sat 05/04/2025

Theatre Reviews

The Habits, Hampstead Theatre review - who knows what adventures await?

aleks Sierz

“The exercise of fantasy is to imagine other ways of life,” says one of the role-players during a Dungeons & Dragons marathon, because “without understanding how others might live, I ask you, how will we ever understand ourselves?” It’s a good question, and writer and director Jack Bradfield, in his enchanting new play The Habits, has a good stab at answering it.

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Farewell Mister Haffmann, Park Theatre review - French hit of confusing genre, with a real historical villain

Helen Hawkins

When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit, Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s Adieu Monsieur Haffmann, has landed, and the genre confusions could start all over again.

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Edward II, RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford review - monarchs, murder and mayhem from Marlowe

Gary Naylor

“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. 

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One Day When We Were Young, Park Theatre review - mini-marvel with a poignant punch

Helen Hawkins

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.

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Alterations, National Theatre review - high emotional costs of ambition

aleks Sierz

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.

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A Knock on the Roof, Royal Court review - poignant account of living under terror

aleks Sierz

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…

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The Score, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - curious beast of a play fails to engage

Rachel Halliburton

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.

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The Ferryman, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin review - Jez Butterworth's Northern Irish epic comes close to home

David Nice

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.

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Richard II, Bridge Theatre review - handsomely mounted, emotionally muted

Matt Wolf

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.

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Backstroke, Donmar Warehouse review - a complex journey through a mother-daughter relationship

Helen Hawkins

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.

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Advertising feature

★★★★★

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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