How are West End directors reinventing classic shows?

From revelatory queer readings to incorporating cameras or taking theatre outside, plays and musicals are being excitingly reimagined.

Summary

• Max Webster's joyfully queer production of 'The Importance of Being Earnest' is playing in the West End
• Other innovative revivals include Jamie Lloyd's use of cameras in 'Sunset Boulevard'
• Both 'Starlight Express' and 'Cabaret' have been reborn as immersive productions

Oscar Wilde’s glorious comedy The Importance of Being Earnest is all about transformation, so it seems entirely apt that Max Webster’s hit National Theatre production, now playing in the West End, reinvigorates the material with an inspired new staging.

It’s just one of several classic shows that has benefitted from a visionary reimagining in recent times, as London theatre plays host to plays and musicals that we thought we knew inside out, and are now experiencing in a completely different way.

There are plenty more intriguing productions to come this year, including The Lady from the Sea, Hamlet, Seagulls, Bacchae, and Into the Woods, as well as numerous current hits to enjoy. Check out our guide to how directors and adaptors are brilliantly reinventing the classics.

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Lights, camera, action

The use of cameras is a major innovation in theatre, and, when used judiciously, can illuminate a classic text and communicate it to an audience with exciting immediacy. The virtuosic Sarah Snook wowed West End audiences in The Picture of Dorian Gray in 2024, playing numerous characters with the help of tech wizardry. Kip Williams’s production also drew a direct line from Wilde’s fatally narcissistic Dorian to our modern world of screens, influencers, and Instagram filters.

Jamie Lloyd is another director who has ingeniously incorporated cameras into his work, most notably in his versions of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals Sunset Boulevard (starring Nicole Scherzinger) and Evita (Rachel Zegler). In the former, we saw how this fading actress could only define herself via cameras and movies; in the latter, audiences watched Eva Peron knowingly perform for the camera.

Creating new soundscapes

As well as cameras, the increasingly sophisticated use of sound has given directors new tools when approaching classic texts. Earlier this year, Cate Blanchett led a propulsive production of Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Barbican, in which these often delusional or deceptive characters confessed their honest feelings into a microphone.

Max Webster, the director of The Importance of Being Earnest, also impressed with his innovative revival of Macbeth at the Donmar Warehouse in 2023. By using a binaural soundscape, communicated to the audience via headphones, we were listening in on the whispered conspiracies of David Tennant’s Macbeth and Cush Jumbo’s Lady Macbeth – a horribly effective device.

Exploring a queer reading

This approach can put a revelatory twist on a familiar story, perhaps making it feel more contemporary, or honouring the intention that the original might have had but not been able to express. Virginia gay’s joyfully gender-swapped Cyrano at the Park Theatre last year changed the central character’s dilemma from having a large, unattractive nose to having their gender prove a barrier to love.

Marianne Elliott’s 2018 gender-swapped revival of Sondheim’s Company made inspired contemporary sense of his conflicted characters, especially 35-old-year now-female protagonist Bobbie, and cleverly turned a subplot about a bride-to-be into a gay man panicking about his imminent wedding. The line “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should” took on a whole new meaning.

Webster’s The Importance of Being Earnest takes what was likely Wilde’s knowing subtext about two bachelors living a double life and makes it a jubilant, triumphant text. Algernon (played by Ncuti Gatwa at the National, and by Olly Alexander in the West End) going “Bunburying”, or his friend being “Ernest in town, Jack in the country”, now rings out as clear queer coding – and honours the subversive spirit of Wilde’s work.

Immersive world-building

Theatre, at its best, invites us into the show, and directors are now sometimes doing that through their productions too. The immersive approach brings Lloyd Webber’s train musical Starlight Express full steam ahead for a new generation of theatregoers, thanks to Luke Sheppard’s jaw-dropping, high-tech production at the Troubadour Wembley Park. The race track goes right through the audience, bringing you closer than ever to the action.

Although a very different work, Kander and Ebb’s classic musical Cabaret has also been reborn in an immersive form at the Kit Kat Club aka the transformed Playhouse Theatre. Rebecca Frecknall’s remarkable production turns the whole space into the Berlin nightclub where Sally Bowles performs: we become complicit, both in indulging in this decadent entertainment, and in ignoring the horrors outside.

Book Starlight Express tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Book Cabaret tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Taking theatre outside

This is another hallmark of Jamie Lloyd’s eye-catching revivals. The title number of his Sunset Boulevard has passed into legend, thanks to actor Tom Francis performing it while strolling through the theatre’s backstage and out into the street – both in the West End and later on Broadway. Likewise, the biggest theatrical moment of this summer was Zegler taking to the actual London Palladium balcony, singing to the people in the street below: a telling moment for this arch-populist.

Of course, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has been tapping into this al-fresco magic for years. Recent examples include Jordan Fein’s evocative Fiddler on the Roof, which was steeped in the land, and Drew McOnie’s exuberant revamp of classic musical Brigadoon, which used both the earthy environs of the park and its magical quality to memorable effect.

Stripped back and glorious

Sometimes, less is more. Co-directors Matthew Bourne and Jean-Pierre van der Spuy and producer Cameron Mackintosh have given Lionel Bart’s family-favourite musical Oliver! a new lease of life by getting back to the Victorian grit and grime in this spry, swift and heart-pounding production. It still has plenty of escapist pleasures, not least Bart’s indelible songs, but it’s a gripping adventure too – and closer in spirit to Charles Dickens’s novel.

Director Patrick Marber has also triumphed with his revival of Mel Brooks’s zany musical comedy The Producers. It began life at the Menier Chocolate Factory, whose smaller scale frequently inspires inventive solutions, and the result is a show just as jam-packed with gags, but more eloquently illustrating down-at-heel producer Max Bialystock’s desperation to make his scheme come off, and also his endearing bromance with accountant Leo Bloom.

Book Oliver! tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Book The Producers tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Throwing a party

If in doubt: dance! One of my 2025 theatre highlights was having an absolute blast at Lloyd’s revival of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, starring a very game Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as the sparring lovers. This Barbie-pink-hued, disco-scored production was one big party, with confetti, a giant inflatable heart, spangly jumpsuits, and Mason Alexander Park belting out ’90s pop songs.

It encapsulated the sheer joyful wonder of the central pair: they had actually found love, albeit it in the most unlikely place, and that, in an uncertain world, that was worth celebrating. Plus we got to see Hiddleston doing the sprinkler.

Main image credit: The Importance of Being Earnest. Inset: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Max Webster in rehearsal for Macbeth, The Importance of Being Earnest, Starlight Express, Evita, The Producers, Much Ado About Nothing (Photos by Marc Brenner, Pamela Raith, Manuel Harlan)