Lyn Gardner's Weekly Picks
Published on 9 March 2026
Playwright David Hare has always been very good when writing about endings and loss. If one of his early plays, Plenty, charted the collapse of post-war hope, then his 1975 play, Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, is an abrasive eulogy for the 1960s, the hope it promised and the dreams it trashed. The play was quite something at the Royal Court 50 years ago, and it gets a revival by Daniel Raggett that, with any luck, will be revelatory. At its heart is Maggie, a small-time rock star—here played by Rebecca Lucy Taylor (Self Esteem)—whose band is playing a May ball at a Cambridge college in 1969. What can go wrong does go wrong with incendiary consequences.
After that you may well need a laugh, and that’s guaranteed with the excellent Jane Austen improvised show, Austentatious, which is playing on selected Monday evenings only at the Vaudeville between now and July. It’s daft but highly enjoyable, as at every performance, a crack improv team delivers a brand-new, completely improvised Jane Austen novel which she definitely didn’t write—but should have. There's ingenuity aplenty and lots of gags too. You almost certainly need to have some knowledge of Austen’s oeuvre to really get it, but it’s genuinely smart stuff which is both devoted to Jane and also knows that she is ripe for a joke.
It’s always worth checking shows which are about to finish their runs because when they’ve gone, they’ve gone. It’s the final week for the Noël Coward curiosity The Rat Trap at the Park, written when he was still a teenager. It’s no Private Lives, but Bill Rosenfield’s rewritten version has appeal, not least because it hints at the great playwright Coward would eventually become. You’ve slightly longer to slip in to see long-runner Back to the Future, which finishes its run at the Adelphi in April. It’s preposterously entertaining, full of clever special effects, but it’s got emotional clout too, reminding us all that sometimes you do get a second chance.
Settling in for a six-week season at the Barbican from late July comes Death Note, the musical is based on the best-selling Japanese manga about Light Yagami, a high school student who discovers he can play god when a mysterious notebook falls into his hands, which has the power to bring instant death to any person whose name he writes in it. Light sees this as an opportunity to right the injustices of the world, and soon the crime rate plunges as criminals fear for their lives. But is killing the guilty without trial the answer, and is Light any better than those he is murdering? Will the enigmatic detective L bring him to justice? The musical has been seen in concert versions here, which were well received, and now gets a full production led by Stephen Whitson, who was associate director of the UK production of Hamilton.
By Lyn Gardner
Lyn Gardner is an acclaimed theatre journalist and former critic with decades of experience covering British theatre, from off-West End and fringe theatre to major West End productions.