The best theatre shows in London for 2024 not to miss

Twenty years after the classic comedy film briefly threatened to make Lyndsey Lohan a global icon for the right reasons, Tina Fey’s musical adaptation of her smash ‘Mean Girls’ finally makes it to the West End in 2024.

Perhaps more so than ‘Cats’, more so than ‘Phantom’, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Starlight Express’ is his most quintessentially ’80s musical, its world of highly competitive trains played by people on rollerskates somewhat unimaginable as a product of any other era…

Even by Complicité’s lofty standards, 1999’s ‘Mnemonic’ is regarded as something truly exceptional…

Jeremy O Harris’s frenzied satire about a trio of interracial couples who seek to get their sex lives back on track by indulging in Antebellum-styled master-slave roleplays was both a massive smash and wildly controversial over its two Broadway seasons (for reasons that are presumably obvious from that description).

After a decade or so away, cult Argentine physical spectacular Fuerza Bruta returns to London in a new guise. Following the brooding machismo of its previous incarnation, ‘Aven’ is, apparently, an upbeat burst of sunshine and light.

Inspired by interviews with actual pop star fangirls, Yve Blake’s transferring cult musical follows Edna, a 14-year-old Australian girl madly in love with one ‘Harry’, a member of a massive-selling pop group (hmm, rings a bell). When the band comes to Sydney she’s determined to meet Harry – at any cost.

There were understandable logistical reasons why the National Theatre never got it together to restage all three of Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s ‘Death of England’ plays…

Despite the late Irish titan’s estate being famously resistant to any sort of major innovation when it comes to revivals of his work, Samuel Beckett’s existential masterpiece ‘Waiting for Godot’ still gets wheeled out semi-frequently: it’s too good and too singular to bother fretting over whether or not you can radically reinvent it or not (NB, you can’t). This is the first time it’s had a full-on West End production since Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart did it in 2009, though, as heavyweights Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw take on the role of tramps Estragon and Vladimir, lolling about in a no-man’s land while kidding themselves that the mysterious Godot is going to visit them sometime soon. The great director James Macdonald – renowned for his work with the likes of Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Annie Baker – will helm things while trying not to annoy the Beckett estate.

Director Dominic Cooke's stellar National Theatre revival of Sondheim's ‘Follies’ had much to recommend it, but one of its highest points was Imelda Staunton's performance as a wistful former showgirl, haunted by regrets. Now, Staunton and Cooke are reuniting for a crack at another classic musical, ‘Hello, Dolly’, which hasn't had a London revival in over a decade.

Screen star David Oyelowo makes his debut in the National Theatre’s huge Olivier to play the role of Shakespeare’s heroic Roman general turned embittered national foe after his distaste for the plebs becomes public knowledge. NT regular Lyndsey Turner will direct, her first shot at a Shakespeare play since her blockbuster Benedict Cumberbatch-starring Hamlet back in 2015.

Mark Rosenblatt’s John Lithgow-starring ‘Giant’ looks set to be the defining piece of programming of David Byrne’s Royal Court tenure, or certainly of the first year.

Jodie Whittaker returns to the stage with playwright-director Zinnie Harris’s 2018 adaptation of John Webster’s Jacobean gorefest ‘The Duchess of Malfi’.

This heavily adapted version of Sophocles’s ‘Oedipus Rex’ by erstwhile Almeida wunderkind Robert Icke stars Mark Strong and Lesley Manville. A modern version, it’s set on the night of politician Oedipus’s great electoral victory – but some very disturbing revelations will come to light about his wife.

On the face of it a stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s immortal Cold War satire 'Dr Strangelove’ is as hubristic a conceit as adapting ‘2001’ or ‘Full Metal Jacket’. Nonetheless, here we are: the Kubrick estate has given the stage rights to master satirist Amando Iannucci (‘The Day Today’, ‘I’m Alan Partridge’, ‘The Think of It’, ‘Veep’. ‘The Death of Stalin’, etcetera etcetera) to adapt Kubrick’s classic about a rogue American general who decides to pre-emptively nuke Russia. Iannucci has in turn cast his old mucker Steve Coogan as the lead.

Elton John’s musical adaptation of the fabulous Meryl Street and Anne Hathaway-starring fashion industry satire relaunches in London in revamped form, with US singer and actor Vanessa Williams starring.

The NT hasn’t tackled Oscar Wilde’s immortal comedy since the early ’80s, but here, intriguingly it is, finally getting a splashy Christmas revival that’ll star newly-minted Timelord Ncuti Gatwa as lusty young idler Algenon, who alongside his BFF Jack (Hugh Skinner) must infiltrate the stately home of the formidable Lady Bracknell in order to go a-wooing. 

Reese Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s long-running BBC comedy horror anthology ‘Inside No. 9’ may be wrapping up on our screens but the duo don’t seem to be in any hurry to step away from it: this new live spin-off entitled ‘Stage/Fright’ premieres in the West End in 2025.