Max Olesker: Making the Cut ★★★★Pleasance DomeMost Fringe fans will know Max Olesker as one half of sketch duo Max and Ivan, but this is his Fringe debut as a solo performer. In it he tells how he, a man who had grown up in a liberal Jewish household, had to convert to Judaism in order to be with the woman he loved.It’s a terrific tale, well told. Olesker uses just a few stage props – a table and chairs, and a simple white cloth – to tell the story, as they become a dinner table or a courtroom, or a prayer shawl or a Jewish wedding canopy (a chuppah). Like all good stories, Olesker tells Read more ...

Populist theatre really is a terrible flirt. You know the type of thing I mean: cheeky pursed lips, making eyes at the audience, strutting with a provocative wiggle. No need for subtle signals. No need for hidden depths. Okay, so here we are: Nadia Fall’s revival of Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, the classic 1970s suburban wince-machine, finally arrives at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End, trailing the cheap perfume of crowd-pleasing populism, after first being seen at the Theatre Royal Stratford East two years ago, and touring since. One thing is certain: it’s enormously, and I mean Read more ...

Supposing: ★★★★★Sally fell down a hole outside the local theatre. Since then, things have changed. She just… knows things that other people don’t. But rather than being a source of joy, help or hope, her new abilities feel more like a curse.Writer-director Zinnie Harris’s taut, focused two-hander (well, for the most part) turns to ancient Greek myth – and to the chiselled definition of ancient Greek dramatic forms – to address the disintegration of personal freedoms, climate breakdown, rising intolerance, and everything else that’s falling apart around us. It’s an audacious conceit, and Read more ...

It’s been 35 years since Tony Kushner’s two-play, multi-hour epic gay soap opera-cum-spiritual meditation was first unleashed on the world in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And it’s been 18 years since director Ivo van Hove unveiled his own raw, stripped-back production with what was then Toneelgroep Amsterdam, now Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. It’s tempting, therefore, to see the Edinburgh International Festival’s revival of van Hove’s production as a classic traversal of a classic text, with all the nicely safe distancing and detached appraisal that that double status might invite.That’ Read more ...

Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel Mayflies had a memorable television treatment in 2022, and a brand new stage adaptation – to which the writer has given his blessing – is one of the Fringe’s 2026 hot tickets. It’s immediately clear why.Leith-based site-specific specialists Grid Iron theatre have requisitioned a grimy but wonderfully characterful warehouse as the cavernous setting for O’Hagan’s heartbreaking story of youthful, identity-forming joy and later-life tragedy. With its towering brick walls (put to excellent use with Lewis den Hertog’s colourful, clever video projections and Simon Read more ...

An Ulster playwright who insists she's British, a childish American star hung up on Irish Catholic tropes - played by a very grown up actor, Matthew Broderick - and a theatre director who's not as woke as he claims meet in the director's London apartment on the eve of rehearsals. With hilarious results? At times, yes. and Belfast-born David Ireland knows how to structure his three-hander even if you see the ground being laid for the ultimate crisis. In her programme note, Abbey Theatre Artistic Director Caitríona McLaughlin claims that the play, directed by Ciarán O'Reilly of New York's Irish Read more ...

Cathy ★★★Iconic Scottish actor Elaine C Smith towers over writer/director Eilidh Loan’s snarling, acid-sour comedy at the Traverse Theatre. Judging by chat in the hectic pre-show queue, getting the chance to see her in the flesh was a big attraction for many punters. And Smith was central, too, to Loan’s creative process: the character of Cathy is inspired by the writer’s own grandmother, who insisted that Smith should play her.You clearly don’t mess with Loan’s granny. And once you experience her on-stage alter ego, you might tremble at the thought of what that real-life older woman is Read more ...

Well, this is uncannily topical, thought I, as the opening number, “Where Is the Justice?” took me back to Jurisprudence seminars and caught plenty of the newspapers screaming headlines that very morning, decrying the government's early release scheme.Unlike Mr Burnham, Light, a bright schoolboy but one still prone to seeing the world as comprising only good and evil, unshaded by complexity, gains the means to do something about it. Courtesy of a bored shinigami (a Japanese death demon) he comes across a notebook that, merely by writing a victim’s name therein, ensures that death follows in Read more ...

What would ol’ Shakey think of such liberties? Two plays that may or may not be a single narrative, which may or may not have a missing middle section, stitched together with a bit of text added here and a bit there. Then staged outside a toffs' school on Richmond Hill, far from the spit and sawdust of Southwark in every sense.I'd conjecture - and maybe it’s wishful thinking, but The Bard certainly wasn’t precious with his work - that he’d have two questions above all others. Was the box office decent? Did the laughs land? Both would be answered to the actor-manager’s satisfaction.No Read more ...

Popular culture includes both will-o'-the-wisp confections, gone in 900 seconds pace Warhol’s aphorism, but can also creates a shorthand that conveys more than a lengthy monograph in The London Review of Books. Long before he was Prime Minister, Andy Burnham was dubbed the "King of the North", and nobody felt the need to explain. That was the kind of cut-through achieved by Game of Thrones on page and screen.So it’s a surprise to learn that in 30 years since George RR Martin introduced Ned Stark to the world and 15 since he lined up with his family in the cold on TV, that he had never Read more ...

 Water Colour ★★★★Milly Sweeney’s powerful two-hander comes to one of the Fringe’s highest-profile venues bearing prestigious awards for new writing, and it’s not hard to see why it’s won them. Water Colour is a taut, focused, elegantly constructed creation that rather miraculously manages to be both poetic and bracingly vernacular, bristling with the distinctive rhythms of Glaswegian speech but unafraid to mull over matters of life and death, and the apparently arbitrary nature of both, with compassion and insight.Haunted by school traumas, Esme is struggling to put paintbrush to canvas Read more ...

It’s three typical cat-lives since Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn staged TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as a musical. The piece can’t quite shake the feel of being a cleverly fashioned showcase for individual performers whose component parts are not totally stitched together. But 45 years on, it can still surprise.Drew McOnie, in charge at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, is a director who can be relied upon to freshen up familiar material, as he did in his small-forces update of Nutcracker at the SBC. This isn’t a radically rethought CATS, as that production was, but its Read more ...