wed 11/06/2025

Theatre Reviews

Long Day's Journey Into Night, Bristol Old Vic

mark Kidel

Lesley Manville’s performance as Mary, the tortured morphine addict, wife and mother in Eugene O’Neill’s dark masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night, directed by Richard Eyre, is breathtaking, from the moment she first steps on stage until her last sombre soliloquy.

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The Fifth Column, Southwark Playhouse

aleks Sierz

Ernest Hemingway was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. But although his 1940 novel, For Whom the Bells Tolls, is familiar as a classic account of the Spanish Civil War, his play – which is set in Madrid at the height of the conflict – is, to put it mildly, less well known.

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Bug, Found111

Marianka Swain

My skin is still tingling with the presence of imaginary critters. Never mind I’m A Celebrity… or Bear Grylls’s latest expedition – Tracy Letts has got them beat when it comes to nightmarish creepy-crawlies. But it’s not just a creature feature: this starry 20th anniversary revival at London’s newest pop-up theatre offers an eerie mirror to contemporary paranoia.

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Right Now, Bush Theatre

aleks Sierz

Poor Alice. She’s alone all day, with a six-month baby boy, while her husband Ben – a doctor – is out at work. Working all hours. She sleeps at odd times of the day, and at first seems to have just suffered some kind of catastrophic loss. Ben seems to be working too much, so the couple never see each other.

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I Am Thomas, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

David Kettle

"Thomas Aikenhead – who the fuck are you?" So goes the refrain to the opening number of I Am Thomas, a boisterous co-production between London’s Told by an Idiot, and the National Theatre of Scotland and Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre north of the border. It’s a good question, one that acknowledges few in the audience will be familiar with the show’s central figure. And also one that raises the issue of why we should even care about some guy we’ve never heard of.

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Reasons to Be Happy, Hampstead Theatre

Marianka Swain

Sequel-itis has spread to the stage. There’s no caped crusader, but the troubled quartet of Neil LaBute’s latest will be familiar to anyone who caught Reasons to be Pretty at the Almeida in 2011 – as will Soutra Gilmour’s industrial crate set. We even begin the same way: in the middle of a foul-mouthed shouting match between relentlessly combative Steph and sometime-paramour Greg. But nostalgia value aside, this melancholic reprise is generally a case of diminishing returns.

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Twelfth Night, French Protestant Church, Soho

Veronica Lee

This is set in “a world midway between Elizabethan pageant and haute-couture catwalk”, a programme note for Scena Mundi's production says, and the initial signs certainly point to that.

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Raz, Trafalgar Studios

aleks Sierz

Recently, I’ve been meeting some pretty hyper people in the theatre. Fictional people. On stage. Lots of hyper women; lots of hyper agonised women. And men. Hypercative kids; hyped-up teens; hyper-Alpha adults. A lot of these encounters have been monologues; a few have been two-handers. Several have had a public health agenda.

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People, Places & Things, Wyndham's Theatre

Marianka Swain

Recovery depends on honesty, but Emma – not her real name – lies for a living. Duncan Macmillan’s searing play, getting a well-deserved West End transfer from the National, complicates the familiar story of addiction and rehab by making its protagonist an actress.

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The Painkiller, Garrick Theatre

Marianka Swain

The fourth production in Branagh’s Garrick season is the revival of an odd-couple romp he brought to the Lyric, Belfast in 2011. Sean Foley (best known for his superlative Branagh-directed Morecambe and Wise tribute The Play What I Wrote) adapts and directs this nostalgic English version of Francis Veber’s 1969 French farce, which wastes no opportunity for dropped-trousers, door-slamming, mistaken-identity slapstick.

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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.


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