Lyn Gardner’s Weekly Picks
Published on 30 March 2026
The big opening of the week is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Old Vic. Ken Kesey’s iconic story of how the arrival of chancer Randle P. McMurphy on a psychiatric ward sparks rebellion gets a major revival from director Clint Dyer. His casting and approach may offer a slightly different spin on the famous tale, offering an edge, exploring America’s colonial legacy through the lens of Black men’s mental health, cultural difference, and forced subjugation. Aaron Pierce plays McMurphy, Giles Terera is Dale Harding, and Olivia Williams is replacing Michelle Gomez as the hated Nurse Ratched, a woman intent on exerting authority in a predominantly male world.
The school holidays begin this week, so if you are looking for a family-friendly show that will give adults as much pleasure as the kids, look no further than Matilda (Cambridge Theatre), still as ebullient as ever after 15 years, or the wonderfully imaginative staging of My Neighbour Totoro at the Gillian Lynne. Children deserve great theatre and these shows deliver.
It’s your last chance to see Unfortunate (Other Palace), a smart piece of musical theatre doing for sea witch Ursula in The Little Mermaid what Wicked does for the witch Elphaba. It’s an evening that’s part panto, part cabaret, and is delivered with a good dose of heart.
Just announced is the arrival of Trainspotting, a new musical version of Irvine Welsh’s novel peppered with a vibrant cast of Edinburgh-based junkies, scam artists, and psychos, which has previously been seen in Walsh’s own stage version. Now for the show, which will be at the Theatre Royal Haymarket from mid-July, he’s teamed up with songwriter Stephen McGuinness to create original songs that will sit alongside Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life and Lou Reed’s Perfect Day. Renton, the heroin addict who thinks he might want to quit—Ewan McGregor in the 1996 film version—will be played by Robbie Scott. Renton, of course, would be well into middle age by now, suggesting that this new iteration of the story may have both a nostalgic appeal for those who were there the first time around but also has its eye on a younger crowd new to Welsh’s disgustingly compulsive, vomit-drenched underbelly odyssey.
By Lyn Gardner
Lyn Gardner is an acclaimed theatre journalist and former critic with decades of experience covering British theatre, from off-West End and fringe theatre to major West End productions.