January on the London Stage: Billy Crudup in High Noon, Levi Kreis' Already Perfect, Another Mary Todd Lincoln Play

Theater is quick out of the starting gate in 2026. January is hosting a range of Olivier and Tony winners, and film names too, in a mixture of revivals, adaptations and new shows that promise a busy, bustling year ahead. For more on five of the coming month’s most enticing titles, read on.

Mindfulness
The part of Susan in Alan Ayckbourn’s 1986 West End play Woman in Mind has brought acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic over time to such distinctive performers as Julia McKenzie, Stockard Channing, Helen Mirren and Janie Dee. The dark comedy is back, this time starring two-time Olivier Award winner Sheridan Smith, and opening January 6 at The Duke of York’s Theatre; the comedian Romesh Ranganathan co-stars, and Michael Longhurst (Amadeus, Next to Normal) directs. Longhurst had nearly programmed Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular during his time running the Donmar Warehouse, so was pleased to come to this play having fully returned to his freelance life. “It’s made me reassess what I thought I knew about Ayckbourn,” the ever-engaging Longhurst said of this 32nd play from the venerable (and prolific) author, now 86. “Alan writes such an exquisite portrait of a family in pain, but the play is also very, very funny and incredibly bold in its multiple realities.” No praise was too high, Longhurst continued, for his protean leading lady. “Sheridan is so winning in her connection to the audience, which is essential, but she’s also got a layer-less skin; she’s translucent in her feeling.”

'High' Society
The 1952 movie High Noon won four Oscars, and director Fred Zinnemann’s black-and-white Western has now come to the stage, written by Eric Roth (who has his own Oscar for Forrest Gump), and directed by Thea Sharrock (After the Dance). Billy Crudup and Denise Gough inherit the roles originated onscreen by Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, and the designer is Tim Hatley, who—between his awards-laden work on Life of Pi, Shrek and Back to the Future, among others—knows a thing or two about adaptation. “This one’s a real challenge,” said the amiable Hatley, who has tried to “find a unity” for the multi-scene script so as “to give the text a focus; I didn’t want the set to get in the way.” The material has relevance to modern-day issues like “gun crime and the fact of people following the herd,” said Hatley, who is fully aware of a career that has taken him of late from Hill Valley, California in Back to the Future to the dusty environs of Hadleyville, New Mexico, in this show. The two visions of small town America, Hatley noted deadpan, “are very different.” Opening night is January 9 at the Duke of York’s.

Backwards Glance
Levi Kreis rocked Broadway in 2010 in Million Dollar Quartet, winning a Tony for his performance as Jerry Lee Lewis. This month, the charming Tennessee native comes to London to headline his self-penned musical Already Perfect. Opening night is January 15 at Islington’s King’s Head Theatre, and Dave Solomon directs the cast of three. “I love that the UK is very theatrically literate,” Kreis told Broadway.com of his show, which he calls “a meta-musical where the past and the present collide.” Set as an (unnamed) Broadway show is about to be filmed for the archives, the piece is inevitably autobiographical. But, Kreis added, “I also think it’s universal: a lot of people would like to go back and ask themselves why they made the decisions they made, especially in midlife. This is therapeutic for myself but I also hope it will be helpful for the gay kids coming up behind us—that [the show] offers some encouragement in embracing who you are as you are.”

'Goodbye' And Hello
It’s been almost 14 years since Luke Norris made his Royal Court playwriting debut at the tiny Theatre Upstairs with Goodbye to All That, and in January he graduates to the mainstage at the same address with Guess How Much I Love You? Robert Aramayo (star of the British indie film I Swear) and 2024 Olivier nominee Rosie Sheehy (Machinal) co-star under Jeremy Herrin’s direction, and opening night is January 22. “I suppose I thought the progression from the upstairs [auditorium] to the downstairs might be more linear than it has been, but this is all the sweeter for it taking its time,” Norris told Broadway.com of this premiere, which tells of a couple starting a family—and also launches the venerable playhouse’s 70th anniversary season. Norris all along has continued to work as an actor onstage (A View from the Bridge, with Mark Strong) and screen (Poldark, the coming season of Ted Lasso). How does he see writing and acting in relation to one another? “I see them as sort of inseparable, really; I want to be part of communicating feeling, and I feel like both jobs do that.”

The More The Merrier
How many stage portraits of Mary Todd Lincoln can one town take at the same time? Two, it would seem, and in close proximity to one another, too, with John Ransom Phillips’s two-character play Mrs. President opening January 27 at the Charing Cross Theatre—minutes away from the Trafalgar Theatre, home to the newly opened London run of Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! “Her life was unspeakably astounding,” said the Broadway and film name Keala Settle (Waitress, The Greatest Showman), explaining to Broadway.com why she opted for the role of Abraham Lincoln's wife. (Hal Fowler co-stars as the legendary photographer Mathew Brady.) Settle hasn’t seen Oh, Mary! yet—“I would absolutely love to”—but spoke of the dual Marys as a testament to “the fascination of art that comes in all forms from completely different sides of the spectrum.” Busy over the holidays, she has been rehearsing for the play while performing in Dracapella at North London’s Park Theatre. “When the bills come,” Settle said with a laugh of her own schedule, “you do what you got to do.”