tue 03/06/2025

Theatre Reviews

Ursula Martinez: My Stories, Your Emails, Purcell Room

Hanna Weibye

In her book How To Be a Woman, Times columnist Caitlin Moran explains the difference between strip clubs and burlesque shows, and why the latter are perfectly acceptable to feminism.

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My Night with Reg, Donmar Warehouse

Sam Marlowe

Daniel loves Reg; so does John. Guy loves John; John doesn’t love Guy. Bernie loves Benny, and drives him mad. And as for Eric, he once thought he could fall for Reg – but they only shared one night together, and he never even knew Reg’s name. And anyway, as he points out, unlike the middle-aged others, he’s young – “I’ve got plenty of time.”

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Prom 21: Kiss Me, Kate, John Wilson Orchestra

Sebastian Scotney

“Another Op'nin', Another Show”. The first musical number of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate sets the scene for a group of actors and hoofers to brush up their Shakespeare, cross their fingers and hold on to their hearts, and to hope that not too much goes wrong with their show in late 1940s Baltimore.

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A Streetcar Named Desire, Young Vic

Demetrios Matheou

The latest production of Tennessee Williams’s sultry, brutal yet poetic masterpiece is mainstream theatre that dares to go out on a limb. Directed by Benedict Andrews, it may occasionally miss a beat, but its risk-taking comes with an innate sense of the play’s scorching pathos and an unnerving, dare one say exhilarating taste for the jugular that matches that of its primal male.

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Porgy and Bess, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre

David Nice

It should work as pure musical theatre. Yet what precisely is Gershwin’s - or rather “The Gershwins’”, as this title frames it, though Ira wasn’t quite Gilbert or Brecht - Porgy and Bess? An opera? Trevor Nunn made the three-hour-plus score, much cut here, dazzle at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden.

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A Bright Room Called Day, Southwark Playhouse

Marianka Swain

The pivotal early 1930s period in which Herr Hitler overcame strong if fractured left-wing opposition should make for meaty drama, but the sluggish polemic currently occupying Southwark Playhouse will leave carnivorous viewers unsatiated.

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Natural Affection, Jermyn Street Theatre

Siobhan Murphy

The work of William Inge doesn't get much of a look-in on British stages, but the American dramatist's depictions of frustrated aspirations and desires at work in small-town Midwestern lives - most famously realised in the Pulitzer-winning Picnic and Bus Stop - received major Broadway productions in the 1950s. Natural Affection is a later work dating from 1962 which foundered partly due to a New York City newspaper strike, not re-emerging until an Off Broadway run last autumn.

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The Nether, Royal Court Theatre

aleks Sierz

There is so much public anxiety about paedophiles on the internet that it’s surprising that so few plays tackle the issue. Now Los Angeles playwright Jennifer Haley brings her new play on the subject, which won the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, to London after winning awards in the States.

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Shakespeare in Love, Noël Coward Theatre

alexandra Coghlan

“Comedy, and a bit with a dog.” That’s what audiences really want according to the hapless would-be impresario Mr Henslowe, and that’s certainly what they get in Lee Hall’s new stage adaptation of John Madden’s 1998 film Shakespeare in Love – several bits with a dog, in fact.

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Holy Warriors, Shakespeare’s Globe

aleks Sierz

While it is something of a cliché to be reminded that forgetting the past is a sure way of repeating it, the problems of the Middle East are so acute that this thought might be worth taking seriously. In Holy Warriors, playwright David Eldridge’s new look at the struggle for Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Middle Ages to the present day, the scope is ambitious and the subject matter as timely as can be. But is the play any good?

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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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