sun 27/07/2025

Theatre Reviews

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Bridge Theatre review – spellbinding narrative of parallel worlds

Rachel Halliburton

We all remember that moment when we walked through the back of the wardrobe: the heaviness of the fur coats, that first crunch of the snow underfoot. It’s an extraordinary moment of childhood that has also become too normal because shared memory has made it so. What does it really mean to walk through a door and emerge in another world entirely?

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Henry VI, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - a lively vortex

David Nice

No Joan of Arc means no Henry VI Part One. France, where we left the victorious Henry V - the superb Sarah Amankwah, a shining light of this company - in the Globe's summer history plays, only figures briefly in the last act of a candelelit, intimate stepping-back to the more problematic saga.

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& Juliet, Shaftesbury Theatre review - the Bard with dancefloor bangers

Sam Marlowe

It’s bright, it’s brash, it’s a gazillion times camper than Christmas: but is it such stuff as theatrical hits are made on? If that misquotation is already making you cringe, then this glittery pop juggernaut probably isn’t for you – but it is, unashamedly, Shakespeare for the generation that grew up on TV talent shows.

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Dear Evan Hansen, Noël Coward Theatre review - this social outcast will steal your heart

Marianka Swain

Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen is an institution in the States, running on Broadway since 2016 and currently on its second year of a national tour.

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Measure for Measure, RSC, Barbican review - behind the times

Katherine Waters

Because he dramatised power, Shakespeare never really goes out of fashion. Treatments of his plays do though, and the RSC’s Measure for Measure, a transfer from Stratford set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, feels distinctly slack.

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Stray Dogs, Park Theatre review – no fire in this historic encounter

Rachel Halliburton

How do you begin to dramatise one of the most extraordinary conversations of the 20th century between two of its most charismatic and complex intellectuals?

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Touching the Void, Duke of York's Theatre review - not quite high enough

aleks Sierz

Theatre can touch thousands of lives. But can it compete with the success of a bestselling book? First published in 1988, mountaineer Joe Simpson's Touching the Void has apparently sold more than a million copies, and it's been translated into some 20 languages. It tells the adventure story of how he, and Simon Yates, climbed the Siula Grande peak in the Peruvian Andes in 1985.

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Mary Poppins, Prince Edward Theatre review - a lavish but old-fashioned revival

Marianka Swain

It’s been 15 years since Cameron Mackintosh’s stage musical version of P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins made its West End debut.

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The Taming of the Shrew, Barbican review - different but still problematic

Heather Neill

This is one play by Shakespeare ripe for tinkering. It's well nigh impossible now to take it at face value and still find romance and fun in the bullying: the physical and psychological abuse as a supposedly problematic wife is "tamed" into submission. And there have been experiments.

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Shadows, Coronet Theatre review - talking heads in the void

David Nice

In a flowering branch of London theatre, Norway comes to Notting Hill with what's becoming revelatory regularity, thanks to the cultural support of that admirable country. Two visionary-searing Ibsen productions are now joined by an off-piste piece of performance art from the techno-innovative Oslo-based company De Utvalgte.

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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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