The most exciting plays and musicals – Sarah Crompton’s top picks for 2025

With 2025 now in full swing, Sarah Crompton takes a look back at some of the most exciting new productions primed to open on UK stages over the coming months.

You can also listen to Crompton and managing editor Alex Wood break down their favourite picks for 2025 here:

In the meantime, read on…

Elektra / Oedipus

The fascination with Greek tragedy that marked 2024 continues this year, with two tantalising new looks at Sophocles. Brie Larson (Captain Marvel, Lessons in Chemistry) makes her West End debut in an adaptation of Elektra written by Anne Carson and directed by Daniel Fish, whose Oklahoma! was revelatory. He’s assembled an astonishing cast including Patrick Vaill as Orestes and Stockard Channing as Clytemnestra. The production gets a brief run out in Brighton before arriving at the Duke Of York’s. Meanwhile, at the Old Vic Rami Malek and Indira Varma take on the tragic mantles of Oedipus and Jocasta in a production co-directed by Matthew Warchus and the choreographer Hofesh Shechter; Ella Hickson is the adaptor of a production that features a chorus of dancers.

Elektra, Theatre Royal Brighton, from 13 January and Duke of York’s, from 24 January

Oedipus, The Old Vic, from 21 January

Hamlet / Hamlet: Hail to the Thief 

Rupert Goold returns to the Royal Shakespeare Company after 13 years, to direct Luke Thallon in Hamlet in a much-anticipated production that features another powerful cast including Nancy Carroll as Gertrude, Jared Harris as Claudius, Elliot Levey as Polonius, and Anton Lesser as the Ghost and the Player King. Nia Towle, so wonderful in A View from the Bridge, makes her RSC debut as Ophelia. With designs by Es Devlin, it’s a thrilling prospect. The RSC is also co-producer of Hamlet Hail to the Thief, an intriguing mashup of Shakespeare and Radiohead with the enthusiastic participation of Thom Yorke that looks like one of the most unusual productions of the year.

Hamlet, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, from 8 February

Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Factory International at Aviva Studios, Manchester from 27 April, then at the RST Stratford-upon-Avon, from 4 June

Girls & Boys

Dennis Kelly is best known for his book for the long-running musical Matilda. Yet the bulk of his work is both more daring and more bleak.  This one-woman show is one of the most intense and gripping things he has ever written. It had a Royal Court run in 2018, and it is thrilling to see that the Nottingham Playhouse has chosen to revive it now with Aisling Loftus taking the role created by Carey Mulligan; the truth and resonance of its subject matter is as important as ever.

Nottingham Playhouse, from 8 February

Richard II 

Guys and Dolls finally vacates the Bridge, to let Nicholas Hytner offer a new look at Shakespeare’s Richard II, staring Jonathan Bailey as the flawed and fated king.  Bailey’s meteoric rise from supporting player (most particularly in Marianne Elliott’s Company), through Bridgerton on TV, to Hollywood stardom as Fiyero in Wicked, makes his return to the stage at this point utterly fascinating and Richard II is a play that allows its leading man to shine. Long-time Hytner collaborator Bob Crowley provides the designs.

Bridge Theatre, London from 10 February

The Seagull

It really is a year of mind-blowing casts in classic plays. Here Cate Blanchett leads Thomas Ostermeier’s revival of The Seagull, adapted by Duncan Macmillan and Ostermeier himself, as Arkadina the selfish but beautiful actress around whom the tragedy revolves. Her co-stars include Tom Burke, as her lover Trigorin, Kodi-Smit-McPhee as her son Konstantin, and Emma Corrin as the doomed actress Nina. It is unlikely to be a straightforward interpretation; Ostermeier will have a few tricks up his sleeve, and the results should be gripping.

Barbican Theatre, London from 26 February

Rhinoceros

Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist exploration of the role of conformity in the rise of fascism couldn’t be more topical today, and this revival (and translation) by Omar Elerian, who made such a mark with his production at the same venue of Ionesco’s The Chairs, feels like a particularly pertinent piece of scheduling, especially since it stars the exceptional Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, who has recently been seen more on film and TV than in small London theatres.

Almeida Theatre, London, from 25 March

Manhunt

In a year relatively light on new plays, director and writer Robert Icke’s new work based on the manhunt that followed Raoul Moat’s release from Durham Prison in 2010, looks utterly fascinating. It’s described as a portrait of a man on the run and is rich with potential, even before casting is announced.

Royal Court, London from 28 March

Krapp’s Last Tape 

Lucky York! The theatre that once cast Gary Oldman as a pantomime cat, giving him a start on the career that made him a star, now hosts his return to the stage after a gap of nearly forty years. It’s appropriate that he will star in Samuel Beckett’s melancholy monologue, in which a man looks back on his life – and a coup for the Theatre Royal, seeking to attract the audiences who have loved Oldman on screen, most recently in Slow Horses.

York Theatre Royal, from 14 April

Here We Are

Rufus Norris’s final season as artistic director of the National Theatre is full of interest, with an interesting balance of new commissions (David Eldridge’s End, a first play by Shaan Sahota) revivals (Michael Abbensetts’ comedy Alterations) and returning popular successes (Dear England, reshaped for 2025 by James Graham).  And then there is this, Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, directed by two-time Tony award winner Joe Mantello and inspired by the films of Luis Buñuel. Its premiere (in a different production) in New York in 2023 indicated that it wasn’t vintage Sondheim, but it’s still new Sondheim and it has attracted a Rolls Royce cast including Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare (reprising their roles), Jane Krakowski, Martha Plimpton, Chumisa Dornford-May, Richard Fleeshman and Rory Kinnear.

National Theatre, London from 23 April

London Road

One of Rufus Norris’s most remarkable achievements as a director was to bring to the stage Alecky Blythe’s groundbreaking verbatim musical, (with music by Adam Cork) that took a series of murders of women in and around London Road in Suffolk in 2006 and the subsequent trial of the killer Steve Wright and turned the horrific events into a complex meditation on the nature of community. It’s no wonder then that as he leaves the National, he is reviving this 2011 success, hopefully with some of its original cast returning.

National Theatre, London from 5 June

4.48 Psychosis

One of the most influential and searing plays of the 21^st century, Sarah Kane’s final masterpiece is revived 25 years after its premiere with its original cast of Daniel Evans, Jo McInness and Madeleine Potter, directed by James Macdonald.  A co-production with the RSC, it is being performed in the Royal Court’s smaller theatre Upstairs, a gesture true to the spirit and mood of this important and unflinching play, made all the more resonant by the fact that Kane took her life while suffering from depression 18 months before its premiere.

Royal Court, London, from 12 June, then The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 25 June

A Moon for the Misbegotten

One of the great pleasures of theatregoing over the past decade has been watching director Rebecca Frecknall turn her steely intelligence and emotional empathy towards an examination of the towering American dramas of the 20^th century, unlocking their knotty texts and high emotions with unusual insight. After a long sojourn with Tennessee Williams (with her productions of Cat on A Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire both running in the early part of the year), she turns her gaze to Eugene O’Neill’s devastating A Moon for the Misbegotten, with Ruth Wilson and Michael Shannon starring as two lost souls who touch one another on a single night.

Almeida Theatre, London, from 17 June