To dine out before the theatre — dressed up, of course. Champagne, laughter. Then to throw a coat over your shoulders and hurry through the warmly open doors into the stalls, where a star is waiting for you on stage.

You’ll have to choose the outfit yourself — but when it comes to theatrical stars, we’ve got you covered.

Mark Addy (Mark Ian Addy)
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Theatre Royal Haymarket

Haymarket, London SW1Y 4HT
29 January – 18 April 2026

Mark Addy often plays characters united by a shared quality — either a kind of warm, social resonance (that intonation of “Look, I’m just like you”), or a dangerous, carefree recklessness spiced with a booming laugh.

Take King Robert Baratheon in Game of Thrones: a cuckolded husband, once a victorious warrior, now a brutal ruler — a loud, laughing glutton. Or Dave Horsfall in The Full Monty: a powerful steelworker who loses his job and, in desperation, joins six friends to create a strip show. For this role, Addy received a BAFTA Award.

Addy’s theatrical career is no less substantial. At the National Theatre, he played Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and Hjalmar Johansen in Tony Harrison’s Fram. In the National Theatre Live production Collaborators — about Bulgakov and Stalin — Addy played Vladimir, an NKVD officer.

And now, in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, he takes on the title role — Harold, a pilgrim walking in an attempt to comfort an old friend and atone for years of silence.

Vanessa Williams (Vanessa Lynn Williams)
The Devil Wears Prada

Dominion Theatre

268–269 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 7AQ
All winter 2026

American singer, actress, model, dancer, and producer — and the first African American woman to win the title of Miss America (1984). Williams relinquished that title — and somehow became even more radiant because of it.

Two years before the pageant, still little-known, she hesitated for a long time before agreeing to pose nude for a photographer. He assured her the images would be silhouettes only, backlit, an art project — and that no one but him would ever see them. After her coronation, the photographs were sold to Penthouse, which made millions from the issue.

Williams gave up the title — and chose not to sue. Instead, she moved forward: head held high, heart untainted.

A magnificent woman and extraordinarily beautiful actress, she did not break. She became a successful recording artist, released albums, received Grammy recognition, and in the mid-1990s made her Broadway debut, launching a dazzling acting career that brought Tony and Emmy nominations.

Since 2014, she has starred in The Devil Wears Prada.

Years later, Williams returned to the Miss America stage — this time as head judge. The ceremony opened with a formal apology from the organization. She accepted it.

Jodie Comer
Prima Facie

Richmond Theatre

1 Little Green, Richmond TW9 1QJ
23–24 January 2026

Jodie Marie Comer was born in 1993 in Liverpool, into a family far removed from show business — her father was a football physiotherapist, a fact that would later prove deeply influential in her life.

From a young age, she displayed a rare ability to hear speech and accents with absolute precision. She is what we might now call an empath — uncannily attuned to a character’s psychology and emotional rhythm.

At school, Jodie danced in an amateur troupe. One day, rehearsals clashed with a family trip — and her former friends expelled her from the group. Instead of despairing, she chose another path.

She performed at a school talent competition with a self-written monologue about the Hillsborough stadium disaster. Here, her football-rooted upbringing mattered: she understood not only the game, but its social and emotional weight. The tragedy claimed nearly 100 lives and remains one of the darkest chapters in British football history.

She did not win the competition — but her performance so impressed her drama teacher that he recommended her for a small role in a BBC Radio 4 play. She was noticed. And that was the beginning.

Her role as Villanelle in Killing Eve made her a global star. With virtuosic ease, she shifted personas, accents, languages, costumes, masks. The result was unforgettable. For this work she received Emmy, BAFTA TV, and Critics’ Choice Awards, as well as a Golden Globe nomination.

Prima Facie is a one-woman play telling the story of Tessa Ensler, a young, successful lawyer who, after experiencing sexual assault herself, discovers how the justice system truly works.

For Prima Facie, Comer won both the Olivier Award and the Tony Award. There is a beautiful symmetry here: she began with a school monologue — and reached triumph in Suzie Miller’s devastating play.

In winter 2026, Jodie Comer once again performs Prima Facie on tour across the UK and Ireland.

Hugh Bonneville (Hugh Richard Bonniwell Williams)
Shadowlands

Aldwych Theatre
49 Aldwych, London WC2B 4DF
5 February – 9 May 2026

Bonneville’s roles form something like an encyclopedia of English life. His characters are deep, contradictory, tender — all beneath an exterior of restraint.

Say Hugh Bonneville, and one immediately thinks of Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, from Downton Abbey. The role brought him global fame and revealed the full range of his talent. In no small part thanks to his work, the series garnered countless awards and nominations.

He also played Mr Brown, the father in both Paddington films — gentle, bewildered, tradition-bound, and utterly devoted to his family.

Interestingly, he was originally known as Hugh Williams, but to avoid confusion with a mid-20th-century actor of the same name, he rearranged his middle names — eventually becoming Hugh Bonneville.

Bonneville holds a Cambridge degree in Theology, which may well have helped him understand the inner world of C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands. Grief, faith, doubt — all are present here, played with warmth and honesty by Hugh Bonneville, Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to drama.

Ben Daniels
Man and Boy

National Theatre (Dorfman)

London Southbank SE1 9PX
30 January – 14 March 2026

A recipient of the Evening Standard Theatre Award and Olivier Award, and a Tony Award nominee, Ben Daniels always knew he was an actor — and simply kept moving forward.

Even at school, he took drama as an exam subject. He later trained for three years at LAMDA. Daniels’ work is not so much a career as a journey — in the most philosophically saturated sense of the word.

Countless roles, large and small, approached with rigor and care — from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to The Crown.

Today, Daniels appears in Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy. Written in 1964, the play feels alarmingly contemporary: a dialogue between a small boy and his father — a dazzling financial tycoon accustomed to winning. And what does that require? Exactly — stepping over others, again and again, instead of listening to conscience.

Daniels plays Gregory Solomon not as a villain, but as a broken, cold, emotionally numb — and therefore impeccable — man. He was not always this way. He simply learned not to feel.

A devastating portrait of a human being crushed by the system and the hunger for big money.

Beverley Knight (Beverley Anne Smith Knight)
Marie and Rosetta

@sohoplace

4 Soho Place, Charing Cross Road, London W1D 3BG
28 February – 11 April 2026

A Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to the arts, an Olivier Award winner, and a multiple MOBO Award laureate, Beverley Knight — often called the Queen of British Soul — was born in the early 1970s to Jamaican parents.

Her first encounter with music took place in church. Her family was deeply religious, strict in its routines, and church attendance was a weekly obligation — it was there that Knight first tested her voice.

She began writing songs at 13, recorded her first demo at 19, and rose to prominence in the mid-1990s, paving the way for solo albums and numerous accolades.

She came to theatre as a mature artist, with a vast musical background and lived experience. By the 2000s, she was already a musical theatre star (Memphis, Cats, The Drifters Girl, Sylvia) — all while continuing to release albums, including covers of classic songs.

Marie & Rosetta is the musical in which Knight plays Sister Rosetta Tharpe, one of the most influential musicians of the first half of the 20th century. She began with pure gospel, but her art evolved into what would later be called rock ’n’ roll— long before Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard.

She takes a young singer, Marie Knight (performed by the young actress Ntombizodwa Ndlovu), under her wing, sharing not only musical and stage experience, but life itself.

This is a remarkable work — a new path in Beverley Knight’s creative journey: intimate, quiet, and profoundly moving.