February on the London Stage: Rupert Goold Revives American Psycho, Arcadia at the Old Vic Honors Tom Stoppard & More

The London theater season is in full swing during the month ahead, mixing keenly awaited revivals with new plays and U.K. premieres, along with a gala concert honoring one of Broadway’s finest. For more details on all these prospects, read on.

Killing Time
It’s been more than a dozen years since the Duncan Sheik-scored American Psycho first hit the Almeida Theatre stage, with an, um, killer cast that included Matt Smith, Jonathan Bailey and Katie Brayben; Benjamin Walker led its Broadway iteration in 2016. Now the musical adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel is back on that same stage, newly opened with Arty Froushan (Leopoldstadt) playing the murderous Patrick Bateman and Rupert Goold once again directing. “It’s the one that got away,” the choreographer Lynne Page explained to Broadway.com about the decision to revisit the show as director Goold’s farewell production at the Almeida before crossing town to run the Old Vic. (In between, he is directing Dog Day Afternoon on Broadway). “We did a survey of Almeida staff as to the one show they would like to see again, and [American Psycho] led the requests among all others as the show they would most like to see brought back.” Page said this staging is no mere facsimile of what came before: “The cast is radically different, as is the set, and [book writer] Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has had an opportunity to dig deep, providing a relevance to now.” Sociopathy is by no means a thing of the past.

Sidley Park Splendor
Arcadia is largely considered the masterwork of the matchless Tom Stoppard, who died in November 2025 at age 88. The 1993 play is being revived at the Old Vic, opening February 4, with Carrie Cracknell (Medea, A Doll’s House) directing a cast that includes Isis Hainsworth as the precocious teenager, Thomasina, and Seamus Dillane as her adored and adoring tutor, Septimus. (Seamus’ father, Stephen Dillane, won a 2000 Tony for that year’s Broadway revival of Stoppard’s The Real Thing.) “It’s a gift of a play,” said this production’s designer, Alex Eales, who has devised a set to match this season’s in-the-round configuration of the Old Vic. Eales had never seen Arcadia prior to accepting this job so came at it, he says, “fresh-faced and unburdened, as if it were a new play.” At the same time, he acknowledged the weight this production inevitably carries. “It does put us in an extraordinary place,” Eales said of mounting this play directly following its author’s death. “We feel a huge responsibility to Tom and to the piece—huge.”

They've Got Mail
Jerome Kilty’s 1957 play Dear Liar crops up now and again off-Broadway and elsewhere, due no doubt to the charm of this two-hander about the correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, or Mrs. Pat, as the vaunted actress was known. London gets its own revival opening February 11 at the bijou Jermyn Street Theatre and directed by the 70-seater’s artistic director, Stella Powell-Jones. “It’s a pretty good argument for writing a letter or two,” Powell-Jones said with a laugh during a break in rehearsing Alan Turkington and Rachel Pickup in the play’s two roles. Drawn to the power of both these figures “to whisk you away in words,” Powell-Jones comes by her literary affinities naturally: she is the granddaughter of the venerated British author Antonia Fraser and her late husband, the playwright and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter. How, though, does she find running so small a venue without a penny of government subsidy? “The collision of the unexpected is in the core DNA of the place,” Powell-Jones said of the L-shaped theater tucked away down a flight of stairs. “The location of where we are and the scale of what we do are such surprising bedfellows; we’re the only place like it, so audiences and actors want to come.”

Photo Play
Based on real events, the Holocaust-themed Here There Are Blueberries garnered rave reviews off-Broadway two years ago and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Its London premiere opens February 11 at Theatre Royal Stratford East, once again directed by Moisés Kaufman and co-written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich. Geraldine Alexander is stepping into the shoes filled in New York by the mighty Kathleen Chalfant. “The play more than ever seems in direct conversation with the world,” the Venezuela-born Kaufman told Broadway.com of a play that takes its cue from the discovery of an album of Nazi-era photographs: “There are pictures of the perpetrators not doing anything, while murderous things are happening outside the frame.” Kaufman, too, expressed excitement about his play’s transatlantic crossing: “London stages are much more daring in their theatrical explorations, so it’s exciting to have this play here.”

Party Time
Yes Minister has earned its place among the most beloved of all British sitcoms since its TV premiere in 1980 and numerous follow-ups since, not least onstage. And here Jim Hacker and Humphrey Appleby are once again, this time played by Griff Rhys Jones and Clive Francis in I'm Sorry, Prime Minister—which the show’s author-director Jonathan Lynn said was the material’s last hurrah. Michael Gyngell co-directs. “What would an ex-prime minister do?” Lynn said of the situation in which Jim Hacker in the play finds himself—“an utterly bewildered, unhappy old man pushed out of office.” The largely comic answer couples musings on aging and loss alongside the laughs one might expect from a popular series that developed with time into what Lynn calls “a fabulous national institution.” And how does he feel on the occasion of this theatrical farewell? “I’m 82 and I’m not going to write these characters forever. It’s wholly pleasurable; it feels fine.”

Birthday Boy
Composer and lyricist Maury Yeston turned 80 last October, and that milestone is being marked on February 22 with a gala evening, To Maury, With Love, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. The stellar cast is led by Ramin Karimloo, who has appeared in Nine and Titanic—two of Yeston’s signature shows. “I couldn’t be happier,” an enthusiastic Yeston said by telephone from his New York apartment about the tribute that is being put together by his longtime London collaborators, director Thom Southerland and producer Danielle Tarento. “I love the people involved,” said the composer, praising Karimloo for “that voice and those acting chops and his whole spirit.” Yeston’s father was English, which only adds to the sense of occasion. “It’s recognizing both my music and my familial heritage. [The concert] means the world to me; it really does.”