For the first part of Punch it feels as if you’re riding a roller coaster, watching the world speed and loop past as you see it from the perspective of a young man high on hormones and cocaine. He’s 19 years old and in perpetual motion as he zips in and out of the pubs of Nottingham in search of the next girl, the next dance beat, the next drugs hit.It looks as if he’s having the time of his life, but as everyone in the audience is aware, this is the night that will send shockwaves both through his life and through the lives of a family he’s never met. After a call from a mate saying that Read more ...

What would it be like to be driven by OCD urges into idolising Elon Musk and aspiring to be one of his tribe of tech bros? In his debut play, Will Lord, who has been diagnosed with OCD himself, has attempted to spell this out, with mixed results.The scene is a basement office stacked to ceiling height with old cardboard boxes and filing cabinets. At either end is a desk. The audience sits in two long rows in traverse, on either side of the space. Into it strides a ponytailed blonde woman in a white trouser suit who comes on like a fierce motivational speaker, the kind that can lead audiences Read more ...

So often the focus – in the coverage of a royal wedding – is the story of the woman wearing the bridal dress. While every fashion choice she makes will be scrutinised for the rest of her life, it is, nonetheless, she herself who will be mercilessly interrogated as the representative both of a nation’s ideals and its discontents.So it’s a refreshing departure that Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s ravishing, emotionally absorbing Lacrima puts its lens firmly on the dress. It’s a story that’s every bit as human as the princess herself as it reveals a whole ecosystem of workers and the pressures and Read more ...

Playwright Joe Orton was a merry prankster. His main work – such as Loot (1965) and What the Butler Saw (1969) – was provocative, taboo-tickling and often wildly hilarious. Now the Young Vic is staging a revival of his debut, Entertaining Mr Sloane, directed by this venue’s new supremo Nadia Fall, and starring celebrity polymath Jordan Stephens. But does 1960s provocation still resonate today?Well yes and well, no. While this play still has the ability, sporadically, to disturb, the passing of time also means that some of Orton’s attitudes have not aged well. So even Read more ...

About halfway through this world premiere, I realised what was missing. Where is the sinister lift, where are the long corridors and, most of all, WHERE IS MR. MILCHICK? 50 First Dates: The Musical may indeed be the sunnier cousin of Severance, but it’s also much older, tracing its roots back to the mid-hit movie of the same name.You could be forgiven for having forgotten that 2004 Drew Barrymore / Adam Sandler romcom, but writers, David Rossmer and Steve Rosen and director/choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, hadn’t. Fast forward and, like so much else just now, what was born in a pandemic Read more ...

The word "after" can be elastic when a modern writer is inspired by a classic. Nima Taleghani here stretches it to breaking point, although, to be fair his piece is also described as a new play. It is not so much "after" Euripides as a celebration of theatre with frequent sideways reference - mostly knowing and comic - to The Bacchae.In many ways this is the perfect play for the beginning of a new era at the National. The origins of Western theatre are acknowledged in the choice of a Greek classic, played in the Olivier auditorium, itself inspired by Greek amphitheatres. And yet it throbs Read more ...

The impact of great art is physical as much as it is psychological. I recall the first time I saw Perry Henzell’s 1972 film, The Harder They Come. I’d been in the pub and, as we did then with just four channels, slumped in front of the television to see what was on late on a Friday night. Within minutes, I was sitting up straight, seeing an exotic, other world unfold before me in a genre I couldn’t place (was it documentary or drama?) and a performance, by Jimmy Cliff, that reached across time and space with an urgent charisma. It wasn’t the last physical surprise the work held for me – more Read more ...

Why are the Irish such good storytellers? The historical perspective is that the oral tradition goes way, way back, allied to the gift of the gab. On the psychological level, is it partly an evasion, an escape from telling the truth about oneself? The transition from fantasy to honesty in Conor McPherson’s first play of 1997, so much better than his latest, suggests as much.This new staging of a long-running hit, directed, like that well-acted disappointment The Brightening Air, by the playwright, sustains the atmosphere of curious meetings in a rural Irish pub saloon (perfectly designed by Read more ...

If a classic story is going to be told for the umpteenth time, there is a good bet it will come with a novel spin on it. So it proves with a new Dracula by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, directed by Emma Baggott. Here, the Count makes just one heavily disguised appearance, and the focal character is Mina (Umi Myers). After a predictable scary start – a sudden thunderclap and total darkness – Mina appears with a lantern. She is our narrator, sole survivor of the terrible events that she and her team of five helpers are going to re-enact. Fear, she tells us, will be her focus, the anxieties that Read more ...

Hot on the heels of Goodnight, Oscar comes another fictional meeting of real entertainment giants in Los Angeles, this time over a decade earlier. Michael McKeever’s The Code is a period piece, but one with a resonating message for today’s equivalents of the Hayes Code and the House Un-American Activities Committee. It’s 1950, on the eve of the opening of a sword-and-sandals number starring Victor Mature as Samson, who, when not waving at Hedy Lamarr’s Delilah, will apparently be seen wrestling a taxidermied lion. At least, that’s the on-dit in Hollywood, gleefully relayed by one of its Read more ...

If you ever wanted to know what a mash up of Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, stirred (and there’s a lot of stirring in this play) with a soupçon of Chekhov, Ibsen and Williams looks like, The Kiln has your answer.Mark O’Rowe’s feuding family fallouts were a big hit at the Galway International Arts Festival last summer and the play has transferred seamlessly to London, fetching up in a house perfectly suited to its forced intimacy. It’s only after you see scaled up productions lose the run of what sent them on to greater things that you realise how much size matters. We’re on a Read more ...

Like the lighting that crackles now and again to indicate an abrupt change of scene or mood, Simon Stone's version of The Lady from the Sea is illuminated by the sense of adventure and excitement one has come to expect from this singular artist. That's the case even if the cumulative effect falls short of his devastating achievements with the National Theatre's Phaedra or, before that, Billie Piper in Yerma. Moment by moment, the play arrestingly repurposes Ibsen's mystical 1888 play for today, and not only because the text makes reference to OnlyFans, Brooklyn Beckham, and Beyoncé Read more ...