating adaptation of The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst's era-defining novel filleted for the stage by Jack Holden (pictured above, photo c. Pamela Raith), who in turn bookended the year with his own bravura show, KENREX, set well away from Tory Britain in the true-crime climes of Skidmore, Missouri. And while one might have thought Holden would cast himself in Beauty's signature role of the young, questing Nick Guest, that role in fact was cunningly played by Jasper Talbot as a keen-eyed witness to Hollinghurst's world of shadowy sex and gathering self-doubt.
Talbot was seen earlier in the year playing the errant son of a rattled Rosamund Pike in Inter Alia, author Suzie Miller's companion piece of sorts to her breakaway London and Broadway hit, Prima Facie (and due for a West End transfer in the spring). Pike's performance seems destined for awards, as do any of the impassioned leads of Ivo van Hove's taut, tightly focused revival of All My Sons, a morality tale from 1947 that speaks in every way to our time: all credit to Bryan Cranston for renewing his commitment to the London theatre, and for bringing Marianne-Jean Baptiste and Paapa Essiedu along for the ride.
A seismically moving Brendan Gleeson, age 70, decided it was time to hit the West End and did so by charging up a mighty revival of Conor McPherson's The Weir, a 1997 play whose spooky maneuverings pale next to its commitment to compassion. (McPherson was represented four times over on London stages this year, The Weir the pick of a crop that fell away dramatically once one got to his entirely superfluous adaptation of The Hunger Games, a cash grab rivaled only by the dreary Disney musical, Hercules.) And while seasonal good humour suggests one pass politely over the year's most egregious duds, I can't not mention the brutally uninspired and self-deflating musical, Burlesque, and a new play, My Master Builder, intended as a vehicle for Ewan McGregor that turned Ibsen into an unlikely forerunner of Mills and Boon.
I was far more engaged, some challenging accents notwithstanding, by the National's Playboy of the Western World, which spoke volumes about the dangers of celebrity worship, a topic all too pertinent today. The latest Hamlet at that same address, directed by Robert Hastie, offered in Francesca Mills an Ophelia for the ages - robust, raunchy, and by no means ready to give up without a fight on both life and love. Staying with the National, David Eldridge's scorchingly acted two-hander End, with Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves, was at no point more powerful than at its very beginning, which follows in the direct wake of a medical bombshell. David Lan's The Land of the Living, End's predecessor in the Dorfman, laid bare an intriguing slice of WW2 history that came with a document-filled set from Miriam Buether that one was encouraged to comb through during the interval. (You don't get that at Stranger Things, which was also directed by the protean Stephen Daldry.)
Saving the very best for last, I was poleaxed by the Royal Opera's Festen, which managed to surpass the highly commendable film and play of the same name: Mark-Anthony Turnage and Lee Hall have created an instant classic. And Jamie Lloyd's mind-bending revival of the 1978 Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical Evita took Lloyd's previous take on the same show in Regent's Park and ramped it up for an age newly attuned to the seductions, not to mention the sideswipes to civilisation, of autocracy. (Let's also call out choreographer Fabian Aloise's ensemble, whose collective writhings and undulations were of a highly drilled order that I've not experienced before.)
Led from the front by the jointly fearless Rachel Zegler and Diego Andres Rodriguez, two American visitors to the London stage both in superlative form, the production did justice to the "circus" (in Rice's own lyric) of demagoguery then and now, all the while delivering a show of such devouring bravura and brio that you were sent reeling into the summer night.
Below are the 10 productions from 2025, in alphabetical order though with Evita leading the pack, from which I am reeling still.
Cymbeline, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Evita, London Palladium
Festen, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Fiddler on the Roof (in its transfer), Barbican
Here We Are, National Theatre/Lyttelton
KENREX, Southwark Playhouse/The Other Palace
Much Ado About Nothing, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
Paddington the Musical, Savoy
Weather Girl, Soho Theatre
The Weir, Harold Pinter Theatre
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