By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN?: Tuesday 3 February and ran through 5 February 2026

Musical theatre festival MTFestUK is a collection of 6 new pieces shared in 60-minute workshop form and Tristan is the new work composed by Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke (Leave To Remain, Lyric Theatre Hammersmith).

• Read on for reasons including why we look forward to meeting Tristan in full at a theatre soon

Ashley J Daniels plays the titular Tristan who uses his quick wits, good looks and charm to seduce both men and women.

Aretha Ayeh plays Philly who meets him at a bus stop as she decides to call time on her own date and later finds herself pregnant by Tristan as her streetwise author mother played by an intuitive Nicola Blackman starts to suspect something untoward.

Tristan steals her manuscript, goes to a gay club, picks up a guy he goes home with but strikes gold when his partner’s flatmate – a TV producer played by Jasper Talbot (The Line Of Beauty, Almeida) – reads the script and loves it.

Plot summaries of workshop readings when scripts are in hand can struggle to do justice to a piece but it’s in the potency of the songs where Tristan really shows promise.

Ross Harmon (Shucked!, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre) plays Tristan’s gay hook up and there’s real sass and humour to the night-on-the-town song he sings with Talbot’s Nick who only wants to stay 20 minutes in the club they go out in.

Elsewhere Ayeh and Blackman get to explore a complicated mother-daughter dynamic where there’s both real love but also an imbalance with 1 far more successful than the other and neither quite knowing how to overcome the difficulties that causes.

The problem and delight with a taster like this is that while it really whets the appetite for what the fully-formed musical might be it does leave the audience wanting to know how and why Tristan turned into the liar and fantasist we see ruining the lives of those characters we care for before our very own eyes.

MTFest projects have a happy knack of finding their way to the stage in fuller form and we’re looking forward to seeing 1 very such project – Redcliffe by and starring Jordan Luke Gage (Bonnie And Clyde, Charing Cross Theatre) – at Southwark Playhouse in May.

Tristan goes somewhere quite dark before its abrupt end at this workshop but we hope it can finds its way to a stage and soon in similar fashion to Redcliffe.

Bloc Party are an English rock band formed in London in 1999 with Okereke as their lead singer.

We’ve included in this article examples of their best-known work which draws on 6 studio albums including 4 top 10 hits. We look forward to meeting Tristan in full at a theatre soon.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy The Other Palace and Tristan Tickets
• Have you seen a Kele Okereke show before and what did you think of it? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
• Enjoyed this preview? Follow monstagigz on Twitter @NeilDurham, email neildurham3@gmail.com and check us out on Instagram and Facebook