March on the London Stage: John Proctor Is the Villain, Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass & More

Two Tony-nominated Broadway hits reach London, a 2025 Olivier Award winner directs his first London non-musical, and an early play from a now-venerable playwright gets a rare revival: These are among the treats in store for playgoers in the British capital during March. For more on these disparate offerings, as well as others, read on.

Miller Time
Just as the scorching West End revival of All My Sons starring Bryan Cranston ends its sellout run, along comes a revival at the Young Vic of a lesser-known Arthur Miller play, Broken Glass. A Broadway flop in 1994, the same play in a different production went on to win London’s 1995 Olivier Award as the year’s best. Here the Brooklyn-set psychological drama is afresh, opening March 3 at the Young Vic and directed by Jordan Fein, who has made his name with acclaimed local revivals of Into the Woods and Fiddler on the Roof. “When I heard Jordan was doing this play, I was desperate to meet him for it,” said Alex Waldmann, who plays the doctor, Harry Hyman, originated on Broadway by David Dukes and played in the 1996 TV version by Mandy Patinkin. Waldmann was in this same play in college nearly 25 years ago and sounded pleased to revisit its intersection of the personal and the political, situated against the imminence of the Holocaust. The writing, added the warmly expressive Waldmann, “is like a concentrated two-hour punch of so much of what Arthur [Miller] was interested in; he’s just packing it into this short, explosive scream of a play.”

Dynamic Duo
John McCrea received a 2018 Olivier Award nomination for the musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and recently completed eight months off-Broadway in the provocatively titled Prince F****t. McCrea is now tucked away off West End in the tiny Omnibus Clapham—seating capacity less than 100—in author Louis Emmitt-Stern’s two-hander, Slippery. Perry Williams is the other actor, and March 19 is opening night. “I think it’s important to do all sorts of venues for all sorts of audiences,” McCrea told Broadway.com. “A lot of people can’t afford to do fringe theatre, and I’m very lucky that I can.” Telling of two men who reunite a decade following their breakup, the play, McCrea said, “like a lot of great writing speaks to human experience across the board.” He went on to note the difference this time out from “playing a teenage drag queen [in Jamie], or a royal [in Prince F****t], or a Nazi cabaret artiste [as the Emcee in Cabaret]. This has given me the opportunity to find things far closer to myself—and I get to be home and see my partner and my dog.”

Say Cheese!
Sir David Hare wasn’t even 30 when Helen Mirren opened at the Royal Court in his play-with-music Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, which can be seen as the Stereophonic of its day. This month, it gets a rare West End revival opening March 25 at the Duke of York’s Theatre and starring Rebecca Lucy Taylor, also known in music circles as the singer-songwriter Self Esteem. “I’ve been wanting to do this play for a very, very long time,” its director, Daniel Raggett, a self-described “theater nerd,” told Broadway.com. How does it feel to be reviving early Hare even as the 78-year-old author’s new play, Grace Pervades, readies its own West End bow in April? “They’re very different plays, obviously,” said the naturally expressive Raggett, “and yet David is approaching them both with the same question: Why this? Why now?” The answer in the case of Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, the director added, “is that it’s a big play simultaneously about nothing and everything—a band breaking up and also the search for meaning, which we all go through whether we’re creative or not.”

A Class Act
John Proctor Is the Villain was a deserved sensation last season on Broadway, garnering seven Tony nominations and marking the Broadway debut of its Georgia-born author, Kimberly Belflower. This month it arrives at the Royal Court, opening March 26 and directed, as in New York, by Tony winner Danya Taymor (The Outsiders), but with an entirely new cast. “This is literally a dream come true,” the delightful Belflower said in a morning interview, prior to setting off to rehearsals. “When I wrote this play, I thought it was so much about where I’m from, and such a specific place, that it probably wasn’t going to resonate with a lot of people.” Instead, it has been seen in and around the U.S., is en route to the screen, and is about to have its first production overseas. What was it like casting the show abroad? “The Broadway cast was so special that for the first few days of [London] auditions, I thought, I can’t let go of these iterations I’ve seen in New York.” Now, Belflower confesses to “being obsessed” with her current company, headed by fast-rising screen name Sadie Soverall (Emerald Fennell's Saltburn) and the Irish musicals performer, Donal Finn (Hadestown): “All these actors have been so different, and that has been so fun and kept the discovery really alive.” And lest Belflower be missing her original young lead, Sadie Sink, the Tony-nominated 23-year-old is about to open on the West End in Romeo and Juliet within days of the local premiere of John Proctor. Or as Belflower said of her show’s original star, “Sadie [Sink] can do literally anything.”

Hair’s Breadth
Jaja’s African Hair Braiding received five 2024 Tony nominations, including Best Play, following its Manhattan Theatre Club debut. And Jocelyn Bioh’s richly textured comedy-drama gets a London transplant in a brand-new staging that opens March 27 at West London’s Lyric Hammersmith—the same playhouse that did proud by Bioh’s School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play during summer 2023. Monique Touko directed that production and is on board again for Jaja. How does the readily eloquent Bioh, a former actress, feel about the London prospects for a play “set squarely,” she said, “in modern-day Harlem in the midst of a fairly chaotic governmental regime”? In fact, Bioh said, “I think so much of what I write about is universal: Because of the wealth of information and how we access that information, people understand the culture that exists in places like hair-braiding salons.” Bioh, for her part, noted with a laugh that she will be paying a visit to just such a salon in London before long. “I’m here for quite some time, and I’m going to need to get my hair redone.”