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    What to See on London Stages This Summer

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    British theater recommendations for visitors and residents of all ages — and inclinations.London’s theaters offer something for everyone. Whether in big West End venues or on stages tucked away above a pub, the city’s shows include the classics, new plays and some productions that defy classification. Open air playhouses attract audiences willing to brave the unpredictable summer weather, and venues spread throughout the city make for an accessible theater landscape that extends far beyond the heavily trafficked tourist hot spots.Whether you’re looking for frothy musicals or fiercely charged political writing, chances are your wishes can be answered somewhere around town. Below, in seven categories, are some of the shows vying for the attention of visitors and residents seeking out London theater this summer.Give Me Serious DramaDenise Gough as Emma and Malachi Kirby as Mark in “People, Places & Things.”Marc BrennerAlma MaterFew London playhouses generate as much buzz as the Almeida, and expectations are high for its run of this new play from the Australian playwright Kendall Feaver, whose theatrical debut, “The Almighty Sometimes,” impressed British critics when it played in Manchester, England, in 2018. Feaver’s latest is set on a university campus rocked by sexual assault allegations, and Polly Findlay directs a cast led by Phoebe Campbell and Justine Mitchell. Through July 20 at the Almeida Theater.The Boys from the BlackstuffThe regional accents may prove a challenge — especially if English isn’t your first language — but there’s no denying the passion and power that course through James Graham’s stage adaptation of this era-defining 1982 British TV show. Through a community of Liverpool road builders’ struggles, Kate Wasserberg’s empathic production reminds us that employment is crucial to self-esteem. Through Aug. 3 at the Garrick Theater. More

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      ‘Invisible’ Review: Brown and British

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      As part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, Nikhil Parmar’s solo play is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable.In the world of Nikhil Parmar’s funny, fantastical solo play “Invisible,” the mind-set of Britain has undergone a significant shift. One of the West’s favorite boogeymen — the Islamic fundamentalist — has vanished from the public imagination. Chinese terrorists are the designated bad guys now.For brown British actors like Zayan Prakash (Parmar), that is both good news and bad. On the one hand, strangers no longer look at him and assume that he’s a threat. On the other, that means the Muslim terrorist roles that were once so prolific have disappeared. So what’s left for him to play? Just “doctors, cabdrivers and corner shop owners.” He’s lucky if those characters get names.“Invisible,” at 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, is a drama-tinged satire that morphs into a grisly revenge parable, before shape-shifting into something close to reality. But first this play, directed by Georgia Green for London’s Bush Theater, is a sharp and lively comedy in which the charismatic Zayan recalls answering his door to find his ex-girlfriend, Ella, the mother of his toddler daughter, standing there.“Hello. Why do you look weird?” Ella asks, and Zayan — who’s looking weird because he’s just heard on the news about the demise of “brown terrorism” — pivots to the audience with a cliché-killing aside that won my heart: “I was going to do her bit in a really high-pitched voice but, (a), it sounded pretty offensive and, (b), she actually has a properly deep voice, so.”Ella has come to tell Zayan that she has a live-in boyfriend, Terrence, an old classmate of theirs from drama school whose career is flourishing; he’s Korean and playing a terrorist in a prestige drama, now that “East Asian fundamentalism” is supposedly a menace. Zayan can’t stand Terrence, but their ensuing rivalry makes for laughs, even as it drives home a point about jostling for position inside a white-supremacist system.The magnetic Parmar slips in and out of Zayan and the crowd of characters around him, each distinct. Though the play’s narrative becomes somewhat tangled and unruly, there is method in its muchness.What torments Zayan is a creeping sense of his own invisibility: Now that he isn’t perceived as a terrorist, he fails to register at all. Yet over the show’s 60-minute running time, we see Zayan for the multitude that he is: underemployed actor, reluctant cater waiter, incompetent weed dealer, doting father, inattentive son. He is also a grieving brother haunted by the ghost of his dead little sister, the person who looked at him and saw someone central to her story.It is disorienting, and infuriating, to be hampered by a culture’s — and an industry’s — blinkered perception of what a whole group of people is capable of. “Invisible” is a thoughtfully provocative, witheringly knowing response to that noxiousness.InvisibleThrough July 2 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      Review: In ‘Misty,’ a Restless Artist Grapples With a Gentrifying City

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      At the Shed, Arinzé Kene mixes spoken word, music and comedy to tell a story of racial tension and male identity in a changing London.There are many ways to tell a story. Freestyle, direct address and a varied assortment of orange balloons are just a few of the expressive means deployed in “Misty,” which opened on Thursday at the Shed. This multidisciplinary piece, by the British writer and performer Arinzé Kene, uses an array of sights and sounds to toy with the perceptions of the people it presumes are watching.The onstage musicians, Liam Godwin (keys) and Nadine Lee (drums), criticize Kene’s opening rhymes, about a Black man who beats up a drunk passenger on the night bus. Will this be another play about, as Lee says, a “generic angry young Black man”? A story that meets the expectations of a mostly white audience and transforms Black trauma into a commodity? Maybe so, but it’s also a probing and restless self-portrait of the artist.In the show that Kene says he’s writing, he plays a Londoner navigating an increasingly hostile city, likening its rhythms to the inner workings of a living creature. (“Misty” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, where, in 2018, it transferred to the West End.) Accompanied by live beats and with microphone in hand, he delivers spoken verse as the Black man: He leaves the drunk passenger behind, visits a lover and later discovers that his mother has locked him out of their home and he’s being pursued by the police.The poetry-slam vibe of these scenes is regularly interrupted by Kene’s many critics: His older sister (played as a young girl by the child actor Braxton Paul at the performance I saw) hangs him out to dry over email. The play’s American producer (represented by an empty director’s chair and a lit cigarette resting in an ashtray) is voiced, hilariously, in snippets of speeches by President Barack Obama. “I feel like I’m outside myself, second-guessing what is expected of me,” Kene tells him.Kene’s “Misty” excels as an act of self-examination more than it coheres as a piece of narrative theater, our critic writes.Sara KrulwichKene is a versatile artist, who comes across onstage as strikingly honest and vulnerable; “Misty” is as much about the challenges of his creative process as the outcome (a bit of clowning that finds Kene encased in a giant balloon is an apt visual metaphor). The production, from the director Omar Elerian, is beautifully atmospheric, propulsive and often a sensory feat. But “Misty” excels as an act of self-examination more than it coheres as a piece of narrative theater.Audience comprehension may be strained, for example, by the time Kene clarifies that the man on the bus isn’t him, but a friend who inspired the show. It’s around the same time that Kene reverses the play’s central, and ultimately overworked, conceit, insisting that white gentrifiers, rather than Black men, are viruses infecting the city. (The police, however, remain antivirals.) Kene favors repetition, in his lyrics and broader thematic construction, a style that might benefit from a tighter running time (the show is two hours with an intermission).There is a meta irony to bemoaning gentrification from inside this Hudson Yards theater, and to confronting white audiences with what they expect to see there. Even in interrogating the conundrum Kene faces as a Black artist, “Misty” narrowly addresses itself to white perspectives. It’s a trap that settings like this one make even harder to escape.MistyThrough April 2 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘Overflow’ Review: The Bathroom Battleground

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Overflow’ Review: The Bathroom BattlegroundTravis Alabanza’s monologue starring Reece Lyons examines agency and safety, here inextricably intertwined with identity.Reece Lyons in “Overflow,” at the Bush Theater in London.Credit…Sharron WallacePublished More