Theatre Reviews
The Gabriels, Brighton Festival review - hilarious drama in the shadow of TrumpTuesday, 23 May 2017
The subtitle of Richard Nelson’s new trilogy suggests an anti-Trump polemic. Instead, its miraculous, almost invisible craft fulfils the President’s most hollow promise. It restores full humanity to a family of lower-middle class Americans who often feel slighted and helpless. As they gather around their kitchen table, the Gabriels talk and live more fully than most media and politicians ever really believe of those they describe and rule. Read more... |
Meow Meow's Souvenir, Brighton Festival review – subversive but evocative new song-cycleMonday, 22 May 2017
Dream palace, cesspit and church; celebrated, mopped (by Marlene Dietrich, no less) and fucked: Brighton’s Theatre Royal has seen a whole lot of history, of both the splendid and the seedy variety. Now it has found a magnificent if unlikely mouthpiece in the form of post-modern cabaret star Meow Meow. Read more... |
Richard III review - Greg Hicks gruesomely impressive as power-crazed rulerSaturday, 20 May 2017
There may never have been a time when Shakespeare’s Richard III did not have contemporary relevance, but surely never more than it does right now. Read more... |
Lettice and Lovage, Menier Chocolate Factory review - Peter Shaffer's star vehicle sagsFriday, 19 May 2017
You have to hand it to Felicity Kendal: this ever-game actress is fearless about treading in the footsteps of the British theatre's grandes dames. In 2006, she starred on the West End quite creditably in Amy's View, inheriting a part originated on both sides of the Atlantic by Judi Dench. Read more... |
No Dogs, No Indians, Brighton Festival review – poor production shoulders too big a taskFriday, 19 May 2017
A whacking great story has gone largely untold in British theatre: the legacy of colonialism in India, including the cultural ghosts the British left behind. With the 70th anniversary of Indian independence just round the corner this summer, poet and playwright Siddhartha Bose has set out to address this "historical amnesia". Read more... |
Life of Galileo, Young Vic review - shared-experience Brecht is powerful, timelyWednesday, 17 May 2017
Never mind breaking the fourth wall, Joe Wright and the Young Vic have smashed the other three as well. Read more... |
Manwatching, Royal Court review - the vagina manologuesTuesday, 16 May 2017
This monologue first saw the light of day at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015. It's a frank – very frank – piece about female sexuality by an anonymous heterosexual female author, performed by a different male comic each night, who reads it sight unseen. Read more... |
Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour review - West End transfer hits all the right notesTuesday, 16 May 2017
Sacred and profane, trivial and profound blissfully combine in this irresistible, Olivier Award-winning tale of choirgirls gone wild. Lee Hall, of Billy Elliot fame, adapts Alan Warner’s 1998 novel with a similarly shrewd grasp of youthful hope amidst challenging circumstances, and with the arts once again proving a vital escape – albeit, in this case, temporarily. Read more... |
Casus Circus Driftwood, Brighton Festival review - eye-boggling gymnastic theatreTuesday, 16 May 2017
There is a sequence in theatrical circus troupe Casus’ new production, Driftwood, where three of the five members sit, each between the legs of another, in a row, facing the front of the stage. They look as if they’re about to do the rowing dance people in the Eighties used to do to the Gap Band’s “Oops Upside Your Head” at suburban discos. That is not what they do. Instead the front one rolls back... Read more... |
Three Sisters, Sovremennik review - over-conscious of its legendarinessSunday, 14 May 2017
Sovremennik is Russian for “contemporary”, and ever since its founding in the Soviet Union's 1950s Thaw, Moscow’s Sovremennik Theatre company has lived by the idea that it expresses new, fresh breath in Russian theatre. Unless you argue that the adjective “contemporary” by definition must reveal characteristics of its temporal surroundings, moribund is not one of the alternative meanings of the word. Read more... |
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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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