Lexi Cinema London

Thurs 9 Feb, 19:00, tickets £12.50

In a remote village in Eastern Europe, around 1900, the young Motl Mendl is entranced by the flickering silent images of his father’s cinematograph and stumbles on to a revolutionary way of telling stories.  Forty years on, Motl – now a renowned American film director – reflects on his early life and confronts the cost of fulfilling his dreams.

Director Nicholas Hytner presents Nicholas Wright’s (Vincent in Brixton and The Reporter) new play, a funny and fascinating tribute to the many Eastern European immigrants who became major players in Hollywood’s golden age.  With Damian Molony (Being Human) as Motl, and the award-winning Antony Sher (Primo, Broken Glass) as Jacob, his patron.

We suggest that the Lexi is a uniquely suitable place to watch this beguiling new play!

Thurs 1st March, NT Live, tickets £12.50

Coming live via satellite link from the South Bank - complete with all sorts of added extras – experience the glory of our theatrical culture in the comfort of our own bijoux auditorium.  All for £12.50.  Beat that!

Two sets of twins separated at birth collide in the same city without meeting for one crazy day, as multiple mistaken identities lead to confusion on a grand scale.  Lenny Henry plays Antipholus of Syracuse in this new staging.  And though The Comedy of Errors – a rumbustious, pun-laden mistaken-identity caper about two sets of identical twins – may be the closest thing Shakespeare wrote to a farce, Henry is approaching this not as a comic turn but a serious dramatic role.

“You’d be mistaken in thinking it’s all comedy and lah-di-dah,” he says. “There’s quite an emotional core to it …” His character, Antipholus of Syracuse, arrives in Ephesus in search of his twin brother, and “comes on wearing a mask of confidence”. But then, when he’s alone on stage, “he turns to the audience and suddenly you see he’s scared shitless: he’s lost, he has no family, he wants his family. And here he is again in another faceless city. And he’s just lost.”  This is Henry’s first appearance on the stage of the National, and follows on from his award-winning appearance as Othello of two years ago.

Tickets for this popular play will sell fast; book early to avoid disappointment.

Thurs 29 March 19:00, tickets £12.50

One of the great, generous-hearted and ingenious comedies of the English language, Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer offers a celebration of chaos, courtship and the dysfunctional family.

The cast includes:  David Fynn, Harry Hadden-Paton, John Heffernan, Katherine Kelly (Coronation Street) , Steve Pemberton (The League of Gentlemen), Gavin Spokes and Sophie Thompson (Clybourne Park).

Thurs, 6 Oct, 19:00

1950s London. In the kitchen of an enormous West End restaurant, the orders are piling up: a post-war feast of soup, fish, cutlets, omelettes and fruit flans.

Fifteen hundred customers an’ half of them eating fish. I had to start work on a Friday.

Thrown together by their work, chefs, waitresses and porters from across Europe – English, Irish, German, Jewish – argue and flirt as they race to keep up. Peter, a high-spirited young cook, seems to thrive on the pressure. In between preparing dishes, he manages to strike up an affair with married waitress Monique, the whole time dreaming of a better life. But in the all-consuming clamour of the kitchen, nothing is far from the brink of collapse.

We all said we wouldn’t last the day, but tell me – what is there a man can’t get used to?

Folowing on from the Royal Court’s revival of Chicken Soup and Barley this summer, it is a good year for Wesker fans.  The Kitchen premiered at the Royal Court in 1959 and has since been performed in over 30 countries. Bijan Sheibani will direct Wesker’s breakneck play about the chaotic lives of a group of young, rootless people from across the globe, brought together by work in a high pressure West End kitchen. Tom Brooke will star as cheery young cook Peter, who is conducting an affair with married waitress Monique.

Thurs 1 Dec, 19:00

A new play by John Hodge, in a theatrical ‘first’ after his successful partnering with Danny Boyle on numerous feature films.

Moscow, 1938. A dangerous place to have a sense of humour; even more so a sense of freedom.  Mikhail Bulgakov, living among dissidents, stalked by secret police, has both. And then he’s offered a poisoned chalice: a commission to write a play about Stalin to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Inspired by historical fact, Collaborators embarks on a surreal journey into the fevered imagination of the writer as he loses himself in a macabre and disturbingly funny relationship with the omnipotent subject of his drama. 

Killing my enemies is easy. The challenge is tochange the way they think, to control their minds. And I think I controlled yours pretty well. In years to come, I’ll be able to say: Bulgakov? Yeah, we even trained him. He gave up. He saw the light. We broke him, we can break anybody. It’s man versus monster, Mikhail. And the monster always wins.  

John Hodge’s blistering new play depicts a lethal game of cat and mouse through which the appalling compromises and humiliations inflicted on any artist by those with power are held up to scrutiny. Alex Jennings plays Bulgakov and Simon Russell Beale, Stalin.