“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. Tamara Harvey took no heed and Edward II sees her RSC compadre, Daniel Evans (pictured below, kneeling centre), back on stage after 14 years and in the title role to boot. In Daniel Raggett’s stripped back, helter-skelter, 100 minutes version of Christopher Marlowe’s sex, power and violence fest, Evans has certainly jumped in at the deep end (literally so at one point, which you won’t miss!). The noblemen of England disapprove of the king’s flamboyant "friend", Gaveston (Eloka Ivo, blessed Read more ...

Nick Payne, the writer of Constellations, has created another 90-minute zinger for two actors. This one is much simpler in structure but poses equally potent questions about the nature of love and how it’s moulded by the passage of time.In Park Theatre’s pocket Park90 space, the teeny stage area is just about able to accommodate a double bed; behind it is a curtained window. A radio broadcast tells us we are in the midst of the Second World War and the Japanese are taking over southeast Asia. In the bed are Leonard (Barney White) and Violet (Cassie Bradley). As the slowly unfolding dialogue Read more ...

Plays about the Windrush Generation are no longer a rarity, but it’s still unusual for revivals of black British classics to get the full resources of the National Theatre. Guyana-born playwright Michael Abbensetts, who died in 2016, is often mentioned in books about black British drama, but his plays are infrequently revived.So it’s great to have a chance to watch Alterations, his vibrant comedy of 1978, the year his BBC soap Empire Road was also broadcast.The story is set entirely in a dusty upstairs tailoring workshop, whose boss is Walker Holt, an experienced Guyanese worker who dreams of Read more ...

The war in Gaza has been going since 7 October 2023 – that’s about 15 months. But it’s strangely absent from British stages. Of course, it’s a divisive issue, a difficult issue, a painful issue – but isn’t that what contemporary theatre should be about? Instead, we prefer to stage bellicose horrors in plays by ancient Greek tragedians, or mention Palestine in Shakespeare plays, but really…Now at last, after being staged in Edinburgh last year, Syrian-Palestinian theatre-maker Khawla Ibraheem’s A Knock on the Roof comes to London, to the Royal Court, having already been to the Read more ...

Why is it so hard to write a decent play about Bach? Maybe, in part, because there are no words that can express anything as eloquently as his music did – about life and death, pain and transcendence, wretchedness or rapture at the simplest aspects of existence. So much of what he represented was distilled into that music – and what we are left with biographically is the workaholism, the curmudgeonliness, the rows with figures of authority.Nina Raine wrestled with this only semi-successfully in her 2021 play, Bach & Sons, and now Oliver Cotton has taken on the challenge by focusing on Read more ...

Dublin theatregoers have been inundated with Irish family gatherings concealing secrets or half-buried sorrows, mixing “bog gothic” with very real horrors. Clearly they’re willing to try again with Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, because its run has just been extended. The vanishings familiar to Butterworth’s wife Laura Donnelly, whose uncle was among the disappeared, still resonate, as a programme article by Sandra Peake, CEO of WAVE Trauma Centre, reinforces.In the London premiere (vividly reviewed on theartsdesk by Aleks Sierz), Donnelly played Caitlin Carney, who along with son Oisin has Read more ...

Screen stardom is generally anointed at the box office so it's a very real delight to find the fast-rising Jonathan Bailey taking time out from his ascendant celluloid career to return to his stage roots in Richard II.His director, Nicholas Hytner, provided an early Shakespearean platform for this performer more than two decades ago as Cassio in the National's Othello, and the screen's current Fiyero in Wicked, soon to be seen in the latest Jurassic reboot, here graduates to one of the most luxuriant roles in the canon: a part so fulsomely written that the language itself can move a listener Read more ...

The theatre director Anna Mackmin has written and directed an extraordinary play about a mother and daughter relationship: extraordinary because it puts the audience inside the maelstrom of these characters’ lives, forcing us to focus on how we interpret them and how our lives might resemble theirs.Things start relatively straightforwardly. A hospital bed dominates the raised half of the stage, with all the familiar accessories: the nurses’ sink in the corner, the IV drip stand, the urine bag. At the top of the back wall is a panoramic screen; at the front of the stage, a country kitchen Read more ...

“Who’d be a woman?... Who in their right mind would choose all that?” The question comes towards the end of a conversation where two former lovers are comparing notes on their tumultuous recent past.One of them, Jo, has just had a baby. The other, Harry, has taken hormones to transition from being a man to being a woman. In answer to the question, Harry replies, “No-one does though, do they? No-one chooses… Some of us just come the long way round.”The humorous understatement of the exchange is typical of a script that’s as fresh as a sea breeze and as lyrical as birdsong. Playwright Chris Read more ...

Over the last few months, celebrity-driven West End productions have suffered some inglorious crashes. So there was a certain degree of trepidation at the opening night for this star vehicle for Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell. For five minutes, it must be confessed, this reviewer was worried; it seemed so over-miked, so hyper, so, well PINK. But between the diamond-sharp banter and the endorphin fizz, something started to happen, and suddenly it erupted into one of the best parties in town.Lloyd’s shamelessly hedonistic production seizes on the carnivalesque spirit of Shakespeare’ Read more ...

The date, projected behind the stage before a word is spoken, is a clue - 14th April 1912. “Why so specific?” was my first thought. My second was, “Ah, yes”.Sure enough, Akhila Krishnan’s video and Adam Cork’s sound floats us on a sea of troubles, as Denmark’s ship of state is battered by storms, literal and metaphorical, in a roiling Atlantic. After a fortnight in which that ocean has never looked wider nor choppier, a three hour examination of how a psychologically unstable man could eviscerate a polity seemed both timely and scarily portentous. But that, 425 years on, is why the play Read more ...

Our humanity is defined not only by our use of language, but also by our sense of the spiritual. Whether you are a believer or not, it’s hard to deny the attractions of religion for billions around the world. Sounds portentous? Yeah. Okay, you’re now in the zone for Beau Willimon’s new play East Is South, currently at the Hampstead Theatre, a work which suggests that the digital world can also be mystical place. In our ChatGPT universe, the playwright, who created House of Cards for Netflix and inspired the George Clooney political thriller The Ides of March, explores contemporary ideas Read more ...