Time Out’s Best Theatre of 2017 awards “An Octoroon” as #3 and “Girl From the North Country” as #7
Ken Nwosu lead the cast and starred in An Octoroon which is set to return to the National Theatre in May.
© The Other Richard
Orange Tree Theatre
In 2017 London finally got a proper run of a play by the celebrated US writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins… and we liked what we saw. ‘An Octoroon’ is a dizzyingly clever meta-theatrical race satire in which a black playwright named BJJ loses his mind adapting Dion Boucicault’s un-PC Victorian melodrama ‘The Octoroon’. If you missed it, don’t despair: it transfers to the National Theatre in 2018 (dates tbc).
Karl Queensborough in Girl from the North Country which will transfer to the West End in 2018.
© Manuel Harlan
Old Vic, West End 2018
A Bob Dylan musical doesn’t sound like a brilliant idea, and Conor McPherson’s brooding ‘play with songs’ shies away from that title, somewhat. It’s a chokingly bleak but desperately romantic account of a group of lost souls washed up in a Dustbowl inn at the height of the Great Depression. And it’s held together by a staggering performance from Shirley Henderson as the innkeeper’s dementia-suffering, shamanic wife Elizabeth. The songs are pretty good too. Expect its limited West End run to sell out sharpish.
