Theatre reviews: Les Misérables – The Arena Spectacular | Anna/Anastasia | After Party

Anna/Anastasia, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

After Party, Tron, Glasgow ★★★

What more can there be to say about Boublil and Schoenberg’s mighty musical Les Misérables, based on the 1862 novel by Victor Hugo? First seen in Paris in 1980, it has become one of the most successful musicals of all time – its legendary London production by Cameron Mackintosh, which opened in 1985, is now the longest-running musical in UK theatre history.

Les Misérables has thrilled and moved audiences across the planet, from New York to Manila and beyond, with its is the story of two men – the police chief Javert and the hero Jean Valjean – locked in a lifelong moral and spiritual struggle. Now, Cameron Mackintosh presents a new stadium-sized concert version based on his 1985 production. Set to tour across the world over the next 15 months, the show staged its world premiere at the Hydro in Glasgow this weekend, with a stunning A-list cast (the alternates are also true stars) led by Michael Ball as Javert, Alfie Boe as Valjean, and Bonnie Langford and Gavin Lee as comic rogues the Thenardiers.

If you love the musical – or just want to see a world-class team of UK theatre professionals and musicians, at the top of their game, absolutely knocking a mighty musical theatre score out of the park – you should try to see this terrific, sometimes breathtaking staging by James Powell and Jean-Pierre Van Der Spuy before it leaves the UK at the end of the month.

Like Jean Valjean, the central character in Johnny Donahue’s Play, Pie, Pint drama Anna/Anastasia spent much of her life living under an assumed identity. The play is based on the true story of Anna Anderson, who insisted throughout her life that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, the youngest daughter of the Tsar, and had somehow survived the execution of her whole family during the 1917 revolution. DNA testing has since proved that Anderson was not Anastasia; but the play begins in Berlin in 1920, as a straitlaced young policeman, Franz, tries to interview Anna after what seems to have been a suicide attempt. Donohoe then traces Anna and Franz’s occasional relationship over the next 20 years and more, as Anna spends time in mental hospitals, and moves – always hopefully – between Germany and the United States.

In Liz Carruthers’s quietly effective production, Kirsty McDuff delivers a brilliantly eccentric yet poignant performance as Anna, as imperious as she is lost; Chris Forbes is quietly touching as the bewildered Franz. And the play also offers a 21st-century twist on the possible reason for Anna’s compulsive flight from her own identity; it’s plausible, painful and chillingly well delivered.

It’s hard to imagine a political topic more timely than the one tackled by Annie Lowry Thomas in her brief solo show After Party. Its subject – staged in the balloon-strewn aftermath of a party gone to seed – is the trauma caused to her and her Labour-voting parents by the many failures and compromises of the New Labour government of 1997-2010, which once pledged that things could only get better, but ended in disappointment.

Lowry Thomas’s show is witty, sharp-eyed and enjoyable, in its sense of left-leaning British voters and their fraught relationship with the Labour Party. It is, though, more than strange to hear a Glasgow-based theatre-maker discuss the last 30 years of UK politics entirely as a Labour-Tory affair, without a single reference to the SNP. Thomas’s exploration of the topic is so light-touch,  in the end, and often so self-mocking, that it seems to end almost before it has begun.

Les Miserables is at P&J Live, Aberdeen, 17-20 October, and on tour until December 2025. Ana/Anastasia is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 8-12 October, and the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 15-19 October. After Party is at Summerhall, Edinburgh, 11-12 October.