Theatre Reviews
The Habits, Hampstead Theatre review - who knows what adventures await?Thursday, 13 March 2025
“The exercise of fantasy is to imagine other ways of life,” says one of the role-players during a Dungeons & Dragons marathon, because “without understanding how others might live, I ask you, how will we ever understand ourselves?” It’s a good question, and writer and director Jack Bradfield, in his enchanting new play The Habits, has a good stab at answering it. Read more... |
Farewell Mister Haffmann, Park Theatre review - French hit of confusing genre, with a real historical villainWednesday, 12 March 2025
When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit, Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s Adieu Monsieur Haffmann, has landed, and the genre confusions could start all over again. Read more... |
Edward II, RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford review - monarchs, murder and mayhem from MarloweMonday, 10 March 2025
“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. Read more... |
One Day When We Were Young, Park Theatre review - mini-marvel with a poignant punchWednesday, 05 March 2025
Nick Payne, the writer of Constellations, has created another 90-minute zinger for two actors. This one is much simpler in structure but poses equally potent questions about the nature of love and how it’s moulded by the passage of time. Read more... |
Alterations, National Theatre review - high emotional costs of ambitionSunday, 02 March 2025
Plays about the Windrush Generation are no longer a rarity, but it’s still unusual for revivals of black British classics to get the full resources of the National Theatre. Guyana-born playwright Michael Abbensetts, who died in 2016, is often mentioned in books about black British drama, but his plays are infrequently revived. Read more... |
A Knock on the Roof, Royal Court review - poignant account of living under terrorFriday, 28 February 2025
The war in Gaza has been going since 7 October 2023 – that’s about 15 months. But it’s strangely absent from British stages. Of course, it’s a divisive issue, a difficult issue, a painful issue – but isn’t that what contemporary theatre should be about? Instead, we prefer to stage bellicose horrors in plays by ancient Greek tragedians, or mention Palestine in Shakespeare plays, but really… Read more... |
The Score, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - curious beast of a play fails to engageFriday, 28 February 2025
Why is it so hard to write a decent play about Bach? Maybe, in part, because there are no words that can express anything as eloquently as his music did – about life and death, pain and transcendence, wretchedness or rapture at the simplest aspects of existence. Read more... |
The Ferryman, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin review - Jez Butterworth's Northern Irish epic comes close to homeThursday, 27 February 2025
Dublin theatregoers have been inundated with Irish family gatherings concealing secrets or half-buried sorrows, mixing “bog gothic” with very real horrors. Clearly they’re willing to try again with Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, because its run has just been extended. The vanishings familiar to Butterworth’s wife Laura Donnelly, whose uncle was among the disappeared, still resonate, as a programme article by Sandra Peake, CEO of WAVE Trauma Centre, reinforces. Read more... |
Richard II, Bridge Theatre review - handsomely mounted, emotionally mutedSaturday, 22 February 2025
Screen stardom is generally anointed at the box office so it's a very real delight to find the fast-rising Jonathan Bailey taking time out from his ascendant celluloid career to return to his stage roots in Richard II. Read more... |
Backstroke, Donmar Warehouse review - a complex journey through a mother-daughter relationshipSaturday, 22 February 2025
The theatre director Anna Mackmin has written and directed an extraordinary play about a mother and daughter relationship: extraordinary because it puts the audience inside the maelstrom of these characters’ lives, forcing us to focus on how we interpret them and how our lives might resemble theirs. Read more... |
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★★★★★
‘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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