sat 18/01/2025

Theatre Reviews

The End of Hope, Soho Theatre review - initially bold but not quite enough

Katherine Waters

In David Ireland's new hour-long two-hander  a co-production between Soho Theatre and west London's Orange Tree  two strangers, Janet and Dermot, meet for a casual hook-up arranged over the internet.

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Venus in Fur, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - pain and pleasure in a starry two-hander

Marianka Swain

A hit on Broadway, David Ives’s steamy two-hander now boasts Natalie Dormer and David Oakes, well-known for their screen work, in its West End cast, with Patrick Marber on directing duties.

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Albion, Almeida Theatre, review – Victoria Hamilton’s epic performance

aleks Sierz

Prolific writer Mike Bartlett is the most impressive penman to have emerged in British theatre in the past decade. The trouble is that his work is so uneven.

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A Woman of No Importance, Vaudeville - Eve Best is superb as a woman scorned

Veronica Lee

In a rather clever wheeze, Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe – who therefore knows a thing or two about historically accurate stagings – has established Classic Spring, a new company dedicated to celebrating work by “proscenium playwrights” and staging their plays in the theatres they were written for.

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Beginning, National Theatre review - assured, intimate, but short of surprises

Sam Marlowe

Loneliness: in the age of the digital hook-up and the flaunting narcissism of social media, it’s become a strange sort of taboo – a secret shame, the unsexy side of singledom. So it’s good to see playwright David Eldridge putting it centre-stage in this tender, pleasingly unsentimental two-hander.

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The Seagull, Lyric Hammersmith review – is Lesley Sharp's Irina a sex addict?

Ismene Brown

The awful mother, the celebrity-obsessed teenager, the mediocre old writer who wants some young sex in his life – there are motifs in Chekhov’s The Seagull that fly merrily from one century to another, and Simon Stephens and...

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The Busy World Is Hushed, Finborough Theatre review - new play puts the G-word centre stage

Jenny Gilbert

God makes few appearances at the modern playhouse – so few that the Finborough Theatre saw fit to print a glossary in the programme for its latest production.

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Young Frankenstein review - Mel Brooks musical is blissfully bonkers

Matt Wolf

What a difference an ocean and a change of scale can make. When I saw the Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein on Broadway a decade ago, the show seemed to take its cue from the lumbering monster contained within it, who stutters and sputters before eventually being kickstarted into something resembling life.

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Saint George and the Dragon, National Theatre review – a modern folk tale in the Olivier

Heather Neill

Bold and fearless are adjectives that might describe playwright Rory Mullarkey as accurately as any chivalrous knight. He made his name in 2013 when, at the age of 25, his play Cannibals, part of which was in Russian, took to the main stage at the Manchester Royal Exchange and went on to win the James Tait Black Prize.

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Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle, Wyndham’s Theatre review – paradoxically predictable

aleks Sierz

Playwright Simon Stephens and director Marianne Elliott are hyped as a winning partnership.

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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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