sun 23/03/2025

Theatre Reviews

Lend Me a Tenor - The Musical, Gielgud Theatre

David Nice Yes he can: Damian Humbley's Max Garber finds the tenor within while Michael Matus's Tito Merelli leaps for joy

Acid prophecies of this show’s swift demise, as with that of the great Italian tenor whose supposed transformation from il stupendo to il stifferino results in the debut of a surpise new Otello at the "Cleveland Grand Opera", turn out to be greatly exaggerated. Allora, the tunes and the lyrics aren’t prime cut, but it’s slickly done, strongly cast and contains enough frothy set pieces to earn its salt. And any musical which has stylish fun with both the most...

Read more...

Shrek the Musical, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

Matt Wolf

Broadway musicals can have a bumpy transatlantic crossing. For every New York entry that repeats its acclaim on the West End, others quickly fade, while still others never make it to the capital at all: consider The Light in the Piazza, which won six Tonys in 2005 but hasn't yet been seen in the UK south of Leicester. What, then, of Shrek, DreamWorks's entry into the Broadway musical sweepstakes that called it quits in New York after little more than a year? It's way too...

Read more...

Luise Miller, Donmar Warehouse

Ismene Brown

Time lurches when you see a historical play. But is it a case of autre temps, autres moeurs, or of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Either way, the history needs to slap your face hard with recognition. Schiller’s Luise Miller is a 1784 play that clearly fires at its own vicious contemporary world, a catastrophically corrupt and unruly coalition of German states, and is its world just too far from our own to believe in the tragic young lovers at its core...

Read more...

Government Inspector, Young Vic

David Nice

It's not often in classic comedy that you cry with laughter at the opening gags, and even rarer that the final scene of perfectly orchestrated ensemble acting actually crowns the work. More than two decades on from his groundbreaking Old Vic production of Ostrovsky's Too Clever By Half, director of genius Richard Jones is still finding the right mugs and pushing the boundaries of edgy satire.

Read more...

Hard Times, Murrays' Mills, Manchester

philip Radcliffe This version of 'Hard Times' is in effect a classic TV series live: Alice O’Connell as Louisa Gradgrind and Verity May Henry as Sissy Jupe

Dickens wasn’t wrong – hard times they were. Around 1300 men, women and children worked at the Murrays’ Mills complex in the Ancoats area of Manchester in its mid-19th-century heyday (if you can call it that). Arrive a minute later than 7am and you were locked out, without pay. Now that actors are treading those same worn and oil-stained boards with an imaginative new version of Hard Times, you won’t get in after 7pm (and you’re the one paying, of course).

Read more...

American Trade, Hampstead Theatre

aleks Sierz

Some theatre genres seem indestructible. One of these is the satirical city comedy, for which playwrights dip their pens in poison and spray their venom over the teeming mass of the shallow, the stupid and the successful. When they do this today, they inevitably recall all manner of past plays from Jacobean and Restoration times to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and beyond.

Read more...

Chicken Soup With Barley, Royal Court Theatre

Matt Wolf

"Love comes now. You have to start with love," urges Sarah Kahn (Samantha Spiro) early in Chicken Soup With Barley, and it's inconceivable that Dominic Cooke's knockout production of Arnold Wesker's 1958 play could have sprung from any other starting point. There's talk later in Wesker's three acts (taken here with only one...

Read more...

Butley, Duchess Theatre

Sam Marlowe Ego in academia: Dominic West and Martin Hutson

Ben Butley is poisonous, spiteful, a bully, a sadist and a snob. So how does Simon Gray, who created his titular anti-hero in 1971, ensure that an audience can endure his company? He equips him with the kind of lacerating verbal dexterity that makes you catch your breath, appalled and a little awed all at once. And in Lindsay Posner’s fine revival, this nasty, sad, desperate piece of work who,...

Read more...

Tactical Questioning, Tricycle Theatre

aleks Sierz

Verbatim theatre has been the flavour of political theatre for the past two decades, and no theatre has done more to promote this style of public witnessing than the Tricycle in Kilburn, north London. Its artistic director, Nicolas Kent, has created a special style of verbatim drama called tribunal theatre, where the results of long-running public inquiries or trials are edited into an evening’s viewing. His latest venture, Tactical Questioning: Scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry,...

Read more...

Into Thy Hands, Wilton's Music Hall

alexandra Coghlan Let's get metaphysical: Donne (Varla) and his wife Ann (Murphy) in their marital bed

“Where once was certainty is now only void.” The age of John Donne was also the age of Galileo, Milton, of Hobbes, Francis Bacon and, of course, the King James Bible, whose 400th anniversary we celebrate this year. At the intersection of politics, religion and scientific philosophy, Donne’s life under James I holds up a mirror to the...

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...

Music Reissues Weekly: Too Far Out - Beat, Mod & R&B...

The thrill of hearing “Crawdaddy Simone” never wears off. As the September 1965 B-side of the third single by North London R&B band The...

Naumov, SCO, Egarr, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh review - or...

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has had to put up with its fair share of artist cancellations over the last month, and the ensuing games of musical...

Brief History of a Family review - glossy Chinese psychologi...

Brief History of a Family is a psychological thriller with a story familiar to anyone who has seen Ripley, ...

Album: Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco - I Said I Love You Fir...

Selena Gomez is the enormously successful Disney child star who grew up to be a Hollywood actor and global pop sensation. As notably, she’s the...

Die Zauberflöte, Royal Academy of Music review - first-rate...

Tamino in the operating theatre hallucinating serpents? Sarastro’s acolytes wheeling lit-up plasma packs? From the central part of the Overture...

Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other review - a portr...

Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other is a documentary portrait of photographer Joel Meyerowitz, acclaimed for his...

The Alto Knights review - double dose of De Niro doesn'...

The power struggle between New York crime bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello is one of the foundational stories of the American Mafia, though...

Album: The Horrors - Night Life

For fans of The Horrors, the headline here is that, 20 years into the career, for their sixth album, the band have lost two of their founding...