Martin, Justin (Theater Director)

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    A ‘Stranger Things’ Prequel Is Coming to Broadway Next Spring

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    The play, now running in London, is set 24 years before the start of the Netflix series.“Stranger Things,” Netflix’s enormously popular sci-fi drama, is coming to Broadway.The three-hour drama, already running in London, is a prequel of sorts, set in 1959, 24 years before the streaming series begins. The play’s full title is “Stranger Things: The First Shadow”; like the Netflix series, it takes place in the fictional town of Hawkins, Ind., and features some of the supernatural streamer’s adult characters when they were high school students.“Stranger Things: The First Shadow” is to begin previews March 28 and to open April 22 at the Marquis Theater.The lavish, spectacle-heavy production opened in London in December. British critics were enthusiastic: In the Sunday Times, Dominic Maxwell called it “a tremendous technical feat that is also moving, amusing and surprising,” while in the Daily Telegraph, the critic Dominic Cavendish labeled it “the theatrical event of the year.” But in The New York Times, the critic Houman Barekat was unimpressed, calling it “a gaudy, vertiginous fairground ride of a play.”The London production has been successful and will continue to run. The producers say the show has attracted a high number of first-time theatergoers and those who rarely go, drawn by their interest in the “Stranger Things” story. The show also won two Olivier Awards, for best new entertainment and for set and video design.The play is written by Kate Trefry, who is also a writer of the series, and it is based on a story by Trefry; the Duffer Brothers, who created the series; and Jack Thorne, a playwright who won a Tony Award for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” The play is directed by Stephen Daldry, a three-time Tony winner, for “The Inheritance,” “Billy Elliot,” and “An Inspector Calls,” and co-directed by Justin Martin.The creative team is considering making some changes to the narrative and technical elements of the show as they bring it to Broadway.Netflix is a lead producer of “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” along with Sonia Friedman, a prolific producer on Broadway and in the West End. More

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      How to Make Thrilling Theater About Climate Change Negotiations

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      A new play from the writers of “The Jungle” dramatizes the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a landmark climate agreement preceded by years of arguments over its wording.When the playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson were looking for ideas for a new production, they stumbled upon a radio show about the negotiations that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.Some parts of the show, Robertson recalled in a recent interview, made the culmination of those discussions about lowering global carbon emissions sound “like a thriller,” with politicians holding talks in locked rooms and exhausted negotiators falling asleep beneath their desks.The pair thought that the landmark climate agreement could be the basis for another impactful stage production, similar to “The Jungle,” their hit about a refugee encampment in northern France. The problem was that the negotiations had dragged on for years before the agreement was reached in Kyoto in December 1997 — and that process was at times far from exciting. Most of the action involved representatives from different countries arguing over the language, and even punctuation, they wanted in the protocol.Climate negotiations “are so bloody boring in one sense,” Robertson said. “The challenge,” he added, “was, ‘How do we do take them, put it onstage and make it dramatic?’”Raul Estrada-Oyuela, left, the negotiations’ chairman, and Hiroshi Oki of Japan’s Environmental Agency shook hands as the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997.The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty ImagesThe playwrights’ answer to that question is “Kyoto,” directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, and running at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, from Tuesday through July 13.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Prima Facie,’ Jodie Comer Makes the Case

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      The “Killing Eve” star has a spectacular Broadway debut in a play that puts sexual assault jurisprudence on trial.The neon image of a louche Lady Justice, in an electric blue robe and a hot pink mask, greets the audience at the Golden Theater as if the place were a strip joint for lawyers.In a way it is, at least while “Prima Facie,” which opened on Sunday, is playing there. Over the course of the one-woman, 100-minute play, we watch a barrister — the story takes place in England — remove every piece of psychological armor from the women she cross-examines in sexual assault cases, then see the same armor stripped from her when she becomes a victim herself.The play, by Suzie Miller, won all sorts of awards in Australia and Britain. It’s easy to see why. Its star, Jodie Comer, late of “Killing Eve,” gives a performance of tremendous skill and improbable stamina, especially considering it is her first stage appearance. The production, directed by Justin Martin, is chic and accessible, with design flourishes, by now de rigueur, to underline the idea that it is a Big Event. And the reform of sexual assault jurisprudence that the play advocates could hardly be more convincingly argued or worthy of our attention.But the underlining and the advocacy do something odd to the drama: They make it disappear.Not at first. When we meet Tessa Ensler she’s a complex and theatrical character, a “thoroughbred,” “primed for the race,” with “every muscle pumped.” She’s also, in Comer’s interpretation, funny, sexy and self-deflating, bloviating in bars and flirting with associates. She is not beneath the arrogance of pedigree: “Top law school, top city, top marks, top people.” When she bellows drunkenly that “innocent until proven guilty” is the bedrock of civilized society, you see that she also uses it as a free pass for her own dodgy behavior. At one point she throws a piece of trash into the audience.Thoroughbred she may be, but we soon meet a different incarnation of Tessa: a refugee from the working class, never able to return to it comfortably. Visiting her chilly mother in Liverpool, she becomes a girl in want of kindness and not getting much. (Her older brother is violent.) The posh accent she uses in court seems to erode before our ears, revealing the peculiar early-Beatles twang of her (and Comer’s) native Scouse dialect. (“Says” is not pronounced “sez” but “saze.”) She dashes back to London before she can get hurt.The dashing is not just Tessa’s M.O. but the production’s. With its expressionistic sound (lots of pumped-up heartbeats by Ben and Max Ringham) and sudden slashes of harsh light (by Natasha Chivers), Martin’s busy staging is at pains to help Comer fill the vast space alone. She doesn’t need it; she solves the one-actor problem with her own resourcefulness, handily playing all sides of conversations that sometimes involve several people. And when she must be both a third-person reporter of a remembered event and a first-person participant in it, she makes the echo meaningful by using it to specify the content. The laugh she lets out after saying “We laugh” is a very particular and complicated kind.Comer delivers a complex portrayal, our critic writes, going from a high-powered barrister to a defenseless victim.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, Martin has her constantly running about, moving tables, jumping on those tables to declaim in court, shouting over music, fiddling with her clothing and juggling props. Some of this stage business helps provide character insight that might go missing in the absence of other actors: When approached by a senior trial lawyer interested in offering her a job, Tessa tries to hide her Victoria’s Secret shopping bag. But much of it feels pro forma.In any case, the bustle comes to a halt halfway through. Now we meet a third Tessa, this one the victim of a rape she knows she will have trouble proving to the law’s satisfaction. She was drunk; she had previously consented to have sex with the man; she couldn’t shout no because he covered her mouth to the point that she could hardly breathe.She now enters the legal system as a complainant, not a defender: “Same court, no armor,” she says. Comer’s portrayal of that defenselessness is devastating: Mousy and short-circuited, the gloss gone from her hair, she looks small in her clothes and alone in the world. Her voice has shriveled. Even Miriam Buether’s set — sky-high shelves of case files — abandons her, rising into the flies.Yet this is also where the play abandons itself. Not its argument, of course. As Tessa suffers the same kind of cross-examination she has visited on other women in the name of “testing the case” impartially, it becomes painfully clear that finding truth, let alone justice, in such situations is all but impossible. More than that, the system of adjudicating consent is diabolical, a manmade trap to disable women from proving anything and thus, in effect, a second rape.Miriam Buether’s set features sky-high shelves of case files.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf only the play allowed us simply to feel this. But as Tessa speaks to the courtroom despite being warned by the judge to stop, Miller, the playwright, herself a former criminal defense lawyer, likewise breaks free from the dramatic frame to let her. The lights come up on the audience. The text, now delivered straight out, becomes an oration, a summation. For reasons that seem more wishful and political than characterological, Tessa gets her voice back.One-person, multicharacter stories often fail to develop suspense and momentum, but Miller has structured this one precisely. Details we learn casually in the first half return menacingly in the second. The abandonment of that structure in the play’s final third is likewise precise, and many will value the disruption prima facie — at first glance.But for me the change undid the previous work of emotional engagement in favor of flat-out persuasion on a subject with which few in the audience would be likely to disagree. As Tessa’s speech ran on, repeating ideas that had already been dramatized, I began to feel pummeled, as if by a politician.Enlightening and enraging theatergoers in the hope of changing the world is not, of course, a violation of dramatic policy. That Tessa’s last name honors Eve Ensler, now known as V, ought to have been a clue to Miller’s intentions. V’s 1996 play “The Vagina Monologues” broke with dramatic forms (which, after all, were formalized and popularized by men) to make a difference well beyond them. I also thought of Larry Kramer, whose plays were pleas: agitprop and artistry pulped into something new. Thinking of works like theirs, and a singular performance like Comer’s, I won’t belabor the compromises of “Prima Facie.” Especially if, in the long run, it wins its case.Prima FacieThrough June 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; primafacieplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘We’ve Experienced the Stories We’re Telling’: ‘The Jungle’ Is Back.

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      ‘We’ve Experienced the Stories We’re Telling’: ‘The Jungle’ Is Back.Five years after its American premiere, the acclaimed play about migrants eking out lives in an encampment returns with a mix of new and original cast members.Clockwise from top left, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Mylène Gomera, Mohamed Sarrar and Ammar Haj Ahmad. Hesmondhalgh and Gomera are new additions, while Sarrar and Haj Ahmad are reprising their roles.Sara Messinger for The New York TimesMarch 2, 2023At the Afghan Cafe, the smell of fresh dough, soft and earthy, lingers as the bread makes its way to the oven. Boxy televisions with old Bollywood films on a loop perch in the corners where the walls meet the ceiling. The floor is hardened mulch, the menu handmade. And all the patrons are a long, long way from home.“The Jungle” — an immersive play about the residents of a makeshift migrant camp in Calais, France — is back at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, where it had its American premiere in 2018. As the story unfolds against the backdrop of the improvised cafe, the audience meets characters from Eritrea, Syria, Sudan, Iraq and Iran, who describe their harrowing journeys while confronting treacherous living conditions and impending eviction.When “The Jungle” last ran in New York (the critic Ben Brantley called it a “thrilling drama” and “a work of absorbing theater”), President Donald J. Trump’s travel ban had virtually blocked citizens of many predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, which meant three of the actors nearly didn’t make it to the stage. This time, the production — featuring a mix of new and returning actors, many of whom are former refugees themselves — hoped for a smoother entry. Julie Hesmondhalgh, who portrays Paula, a do-gooder English volunteer dedicating her life to the women and children of the camp, and Mylène Gomera, who plays Helene, a Christian Eritrean traveling solo, are new to the company; Ammar Haj Ahmad returns as Safi, the show’s Syrian narrator, along with Mohamed Sarrar as Omar, a Sudanese refugee.But the return to the Brooklyn set has been a bumpy one.“We obviously had some trouble last time, but we did find a way to get here in a sort of timely manner,” said Justin Martin, who directs the play with Stephen Daldry. “This time, we’ve actually found it a bit more difficult.”Once the show was scheduled for 2023, the visa problems began anew. Applications dragged on without explanation. One of the original cast members, Yasin Moradi, a Kurdish martial artist from Iran, is still waiting for his visa in London.Others encountered obstacles upon arrival in the United States. Gomera, who is originally from Eritrea, was held at the airport for questioning.“It took me a couple of days to let it go and shake it off,” she said.Yasin Moradi, a returning cast member, sits in London awaiting his visa.Sara Messinger for The New York TimesThe American political context may have shifted, but war, natural disaster and economic collapse continue to displace communities around the world — and the story of desperate people seeking safe harbor still resonates.“When does a place become a place?” Safi asks at the end of the first act. “When does a place become a home?”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.We spoke with five cast members about their connections to the show and where they find a sense of home. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Ammar Haj AhmadI am from Syria, and I am British, but none of it, to be honest, means anything. And maybe it’s corny to say, but it’s the truth. I am context, and I am human.Home for me now is people. After what happened to Damascus, I don’t have the same relationship to places. Anything you build you can lose. Sometimes safety comes from attitudes and thoughts. That’s where home is for me, when someone is kind in nature and has the appetite to understand.It can be tricky sometimes, because I am performing and people are clapping, and my sisters are sleeping in cars in southern Turkey — the center of the earthquake.The last time I was here, I didn’t enjoy any minute of it aside from the time I spent onstage. But I couldn’t wait to come back. The cast are amazing and the audience is there around you. There is always the potential for it to be magical.Mylène GomeraI’m Eritrean. As cliché as it sounds, I’m really a global nomad on so many levels. The role I play, Helene, is essentially my story, my route. It’s such an honor to be a voice for Eritreans, especially Eritrean women. The responsibility I feel is immense.The intention is never to leave your country. That’s what gets lost. And you figure out that it isn’t necessarily better, but it is safer. There is a constant battle of: Am I in a better place now?To be in New York, to be onstage, to have come this far, to have no connections to the industry, to come from a tiny village in Eritrea — I’m constantly asking myself how this happened.I’m new to the company, but I feel right at home. We’re all taking care of each other; this play requires that. We’ve experienced the stories we’re telling.The Afghan Cafe on the set of “The Jungle,” which integrates the audience with the cast, features catwalk-like runways throughout the makeshift restaurant.Teddy WolffMohamed SarrarI am one of the people who lived in the Jungle in Calais. I lived it in reality, and now I’m doing it again. I’ve moved on, but I go back in my mind to show others what it was like there.My homeland is Sudan. I fled when I was 25 because of what was happening in Darfur. I fled violence and evil.Sometimes, onstage, the tears come, because it’s not just about me, it’s about all of the people who are still working to come, who can’t leave.Julie HesmondhalghI’m U.K. born and bred. I come from a working class family in the north of England and I live in Manchester now, which is a city that is traditionally a city of protest and radicalism.Back in my history there is Irish heritage, so with that always comes immigration and prejudice, for sure, but my connection to refuge and migration is purely as an activist. Let’s put it this way: It wasn’t me who was taken into a side room to be interviewed.There’s always a crisis of refugees, and you have to ask the question, “Why?” And racism has to be part of that conversation. That’s why this play is so important: because it takes you right to the refugee stories, which we hear in a really real and personal way. And that’s where art steps in.It’s an honor to play this role. I wanted this job more than any job I’ve ever wanted before. Yasin MoradiI am originally Kurdish from Iran. I am still in my home in London, unfortunately. It’s been a long process.I thought with Biden in office, we would go to the U.S. more easily, but it seems like it’s harder than before. I am the only person who has been here for three weeks waiting without any explanation. No one is forced to leave their land unless it is unsafe. I lived in the Jungle in 2015 for six weeks. We Kurdish people, we don’t have anywhere.The more people see this play, the more sympathy people have. It is hard to hate someone when you hear their story or laugh at their joke.I am not there, but my heart is with them. More

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      Jodie Comer to Make Broadway Debut in ‘Prima Facie’ Next Spring

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      The “Killing Eve” star will reprise her role in Suzie Miller’s solo show, which is wrapping up a run in London.Jodie Comer, known for playing the charismatic assassin Villanelle on “Killing Eve,” has received glowing reviews for her West End stage debut in the one-woman play “Prima Facie.” Now she’s setting her sights on Broadway.Next spring, Comer will reprise her role, as a lawyer named Tessa who discovers the limitations of the law after being sexually assaulted, when the show arrives on Broadway at a yet-to-be-announced Shubert theater. This will be her Broadway debut.The play, written by Suzie Miller, is currently in the final weeks of its run in London’s West End. Critics praised Comer for her breakneck performance in an emotionally demanding role that, under Justin Martin’s busy staging, is quite physical. It calls for her to leap onto furniture, endure a brief onstage rainstorm and more as she tells the story of working her way up from working-class origins and later being assaulted by a colleague whom she brings to trial.“There’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro,” Matt Wolf wrote in his review for The New York Times.The play originally premiered in 2019 in Miller’s native Australia. The playwright is a former human rights and children’s rights lawyer.No dates have been announced for the Broadway production, which will be directed by Martin. The lead producer is Empire Street Productions, led by James Bierman. More

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      A Theatrical Neophyte With the Know-How of a Pro

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      Jodie Comer, from the TV series “Killing Eve,” makes a thrilling stage debut in “Prima Facie” on London’s West End.LONDON — If you’re going to venture onstage for the first time, a nearly two-hour, emotionally fraught solo play without a break might not seem the best place to start. But the TV actress Jodie Comer, better known as the assassin Villanelle in the Emmy-winning series “Killing Eve,” has taken to the West End in just such a play, “Prima Facie” by Suzie Miller, with gleaming-eyed assurance.First seen in 2019 in the writer’s native Australia, “Prima Facie” is at the Harold Pinter Theater through June 18 — though it will presumably have more life as long as its star chooses to stick with it. “House Full” signs have marked out Comer as the box-office equal of such theatrical heavy hitters as Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem,” the Jez Butterworth masterwork playing just streets away.Comer is cool and commanding as a defense lawyer named Tessa who discovers, at considerable personal cost, the limitations of the law. Assaulted on a night out by a colleague whom she brings to trial, Tessa soon finds herself confronting a legal system whose strictures even a mind as shrewd and sharp as hers cannot overcome. The second half devolves into an angry broadside, but you can only commend the impulses behind a play that wants to educate as well as entertain: Audience members are handed leaflets on the way out to raise awareness about sexual consent.Justin Martin’s busy staging finds Comer leaping onto the furniture and engulfed by a brief onstage rainstorm, to keep a potentially static monologue interesting to the eye: A chair at one point becomes a toilet bowl into which Tessa is sick, and a crucial costume change is done in full view of the audience.Comer plays to all levels of the theater, often sweeping her gaze upward as if to enlist us as her jury. And though she speaks the text at breakneck speed, there’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro.Nicola Walker in Emlyn Williams’s “The Corn Is Green,” directed by Dominic Cooke at the National Theater.Johan PerssonThe director Dominic Cooke’s revival of “The Corn Is Green,” by contrast, is a large-scale production featuring a male ensemble of lusty-voiced Welsh coal miners. But the star attraction is Nicola Walker, a 2013 Olivier Award winner whose gathering TV acclaim since is surely attracting audiences to the National’s Lyttelton auditorium, through June 11: She headlines the legal drama “The Split,” which started its third and final season on the BBC last month.Walker plays the crusading teacher Miss Moffat in “The Corn Is Green,” a 1938 play by Emlyn Williams that draws from that Welshman’s singular path toward literary self-confidence and success. A brisk, no-nonsense Englishwoman, Miss Moffat has arrived in a rural Welsh mining village at the start of the 20th century to bring literacy to a community of colliers distinguished, she’s quick to point out, by their smell. (Their daily routine is hot and sweaty.) One of these begrimed youngsters, Morgan (the charismatic Iwan Davies), displays an aptitude for the life of the mind and not just the mines, and Miss Moffat leads him toward a scholarship to Oxford that the feisty lad at times resists. Morgan is disinclined, at least at first, to be the “little pit pony” that his keen teacher would have him be, though he soon realizes that education makes an entirely new life possible.The play’s journey is preordained, and some of the bumps on the way are because of Williams, who pushes Miss Moffat in a direction — not to be revealed here — that doesn’t entirely jibe with her character. But Cooke enlivens a time-honored tale by involving Williams directly as his play’s narrator (played by Gareth David-Lloyd), setting the scene and monitoring events throughout. And a vigorous Walker invests the peppery spinster at its inspirational center with a fiercely beating heart. Morgan is better for having met her, as are we.Change hovers less happily over “Middle,” the beautifully acted new play from David Eldridge running in the National’s smallest auditorium, the Dorfman, through June 18. A two-hander about a couple in crisis, the play returns to the stage another fine actress, Claire Rushbrook, who is better known for work on film and TV. (Her credits include “Doctor Who” and “Whitechapel,” two well-known British series, and the wonderful Mike Leigh film “Secrets and Lies.”)Daniel Ryan and Claire Rushbrook in David Eldridge’s “Middle,” directed by Polly Findlay at the National Theater.Johan PerssonRushbrook’s Maggie has been married for 16 years to Gary (Daniel Ryan), and the two have an 8-year-old daughter who is in bed upstairs when a sleepless Maggie enters the kitchen before dawn to inform her husband that she’s not sure she still loves him. What ensues is a reckoning across 100 minutes (no intermission) in which the pair, both nearing 50, figure out where they are heading next.Gary’s response, at least at first, is to keep things light, but that doesn’t last. By the end, tears have been shed and crockery smashed on the way to a movingly ambivalent finish. Life doesn’t always allow for tidy closure and nor does “Middle,” which suggests that muddling through is sometimes the only option. Will Maggie leave Gary for John, a policeman with whom she has gone on a date to Tate Modern? She may not know herself, and Rushbrook communicates an uncertainty that is immediately raw. Her eventual breakdown scene feels lived from within.Ryan does well, too, countering his wife’s truth-telling by saying he finds “complete honesty” overrated: He’d rather make jokes than discuss dissatisfactions that are no less real than his wife’s. (Among other things, he wanted a second child, and she did not.) Where Maggie speaks what’s on her mind openly, Gary hides his feelings behind a smoke screen of banter.Polly Findlay’s production keeps us guessing, and the emotional swerves are skillfully navigated throughout. As with Comer and Walker in their plays, “Middle” offers an actress at the top of her game forsaking the screen for the in-the-moment excitement only found onstage.Prima Facie. Directed by Justin Martin. Harold Pinter Theater, through June 18; NTLive broadcast on July 21.The Corn Is Green. Directed by Dominic Cooke. National Theater, through June 11.Middle. Directed by Polly Findlay. National Theater, through June 18. More