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Star debuts and happy returns: theatre, dance and comedy in 2020

Theatre

Beckett Triple Bill

Trevor Nunn’s trio of short Beckett plays dwells on ageing and the unreliability of memory, kicking off with Krapp’s Last Tape starring James Hayes, followed by Eh Joe, the first drama Beckett wrote for television, which features the voice of Billie Whitelaw’s mentee Lisa Dwan opposite Niall Buggy. In The Old Tune, David Threlfall and Buggy play elderly men reminiscing about their lives. Separately at the Old Vic, a Beckett double bill includes Endgame with a star-studded cast (Alan Cumming, Daniel Radcliffe and Jane Horrocks) alongside a rarely staged short play, Rough for Theatre II.
Jermyn Street theatre, London, 15 January-8 February. Old Vic, London, 27 January to 28 March

The Welkin

Maxine Peake and Ria Zmitrowicz star in Lucy Kirkwood’s play about a woman waiting to be hanged for murder in 1759. When she claims she is pregnant, a jury of 12 matrons from local households in rural Suffolk is enlisted to decide whether she is telling the truth. Zmitrowicz plays the suspected murderer while Peake is a midwife and the woman’s only supporter against a baying mob.
National Theatre, London, 15 January-23 May. Streaming as part of National Theatre Live on 21 May

Leopoldstadt

Any new play by Tom Stoppard is a big event but this has added buzz for being his most personal. Set in the Jewish quarter of Vienna in 1900, it follows a prosperous Jewish family who have fled the pogroms. Stoppard, who left Czechoslovakia as a child refugee and whose grandparents died in Nazi concentration camps, says it has taken him a year to write it, though the “gestation was far longer”. Patrick Marber directs.
Wyndham’s theatre, London, 25 January-13 June

I Think We Are Alone

The Frantic Assembly company celebrates its 25th anniversary with this piece, co-directed by Scott Graham and Kathy Burke. Sally Abbott’s play is billed as a “delicate and uplifting story about our fragility, resilience and need for love and forgiveness”.
Theatre Royal, Plymouth, 3-8 February. Then touring

Far Away

Twenty years on from its premiere, Caryl Churchill’s surreal dystopia seems ever more resonant. Its world is riven with environmental chaos, ethnic cleansing and a growing disregard for humanity, all of which are wound around the sinister goings-on at a hat factory. Revived by Lyndsey Turner, it stars Bafta-winning Jessica Hynes as well as Aisling Loftus and Simon Manyonda. Graduate students from the London College of Fashion create the extravagant headwear for the hat parade scene.
Donmar Warehouse, London, 6 February-28 March

Pass Over

Antoinette Nwandu’s play was inspired by Waiting for Godot, although there are not only shades of Vladimir and Estragon but also enslaved African Americans of the plantations. When it was staged at the Lincoln Center in 2018, the New York Times thought it conjured a “vivid world of injustice”. Its UK premiere stars Paapa Essiedu, Alexander Eliot, and Gershwyn Eustache Jr, and is directed by Indhu Rubasingham.
Kiln theatre, London, 13 February-21 March

Back to the Future: The Musical

The film about time-travelling teenager Marty McFly became a cultural phenomenon in 1985. This musical’s production team includes Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, who wrote the screenplay. Some of the film’s songs are kept in (The Power of Love, Johnny B Goode) while the Grammy award-winning Alan Silvestri, who wrote its score, composes new music and lyrics with Glen Ballard. The Tony award-winning Roger Bart stars as Doc Brown and McFly is played by Olly Dobson.
Manchester Opera House, 20 February-17 May. Then West End

Run Sister Run

Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of Little Women has made the tender, complicated drama between sisters fashionable again. The playwright Chloe Moss probed one kind of unbreakable bond between women in her award-winning drama about former cellmates, This Wide Night. Now she brings sisterhood to the stage to examine its tensions, intimacies and dependencies through Connie and Ursula, whose stories are followed over four decades. A co-production between Sheffield theatre, Soho theatre and Paines Plough, directed by Charlotte Bennett.
Sheffield theatres, 27 February-21 March; then Soho theatre, London, 25 March to 2 May

Freedom Hi 自由閪

This is a synthesis of theatre and performance art made by Hong Kong artists based in the UK as well as British east Asian artists, during the autumn protests in Hong Kong by the pro-democracy movement. It aims to reflect on the right to protest as well as the gendered experience of political resistance, and combines personal testimony with geopolitical commentary in “an act of total theatre”.
Vault festival, London, 10-15 March

Related: Enter stage right: 12 theatre stars for 2020

All of Us

One of the most exciting debuts of the year is Francesca Martinez’s first play. A standup comedian who describes herself as “wobbly” (she has cerebral palsy), Martinez is a dedicated campaigner for disability rights. Her drama explores the effects of austerity and the struggle for those who don’t fit in.
National Theatre, London, 18 March-16 May

Milky Peaks

A fictional town in Snowdonia is hit by rightwing populism and dark machinations when it receives a nomination for Britain’s best town award in Seiriol Davies’ musical comedy about community, division and a mysterious force lurking in the mountains. Hailed as a modern Welsh fable, it features “three lost souls and a shabby drag queen” who must save the town’s soul.
Theatr Clwyd, Mold, 20 March-11 April. Then touring Wales

Mrs Puntila and Her Man Matti

Bertolt Brecht’s class comedy featuring a capitalist landowner and his chauffeur is given a gender switch by the crime novelist Denise Mina. Directed by DOT Theatre Istanbul’s Murat Daltaban, it stars Elaine C Smith as the landowner with a split personality: unerringly avaricious when sober, spectacularly generous when drunk.
Royal Lyceum theatre, Edinburgh, 28 February to 21 March. Then at Citizens theatre, Glasgow, 25 March-11 April

Orlando

Six years ago, Alice Birch staged Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again as part of an RSC series written by women to draw the attentions of the present generation to radicalism in the past. This latest work may be seen as an extension of that in spirit: Birch and longtime collaborator Katie Mitchell adapt Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel which deals with the very contemporary theme of gender identity and fluidity. Live cinema meets performance in this edgy iteration of the novel, performed in German with English surtitles.
Barbican, London, 2-5 April

Testmatch

This study of sport, gender politics and the legacy of colonialism revolves around two cricket matches between England and India. In the present day, the Women’s Cricket World Cup is held up by rain at Lord’s, while a match in 19th-century, Raj-administered Calcutta sparks tensions between coloniser and colonised. Kate Atwell’s play premiered in San Francisco in 2018 and she has been hailed as an exciting new voice in American theatre.
Theatre Royal Bath, 2 April-9 May

4000 Miles

Timothée Chalamet, Oscar-nominated for Call Me By Your Name, makes his West End debut alongside Eileen Atkins in a revival of Amy Herzog’s 2011 drama. It’s about a young man’s cross-country cycle trip.
Old Vic, London, 6 April-23 May

Projekt Europa

The RSC celebrates our relationship with Europe in three productions from leading European theatre-makers. Maria Åberg and Judith Gerstenberg’s adaptation of the satirical Czech novel Europeana compresses 100 years of European history into “a narrative that collides the invention of the bra with the tragedy of the Holocaust”. There’s also a radical staging of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt by Barbara Frey, and Blindness and Seeing, based on two novels by the Portuguese Nobel prize-winner José Saramago, adapted by Tiago Rodrigues.
Swan theatre and the Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon. 9 April -26 September

Castle Lennox

This new play by Linda McLean follows a young autistic girl living in Lennox Castle, a Scottish hospital designed for the incarceration of the “feeble-minded” that housed hundreds of disabled children and adults from the 1930s until its closure in 2002. The girl’s story is loosely based on personal experiences collected from a similar home and the production, with songs by MJ McCarthy, will be performed by Lung Ha, a company of differently-abled artists.
Royal Lyceum theatre, Edinburgh, 1-2 May

The House of Shade

Beth Steel has won plaudits for staging powerful stories of working-class lives. In 2014, her play Wonderland dramatised the lives of coal miners during the 1984 strike. This latest work is a broader, more epic survey of working-class Britain. Directed by Blanche McIntyre, it follows a family over half a century of social and political upheavals in a northern town and explores the evolutions of the labour movement.
Almeida, London, 18 May-27 June

Paradise

Kate Tempest is a rapper, poet and polymath who has published award-winning poetry collections, acclaimed albums and a novel. Now there is a first play, too; billed as a “potent and dynamic reimagining” of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, it stars Lesley Sharp as the eponymous Greek hero and master archer. The story revolves around Philoctetes and Odysseus, once comrades but now enemies.
June, National Theatre, London

Hamlet

In 2012, Cush Jumbo earned an Olivier award nomination for her role as Mark Antony in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar. She has since worked widely across screen and stage, including the US TV series The Good Wife, and has written her own one-woman show. Now she gives us “a new kind of Hamlet” in a production directed by Greg Hersov, her long-standing collaborator.
Young Vic, London, 6 July-20 August

To Kill a Mockingbird

This is Aaron Sorkin’s maverick adaptation of Harper Lee’s bestselling novel about racism in 1930s Alabama that her estate did not initially want staged because it allegedly deviated too greatly from the original story. Directed by Bartlett Sher, it comes to London in the 60th anniversary of the book’s publication.
Gielgud theatre, London, from 21 May

The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams’ autobiographical play about family love and its clash with creative freedom is perennially popular, with two major productions to be staged this year. This one is arguably the starriest of recent times: Isabelle Huppert plays Amanda Wingfield, the faded Southern belle and mother to two grownup children. Ivo van Hove directs in a collaboration with Odéon–Théâtre de l’Europe. In French with English surtitles.
Barbican, London, 5-11 June

A Doll’s House

This hotly anticipated production of Ibsen’s play marks Jessica Chastain’s West End debut. Chastain is known for her work in films such as Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and The Help (which earned her an Oscar nomination) but she began her career on stage. Director Jamie Lloyd calls this “a bold reappraisal of Ibsen’s great masterpiece”.
Playhouse theatre, London, 10 June-5 September

Sunday in the Park With George

A garlanded musical meets a garlanded Hollywood star in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Pulitzer-winning masterpiece, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the French artist Georges Seurat, and Annaleigh Ashford as his lover. Originating at the New York City Center in 2016, it became one of the fastest-selling musicals on Broadway the following year. It is directed by the book writer’s niece, Sarna Lapine.
Savoy theatre, London, 11 June-5 September

Semmelweis

Mark Rylance had the idea of a drama based on the true story of a pioneering Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, who made a radical discovery that could save new mothers, only to have his sanity doubted by the medical profession. Written by Stephen Brown in collaboration with director Tom Morris and Rylance.
Bristol Old Vic, 13 June-25 July

The House of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

Seventeen years ago, Nicholas Hytner adapted Philip Pullman’s bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy at the National Theatre. Now he takes on the first in a prequel trilogy of fantasy novels, set 12 years earlier. It is adapted by Bryony Lavery with music composed by the Tony-nominated Grant Olding.
Bridge theatre, London, 11 July-10 October

Related: Vault festival 2020: comedy and theatre shows to see

Is God Is

Aleshea Harris won the American Playwriting Foundation award for this play in 2016. A modern myth about twin sisters who travel from the south to California to “exact righteous revenge”, it draws on influences that range from spaghetti westerns to hip-hop and Afropunk, and explores what it means to be black and female, alongside patricide and family dysfunction. It seems perfectly paired with Ola Ince, the director of acclaimed and edgy productions from Debris Stevenson’s Poet in Da Corner to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate.
Royal Court, London, 20 July-15 August

The Wife of Willesden

Zadie Smith published her debut novel, White Teeth, in 2000. Twenty years later comes her debut play: a reimagining of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath, which shed light on the role of women in the late middle ages and was the bawdiest of all the Canterbury Tales. Smith re-envisages Chaucer’s story in the west London borough where she was raised, raising questions about women’s place in society today.
Kiln theatre, London, December

Dance

Black Waters

Phoenix Dance Theatre’s artistic director Sharon Watson continues to tackle serious political stories through dance. This time it is two shameful incidents of British colonial history: the massacre of more than 130 African slaves aboard the Zong ship in 1781, and the incarceration of freedom fighters at Kala Pani prison in Raj-era India. Black Waters is, unusually, jointly created by three choreographers – Watson, Shambik Ghose and Mitul Sengupta – bringing a trio of perspectives to the stage.
Leeds Playhouse, 12-15 February. Then touring

Bluebeard

One of the late Pina Bausch’s legendary early works for Tanztheater Wuppertal, from 1977, remarkably never before performed in the UK. Here it gets a belated premiere (and the first staging anywhere for 29 years). It’s a disturbing piece, drawing loosely on Béla Bartók’s opera in its illustration of a murderously dysfunctional couple – the misery between men and women being one of Bausch’s enduring themes. Bluebeard is both more dancerly and more raw and radical than much of Bausch’s later work.
Sadler’s Wells, London, 12-15 February

Deluxe

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the BalletBoyz company. Back in 2000 it was a breakaway project for two ex-Royal Ballet dancers, Michael Nunn and William Trevitt; now it’s a strong company of young male dancers, as well as a launchpad for Nunn and Trevitt’s film-making. The company’s new stage show, Deluxe, features choreography from Shanghai-based Xie Xin and and a piece by Punchdrunk’s Maxine Doyle, set to live music from Mercury-nominated jazz saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi.
Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 1 March. Then touring.

Revisor

Choreographer Crystal Pite’s first collaboration with writer/actor Jonathon Young yielded arguably the best dance work of the century so far, Bettroffenheit. So hopes are exceedingly high for their new piece, Revisor, an ambitious revision of Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 farce The Government Inspector in which Pite and Young turn their hands to political satire. Early reviews suggest a clever, challenging and thought-provoking work.
Sadler’s Wells, London, 3-5 March

Black Marrow

If you’ve seen Thom Yorke and Paul Thomas Anderson’s short film Anima, you’ve already seen some of the choreography for Black Marrow, created by Damien Jalet and Iceland Dance Company’s artistic director Erna Ómarsdóttir. The cool Reykjavik company presents the full work, which asks urgent questions about humans’ reliance on oil.
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 21 March

Double Murder

The first show announced for 2020’s Brighton festival is a new creation from choreographer Hofesh Shechter that will play in a double bill with 2016’s Clowns and promises to be a foil for that piece’s unsettling energy. Meanwhile Shechter’s blisteringly talented apprentice company, Shechter II, celebrates the 10th anniversary of his acclaimed Political Mother by taking the work that once shredded speakers at Brixton Academy on an “unplugged” tour of smaller venues.
Brighton festival, 2-3 May

New Work for Goldberg Variations

Following years of obscurity, New York choreographer Pam Tanowitz leapt to the top of everyone’s must-see list when she brought her version of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets to London last May, with its rich textures and Cunningham-influenced lines. Goldberg Variations is the piece that preceded Four Quartets in 2016 and pushed Tanowitz into the spotlight in the US. Here it gets its European premiere, performed by seven dancers surrounding the grand piano of Simone Dinnerstein.
Barbican, London, 6-9 May

The Dante Project

A mega-project from choreographer Wayne McGregor and some stellar collaborators including composer Thomas Adès and artist Tacita Dean. McGregor dives into Dante’s Divine Comedy in an epic journey through purgatory and into paradise with, no doubt, his usual questing sense of physical and intellectual exploration. And while you’re booking Royal Ballet tickets, get one for Cathy Marston’s new piece The Cellist, about Jacqueline du Pré (17 Feb to 4 Mar).
Royal Opera House, London, 6 May-1 June

Curated by Carlos

Exciting times in Birmingham as Carlos Acosta takes over as artistic director at Birmingham Royal Ballet in January. The first taste of his programming comes in the summer at a festival celebrating this new chapter for BRB. Full details are still to be announced, but we know it features Acosta’s own spirited production of Don Quixote and a mixed bill that opens with a duet created by Spanish choreographer Goyo Montero for Acosta and the amazing Alessandra Ferri.
Birmingham Hippodrome, June

Singin’ in the Rain

Former Royal Ballet principal turned song-and-dance man Adam Cooper reprises his star turn as Don Lockwood, the Gene Kelly role in MGM classic Singin’ in the Rain. Jonathan Church’s joyful production originally opened in 2011 at Chichester Festival and played in the West End. It returns for a summer season at Sadler’s Wells, with Olivier award-nominated choreography from Andrew Wright and 14,000 litres of water on stage each night.
Sadler’s Wells, London, 24 July-30 August

Comedy

Jessica Fostekew

Who gets to decide what’s womanly? One of the breakout acts of 2019’s Edinburgh fringe, Fostekew made waves – and secured a Comedy award nomination – with her show Hench, about femininity and the muscular female body. Now touring, it’s full of no-nonsense attitude and big-hitting set pieces about the dieting industry, childbirth and Fostekew’s fraught relationship with her bolshy little boy.
Soho theatre, London, 6-25 January. Then touring

Trygve Wakenshaw

The New Zealand comic with the name as twisty as his loose-limbed body was last seen on these shores performing a double act with his own baby son. Now, as part of the London international mime festival, he returns – in response to a challenge from his countryman Thom Monckton – with a pared-back solo show featuring just one performer, one technician, one light, no text and a stage of only 1m2.
Soho theatre, London, 7-25 January

Josie Long

Josie Long’s standup shows are the equivalent of open-heart surgery – with the benefit that it’s her heart that’s open, not yours. Through a lens of politics, love life or now family, they chronicle the ebbs and flows of Long’s optimistic spirit – never more so than with Tender, her joyful latest about pregnancy and childbirth. It delighted Edinburgh audiences last summer, and now – with its blow-by-blow account of new motherhood and ruminations on child-rearing in an overheating world – it takes to the road.
Warwick Arts Centre, 23 January. Then touring

David Baddiel

David Baddiel.
On the frontier of social media … David Baddiel. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

His last solo show My Family: Not the Sitcom was one for the ages, a comical but heartfelt account of his parents’ eccentric lives that raised one’s eyebrows to the back of one’s neck and beyond. Now David Baddiel returns with a new one-man show, Trolls: Not the Dolls, about his adventures on the frontier of social media. It promises to be just as lurid.
Grand Theatre Swansea, 24 January. Then touring

Alexei Sayle

It seems like only yesterday we were hailing Alexei Sayle’s return to standup after 17 years away. In fact, it was seven years ago – and now he’s touring again, for the first time since (give or take the odd festival gig). More “dangerously political” laughs are promised from the man who put the punk into alternative comedy – before settling down to host recent Radio 4 hit Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar.
HOME Manchester, 31 January-1 February. Then touring

Anna and Helen

Sometimes stoopid is exactly what you want from your comedy, and at such a time, Anna O’Grady and Helen Cripps’ Stuck in a Rat is precisely the ticket. The rookie duo made a splash on the fringe with this faux self-care seminar – the joke being that this summons to sort yourself out was delivered by two complete doofuses, barely able to keep their own show on the road. It’s classic double act stuff, worth catching in February.
5-7 February, Vault festival, London

Ahir Shah

He made his name with heartfelt lefty cris de coeur as the country hit the reactionary skids. But in the last two years, the 28-year-old has inflected his emphatic standup with personal intimacies and spiritual doubt. In his compelling new show Dots, Shah considers the evaporation of his youthful certainties – albeit in the voice of a comic who still sounds ardent about everything.
Cliffs Pavilion, Southend, 14 February. Then touring

Dane Baptiste

Radical … Dane Baptiste.
Radical … Dane Baptiste. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

A few years ago, Dane Baptiste was a rising star of UK comedy, with a killer second show (Reasonable Doubts) and an acclaimed BBC sitcom (Sunny D) under his belt, alongside a burgeoning rep for radical commentary on race and politics. If he’s yet fully to deliver on his ambition to be Britain’s Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle – well, 2020 heralds another opportunity, as new show The Chocolate Chip tours the UK.
South Street Arts Centre, Reading, 20 February. Then touring

Rachel Parris

If The Mash Report is the closest the UK has yet come to cultivating its own Daily Show, props are due to Rachel Parris, the smiling assassin whose sections on Trump, Piers Morgan and sexual harassment went viral, putting the show in the public eye. In 2020, Parris takes to the road with a new show, All Change Please, combining political satire with the tart musical comedy with which she originally made her name.
Previews at Soho theatre, London, 2-4 March and the Old Market, Brighton, 24 April. Then touring

Steve Martin and Martin Short

You know them from TV and the movies: The Three Amigos, Father of the Bride. You may not know that Steve Martin and Martin Short are a jobbing comedy double act, Emmy-nominated for their Netflix special, and UK-bound. “I like to think of this as among the funniest shows the audience has ever seen,” says Martin, of a night that has variously been described as vaudeville and “a children’s show for adults”, and which features solo standup, double-act larks, Martin on banjo and a live band.
SSE Hydro, Glasgow, 9 March; Royal Albert Hall, London, 14-15 March