Jermyn Street - New Season

Impressive, a great little Theatre punching way above its weight and showing a lot of the big players how it should be done.


DRAMA
Our new Carne Deputy Director, Ebenezer Bamgboye, reopens the theatre with the first revival of Biyi Bandele's award-winning play Two Horsemen. Our friends at the Watermill Theatre share their wonderful production of Lone Flyer, about pilot Amy Johnson. Keith Waterhouse's Mr and Mrs Nobody is his hilarious adaptation of The Diary of a Nobody.

SOLO
These nine plays for one performer are a banquet of delights. They include work from our Creative Associates Somebody Jones and Khadifa Wong (HOW I LEARNED TO SWIM), brilliant actors Hannah Morrish (Hole), Helen Reuben (Saviour), Jack Klaff (The Whole Shebang), Sophia Eleni (On Arriving), and Robert Mountford (Vagabonds - My Phil Lynott Odyssey). Simon Evans from the BBC's Staged makes his JST debut with Leaves. The Girl Who Was Very Good at Lying is a comedic treat, and Hannah Kumari's football drama ENG-ER-LAND, could hardly be more timely!

CABARET
Come taste the wine, come hear the band... These shows include the music and comedy we've all been waiting for to celebrate the end of a long winter! Performers include Stefan Bednarczyk with Flanders and Swann and Tom Lehrer, Issy van Randwyck with Dazzling Divas, Rosemary Ashe with Adorable Dora, and Terence Blacker with The Shock of the Old. There's comedy from Katie Arnstein in her Sexy Lamp and Bicycles and Fish, and from Sudha Bhuchar in Evening Conversations, a tribute to Joyce Grenfell in Ode to Joyce. It all kicks off with a family musical, HouseFire.

CLASSICS
Great stories, wonderfully told. Jatinder Verma and Tom Littler stage readings of The Mahabharata and The Odyssey. Michael Pennington returns with his acclaimed shows Anton Chekhov and Sweet William. 'Rockstar classicist' Natalie Haynes brings two very clever standup shows about the ancient world. Fans of William Blake can't miss Blake: Letters from Heaven and Hell, lovers of Pinter can delight in James Hayes’ Mac and More, Shakespeareans should flock to The Rape of Lucrece, and if you're in the gutter dreaming of the stars, book Wilde Without the Boy. Christopher Kent and Gamal Khamis bring the extraordinary Love and War Trilogy. And if you're a fan of magical realism, check out Love in the Time of Corona.

SHOWCASES
Discover the stars of the future in these four Showcases of our Creative Associates.

POETRY
The Live Canon Ensemble perform six amazing sets of poetry at Sunday teatimes including poetry of the Romantics, the Metaphysicals, Women on War, the Abolition, Science Fiction, and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Believe they are on sale now.

They got Covid bail-out money but not that much, £90k I seem to think, but are spreading it widely across lots of freelancers. Just shows what an enthusiastic creative AD can do (I’m looking at you Doran).

I’ve seen that Pinter piece before, NT 1982 I think, it is quite amusing. Also the Pennington Chekhov show from around the same era.

Fantastic programme.

It still might be, these are mostly shorter pieces for the reopening season. It was their intention to bring back Tempest. I hope they also revive their planned production of Three Sisters.

Tom Littler was planning to direct Three Sisters. As his production of Miss Julie was a sensation in the same space I thought it should be good. One of the most notable productions of Three Sisters, directed by Treveor Nunn, was on the small stage of The Other Place lit by candles to generate that sense of claustrophobia and remoteness. 

Two Horsemen

Took my time walking from St Pancras to the Theatre soaking up central London and just enjoying being out and about, whilst still relatively quiet it was good to see London waking up and am sure by the weekend it will be significantly busier.

On entering the Theatre everyone was in good spirits and plenty of conversations sparked up in the audience as we all enjoyed being in a Theatre again and could not contain our excitement.

The play itself is a complex two hander where the stories swirled, twisted upon themselves and never really settled into a linear narrative and honestly a play I did not fully understand and one that requires concentration and glad I saw it live as at home the distractions would reduce the immersive impact required that only live Theatre can provide.

The acting was top notch and the characters often morphed into each other adding to the confusion and personally believe there was only one character and a play I would dearly love to discuss further as I’m sure every one of us there came out with a different perspective.

An enjoyable return and even though socially distanced and the wearing of masks the pleasure of being there greatly outweighed any inconvenience.

I see they also have "Relatively Speaking" re-scheduled for later in the year. I had tickets for that previously. One of Ayckbourn's very early plays but in my opinion one of the ones that will stay in the repertoire the longest.

Watched the Mac and More - entertaining, fringe feel,

Season wasn't a success it seems

My assumption on the Almeida 3 booking periods is they don’t know how to price it. Three periods also reflects their recent practice of pricing high at the start and end of a run and lower in the middle.

On JST, some of the events in that season would not typically have got an audience there anyway.

Good to hear, seeing it in a couple of weeks.