Theatre Reviews
The Homecoming, Young Vic Theatre review - Pinter's disturbing masterpiece is given a low-key revivalWednesday, 06 December 2023
As the audience enters, thick mist envelopes the thrust stage and jazz music fills the theatre. The set, designed by Moi Tran, consists of a sparsely furnished but spacious room, backed by a staircase. It is a place in the past but also anywhere and any time, both naturalistic and imaginary. Read more... |
Dreaming and Drowning, Bush Theatre - dense and intense monologue about Black queer identityTuesday, 05 December 2023
Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drowning. But its brevity is no bar to its being a dense and intense experience, worthy winner of last year’s Mustapha Matura Award. Read more... |
Infinite Life, National Theatre review - beguiling new comedy about a world of painMonday, 04 December 2023
A sun deck with seven pale-green padded loungers is the latest setting for the latest National Theatre premiere from American playwright Annie Baker to people in her inimitable way. In her hands this banal space is as dramatically charged as any windowless Beckett cell. Read more... |
£1 Thursdays, Finborough Theatre review - dazzling new play is as funny and smart as its two heroinesMonday, 04 December 2023
It’s 2012 and the London Olympics might as well be happening on the Moon for Jen and Stacey. In fact, you could say the same for everyone else scrabbling a living in Bradford – or anywhere north of Watford – and we know what those left-behind places did when presented with a ballot box in 2016 and 2019. Read more... |
A Sherlock Carol, Marylebone Theatre review - merry, but mirthlessSaturday, 02 December 2023
It’s an elementary fact that Dickens sells at this time of year — look at all the perennial Christmas Carols sprouting up everywhere. But if grumpy old Scrouge is an instantly recognizable literary icon then so is the super sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Read more... |
Macbeth, The Depot, Liverpool review - Ralph Fiennes leads a conventional production in an unconventional spaceFriday, 01 December 2023
Next door to the beautiful Art Deco Littlewoods Pools Building, nearly 30 years standing derelict, a set of grey sheds stand, a seat of potential for Liverpool’s nascent film industry. Nearly a century ago, the long, white, towered construction in which the next "Spend! Spend! Read more... |
Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Lyric Theatre review - adult panto delivered as jolly chaosFriday, 01 December 2023
Mischief Theatre set themselves a big challenge when they evolved their brand of knowing slapstick. And not just about how to destroy the scenery without maiming themselves. More crucially, they have to pull off the Janus-faced trick of playing the amateur actors of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, indicated below in quotation marks, while getting the audience to applaud their brilliance. Mostly they succeed. Read more... |
The House of Bernarda Alba, Lyttleton Theatre review - dazzling darknessThursday, 30 November 2023
Rebecca Frecknall opened 2023 with a youthful, visceral, and brutal Streetcar Named Desire at The Almeida; she ends it with another startlingly vigorous adaptation, again of a play in which women are abused by men both physically and psychologically. Meanwhile, Cabaret, her production of which has now been playing in London for three years, is set in Nazi Germany. Frecknall is becoming a supreme exponent of dazzling darkness. Read more... |
Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime, Charles Court Opera, Jermyn Street Theatre review - topsy-turvy HomerWednesday, 29 November 2023
This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all delivered with high energy and greeted with joyful groans. To say it’s no epic is a compliment: Charles Court Opera’s boutique pantos rely upon perfect focus in small spaces, and this is a tight little craft, with five brilliant women firing up director/writer John Savournin’s script and David Eaton’s musical arrangements. Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, The Old Vic review - older, wiser, and yet more movingTuesday, 28 November 2023
Familiarity has bred something quite fantastic with the Old Vic Christmas Carol, which is back for a seventh season and merits ringing all available bells - those and a lost love called Belle being crucial to the show. Matthew Warchus's staging at this point seems a seasonal imperative, and in a wild-haired Christopher Eccleston, Jack Thorne's adaptation of Dickens's 1843 call to empathic arms has its most emotionally piercing and resonant leading man yet. Read more... |
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★★★★★
‘A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.’
The Observer, Kate Kellaway
Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.
★★★★★
‘This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.’
The Times, Ann Treneman
Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.
Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.
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