Theatre Reviews
Rosenbaum's Rescue, Park Theatre review - curiously solid Jewish dramaWednesday, 16 January 2019![]()
Theatrical alchemy is eternally slippery. Read more... |
Approaching Empty, Kiln Theatre review - more minicab than UberTuesday, 15 January 2019![]()
Write what you know, says the adage, and that's exactly what playwright Ishy Din has done with his new play, Approaching Empty, now at the Kiln in Kilburn. Read more... |
Coming Clean, Trafalgar Studios review - Kevin Elyot play has lost the pathos if not the plotTuesday, 15 January 2019![]()
Time and a transfer haven't been kind to this well-meaning but surface-thin revival of Coming Clean, the 1982 Kevin Elyot play that is surely more poignant than is ever apparent here. Read more... |
Time Is Love/Tiempo es Amor, Finborough Theatre review - sultry yet staticMonday, 14 January 2019![]()
Confessions first: I fell asleep mid-way through Time Is Love/Tiempo es Amor, from too much time on trains and planes over the New Year. I was kindly allowed back for a second visit to the Finborough Theatre show, for a Sunday matinee, dosed with coffee and determined to concentrate fully. This was a good thing. Read more... |
Aspects of Love, Southwark Playhouse review - discourse keeps passion at bayFriday, 11 January 2019![]()
“Love Changes Everything”, as immortalised by Michael Ball, is the most enduring feature of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Charles Hart’s 1989 musical – a moderate West End success, and a Broadway flop. Read more... |
Pinters Five and Six, Harold Pinter Theatre review - superlatively acted esotericaTuesday, 08 January 2019![]()
The scintillating, commercially bold season of Pinter one-acts at the theatre bearing his name plays a particular blinder with Pinter Five (★★★★★), from which I emerged keen to engage with its mystery and breadth of feeling all over again. Read more... |
Best of 2018: TheatreSunday, 30 December 2018![]()
Will pride of place amongst theatre productions every year go in perpetuity to the work of Stephen Sondheim? Read more... |
Sweat, Donmar Warehouse review - America at once fractured and fractiousThursday, 20 December 2018![]()
A tremendous year for American theatre on the London stage is resoundingly capped by Sweat, the Lynn Nottage Pulitzer prize-winner that folds the personal and the political into a collective requiem for a riven country. Read more... |
The Tragedy of King Richard II, Almeida Theatre review - Simon Russell Beale leads revelatory interpretationWednesday, 19 December 2018![]()
Joe Hill-Gibbins’ uncompromising production of The Tragedy of Richard II hurtles through Shakespeare’s original text, stripping and flaying it so it is revealed in a new shuddering light. Read more... |
Caroline, or Change, Playhouse Theatre review - Sharon D Clarke is superlativeWednesday, 19 December 2018![]()
With the politics of hate alive and well both sides of the Atlantic, this seems a good time to revive Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's 2003 musical, which is set in Civil Rights-era Louisiana. Read more... |
Pages
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.
latest in today

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...

Emotions run high at WNO these days. When the company’s co-...

When Vladimir Jurowski returns to what used to be “his” London Philharmonic Orchestra, you’d better jump. I would have done on Wednesday had I...

The sax-player Kenny Garrett established a reputation as one of Miles Davis’s band in the Amandla (1989) period. He was also a member of...

The titular “lighthouse of glass” is a place where the narrator is “crying into the sun,” in which there is a need to “stand by my solitude.”...

Stereo Instrumental Music was recorded in July 1976 and originally issued only on cassette. The release was organised by...

Akira Kurosawa described his 1961 hit Yojimbo as a tale of “rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad… we are weakly caught...

Igor Levit is a master of the unorthodox marathon, one he was happy to share last night with 24-year-old Austrian Lukas Sternath, his student in...

Is the theatre of the absurd dead? In today’s world, when cruel and crazy events happen almost daily, the idea that you can satirize daily life by...

Many know that the actor Richard Burton began life as a miner’s son called Richard Jenkins. Not so many are aware of the reason he...