This Celine Dion jukebox musical has been a big hit in New York, but crossing The Atlantic can be perilous for any production, so, docked now at the Criterion Theatre, does it sink or float?We open on a framing device, with a group of tourists being shown round a Titanic museum (there’s a whole industry built up around its legend). Any interest/concern that we’re in for a probing analysis of the ethics of monetising the tragic deaths of over 1500 souls due to, at the very least, some element of corporate negligence, is dispelled by a guide who is just aching to go full jazz hands and sing and Read more ...

It's the images that linger in the mind as I think back on a bustling theatre year just gone. Sure, the year fielded excellent productions (and some duds, too), but as often as not it's a particular sight that sticks in the mind.I shan't soon forget Patricia Clarkson (pictured below in rehearsals by Johan Persson) descending at play's end on the men in her family in Jeremy Herrin's West End revival of Long Day's Journey Into Night, a ghostly relic almost passive-aggressive in her anguish. Or the astonishing Lesley Manville clambering across the body of Mark Strong in Robert Icke's dazzling Read more ...

It is not just Twelfth Night, it’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will in The Folio, a signpost of the choices the inhabitants, old and new, of Illyria must make. Perhaps it’s also an allusion to Will’s own choices as an actor/playwright in the all-male company who cross-dressed (and maybe more) as women and girls without batting an eyelid. As is so often the case with the comedies, the great entertainer doesn’t hesitate to smuggle in a soupçon of transgressive psychology under cover of farce.We open on a young woman clambering out of the sea, shipwrecked but unbowed, soon seeking employment Read more ...

This feels like the theatrical equivalent of being in a centrifuge – a wild, spinning ride through different forms of reality that deftly separates out the different layers of who you think you are. It’s a multiverse that’s like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Everything Everywhere All At Once – both liberating and challenging as you hurtle from one situation to another.For the critic, a further challenge is presented once you emerge into the so-called real world again, since you have signed a terrifying form that promises you will sacrifice your household pets – or something similar Read more ...

Shakespeare must have relished the opportunities brought by the indoor Blackfriars Theatre in 1611: sound magnified in a way impossible outdoors, magical stage effects in the semi-darkness, possibly even fireworks - and all at a time when the masque was the most fashionable theatre form. The Tempest, written especially for the venue, includes a masque and has masque-like properties throughout. Modern directors sometimes provide an equivalent, using whatever technology is at their disposal now, as Greg Doran did in 2016, introducing a digital avatar Ariel while also giving the betrothal masque Read more ...

Broadway shows sometimes hit the West End like, well, like a comet, burning brightly but briefly (Spring Awakening, for example), while others settle into orbit illuminating Shaftesbury Avenue with a neon blaze every night for years.So it might be a wise decision to install Dave Malloy’s much-awarded, 2016 musical, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, in the bijou Donmar Warehouse – fortunately, it’s a gem of a show.“It’s not exactly War and Peace!” was a meme before there were memes, said of anything that was a little too facile to satisfy, the slabby novel a shorthand reference Read more ...

Can men really love each other – without sex? Or, to put it another way, how many different forms of male love can you name? These questions loiter with intent around the edges of Tom Stoppard’s dense history play, which jumps from 1936 to the High Victorian age of the 1870s and 1880s, and is now revived by the Hampstead Theatre starring Simon Russell Beale.First staged in 1997 at the National Theatre, the play tells the story of AE Housman (Beale), the Victorian classical scholar and poet who wrote A Shropshire Lad, that collection of yearning lyricism. This revival, however, raises Read more ...

How do you refresh a masterpiece? Bringing back his first and still greatest hit, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne seems to have changed only minor details since its 1995 premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Its core brilliance is untouched.As usual with Bourne, the production will have been adjusted slightly with each iteration, but it’s possible to compare the 30th anniversary version with the 1995 one, of which handily there is a DVD. The accumulated tweaks are minor. The giant crown hanging in the Prince’s rooms is now a vibrant scarlet, as is the Queen’s ballgown, popping out of her otherwise black Read more ...

The Young Vic has opened under a new artistic director with a puzzle play. The puzzle is, why stage this piece today?The key themes of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play look promising on paper: a strong-willed woman battling her brothers for an inheritance, Succession replayed in the deep South. Regina Hubbard Giddens was a plum role for Tallulah Bankhead on stage and Bette Davis in the 1941 film version. And the cinema is where the piece is most at home, a Hollywood melodrama for an actress who can give Regina (the clue is in the name) a regal grandeur, as well as a skilled line in manipulation. Read more ...

I live in Brixton, south London. To get to the tube, I have to cross Windrush Square. Since 2021, I go past the Cherry Groce memorial, which honours the woman who was wrongfully shot by the Met in 1985, an event which sparked the riots I remember so well from 40 years ago. Amazingly enough, I have now seen her sister, Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee, performing a gig theatre piece on the main stage at the Royal Court.The Legends of Them is an autobiographical memory play during the course of which young Lorna grows into Sutara Gayle, told in fragmentary flashbacks which are vivid enough to be Read more ...

There is something deliciously perfect about the timing of The Producers’ arrival at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In these twitchy times, Mel Brooks’s scurrilous Hitler musical lands like a stinkbomb in a parfumerie.Swastikas are everywhere, even on the backs of pigeons; there’s a man dressed as Jesus serving a tray of champagne, a bearded Hasidic dancer brandishing a prayer roll who wafts in and out of the routines, geriatric humping and prolific swearing; even Michelangelo’s David turns up, created by a dancer in a white bodysuit and wig, his “marble” tackle prominently to the fore. If you Read more ...

Hermia is a headbutting punk with a tartan fetish, Oberon looks like Adam Ant and Lysander appears to have stumbled out of a Madness video. Yet Eleanor Rhode’s exuberant A Midsummer Night’s Dream – which has transferred from a triumphant run at Stratford-Upon-Avon – is no straightforward Eighties tribute, but a psychedelic mashup that’s as ravishing as it’s gritty.Lucy Osborne’s versatile design whisks us from the sinister grandeur of the opening – in which a sun resembling a military flag hangs over the stage to remind us that Theseus has wooed Hippolyta by force – to the hallucinogenic Read more ...