The 2014 film was only a modest success – but now the musical’s message of gay rights and solidarity feels both outlandish and full of hope

Hands down the hottest ticket in London this summer is the musical Pride at the National Theatre, which is booked solid until the end of its run in September and will presumably transfer to the West End after that. There are lots of gay shows doing well at the moment: I saw Oh, Mary! for the second time this week when the show’s creator, Cole Escola, came over from New York to resume the title role, and Operation Mincemeat keeps going and going. But both those shows are tonally rather than politically gay. Pride, which is adapted from the 2014 film and had modest commercial success when it came out, is a different kettle of fish and I’m curious as to why it’s flown now.

I should say up front I haven’t seen the show (can’t get a ticket!). But this week, as I watched my timeline continue to fill up with effusive praise and lots of crying about the musical, I went back to the film. It’s a strange time to watch it, in a news cycle in which issues around sexuality in public life and old views about gay rights have surfaced to yank us back to earlier times. The death of the US senator Lindsey Graham triggered widespread speculation about what, exactly, Donald Trump held over him and gave rise to a lot of gay jokes pulled out of the deep freeze.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist. She is the author of She Left Me The Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me

Helen Hunt and Kristin Scott Thomas are leading revivals of the Russian classic whose blend of comedy and tragedy is baked into our own dramatic heritage

What kind of play is The Cherry Orchard? As a new production starring Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh beckons in Stratford, I am reminded that it is a question people have been asking since the play’s inception. Chekhov himself wrote that what had emerged in his play was “not a drama but a comedy, in places almost a farce”. Stanislavski, who directed the Moscow premiere in 1904, violently disagreed. “It is a tragedy,” he told Chekhov, “whatever prospect of a better life you hold out in the last act.”

While the debate continues, I hope we shall not be told by anyone involved in the new RSC production that they are at long last restoring the play’s comedy. It is a critical cliche that the British sentimentalise the play and treat it as a lament for the decline and fall of a pseudo-Edwardian aristocracy. In my experience of the play – and I have seen about 20 productions – this is simply untrue. We generally do The Cherry Orchard very well because its blend of styles and moods is something baked into our own dramatic heritage. Eschewing the academic formality of the French, for whom tragedy and comedy are rigidly defined genres, we are used to a glorious impurity in drama: a culture that can produce Twelfth Night should have no problem in comprehending The Cherry Orchard.

It took a long time for the actor to find her groove – then the smash TV spy thriller changed everything. She talks about getting advice from A-listers, speaking her mind, and why she’s switching to theatre

Sandra Oh bursts into a back room at the National Theatre in London with wayward post-rehearsal energy. The 54-year-old, long one of the most stylish actors in Hollywood, is in brown linen, a herringbone jacket and hat and sunglasses, which she removes before collapsing into a chair and throwing her head forward, arms outstretched, hair splayed across the table. “It’s just the fucking process of it,” she groans. “We just finished our first stagger-through, which if anyone is an actor – it’s early days, so the fact we made it through was great. It’s brutal. We started in the Lyttelton, and it’s interesting to be in that space and to hear verse. You can really hear it. It’s not just about volume or speed. It’s not even solely about intention. You learn so much just being in that space, but the big thing is – sorry.” She catches herself. “I’m just marching on.” And she bellows with laughter.

Oh has been in London for just over a month rehearsing her role as Alice in a modern reimagining of Molière’s Le Misanthrope. It’s a happy return; eight years ago, she was in the capital to film the first of four series of the hit show Killing Eve, which became a phenomenon and changed her life as an actor for ever. Oh played Eve Polastri, the shambolic but brilliant British intelligence agent, who, along with Jodi Comer’s Villanelle, made for one of the best spy capers of recent years. Now, she is playing a novelist – gender-flipped from the 17th-century original, in an adaptation by Martin Crimp – who is fed up with the flattery and dishonesty of the people around her. It’s a deliberate pivot to theatre; last summer, she appeared as Olivia in a starry production of Twelfth Night at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, New York. In the autumn, she made her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in a production of Donizetti’s comic opera La Fille du Régiment. Unlike the sometimes fraught me-me-meism of screen work, says Oh, working in theatre in general and at the National in particular “is a collaborative thing” – not least, she adds drily, because no one does it for the money. “Everyone has to bring their best and most open selves. And everyone else loves watching everyone succeed.”

He stood down as boss of the NT – and threw himself into kayaking, writing and DIY. The veteran director talks about his new start aged 60, mourning his mother – and directing Death of a Salesman in Turkish

There were several big endings for Rufus Norris in 2025, all crammed into the same few seismic months. Firstly, the close of his tenure as director of the National Theatre after a decade at the helm. That planned ending collided with the loss of his mother, who died three weeks before he left the NT. On top of that, a significant birthday concluding his 50s.

So what did Norris do after turning 60, on the other side of the Big Job, alongside the grief of losing a parent? DIY, plenty of kayaking and a house move, it turns out: “It felt important to have a complete break,” he says. “I’m a bit of a workaholic, but I’m also a bird of simple brain so I can as easily lose myself in how to build a shed or do up a place.”

Over his kaleidoscopic career, the great Shakespearean was a stalwart of the RSC, co-founded a ‘rock’n’roll’ theatre company and excelled at Chekhov and Pinter

Michael Pennington was what Richard II – a part he played with great distinction – called a “well-graced actor”. He had a resonant voice, a handsome countenance, a security and ease on stage. But looking back over his career, on his death at the age of 82, I am struck by its astonishing variety.

He co-founded, with Michael Bogdanov, the English Shakespeare Company. He toured the world with one-man shows on Shakespeare and Chekhov. He directed here and abroad and wrote 10 books full of practical wisdom. On top of all that, he was witty and delightful company.

As the writer turns 80, his masterful adaptation of the French novel is being revived at the National Theatre. It highlights his lifelong interest in political power play

I once dubbed Christopher Hampton, who celebrates his 80th birthday this month, “the quiet man of British theatre”. By that I meant that he was less prone to expressing his views in opinion pieces than contemporaries such as David Hare and David Edgar. The term also implied that his plays possessed a less idiosyncratic style than the work of, say, Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard. But I suspect that Hampton’s regard for the classical virtues of objectivity, lucidity and irony means that his work will prove as durable as anyone’s.

He is also, as I have seen, a man of considerable private passion. One incident in particular is branded on my memory. In November 1990 I was one of a group, including the director David Leveaux and set designer Bob Crowley, despatched by the British Council to Cairo to give a number of talks ahead of a visit by the National Theatre. We were privileged to be given a private night-time tour of the pyramids and were enjoying a quiet drink in the neighbouring hotel in Giza when in burst Hampton, who had just arrived from London. “Have you heard the news?” he cried. “Mrs Thatcher has been attacked in the Commons by Geoffrey Howe and it looks as if she’s in trouble.”