fri 04/10/2024

Theatre Reviews

Waiting For Godot, Theatre Royal Haymarket

Matt Wolf

The wait is over. Less than six months after dramatic literature's defining tramps departed the West End, here are Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) back again, with some new faces to flesh out Beckett's eternal verities about that grievous but also grimly funny thing we call life.

Read more...

Wet Weather Cover, King's Head Theatre

Sheila Johnston Unfair weather friends: Steve Furst (left) and Michael Brandon

"Plays about cinema tend to be written by people who have done some movies, come back and filled their fountain pens from their spleen," the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Larry Gelbart once told me. David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow is probably the best-known example, followed by such works as Christopher Hampton's Tales From Hollywood, Martin Crimp's The Treatment and, most recently, last week's ...

Read more...

The Whisky Taster, Bush Theatre

aleks Sierz

Synaesthesia is a tricky beast. It’s basically a neurological condition which condemns those afflicted with it to a life in which words evoke colours, and emotions can be experienced as colour. Sometimes it is almost playful, with the mere names of the days of the week evoking tonal sensations; at other times it is intensely painful, with the mere glimpse of a buzzy pattern causing dizziness or strong feelings conjuring up great blasts of colour, an unbearable onslaught of confusion and...

Read more...

The Little Dog Laughed, Garrick Theatre

Matt Wolf

Tamsin Greig takes her mighty stage chops to a new level in The Little Dog Laughed, a minor Broadway comedy that gets a major star performance from Greig in her first West End role since God of Carnage.

Read more...

Progress, Union Theatre

aleks Sierz

Sexual politics has always been fertile (oops) ground for comedy, and Doug Lucie’s vigorous satire — whose 1984 premiere starred Lindsay Duncan, David Bamber and Kevin Elyot — is here given a revival on the London fringe. We are in Kilburn during the Thatcher era, and the local trendy lefties have turned inward.

Read more...

Enron, Noël Coward Theatre

aleks Sierz

Crisis makes people hungry. In the case of the banking collapse, this seems to take the form of an ignoble itch for revenge, and a more laudable hunger for knowledge. What exactly happened and what went wrong? As Enron, Lucy Prebble's wonderful play about a previous financial scandal, roared into the Royal Court after its sell-out run at Chichester, there was time to reflect on just why this play has been such a huge success. And by success, I really mean success.

Read more...

Six Degrees of Separation, Old Vic

Sheila Johnston

John Guare's brittle satire, first produced in New York in 1990, was propelled by two phenomena. The first was a certain David Hampton, a con man who persuaded a suite of gullible Manhattan socialites that he was Sidney Poitier's son (and who, when Guare's play became a hit, pestered the playwright for a cut of the profits).

Read more...

Ockham's Razor, The Mill, Linbury Studio Theatre

Ismene Brown The Mill: 'an excellent corporate teamwork video let loose in too large a theatre opportunity'

Call me old-fashioned, but when a bunch of people have trained in circus and French mime theatre, I’m expecting to be astonished, thoroughly surprised, and occasionally to feel the sweat breaking out on my palms. Can one enjoy circus skills without fear and awe being supplied? The aerialist theatre troupe Ockham’s Razor provide a sensational hamster-wheel set for their new show, The Mill, powered by human hamsters, but don’t serve up physical jinks of matching sensationalism. I grew up...

Read more...

The Caretaker, Trafalgar Studios

william Ward

It is almost an article of faith that over the 50 years since its first production, The Caretaker has become a classic of the British theatrical canon.

Read more...

BlackSkyWhite, Institute of Contemporary Arts

Ismene Brown

I whizzed back to my previous reviews of BlackSkyWhite when I got home last night to check how much I’d enjoyed them in the past, so disappointing was their offering for the London International Mime Festival, USSR Was Here.

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

Lear, Barbican Theatre review - a very stormy saga, Korean-s...

What do the cult TV show Squid Game and National Changgeuk Company of Korea’s Lear have in common? Oddly, a K-Pop...

Monet and London, Courtauld Gallery review - utterly sublime...

In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond...

Joker: Folie à Deux review - supervillainy laid low

“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing...

A Tupperware of Ashes, National Theatre review - family and...

Queenie is in trouble. Bad trouble. For about a year now, this 68-year-old Indian woman has been forgetful. Losing her car keys; burning rice in...

First Person: conductor Robert Hollingworth on a four-choir...

I’m sitting in a café in Kraców, Poland, rehearsals finished for the resurrection of a mass setting written nearly 400 years ago in...

The Battle for Lakipia review - why post-colonial Kenya is a...

The Battle for Lakipia is a beautifully filmed and thoughtfully directed documentary that was made over a two-year period. Its focus is...

Album: Coldplay - Moon Music

From the very first chords of "Yellow" in 2000, Coldplay have been an ever present at the summit of popular music's hierarchy. Their uncanny knack...

The Old Man and the Land review - dark secrets of a farming...

The Old Man and the Land depicts a worn-out sheep farmer going about his dreary business as the seasons pass, darkly and dankly. He does...

BBC Singers, BBCSO, Jeannin, Barbican review - from stormy w...

“Bold, ambitious, and good for the sector.” So said Charlotte Moore, the BBC chief content officer, who currently earns £468,000, in March last...

Nobodaddy, Teaċ Daṁsa, Dublin Theatre Festival review - supe...

Nobodaddy, taking its title from Blake’s violent dark-god “Father of Jealousy”, is much more than a dance piece, and Michael Keegan-Dolan...