wed 28/05/2025

Theatre Reviews

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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?

Read more...

Medea, National Theatre

Heather Neill

We know how the story ends, but then so did Euripides' first audience in Athens in 431 BC. Medea was already a familiar character of myth, a sorceress whose ungovernable passion for Jason led her to commit horrible murders when he abandoned her for another woman. Now, as in the Golden Age of Greek drama, the chief interest is in the way the tale is told.

Read more...

The Importance of Being Earnest, Harold Pinter Theatre

David Nice

“Some might say we’re getting too old for this sort of thing,” declares Martin Jarvis’s Jack Worthing, going off Wlldean piste. Well, we did wonder whether the reunion of Jarvis with Nigel Havers’s Algernon after 32 years might not be some sort of vanity Earnest.

Read more...

Intimate Apparel, Park Theatre

Naima Khan

As far as essential female experiences go, Esther Mills hasn't had many. A 35-year-old virgin living in New York City in 1905, she is destined to go down in history as an "unidentified negro seamstress", to cite the caption on the projected image of her that opens Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel in a very fine Off West End staging from the director Laurence Boswell that was first seen in Bath.

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

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Album: Sally Shapiro - Ready to Live a Lie

Ready to Live a Lie is so sonically vaporous it almost isn’t there. While the album’s 11 tracks draw from continental European musical...

Il Trittico, Opéra de Paris review - reordered Puccini works...

So here in Paris, as at Salzburg in 2022, it’s no longer “Puccini’s Trittico” but “the Asmik Grigorian Trittico”. Which would be...

When the Light Breaks review - only lovers left alive

Grief takes unexpected turns over the course of a long Icelandic...

Marwood, Crabb, Wigmore Hall review - tangos, laments and an...

James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a...

Dennis, RSNO, Dunedin Consort, Søndergård, Usher Hall, Edinb...

"How long is Wagner’s Ring Cycle?" That’s not the opening to a joke, it’s a genuine question asked by a friend who I’d met up with before heading...

Dara Ó Briain, Soho Theatre Walthamstow review - master stor...

Dara Ó Briain’s  has described his previous show So… Where Were We? – in which he describes his search for his birth...

Album: Anna Lapwood - Firedove

This album Firedove (Sony Classical), surely, has to be seen as part of a bigger story: that of organist, choir director and...