Theatre Reviews
Play On!, Lyric Hammersmith review - and give me excess of it!Monday, 03 February 2025
If you saw Upstart Crow on television or on stage in the West End, you’ll know the schtick of Sheldon Epps’ dazzling show Play On! Take a Shakespearean play’s underlying plot and characters and relocate them for wit and giggles. “Make it a musical“, you say? Read more... |
Inside No 9: Stage Fright, Wyndham’s review - uneven fright-night from the fêted duoFriday, 31 January 2025
How excited Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton must have been to learn that the venue for their Inside No 9 stage show was haunted, by an actress killed onstage there in 1921 when a death scene went fatally wrong. How very them. Read more... |
Cymbeline, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - pagan women fight the good fightSaturday, 25 January 2025
There’s not much point in having three hours worth of Shakespearean text to craft and the gorgeous Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as a canvas if you merely intend to go through the motions, ticking off one of the canon’s less performed works. The question for Jennifer Tang, making her Globe directorial debut, is what to do with this beautifully wrapped gift. The question for us is does it work. Read more... |
An Interrogation, Hampstead Theatre review - police procedural based on true crime tale fails to ring trueSaturday, 25 January 2025
In a dingy room with dilapidated furniture on a dismal Sunday evening, two detectives prepare for an interview. The old hand walks out, with just a little too much flattery hanging in the air, leaving the interrogation in the hands of the up-and-coming thruster, a young woman investigating the disappearance of a young woman. Alone, with just a camera for company (we get the video feed also from hidden cameras too) she awaits the suspect for the showdown. Read more... |
The Lonely Londoners, Kiln Theatre review - Windrush Generation arrive in a London full of opportunities, but not for themFriday, 24 January 2025
As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London. Read more... |
Kyoto, Soho Place Theatre - blistering, darkly witty play raises more questions than it answersMonday, 20 January 2025
It took a while for journalists to identify the chain-smoking, Machiavellian figure who was a permanent presence at early international gatherings to hammer out a strategy on climate change. When Time Magazine nominated “endangered” Earth as its planet of the year in 1989, politicians and climate campaigners leapt into action – but so too did the fossil fuel lobby, with the US lawyer Don Pearlman appointed as “High Priest” of this sinister “Carbon Club”. Read more... |
A Good House, Royal Court review - provocative, but imperfectMonday, 20 January 2025
Most Brits don’t know much about South Africa today, but we do know about house values, so this new comedy by South African playwright and screenwriter Amy Jephta is comprehensible – even in its incoherent moments (of which there are several). Read more... |
Oliver!, Gielgud Theatre review - Lionel Bart's 1960 masterpiece is Bourne againWednesday, 15 January 2025
Into a world of grooming gangs, human trafficking and senior prelates resigning over child abuse cases comes Oliver!, Lionel Bart’s masterly musical. Is its grim tale of workhouses, pickpockets and domestic violence an awkward fit with today’s values? Read more... |
The Maids, Jermyn Street Theatre review - new broom sweeps clean in fierce revivalMonday, 13 January 2025
There are two main reasons to revive classics. The first is that they are really good; the second is that they have something to say about how the world is changing, perhaps more accurately, how our perception of it is changing. Both are true of Annie Kershaw’s slick, sexy, shocking production of Martin Crimp's translation, up close and personal, at the Jermyn Street Theatre. Read more... |
Titanique, Criterion Theatre review - musical parody sinks despite super singingFriday, 10 January 2025
This Celine Dion jukebox musical has been a big hit in New York, but crossing The Atlantic can be perilous for any production, so, docked now at the Criterion Theatre, does it sink or float? 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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