Opening a theatre should be a celebration, says Nica Burns, the West End power behind this new theatre which is situated next to Tottenham Court Road tube. The co-owner of Nimax Theatre group, she has come up with an elegantly gleaming 600-seat theatre in the round as part of the urban regeneration of the scuzzy top of Charing Cross Road.Her choice of an opening production is this celebratory bio-drama about Newcastle-under-Lyme’s local legend, the irrepressible Neil "Nello" Baldwin, whose amazing career proves that disability can be overcome – a heartwarming message in these turbulent times Read more ...

The cynical might think Pearl Cleage’s play had been expressly written to address the over-riding issues in today’s USA – abortion and contraception rights, gun control, homophobia, racism. But the cynical would be wrong, as Blues for an Alabama Sky was written in 1995. What is notable is its timely scheduling by the National Theatre.Cleage has written a period play, set in the Harlem Renaissance during Prohibition, that works as a tribute to the major players of that movement. Their names are bandied about by the characters as their associates and colleagues – the poet Langston Hughes, the Read more ...

This is not a play for the squeamish: here be blood and cum and unsavoury descriptions of genitalia, male and female, that make you wonder why humans relish sex so much. And it’s all played out in the close quarters of the small in-the-round space of the Orange Tree.The set is dominated by a large Tracey Emin-ish unmade bed, on which the two actors play out their past and present. Above the seating, on all four sides, are long panels where a graphic display shows a pulse line that suddenly flatlines. When the dialogue starts, the text is projected here too.Not that we spend that much Read more ...

As 10-year-old Satsuki observes as she arrives in the countryside with her little sister Mei, “We’re not in Tokyo anymore” – and they’re not in Kansas either, but there is a tang of Oz in the air.  The 1988 Studio Ghibli film, My Neighbour Totoro has the classic status of The Wizard of Oz for a generation of youngsters brought up on whimsical Japanese animé. It’s a brave British theatre that transposes Hayao Miyazaki’s fantastical creatures from the screen to the stage. In the main, the RSC has pulled it off with style, charm and huge panache.  From the Read more ...

“The bands came in 1933.” So begins C P Taylor’s Good, a play that tries its hardest to resist being Googled. It was first performed by the RSC in 1981; this production, starring David Tennant as a mild-mannered German professor who gradually becomes a paid-up Nazi, has been delayed several times by the pandemic. Director Dominic Cooke has crafted a punchy first act, but he can’t save the second from Taylor’s stodgy script.“The bands” play constantly in the head of Tennant's John Halder, their repertoire ranging from Bavarian oompah to American jazz. Halder is a professor of literature in Read more ...

Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-glass doors and pale wood of the boardroom. The Doctor, his 2019 swan song at the Almeida Theatre now transferred to the Duke of York’s Theatre, is an adaptation of a 1912 play by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. It’s a sharp-tongued vivisection of identity politics, anchored by an astonishing lead performance from Juliet Stevenson.Like all good Read more ...

Not much happens but, in its way, everything does in The Band's Visit, the gentle, sweet-natured musical that rather unexpectedly stormed Broadway late in 2017 and is just now receiving a notably empathic London debut.Broadway isn't always hospitable to musicals that wear understatement on their sleeve (cue Moulin Rouge by way of an exact opposite), and there was no guarantee that this adaptation of the 2007 Israeli film of the same name might find the mainstream appeal that it did. Its London perch at the Donmar is in fact closer in vibe to the Read more ...

Therapy is inherently dramatic. After all, it’s all about character – and it has the aim of producing a recognizable change. But who is the most affected by the process: client or therapist?Georgina Burns, a graduate of Hampstead Theatre’s Inspire course for emerging playwrights, examines the issues in her debut play, Ravenscourt. Having spent more than ten years working in the mental health system as a therapist, and being conscious of how British society is becoming increasingly polarized, she brings an intensity of emotional fuel to her story.Set in Ravenscourt, an NHS outpatient therapy Read more ...

Brecht – as I suppose he intended – is always a shock to the system. With not a word on what to expect from his commitment to the strictures of epic theatre in the programme, a star of West End musical theatre cast in the lead and a venue with a history of more user-friendly shows, some are going to have to sit up straight in their seats from the very start – including your reviewer.This new production, the first in London for 25 years, opens on a present day refugee camp, displaced people squabbling over who gets to go home first and what support they can expect when they get Read more ...

It’s particularly poignant to watch this story in the knowledge that a little over a year after US-led troops withdrew from Afghanistan, women and girls are enduring a renewed repression of their rights under the Taliban. The real-life story of The Boy with Two Hearts took place in 2000 – the year before the western invasion began; to see it today is a depressing reminder of how little was achieved through that ill-thought-out venture.Though the focus of the story is on Hussein – the older brother of narrator Hamed – the dramatic backdrop is the entire family’s forced flight from Afghanistan Read more ...

"The poem is real," intones entertainer-turned-courtier Ellen solemnly as a prologue and epilogue to Rona Munro’s vivid, vibrant new James IV: Queen of the Fight, presented by Scottish producers Raw Material and Edinburgh’s Capital Theatres in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, and getting its premiere at the city’s Festival Theatre before a Scotland-wide tour.It’s the follow-up – and latest in a projected series of no fewer than seven historical plays (the sixth, Mary, opens soon at London’s Hampstead Theatre) – to Munro’s James Plays trilogy unveiled at the Edinburgh Read more ...

You know you’re in good company the minute these two appear on stage: they are so splendidly what they are, comfortable in their own skins and perfect in role-play. Justin Vivian Bond, consummate trans cabaret artist, meets Anthony Roth Constanzo, one of the world’s top countertenors, and nothing is out of bounds.Hot from Brooklyn, the partnership seems both unlikely and utterly natural, subversive from the start. The glamorous, sassy Bond can hit the bass register if necessary; Costanzo adapts what, at least with miking, sounds like the most powerful of falsettos to torchsongs and disco as Read more ...