By Sara Bright
So, The Traitors is coming to the theatre.
I know. My first reaction was an eye roll too.
The announcement dropped this morning – or was it yesterday? The days blur a bit in January – saying that the BBC’s big cloak-and-dagger hit is being adapted for the London stage in 2027.
That feels like a lifetime away. But that’s the West End for you. Booking theatres is like trying to get a dentist appointment; you have to plan years before the tooth actually hurts.
My cynicism about this was pretty high, initially. We’ve seen this trend before, haven’t we? TV shows that have no business being on a stage getting shoehorned into a proscenium arch because producers know the title will sell tickets. It’s the “brand recognition” game. It’s why we have Stranger Things on stage (which, okay, was actually decent) and why there’s probably someone, somewhere, trying to figure out how to turn Gogglebox into a musical.
It feels like reheating a takeaway. Sure, it’s food, and you’re hungry, but the texture is never quite right. The magic of The Traitors is the editing. It’s the slow-motion shots of Claudia Winkleman’s fringe. It’s the tense music overlaid on shots of people eating boiled eggs at breakfast. How do you do that live? Without the edit, it’s just people arguing in a room.
But then I looked at the names involved. And I stopped rolling my eyes.
The writer is John Finnemore.
If you don’t know that name, you should. He wrote Cabin Pressure. He co-wrote the second season of Good Omens. He is, legitimately, one of the smartest comedy writers working in the UK. He’s obsessed with puzzles – he’s the guy who solved Cain’s Jawbone, that impossible literary murder mystery, during lockdown.
Hiring Finnemore to write a stage version of a reality TV show is like hiring a Michelin-star chef to make you a cheese toastie. It implies they aren’t just slapping the logo on a poster. It implies they actually want to make something clever.
And the director is Robert Hastie. He did Operation Mincemeat and Standing at the Sky’s Edge. He knows how to take things that sound like they shouldn’t work – a musical about a corpse fooling the Nazis, or a brutalist housing estate in Sheffield – and make them sing.
So, we have a puzzle-obsessed comedy genius and a director who specializes in “difficult” hits.
That changes the conversation, doesn’t it?
It stops being a cynical cash grab and starts looking like… well, a challenge. A weird, risky challenge.
Because the logistics of this are a headache. Think about it. Is it a scripted play? Does the audience watch a fictional cast of “contestants” play the game? If so, that’s just Agatha Christie with tracksuits. The Mousetrap for the Instagram generation.
Or is it interactive? Do we, the audience, get to vote?
The press release mentions a “bold, structural twist.” That’s producer-speak for “we’re doing something weird.” With Finnemore involved, my money is on something that messes with the format. Maybe different endings? Maybe the “Traitor” is randomized every night?
I remember going to see one of those immersive theatre things a few years back – you know the sort, where you have to wear a mask and wander around a warehouse in Bermondsey while actors whisper at you. It was chaos. Half the audience didn’t know if they were supposed to talk back or just stand there. It felt fragile.
Adaptations of reality TV rely on the chaos of human nature. Scripting that chaos usually kills it. You can write a character acting paranoid, but can you replicate the genuine, sweaty-palmed fear of a frantic Roundtable banishment?
Maybe that’s the point. Theatre is live. It has that same “anything can happen” energy that live TV used to have before everything got polished to death.
If they pull this off, it could be brilliant. It could be a proper psychological thriller that uses the theatre space to make us all feel complicit. Or, it could be a pantomime with better lighting.
I’m still skeptical about the timeline. Announcing it for 2027 feels confident. By then, will we still care about The Traitors? We’re on series four now. In two years, we might be on series six, or we might have moved on to the next obsession. It’s a gamble on the longevity of the brand.
But look, I’ll admit it. I’m intrigued. I wanted to hate it on principle – I prefer new plays to adaptations of stuff I can watch on iPlayer for free – but the team is too good to ignore.
It’s like when you see a weird combination on a menu, like chili and chocolate. Your brain says “no,” but your curiosity says “maybe.”
Let’s see if they can keep the tension without the dramatic music cues. Or if they’ll just have a live orchestra playing spooky violins every time someone touches a shoulder.
Actually, that would be kind of great.
