Theatre reviews: Everybody's Talking About Jamie | Macbeth: An Undoing

First seen in 2017, Sheffield Theatre’s hit musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie continues to find hugely supportive audiences, writes Joyce McMillan

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, King’s Theatre, Glasgow ****

Macbeth – An Undoing, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh ****

There’s no point in pretending that gender politics in the UK stands in the same place of liberal consensus as it did a decade ago, before the idea of gender self-identification became a “wedge issue” that has been used to divide both feminists and LGBTQ campaigners, and help whip up up a 21st century storm of anxiety and hostility over queer and trans culture, and its place in our society.

Ivano Turco as Jamie New in Everybody's Talking About Jamie PIC: Credit Matt Crockett

Yet somehow, popular showbiz celebrations of queer folk, like Sheffield Theatres’ smash-hit 2017 musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, sail on undisturbed through these choppy waters, and continue to find hugely supportive audiences across the country. The 16-year-old hero of the musical – written by Dean Gillespie Sells and Tom Macrae, and based on a true-life story – is a gay lad, growing up in the early 2000s in a former County Durham mining community, who loves to wear women’s clothes, and whose dream is to become a drag queen.

His ever-supportive single mum Margaret has always known that Jamie is gay, and fully accepts his passion for high heels and lipstick. His estranged Dad, though, wants nothing to do with him; and although he has a close school friend in his clever and ambitious pal Priti, there’s trouble from the head teacher when some more conservative parents hear that Jamie is planning to attend the school prom in a dress.

The musical tells the story of how Jamie navigates this minefield of conflicting and sometimes threatening attitudes through a playlist of 15 powerful songs, culminating in Rebecca McKinnis’s show-stopping performance of Margaret’s great anthem of unconditional mother love, He’s My Boy. In the end, Ivano Turco’s Jamie – all awkward glamour and uncertain voice – has to accept the truth both of his mother’s love, and of his father’s rejection; and begin the long search for his own true style. Yet as the cast belt out the powerful closing number Out Of The Darkness, there’s no doubt that that journey has to be made – and that millions still want to celebrate the fact that it can now be made in daylight or under the spotlight, rather than in darkness and shame.

A powerful questioning of traditional assumptions about gender also lies at the heart of Zinnie Harris’s immense 2023 show Macbeth-An Undoing, first staged at the Lyceum Theatre in February last year, and now returning for a brief run after visits to London and New York, where it last month garnered from fewer than four Drama Desk Award nominations.

Adam Best as Macbeth and Nicole Cooper as Lady Macbeth in Macbeth (An Undoing) PIC: Stuart Armitt

After a first half that plays like a modern-language rewrite of Shakespeare’s original text – albeit a spiky and interesting one, introduced by Liz Kettle’s sharply meta-theatrical witch and servant, Carlin – the play plunges, after the interval, into a profound reimagining of the story, in which Adam Best’s Macbeth is the one who cracks up and descends into sleepwalking madness, while Nicole Cooper’s magnificent Lady Macbeth tries to hold their increasingly embattled regime together, even though the men around her cannot even see her as a woman when she assumes that leadership role.

Despite her rationalist defiance, Cooper’s unforgettable Lady Macbeth is also haunted, both by the deaths of all the children she has borne, and by the deal she struck with the witches in an effort to save the last one. And as her white shift dresses become increasingly and inexplicably smeared with blood, the story spirals towards its bloody conclusion, with the Lady’s story, and the quality of her courage and defiance, misrepresented to the last and beyond; in a magnificent, troubling dramatic response to Shakespeare’s mightiest piece of stage poetry that is brilliantly designed by Tom Piper and lit by Lizzie Powell, and that all theatre lovers should strive to catch, on its final home run.

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 21-25 May. Macbeth – An Undoing is at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 25 May.