Bat away your lurgy, stop that coffin’ and get up to Finsbury Park for a laugh laden, ballad blitzing, sensational spoof starring the toothsome Transylvanian. If that sentence is boiling your blood with its rich vein of bad humour, you’ll be spitting bile in the house; if not, you’ll be so relaxed at the end of the evening, you shan’t be needing your statins before bedtime.Because there’s little we need more right now than laughter, the best medicine, natch and that’s what we get - liberally laced with groans, because no joke is too daddish for Dan Patterson and Jez Bond - with a smattering Read more ...

Wonder is a word that is used too often in theatre, somewhat emptied of meaning by marketing’s emasculating of language. It’s used even less honestly by critics - we’ve seen too much to really feel wonder. But, for the first time since seeing the RSC’s magnificent My Neighbour Totoro, I’m here to tell you I was as wide-eyed as the Sophies sitting transfixed in my row as this lovely show unfolded before us. The story, beautifully, and, one trusts, uncontroversially, adapted by Tom Wells, will be familiar to many (but was not to me) begins in an orphanage where Sophie and Kimberley bicker Read more ...

Ask many a boomer about their scariest childhood memory, and they may very well cite the extraordinary 1957 East German production, The Singing Ringing Tree, shown regularly on the BBC before, one presumes, an adult saw it and thought, “Uh oh…” It was a kind of anti-Disney (well, the saccharine commercialised studio that emerged after World War II at any rate) that pitched us kids into a Mitteleuropa world of magical threat and fractured families, the grotesque far outweighing the fair in the narrative.At about the same time (the mid-80s) that a collective unease started to censor or, at Read more ...

The National Theatre has a long record of starry revivals so this version of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, with a cast led by Nicola Coughlan (yes, from Derry Girls and Bridgerton), quickens the heartbeats of anticipation, although audience reaction won’t be anything like that of the play’s 1907 premiere. That Dublin production caused nationalist protests from a riotous public who felt insulted by the playwright’s realistic portrayal of the Irish peasantry as lonely drunks, and by its theme of patricide and its image of female underwear. Sinn Féin founder Arthur Read more ...

That young person sitting next to you on the bus, earbuds wedged in, an enigmatic, Mona Lisa-ish smile on their face - are they listening to a podcast? If so, is it one of many, many such concerning True Crime, a genre that has moved out of the WH Smith’s magazine shelf with the National Enquirer and the large print section of the library, and into a much more youthful market in the 2020s? Chances are that it is.I can’t be too precious about it, numbering Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon books amongst my favourites about showbiz and sneaking a peek, as a very guilty pleasure, at Wikipedia’s Read more ...

As reports come in of theatre audiences behaving badly, slumped drunkenly in the aisles, gorging on noisy food and wrestling with their latest smartphones, it’s refreshing to see that kind of behaviour safely onstage, and played for big laughs. Surprisingly, perhaps, this mayhem comes courtesy of Noel Coward.The redoutable Menier has found another gem to polish after Nancy Carroll’s superb revival of Pinero’s The Cabinet Minister and its exuberant The Producers: a 100th birthday edition of Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels. Roundly denounced for its vulgarity and loose morals at its debut, the Read more ...

Hail the spirit of the dance. And of acting. And of driving and flying. At a time when new writing is clearly in decline, and the most successful shows are adaptations or revivals of the classics, the National Theatre returns to one of its big hits from a year ago, thrillingly recast. Unsurprisingly, it’s an adaptation of a popular book of yesteryear: Kendall Feaver’s version of Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild’s classic 1936 coming-of-age novel about three adopted sisters who go to drama school. Set in a fossil-filled crumbling house in Cromwell Road, the plot is about the absent-minded Read more ...

Over the past few years, the National Theatre has specialised in trilogies. End is the final play in both playwright David Eldridge’s outstanding trilogy and in this venue’s former director Rufus Norris’s Dorfman programme. Like Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s Death of England trilogy, Eldridge’s cycle – Beginning (2017) and Middle (2022) – says as much about the state of the nation as it does about the personal lives of its characters. Starring Saskia Reeves (familiar from Slow Horses) and Clive Owen, this two-hander explores the emotional landscape of a couple making plays for a final parting Read more ...

Did you know that women watch porn? That they wank? Shock. Horror. Dismay. If you really are surprised by this non-revelation then maybe you need to get a ticket to see Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play at the Royal Court’s studio space. But, wait a minute, it’s sold out already. Maybe because it stars Ambika Mod (remember her from Every Brilliant Thing @Sohoplace, or Netflix’s One Day?). Anyway, this show is West End bound so you’ll definitely get a chance to see it – its in-the-round staging would work well @Sohoplace. But while Mod is the draw, what’s the play about?  Mod plays Ani Read more ...

New writing for the theatre is good at taking us into the darkest of places – and there are few more painful environments than prisons and mental institutions. Places where agony radiates off the walls, and anguish is in the air we breathe. So it’s a real challenge for Sophia Griffin, in her debut play, After Sunday, at the Bush theatre, to takes us on just such a journey into an unforgiving world of distress, disappointment and despair. If the result is not completely successful, it does have an excellent cast who deliver some powerfully moving moments. Set in a secure unit, basically a Read more ...

Hamilton may have helped the West End recover from The Covid Years, but it carries its share of blame too. Perhaps that’s not strictly fair on some of its spawn, but do we get Coven without that musical behemoth? If not, this one’s on you Lin-Manuel. We’re back in the early 1600s, though not in music and speech, natch. Shakespeare had written the (literally) bewitching A Midsummer Night’s Dream 15 years earlier and The Tempest, with a necromancer as its protagonist, two years prior, but, in 1612 and again in 1633, children were denouncing their families for witchcraft. Of course, as is the Read more ...

Perspectives on Shakespeare's tragedy have changed over the decades. As Nonso Anozie said when playing the title role for Cheek by Jowl in 2004, white actors once "concentrated on their perception of what a black man is". Laurence Olivier, whose 1964 performance in polished ebony make-up was once the gold standard for the part, famously observed black dock workers to learn their gait and mannerisms.Since the 1980s, as numerous actors of colour have tackled the role, the importance of Othello's race has shifted further from the centre of productions. At the National Theatre in 2013, Adrian Read more ...