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Will THE TRAITORS work on stage? | Thoughts on the global TV phenomenon coming to the stage in 2027
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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic and Host)
Meet Lisa.
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Lisa / Podcast Advertiser
Hey there.
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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic and Host)
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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic and Host)
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- [01:21]
Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic and Host)
Start reaching your ideal audience through podcast ads with Acast, visit go acast.com advertisement to get started so the international television phenomenon the Traitors is being adapted for the stage. But is this going to be an ingenious adaptation or a shameless cash grab? And more to the point, exactly how faithful is it going to be to the TV show here in my proverbial turret of theatre criticism? Let us discuss. But first. Oh my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. And hello to those of you listening to this on podcast platforms. And for the benefit of podcast listeners, I am currently wearing a green hooded cape. Considerably cheaper looking than the one sourced by the BBC. Actually, they all do seem to have the same capes in different iterations around the world. Do they have it like a mutual cape person? Where are they sourcing these capes? In any case, it's important for me that you know that I didn't go out and do the very cringe, very embarrassing thing of buying a traitor's cape just so I could sit down and wear one for the purposes of talking about the Traitors coming to the stage. No, no. I already had this cape from when I used to play Dungeons and Dragons as an elf, which I think we can all agree is significantly less embarrassing. But we are here in any case, because yesterday I was traveling Back from New York in a blizzard, news broke that the Traitors was being adapted for the stage, and my immediate reaction was huh. And my subsequent reaction after considering it for some time remained huh. Because there is plenty here for us to discuss and not all that many forerunners in terms of TV reality game shows being turned into theatrical narratives. There are a couple of examples which we are going to talk about today, good and bad, and there are a couple of different directions in which this might go. The burning questions, of course, course are what exactly is this going to be? How exactly is this going to work? And is this going to work? And before I share with you my personal verdict on whether or not this is going to be successful, we are going to talk about the actual details that have been announced as I am doing this. Feel free to share all of your thoughts and feelings in the comments section down below. But this press release came yesterday, on January 26, 2026. I gather subsequently that this has been in development for some time. This is truly the first I had heard about it. Not a whisper of this. So they did a good job keeping it secret, as you would expect the Traitors to do with the breaking of the news, obviously being timed to coincide with the end of the most recent UK series of the Traitors. This is, after all, about the show coming to the London stage, which is the headline of this Email Studio Lambert and Neal Street Productions developing theatrical version of the global hit the traitors for 2027. It is written that they are delighted to announce a major theatre adaptation of the global phenomenon. The Traitors is in development for a launch in London next year. The production is being written by John Finnemore, who is credited to Good Omens and Cabin Pressure as a writer both on television and directed by Olivier Award winner Robert Hastie, who is perhaps best known to audiences for his recent productions of Operation Mincemeat, currently in the West End and on Broadway, set to embark on a UK tour, as well as the award winning standing at the sky's edge. Mr. Hasty has another project coming up soon at the National Theatre and he is, I think, a very good pair of hands for this. I'm not familiar with John Finnemore's work, but the fact that he has been heavily associated throughout his career, it seems, with TV comedy makes this very intriguing because and we'll talk about this a little bit more, but my first follow up question was to what extent is this going to be some kind of a parody? Because that is something we've seen before and if it is the case. It also sort of limits the enthusiasm that I will have about this, but it's not really the way it's being branded right now. This is truly being called the Traitors on stage. It's now for a little bit more context. The announcement of the stage version produced by the all three media backed companies comes as the smash hit multi award winning psychological television series hosted by Claudia Winkleman finished its fourth series on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. The final of the Celebrity Traitors last year captivated audiences with a remarkable 15 million viewers, making it the most popular UK television program of 2025. Like I said, cultural phenomenon, but particularly here in the uk, a truly massive hit. Now we have some statements, first from Stephen Lambert, CEO of Studio Lambert, who said taking the Traitors from screen to stage is a hugely exciting next step for this much loved brand. Partnering with Neal Street Productions, a true theatrical powerhouse, allows us to reimagine the show as a bold and surprising theatrical performance. That's about as much information as we're going to get there. Faithful fans should expect an intense, joyful night out as we reveal a thrilling new hunting ground for our traitors. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I am intrigued. Caro Newling, co founder of Neil Street Productions, meanwhile said in developing the Traitors for the stage, Neil street and Studio Lambert have curated a team of brilliant faithful theatre makers. They both couldn't they get together and decide like, who gets to do the faithful pun? You know, both get to do the faithful pun when there's only two statements that like the PR needs to go back and be like, I'm sorry but like they emailed first. We can't both do faithful anyway. I mean, I understand you can't, you can hardly say traitorous Theatre makers led by director Rob Hasty and writer John Finnemore to bring a bold structural twist to the format that only the live medium can provide. That's intriguing to me and in reading that, I actually have new follow up questions. There is a website where you can sign up to receive further information. That's thetraitorsonstage.com production details, including timelines, are to be announced in due course. They have released a trailer that we can take a look at. You just know it's not going to tell us anything at all. Okay. Castle vibes. Closing. Car door Birds. Yeah, it's all establishing shots. Okay. Oh, London. They're in a theater. I see flies. I see there's an owl in the theater. Somebody get the owl out of the theater. Are they meeting by the ghost light. Deeply Scottish. I like that they like put the envelope on a little red seat in the auditorium. That's a nice nod to one of the visuals that we have in the series. I mean, I love the Traitors. I have been dedicatedly watching the Traitors this year, as I have since it began on UK television. What that little teaser trailer suggests to me is that this isn't necessarily going to be a play or a full narrative show inspired by the Traitors, but rather a version of the Traitors that is being played on stage that maybe has audience involvement. Like truly with the ambiguity of how this has been announced, this could be like a hard hitting theatrical drama based on or around or inspired by the Traitors. Or it could be like come and watch the Traitors as a game play out on stage. At which point it feels almost suspiciously similar to the Traitors Live experience that you can already go and participate in with Friends. I think there's a version of that in London and in New York right now at least. And to my mind, for both to be able to maintain an audience, there needs to be some clarity around the differences between them. And if this is just like you're watching people play the Traitors on stage, even with the structural twist that they've alluded to, that feels a little bit too close and almost redundant. If there's a version of it, you know a tube right away that you can go and play for yourself. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's speculate a little bit more about exactly what this might be and where this might.
- [09:01]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [09:28]
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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic and Host)
Might be. So the where of it all is a very interesting question, and they filmed that in A traditional West End theatre setup. It looked like somewhere, perhaps on Shaftesbury Avenue, but there are arising a bunch of new theatrical venues. I'm talking not just about the West End's most recent theatre at Soho Place, but all of these troubadour theaters, the likes of which are currently housing Starlight Express and the Hunger Games, with more popping up very soon, which are very adaptable spaces, very technologically inclusive spaces, and with the vibe of what this is beginning to sound like, that could be very beneficial to the show that they are developing. I remain so intrigued and more than a little in the dark about exactly what it is that has been announced here. My first thought, I keep telling you, my first thought, among my first thoughts, was that this was going to be some kind of a narrative version of. Of the Traitors, where we would get a cast of actors playing a bunch of regular people, presuming it's based on ordinary British traitors and not celebrity traitors, and that you would see essentially the events of an entire series play out over the course of an evening. And before we dig into whether or not we think that that is a compelling enough premise for a stage production, it wouldn't surprise me if that is what they were aiming at. After the success of the Traitors, theater producers tend to have a habit of glancing out the side windows of their proverbial cars and see things that have become remarkably popular and successful and trying to find a way to make money out of them on stage, basically, which honestly matters little if the thing they end up developing becomes successful and sort of justifies its own existence. And it's worth pointing out that even prior to the Traitors live experience, the one that you can go and participate in that I mentioned, these producers are not the first to notice the inherent theatrical capability of the Traitors as a program. I think there was a piece written in the stage newspaper around this time last year, circa season three, when one participant announced at the cliffhanger of one episode, you know, ex. Other participant murdered my mum, so I'm going to now get revenge. That the whole thing had basically transcended and become pseudo Shakespearean. And for the benefit of those who aren't watching the program who haven't seen it before, the entire idea is that a group of individuals who are strangers, unless it's the celebrity version, in which case they may have prior relationships or certainly be aware of each other, but they are all brought to a castle where a minority of them are secretly elected to become a team of traitors who will nightly murder Essentially the other players in the castle who will be working together with the traitors amongst them to try and determine the identity of the traitors. Because if there are any traitors left at the end, then they steal all of the prize money for themselves. But if it's just faithful, they get to share it between themselves. What emerges is an interesting psychological study about the way in which we analyze people and trust people, with a lot of troubling revelations about, amongst other things, unconscious bias usually coming to the surface. And there is something about it that is so inherently theatrical and so of the stage, not just the aesthetic of it all, with them parading around these hallways in the cloaks and things happening by night, but also the language of it all, with them being banished and murdered and the designations, are you a traitor or are you a faithful? These moral, absolute ideas, but also the climax of almost every single episode being this banishment around a round table when they have to debate amongst themselves who they are each going to vote for and try and sway public opinion. That's right out of a play. You have characters literally arguing around a table. We've been doing that on the stage for decades now. And something we've been doing for centuries is perpetrating the idea of dramatic irony, the notion that an audience realizes more about something, perhaps a villainous plot that is unfolding than other characters on stage. It's a key part of the introductory scenes of Shakespeare's Richard iii, of course, one of his greatest villains. But Iago in Othello also lets us know his mission statement before he begins to carry it out. That entire play hinges on the fact that we know that Iago is a dastardly, deceitful villain, but Othello and a lot of the other characters around him simply can't see it. A very similar frustration that audiences of the traitors experience every year. And so, in response to the question, can the traitors be theatrical and can it exist within this realm? I think the answer has to be yes. But I remain so acutely curious of what it is that this is actually going to be. And there are, like I said, a couple of prior examples within this kind of idea that could clue us in. There is Queers, the celebrated play by James Graham that is not set entirely within who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but certainly depicts it as it dramatizes the story of a man who was alleged to have cheated on the program. That play, from what I understand, I've never actually seen it on stage, but I have seen the brilliant TV adaptation, certainly plays into the aesthetic of who Wants to Be a Millionaire as it puts him theatrically on trial. It even allows the audience to act as a jury and vote with their perception of what the verdict ought to be by the end of the thing. Kind of playing into the audience voting element of who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The key difference, I think, being that it's not just creating a generic episode of who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It is depicting the very real and well known story that was happening around it. It's a story that became bigger than just the program. And the Traitors is very big and very culturally impactful. But I'm curious as to whether if this is going to be a narrative theatrical drama, whether it's just going to be set within the world as cameras are rolling, or whether we're going to get to see that from outside, I. E. Are we going to actually see cameras on stage? Are there going to be producer characters? Is it going to be as much about that as anything else? Is there going to be a host character? Are they going to resemble Alan Cumming, the host of the US Version or Claudia Winkleman, the host of the British version? I think it would probably be more likely to lean Claudia than Alan. That seems to be what the press release is suggesting. My concern though is as soon as you start to enter that territory of portraying real individuals and they did it in quiz. Fair enough. But it does sort of begin to push you towards the realm of comedic parody. And it's at this point that I think about a couple of musicals that have been based on TV competition programs. One of them is the Great British Bake off, which I thoroughly enjoyed. You can go and check out my review. And a big part of the success of that was how they evaded the structural expectations. They didn't just run through like, here's an episode, here's another one. We're gonna do like Technical and then Showstopper and like through it repeatedly in a way that would have become predictable and tedious. But also they really, I think, cherished and uplifted and understood the key thing about what made the program successful and what makes it so watchable. And it's about the personalities of the individuals. They found the really theatrical thing, which is not cakes and biscuits because you know, we're not seeing them like mouth wateringly close on the stage. It's not quite as delicious and they tend to be like pre made props. What we are going to relate to, however, are the personalities of these characters and the journeys that they go on on in the interpersonal relationships, which of course is also what the Traitors is kind of all about. And you would expect them to play on a lot of the familiar tropes of, like, hidden relationships and people really opposing each other and going after the wrong person. And perhaps one character who does have the right idea, but they aren't believed by other people. The things that we see every single year. Another, perhaps less successful musical version of a TV game show was Come Dine With Me, the musical which I saw at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This one fell slightly more into the trap of repetition. Interestingly enough, if I recall correctly, both Come Dine With Me and Bake off traded on the idea of there being a secret saboteur, a very theatrical concept, and of course, the entire thing of the Traitors. But then you have to remember it's not all turret deliberations aside conversations and round table banishments. They also do these huge, physically demanding challenges in the TV program. There are a lot of aspects of it which I think would be very difficult to bring to the stage and juries out as whether or not this is going to be a dramatic narrative or if it's, like I said, a live version of the Traitors that is being played. I feel like we still don't really have an answer about that. The only clues we have are that, you know, there is a writer credited John Finnemore to suggest that the Thing is scripted and you're not just watching a game show on stage. They also mention this bold structural twist to the format that only the live medium can provide, which I have to assume is some version of an audience vote. That's the thing that speaks to me. Is it going to be like quiz? Is it going to be a little bit like the Mystery of Edwin Drood? Do we have multiple outcomes based on what the audience decide? Are the audience going to know the identities of the Traitors? There was like a week at the beginning of the series this year where the British audience didn't know who the secret Traitor was. And I feel like there's a lot that you could do with that that could be quite interesting. Certainly I think the idea is rich with possibility. There is also an awful lot about it that makes me.
- [19:31]
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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic and Host)
Nervous. Let's consider then whether or not we think that this is a good idea, whatever it is going to amount to, and let's take a look at the pros and cons here. And the obvious pro is the cultural impact that it's had. And audiences, when they love something this much, tend to search for ways to engage with it more thoroughly. And, you know, while they're waiting for for the next season of Celebrity Traitors, while we're waiting for the next season of the Regular Traitors, and especially after the enthusiasm of just having watched it for the past couple weeks, I think people will be very eager to find more ways to kind of keep that fire burning and keep the enthusiasm of what it provided. It's kind of been this landmark television moment that seems to revitalize water cooler conversation, as they call it, with people going into work talking about the episode that they watched the night before. Did you watch the Traitors? What do you think is going to happen? Who do you think they're going to murder? Do you think this person's going to be discovered? Do you think these people are really twins who were separated at birth? Spoiler alert. No. No, I don't. And I think for as long as the Traitors has been on television, that's always been a huge part of its success. It's not just watching this gripping, brilliant piece of television. It's all of the discussion that you have afterwards. It's the family group chats, it's, you know, getting ready to watch it every night in a row for the last three nights of the week and then impatiently waiting for the three episodes the next week. And while that is obviously a very attractive thing to producers, that there is so much enthusiasm beforehand that there are so many fans of the Traitors out there who may want to buy a ticket and go and see it just because they heard the Traitors on stage and they thought, oh, that's gonna be, you know, that's gonna be brilliant, I do think that that also brings its own challenge. People are accustomed to this being drawn out over a couple of weeks, being able to go away and digest it and come up with theories and discuss it. And you will have, presumably, an interval of about 20 minutes in which to do that if you aren't busy paying for an expensive glass of wine or going to a small bathroom, essentially. I think while the stage could be a fitting home for the traitors, tonally, I'm not sure if structurally I can really understand how this is going to work, especially because, as I've already mentioned, to just go through, like, murder, banishment, murder, banishment, murder, banishment does seem like it would be a mistake. A tool that musicals have is being able to do more of a kind of a montage. There's a sequence in the Bake off musical in which they can deliver an awful lot of eliminations after spending more time in scenes of exposition. But this, by all accounts, seems like it isn't going to be a musical. And I do fear the idea of what this might look like as a parody, because to my mind, that sort of relegates it to the realm of the Edinburgh Festival fringe. I don't know that it really justifies its presence on a West End stage, if indeed that is where this is heading. They said launch in London, but there's every possibility that this could be something that is being built to eventually tour. You know, people love this TV show all around the country. It would make sense to try and extend it to everywhere that they could get to see it. But if there's one thing I really don't care for, it's these sort of soulless theatrical parody productions that basically market themselves and sell a lot of tickets on the basis of, you loved this TV program, so come to the theatre. We're doing it on stage. It doesn't have to be particularly original or particularly good, but you will walk away, you know, talking about nostalgia and how familiar it was and, like, oh, their hair looks just like it did in the program in the 90s, which is great, which is lovely for those audiences, if they're having a nice time. I just think it's one of the less creative things that we could be doing. And there's room for an awful lot of different theater here in the uk. I don't have to like all of it, but I think, and I do trust Robert Hasty, you have to walk me a certain length of the ways down this garden path before I can begin to get on board with the idea of the traitors on stage. At this point, I can't really begin to conceptualize a particularly satisfying version of whatever this is. Going to look like. But I have a lot of red flag filled visions of kind of cringe interpretations of previous seasons and parodying big personalities and iconic moments and doing the Diane Ross thing again and having a relationship that emerges. And I think while it may be crowd pleasing, it's currently not playing well to the audience inside of my brain. But you know, perhaps that is what people want. This is a great opportunity for you to weigh in in the comments section down below. What do you think this ought to be and do you share my fears that it could be something a little bit cringe? And perhaps I'm being too hard on the very idea of the traitors on stage. If this was something that was being announced for a fringe of fringe space and it was called Traitors the Musical, which I dare say is going to exist, or perhaps even already has, then I would definitely have a much clearer idea of what it was going to look like. At this point. There is still room for this to surprise me. They promised that this would be a bold and surprising theatrical performance and that's one of my favorite things to experience in a theatre is something genuinely surprising. So I will absolutely be going to see this for myself once it has arrived on a London stage. Enduringly, I have some misgivings, but like I said, I would love to know what you all think in the comments section down below. Have you seen the Traitors? Have you been enjoying it? Do you think it could work on stage? What exactly do you think it's going to be as? And when there are substantial updates to this news, I will be right back here talking about them with you. In the meantime, if you would like to hear my thoughts on everything else happening on stage in the West End and on Broadway and around the world, make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube or following me on podcast platforms. As always, I hope that you enjoyed listening to this. I have been Mickey Jo and I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Joe Theater. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
- [26:22]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching your insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes min and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [26:49]
Lisa / Podcast Advertiser
Lunch was great, but this traffic is awful. Um, can we stop at a bathroom? Are you alright? I keep having stomach issues after eating like diarrhea, gas and bloating, abdominal pain and sometimes oily stools.
- [27:01]
Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic and Host)
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- [27:46]
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