Theatre Reviews
German Skerries, Orange Tree TheatreTuesday, 08 March 2016![]()
Birdwatching is not the most thrilling subject for a drama. In fact, next to watching paint dry, it is probably the poorer option. So there is something wonderfully clever and theatrically brilliant about Robert Holman’s 1977 play, which takes place at a popular birdwatching spot overlooking the mouth of the Tees, a location around which several lives meet and connect. Read more... |
I See You, Royal Court TheatreMonday, 07 March 2016![]()
An innocently-intended Friday night out turns into something fearsome indeed in I See You, a Royal Court co-production with the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, that puts the tensions of post-apartheid South Africa under a sorrowful microscope. Read more... |
Welcome Home, Captain Fox!, Donmar WarehouseThursday, 03 March 2016![]()
It’s often remarked that are no new stories, only old stories retold. The French playwright Jean Anouihl got the idea for his first play from a French newspaper report of 1919, about a young man who turned up on a railway platform with no knowledge of who he was or how he came to be there. In the wake of the story’s publication, hundreds of bereaved families came forward to claim the unknown soldier as their own. Read more... |
The Solid Life of Sugar Water, National TheatreTuesday, 01 March 2016![]()
Hurray, the two-part epic wizard-fest Harry Potter and the Cursed Child lands in the West End this summer, and its playwright is the ever-versatile Jack Thorne (who also successfully adapted the vampire romance Let the Right One In for the stage). But audiences who’d like to enjoy Thorne at his thorniest, rather than most Rowlingesque, might prefer to take a look at this, his 2015 two-hander about a couple and their loss of a child. Read more... |
The Maids, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 01 March 2016![]()
“Murder is hilarious,” quips Zawe Ashton’s scheming maid, and in Jamie Lloyd’s high-octane, queasily comic revival of Jean Genet’s radical 1947 play, it really is. It’s also lurid, strange, bleak and powerfully transcendent, as befits a piece that locates hunger for creation and liberation in the imitation and destruction of another. Read more... |
The Tempest, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseSaturday, 27 February 2016![]()
A prevailing sense of farewell ripples through this closing production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse's hugely welcome season of Shakespeare's final quartet of plays. That valedictory feel is traditionally true of The Tempest, a text commonly regarded as Shakespeare's own leave-taking and one that here also marks the final staging after a decade at the helm of the venue's sure-to-be-missed artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, who now hands over the reins to Emma Rice. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lyric HammersmithSaturday, 27 February 2016![]()
Shakespeare’s plays have proved remarkably resilient to everything that’s been thrown at them down the years, including – in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its flowery bowers and fairies – cloying Victorian whimsy. Peter Brook’s white box production in 1970 effectively Tippexed out that option for the late 20th century. In turn, this version by the touring company Filter has put down a marker for the 21st. Read more... |
The Patriotic Traitor, Park TheatreSaturday, 27 February 2016![]()
Theatregoers suffering from First World War fatigue may want to pass on Jonathan Lynn’s merely competent historical drama about two mythic figures: Charles de Gaulle and Philippe Pétain. Read more... |
Hamlet, Tobacco Factory, BristolFriday, 26 February 2016
Alan Mahon’s Hamlet in Andrew Hilton’s production for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory bristles with teen spirit and this is no bad thing. The Prince of Denmark, even before his father dies, is beset with the angst that goes with the territory of late adolescence. The production presents, on one level, a tragic coming of age drama, one in which the young heroes are consumed by madness and caught in the political and sexual machinations of their elders. Read more... |
Cleansed, National TheatreWednesday, 24 February 2016![]()
Although everyone agrees that Sarah Kane was one of the most influential British playwrights of the 1990s, revivals of her work have been few and far between. Now, at last, some 17 years after her suicide at the age of 28 in 1999, our flagship National Theatre has finally decided to stage one of her best works (artistic director Rufus Norris, thank you). 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...

That friend you have who hates musicals – probably male, probably straight, probably not seen one since The Sound of...
Motherhood is a high stress job. Ask any woman and they will tell you the same: sleepless nights, feeding problems and worry. Lots of worry. Lots...

Spring may have sprung, but there’s little in life to truly raise the sprits, so this week’s release of Who Believes in Angels? ...

Is the Royal Ballet a “Balanchine company”? The question was posed at a recent Insight evening to Patricia Neary, the tireless dancer...

Joshua Oppenheimer made his name directing two disturbing documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014...

Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruin of Empire, the journalist Howard Amos’ first book, is a prescient and fascinating examination...

“I knew I wanted all the effects practical and made for real. The movie is about flesh and bones, about women’s bodies.”
Coralie Fargeat,...

The typical Jason Statham movie character – muscular, resourceful, drily humorous – could probably carve an army into mincemeat using a few odds...

The BBC Philharmonic took its Saturday night audience on a journey into French sonic luxuriance – in reverse order of historical formation,...