wed 13/08/2025

Theatre Reviews

Boa, Trafalgar Studios

Marianka Swain

Casting existing partners is no guarantee of artistic success – for every Burton/Taylor, there is a Bennifer. Hannah Price has taken a risk, too, by pairing the revered Dame Harriet Walter with her comparatively unfamiliar American husband, Guy Paul, in Clara Brennan’s exposing two-hander. But it’s a risk worth taking, as the couple’s deep-rooted rapport lends a frisson to this stroll down memory lane.

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Little Light, Orange Tree Theatre

Marianka Swain

The Orange Tree’s renaissance continues with this searing piece from playwright of the moment Alice Birch, who will shortly follow up last year’s subversive Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again with an interrogation of the porn industry for Rufus Norris’s debut National season. Her fearlessness is also in evidence in deceptive early work Little Light, an initially typical domestic drama that furiously erupts in a bruising, bravura 90 minutes.

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The Singing Stones, Arcola Theatre

aleks Sierz

Kay Adshead’s new play about the Arab Spring has a beguiling premise: to tell the human stories behind the headlines. We all remember the news footage of the Arab Spring in 2011, from Tunisia to Egypt, with their huge crowds and mass protests. Contrary to the West’s clichéd view of passive Arab women, many of the protestors who took to the streets were female. They may have been veiled, but that didn’t prevent them from being radical activists.

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The Last of the De Mullins, Jermyn Street Theatre

Marianka Swain

Even the most begrudging acquaintance with thematic foghorn Downton Abbey will have affirmed that the Edwardian era heralded momentous social change. Provocatively embedding this revolution in his work was largely forgotten “New Drama” exponent St John Hankin, whose suicide Shaw described as “a public calamity”; Granville-Barker dedicated his first volume of plays to him.

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Six Characters in Search of an Author, Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Barbican

David Nice

"The fantastical should come so close to the real that you must almost believe it," declared Dostoyevsky on Pushkin’s ghostly short story The Queen of Spades. Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and his superb French ensemble have brought off the feat twice now at the Barbican: two years ago with the pachydermal transformations of Ionesco’s masterpiece Rhinocéros, and now through the intrusion of Pirandello’s nightmare family into a rehearsal of one of his plays.

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Di and Viv and Rose, Vaudeville Theatre

Marianka Swain

Is there any bond more powerful than shared history? If life is the sum total of our experiences, then those who experienced it with us will always hold a piece of us – and none more intimate than those formative years when we are figuring out who we want to become. Friendships forged on the cusp of adulthood rival great affairs in their intensity, but can be just as difficult to maintain.

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The Hard Problem, National Theatre

Matt Wolf

Here's the genuine hard problem facing commentators confronted with Tom Stoppard's new play of the same name: how do you honour the legacy of this extraordinary writer's first play in nine years that also marks its director Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre swansong and is – truth be told – a disappointment on multiple fronts?

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The Ruling Class, Trafalgar Studios

Demetrios Matheou

Now that the national self-delusion of the classless society has been laid to rest by the double whammy of economic crisis and the Cameron-Osborne-Johnson era of Bullingdon Club governance, it would seem an ideal moment to dust off Peter Barnes’s 1968 satire of upper-class madmen and monsters.

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Dara, National Theatre

aleks Sierz

The history play has roots that go deep into our culture. We love to see stories that are kitted out in fancy dress, and long to savour a past that resonates with our present. In the case of Dara, which is adapted by Tanya Ronder from an original by Shahid Nadeem first performed five years ago by Ajoka Theatre in Pakistan, we time-travel back to Mughal India in the mid-17th century to confront once again the problem of militant Islam.

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Hello/Goodbye, Hampstead Theatre

Marianka Swain

If the London property boom continues post-election, the fight for living space may well develop into all-out war. But what begins as skirmish in Peter Souter’s 2013 play, promoted from the Hampstead’s downstairs space, soon turns to romance as two twenty-somethings with competing claims to a flat discover the benefits of estate agent incompetency. It’s a fairy tale for our times.

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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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