DEAR LIAR
Jermyn Street Theatre
★★★½
“a warm celebration of two extraordinary people”
Nestled behind the ornate facades of Piccadilly is a charming secret, Jermyn Street Theatre. Designed as a studio space that’s easily accessible to the West End, with merely 70 seats, the theatre guarantees its audience is never more than four rows away from the action. It’s a fitting backdrop for Dear Liar, an intimate story which travels the forty-year correspondence between two towering theatrical egos, George Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell. Brought to life in Jerome Kilty’s epistolary play, Shaw and Campbell became friends, collaborators, and something more complex—the subjects of one of theatre history’s most celebrated letter exchanges.
There’s a certain geographical poetry to staging a play about Shaw (Alan Turkington) and Mrs Campbell (Rachel Pickup) just round the corner from where their work would have debuted. Kilty’s script dances through their correspondence—covering the opening of Pygmalion, the ebb and flow of devotion, the careful construction of self. As a piece, it revels in its meta-textuality: their letters to each other are performances in themselves, as intimate as they are curated. When they eventually debate and argue over the publishing of these letters, the layers multiply—private becomes public becomes theatrical becomes our interpretation of both.
Yet converting letters into dialogue brings inevitable clunkiness at moments. The language itself is often magnificent, but the epistolary format resists easy dramatisation. Kilty’s script does well to link the letters together into conversation where possible, but it soars highest when abandoning the letters entirely—imagining, for instance, Shaw following Mrs Campbell to the seaside, or their Pygmalion rehearsal together, a comic reversal of the famous play where instead the grand dame struggles deliciously to sound like a flower girl. Pickup seizes the moment, her faux attempts at cockney earning some of the night’s biggest laughs.
Pickup overall is strong as Mrs Pat, capturing both her vanity and her vulnerability, bringing warmth and imperious grace to a woman who knew her own worth. Turkington delivers a solid performance as Shaw, though at times he feels a touch too even-keeled for a man known for his firebrand polemic. There are glimpses of Shaw’s childish capriciousness and intellectual fire, particularly in his anger at a young soldier’s pointless death, but they never fully ignite.
Stella Powell-Jones’ direction ensures the piece never succumbs to static staging, finding visual interest throughout. She uses the space inventively, varying levels and sightlines to keep the two-hander dynamic. A particularly affecting moment sees Mrs Pat materialise behind a curtain as Shaw describes her first appearance in Hollywood, the staging rendering her almost ghost-like as he mythologises her legend.
Tom Paris’ design work across set and costume yields uneven results. His drapes section the playing area deftly, conjuring immediate worlds whilst sparse staging elements anchor the space. The costuming, however, stumbles in its attempt to blend modern and period. It succeeds for Mrs Pat, but Shaw is saddled with a graphic undershirt beneath his waistcoat that reads more high street than Shavian, drawing the eye for the wrong reasons. Chris McDonnell’s lighting offers more assured work, bathing the stage in soft pink warmth, though Harry Blake’s typewriter sound design veers between effective and unnecessarily intrusive.
At its heart, Dear Liar offers comfort theatre at its best—a warm celebration of two extraordinary people, presenting a mosaic of their lives that illuminates the humans behind the legends. It’s truly a theatre lover’s play, holding a bittersweet irony at its centre: Mrs Patrick Campbell’s performances were ephemeral, lost to time as all theatre must be, yet through these letters her words endure alongside Shaw’s. Productions like this preserve what the stage could not—her voice, her wit, her humanity—even as she protests to Shaw her inability to match his way with words. It may not break new ground, but it delivers wit, tenderness, and theatrical charm in abundance.
DEAR LIAR
Jermyn Street Theatre
Reviewed on 10th February 2026
by Daniel Outis
Photography by David Monteith-Hodge
