From live-streams of new plays to classics from the archive, here are some of the top shows online now or coming soon
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s phenomenal, Pulitzer prize-winning musical about the “10-dollar founding father without a father” was filmed over three nights in New York in 2016 with the original Broadway cast. Slated for a 2021 cinema release, it has been fast-tracked on to the Disney+ streaming service. It’s directed by Thomas Kail, who staged the musical, and according to Miranda gives “everyone the best seat in the house”. Watch it once and, to quote Jonathan Groff’s frothing King George III, You’ll Be Back. Read the full, five-star review.
In July, a group of Yorkshire theatre companies – organised by the brilliant Tutti Frutti – came together for a citywide outdoor children’s festival, Live Little Stories for Leeds. Unlimited Theatre’s production How I Hacked My Way Into Space, performed by Jon Spooner, is now available to watch online until 27 August. In his intergalactic shed, Spooner tells how he accidentally set up a space agency. The result is a funny and warmly inspiring space oddity for families. Funded by Leeds 2023.
Edinburgh fringe has been cancelled but here’s a three-week online alternative: comedy, theatre and music performed by a lineup of fringe stars, streaming live from sheds. There’s one built at Edinburgh’s mighty Traverse, one at Soho theatre, and some performers will be squeezing into their own garden sheds. The “shed-ule” includes Gary McNair, Casey Jay Andrews, Yolanda Mercy, Tim Crouch and many more. There’s even room for duos: Sara Pascoe and Steen Raskopoulos, Rosie Jones and Helen Bauer, and Michael Patrick and Oisín Kearney, creators of My Left Nut.
Laura Lindow’s new play explores experiences of the universal credit system, drawing on a study focusing on its impact in Gateshead and Newcastle that suggested it has increased depression, anxiety and suicide risk. A rehearsed reading of Credit, recorded at Newcastle’s Alphabetti theatre, will be streamed on 16 September, followed by two panel events featuring the Guardian’s social policy editor Patrick Butler.
Now in its sixth year, the festival goes online this summer with a series of performances by artists based in the south west of England. There are dramas about artificial intelligence, dystopias and failed relationships; a poetic short film that asked black people what freedom means to them; an acrobatic take on lockdown life; and a comedy showcase. Performances are streamed “as live” and available to watch again on YouTube until the end of August.
Pitlochry Festival theatre’s series of audio dramas, podcasts and short films brings together more than 20 British playwrights and poets, including Timberlake Wertenbaker, Peter Arnott, Jo Clifford, Hannah Khalili and Chinonyerem Odimba. Released weekly on Saturdays until 21 November, these new pieces are inspired by the River Tay and its surrounding landscape. Each is performed by one of PFT’s 2020 summer season cast, who will stage them together in a festival when the theatre reopens.
In 2019, the married couple Frauke Requardt and Daniel Oliver toured a performance called Dadderrs, which featured audience interaction and participation. Now, in a collaboration with film-maker Susanne Dietz, the piece has been reimagined, filmed during lockdown. Expect songs, balloons and a double-headed pantomime llama. Available until 21 August. Read the full review.
One year on from his award-winning run in Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, Andrew Scott returns to the Old Vic in London to perform a new livestreamed play. Three Kings was written for the Sherlock and Fleabag star by Stephen Beresford as part of the In Camera series. Scott will perform to an empty auditorium for the performances, which have been delayed as he undergoes a minor operation. Dates TBC.
In the internet age, “we’re surrounded by things we can never erase,” says teenager Kemi. But does that lead to a failure to commit? Matthew Morrison’s new play, Dance, is told through a series of vlogs and follows the relationship between the bullied Kemi and her dad, exploring the impact of social media on mental health. Directed by Charlotte Peters and starring Shonagh Marie and Tim Treloar, it’s released by the Soho Poly.
Ben Weatherill’s play is set in the year 2025 when a flood has left Britain in a state of emergency. Originally planned for a stage production, it is now a three-part audio drama directed by Alex Brown and featuring teenage actors from the Almeida Young Company, who recorded their parts in isolation during lockdown. Released as part of Shifting Tides, the Almeida’s digital festival about the climate emergency, aimed at and created with 14-25-year-olds. Read the full review.
Miriam Margolyes stars in this short play by Louise Coulthard, exploring dementia in lockdown. It is based on Coulthard’s debut drama, Cockamamy, an award-winner at the Edinburgh fringe in 2017. The playwright also co-stars, along with Amit Shah, and the film is directed by Michael Fentiman. Released on 6 August and available until 30 September, it’s free to view but donations are encouraged in support of Dementia UK.
The Way Out, a single-take, 40-minute variety film, invites viewers to follow Omid Djalili through the mysterious, majestic and mundane corners of the phoenix-like Battersea Arts Centre. The film is part of the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine programme on iPlayer, which includes Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s five-star show Revisor; Michael Clark’s deliriously thrilling to a simple, rock’n’roll … song; Corey Baker’s mini Swan Lake, performed in dancers’ baths; a selection of Shakespeare from the RSC and the Globe; Northern Ballet’s Dracula; and physical theatre company Gecko’s debut feature film Institute, about what it means to care.
Sharon D Clarke has portrayed a long line of memorable characters but this is something else. In a new short play by Bernardine Evaristo, directed by Adrian Lester, Clarke speaks for the National Health Service and those who work for it, reflecting on the NHS’s past and future. As she proudly says: “I am one of the best things that has ever happened.” First, Do No Harm is part of a series celebrating the NHS entitled The Greatest Wealth, curated for the Old Vic by Lolita Chakrabarti. The Old Vic is also pioneering socially distanced live performances and rehearsed readings as well as archive recordings of past productions.
Slam poet and playwright Zodwa Nyoni was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in Yorkshire. The locations are combined in her vivid 2016 monologue, in which Lladel Bryant plays Ishmael, a young gay Zimbabwean who flees homophobic violence in his home country and seeks asylum in the UK where he is dispersed to Leeds. Alex Chisholm’s hour-long production, available on YouTube, was recorded at the Arcola theatre in London.
The all-male theatre company, known for touring open-air Shakespeare productions around the UK, has postponed its Macbeth until next year but shared two past productions online: The Tempest, staged in 2018, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, presented last year to mark the company’s 15th birthday. They encourage you to recreate the spirit of their productions at home – “whether it is on a picnic blanket in your living room or under the stars wrapped up warm” – and share the results on social media.
Quite simply one of 2019’s most celebrated and momentous stagings of Shakespeare. Adjoa Andoh stars as Richard and co-directs, with Lynette Linton, a superb cast entirely comprising women of colour including Shobna Gulati and Ayesha Dharker. An English history play vividly staged for today in the Globe’s candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, perfect for a play full of plotting. Available to watch on YouTube.
Directed by Jennifer Tang and Anthony Lau, this series of 10 short dramas by Moongate Productions and Omnibus theatre explores the pandemic of racism exacerbated by Covid-19 and enacted against Britain’s east and south-east Asian communities. With pieces by writers including Oladipo Agboluaje, Nemo Martin and Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen, it amounts to two hours of theatre on film that incorporates animation, poetry, music and dance. Available on YouTube. Read the full review.
The National Theatre of Scotland was among the first theatres to announce a lockdown programme of work responding to the pandemic. Its growing collection of short films is designed to offer audiences “hope and joy”. There’s Brian Cox as Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh detective John Rebus, Two Doors Down’s Jonathan Watson as a shipyard electrician suppering from exposure to asbestos and Kate Dickie as brilliant as ever in a monologue by Jenni Fagan. The lineup of Scottish talent is extraordinary – Tam Dean Burn, Rona Munro and Douglas Henshall all contribute – and don’t miss Janey Godley’s two-hander with her adorable sausage dog. Read the full review.
The ever-enterprising company Stan’s Cafe have put together a season of lockdown work including a version of their 2013 show The Anatomy of Melancholy, re-conceived as 35 short split-screen films. They also have a new production, For Quality Purposes, which is set in a call centre, directed by James Yarker and devised by the company specifically to be performed online. It promises humour and pathos as it explores the dynamic between call-centre worker and customer. Online from 11 August.
One of the major dance productions cut short by the coronavirus crisis was Matthew Bourne’s tour of The Red Shoes, his rapturously received version of the Powell and Pressburger film. But Bourne’s company New Adventures has unveiled a charming 12-minute film version, performed by the cast from home – among children’s toys in their living rooms, on tables, in gardens and backyards, and in the kitchen. The costumes include football kits and, in one case, a couple of towels.
This is a site-specific triple bill with world premieres from three superb dance companies – making it one of autumn’s hottest online shows. Studio Wayne McGregor, Northern Ballet and Gary Clarke Company unveil pieces about isolation, choreographed by Jordan James Bridge, Daniel De Andrade and Gary Clarke respectively, and performed around the Lawrence Batley theatre’s Grade II listed building in Huddersfield. Available to watch from 28 September to 18 October; tickets cost £12.
Antoinette Nwandu’s blistering, Beckettian play about police brutality was filmed at Chicago’s Steppenwolf theatre by Spike Lee for this 75-minute version, which crackles with humour, tension and tragedy. Lee skilfully weaves the audience, and the world outside the theatre, into a work that our critic Arifa Akbar gives five stars. Available on Amazon Prime. Read the full review.
With wonder, wit and sophisticated storytelling, performance poet Toby Thompson creates a beautiful show for over-sevens. Thompson steps in and out of his version of Hermann Hesse’s fairytale Faldum, riffing with the young audience and spinning a handful of jazz LPs. I Wish I Was a Mountain embraces big questions about time and contentment. This is a short but profound show, directed by Lee Lyford, hatched by the Egg theatre’s Incubator development programme and cleverly designed by Anisha Fields. Read the full review.
A co-production by Zest Theatre and Half Moon, the two-hander What Once Was Ours follows the relationship between a pair of half-siblings and draws on real conversations with Britain’s young people in the wake of the Brexit vote. Their voices can be heard amid the conversations between Callum (Jaz Hutchins) and Katie (Pippa Beckwith). Available free online. Read the full review.
Obsession! Haunting ballads! A shattered chandelier! And musical theatre’s most famous mask … Enjoy one of the world’s most successful shows, presented at the Royal Albert Hall in 2011, with Ramin Karimloo as the Phantom and Sierra Boggess as Christine, to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The film is available to rent on Amazon. It was also streamed as part of The Shows Must Go On, a series offering a different Andrew Lloyd Webber musical each week.
The Cure’s Robert Smith tried to laugh about it, cover it all up with lies, because – all together now – boys don’t cry. A powerful piece of rhyme-packed storytelling for the over-eights, Boys Don’t is delivered by four compelling performers and based on real-life experiences of the expectations placed on “little men” throughout the generations before they even get to the playground. Presented by Half Moon theatre, it’s a Papertale production in association with Apples and Snakes, staged at Brighton festival in 2018.
Is there a more fitting playwright for our current moment of isolation, uncertainty and endurance than Beckett? In this production, filmed at the marvellously atmospheric Bouffes du Nord in Paris in 2015, Peter Brook directs five Beckett shorts with a cast of three (Jos Houben, Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter). The production comprises Rough for Theatre I, Rockaby, Neither, Come and Go and Act Without Words II. Feel the rising panic and despair in Rockaby as the solitary, wide-eyed Hunter recounts a descent through long, lonely days.
At first sight they could be Pina Bausch’s dancers: a procession of performers wearing smart suits and enigmatic smiles, gliding across a stage filled with apples. Bausch’s company memorably balanced apples on their heads in Palermo Palermo, but as Smashed is created by those juggling supremos Gandini, the fruit is mostly in motion here. Their Bausch homage has the same childlike games, adult fantasy and bruised humour of the German choreographer’s work. Smashed is crisp, fresh and full of flavour. You may never look at an apple in the same way again …
You have to hunt to find full theatre productions for very young audiences online, so here’s a little treat. To mark World Day of Theatre for Children on 20 March the lovely Egg in Bath released their wintry 40-minute tale for the under-fours.
Travel restrictions needn’t prevent you from enjoying international theatre online. Paris’s esteemed Odéon has released its 2018 production of Molière’s satirical 1662 comedy of manners and cuckoldry. Claude Duparfait stars as the foolish Arnolphe, and Stéphane Braunschweig directs. English subtitles available, évidemment. Read the full review.