sun 27/07/2025

Theatre Reviews

Sessions, Soho Theatre review – intense, but inconclusive

aleks Sierz

After lockdown, the stage monologue saved British theatre. At venue after venue, cash-strapped companies put single actors into simple playing spaces to deliver good stories for audiences that just wanted to visit playhouses again. But this theatre form, which is relatively inexpensive and often immune against the pingdemic, does have its limitations.

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Milk and Gall, Theatre 503 review - motherhood in the age of Trump

Gary Naylor

Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vera is in a New York hospital room giving birth to a son. On anxiously checked phones, the votes are piling up for Hillary, but the states are piling up for Trump. Vera’s world will never be the same again.

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The Choir Of Man, Arts Theatre review - old school hits in an old school pub

Gary Naylor

Like a previous occupant of this venue, Six, The Choir Of Man started life as a quirky Edinburgh show and has gone on to be staged around the world to adoring audiences, tapping into a vibe that’s as much about participation as viewing, the show as much a gig as a musical....

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The Sugar House, Finborough Theatre review - appealing but uneven family drama

Mert Dilek

The complex history of capital punishment in Australia may not be familiar to many Londoners, but the Finborough Theatre turns out to be a good place to find one’s bearings around the subject.

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The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Duke of York's Theatre review - pure theatrical magic

Laura De Lisle

This show has been a long time coming. Neil Gaiman had the first inklings of The Ocean at the End of the Lane when he was seven years old and living near a farm recorded in the Domesday Book. Several decades later, he wrote a short story for his wife, Amanda Palmer, “to tell her where I lived and who I was as a boy”, as he puts it in his programme notes.

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Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of), Criterion Theatre review - bursting with wit, verve, and love

Laura De Lisle

“We haven’t started yet!” Hannah-Jarrett Scott, dressed in Doc Martens under a 19th-century shift, reassures us as she attempts to dislodge a yellow rubber glove from a chandelier in the middle of the set of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of).

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Old Bridge, Bush Theatre review - powerful, poetic and profound

aleks Sierz

Is the Bosnian conflict of 1992–95 the war that Europe forgot? Maybe, although most fans of new writing for the British stage will remember its massacres as the inciting incident for Sarah Kane’s 1995 modern classic, Blasted. Certainly, this genocidal struggle in the heart of Europe not only etched its horror on everyone who heard about it, but also continues to inspire drama.

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'Night, Mother, Hampstead Theatre review - despair in sotto-voce

Tom Birchenough

‘Night, Mother remains a play of piercing pessimism, something that’s not necessarily the same as tragedy, though the two often run congruently. The inexorability of the development of Marsha Norman’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize winner certainly recalls the tragic arc of drama, but its sense of catharsis remains somehow limited.

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The Magician's Elephant, Royal Shakespeare Theatre review - family musical doesn't fully deliver

Gary Naylor

Trigger warnings have become commonplace in theatres these days, but few chill the blood like the description "a new musical" on a playbill.

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albatross., Playground Theatre review - interconnected intimacies

Mert Dilek

"You need to get better at communicating", says one character to another in Isley Lynn’s albatross. Indeed, the same advice would fare well with many of those in the Anglo-American Lynn’s new play, where miscommunication plagues a range of relationships and chance encounters

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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.


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