mon 19/05/2025

Theatre

1536, Almeida Theatre review - fast and furious portrayal of women in Henry VIII's England

Ava Pickett’s award-winning début play, 1536, is a foul-mouthed, furious, frenetically funny ride through the lives of three young women living in Henry VIII’s England in the year of Anne Boleyn’s execution. It’s less Wolf Hall than a wolf howl of...

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House of Games, Hampstead Theatre review - adapted Mamet screenplay entertains but is defanged

There is so much that is right about Jonathan Kent’s new production of House of Games – the casting, the staging, the direction. But the flaw it can’t overcome is that the 1987 David Mamet screenplay on which Richard Bean based this stage version in...

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Here We Are, National Theatre review - Sondheim's sensational swan song

You don't have to be greeting the modern day with a smile unsupported by events in the wider world to have a field day at Here We Are. The last musical from the venerated Stephen Sondheim has only grown in import and meaning since I caught its New...

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The Deep Blue Sea, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - Tamsin Greig honours Terence Rattigan

The water proves newly inviting in The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Rattigan's mournful 1952 play that some while ago established its status as an English classic. Lindsay Posner's production, first seen in Bath with one major change of cast since then,...

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The Comedy About Spies, Noel Coward Theatre review - 'Goes Wrong' team hit the spot again

From the creative team that brought you The Play That Goes Wrong in 2012 (and assorted sequels) comes this spy caper. As ever with Mischief productions, their latest work is a lot of fun and pays its dues to the great age of British farce (and...

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Giant, Harold Pinter Theatre review - incendiary Roald Dahl drama with topical bite

When Mark Rosenblatt was preparing his debut play, the miseries of the assault on Gaza were still over the horizon. Now they are here, another terrible moment in human history that resonates all through Giant. Since the play opened at the Royal...

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Einkvan, Det Norske Teatret, The Coronet Theatre review - alienation times six

Watching the stricken faces on the split screen, I felt at times like callow Farfrae in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge: when faced with Henchard’s account of his blackest misery, the young man replies “Ah, now, I never feel like it”. Well,...

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The Gang of Three, King's Head Theatre - three old Labour ghosts resurrected to entertain and educate

There was a time when the only daytime TV (ex-weekends and ex-Wimbledon fortnight) comprised the annual party conferences and the Trade Union Congress. A seemingly endless parade of indistinguishable middle-aged balding white men, with Barbara...

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Conversations After Sex, Park Theatre review - pillow talk proves a snooze

In Dublin, a city that has changed more than most in the last 30 years, a young woman, with an English accent that is expensive to acquire, is cycling through sexual partners. We eavesdrop on their conversations, witness the physical intimacy fade...

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Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's Globe - swagger and vivacity cohabit with death

Holsters, Stetsons and bluegrass music bring a distinctive flavour to this Wild West riff on Romeo and Juliet that flings us into a vortex of frontier-town politics where men are men and bad girls wear gingham. Sean Holmes’ vigorous production stirs...

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Krapp's Last Tape, Barbican review - playing with the lighter side of Beckett's gloom

In the Stygian darkness of a bare room, a table on a low platform with a light hanging overhead starts to emerge. Then a door briefly opens at the back of the space and the figure that has entered and sat down at the table also begins to emerge....

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My Master Builder, Wyndham's Theatre review - Ewan McGregor headlines stillborn Ibsen riff

It's both brave and bracing to welcome new voices to the West End, but sometimes one wonders if such exposure necessarily works to the benefit of those involved. And so it is with My Master Builder, American writer Lila Raicek's Ibsen-adjacent play...

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