fri 17/01/2025

Theatre Reviews

Good Grief, Platform Presents online review - a little more, please

Laura De Lisle

Good Grief, a new show from American screenwriter and playwright Lorien Haynes, can’t work out what it wants to be. It’s billed as an “online filmed production”.

Read more...

Shook, Papatango online review - strongly acted, but depressingly predictable

aleks Sierz

Film is the new theatre – this we know, but does the distance imposed by the change of medium increase or decrease the impact of the story?

Read more...

Love in a Wood, Jermyn Street Theatre review - stars gather remotely for a lively online presentation

Heather Neill

Swaggering rakes, posturing fops, sexual intrigue, illicit encounters, wit, artifice, wigs, fans and beauty spots - these are familiar ingredients of Restoration comedy. It is a louche world where the word "mask" is associated with naughty goings on under cover of darkness rather than health worries, and where social distancing and restraint have no place.

Read more...

Peter Pan: The Audio Adventure review - the perfect bedtime story

Laura De Lisle

The blurb for Peter Pan: The Audio Adventure, Shaun McKenna’s new adaptation of JM Barrie’s classic, tells us, with a...

Read more...

Dick Whittington, National Theatre at Home review - colourful and amiable entertainment

Veronica Lee

In a much-depleted and truncated pantomime season that withered on the vine, the National Theatre's debut production of Dick Whittington lasted only four performances before the show was cancelled; it has now released this recording, which will be available throughout the current lockdown.

Read more...

Best of 2020: Theatre

Matt Wolf

"Goodbye": The single word lingered heavily in the air last March 16, as the scripted closing both of the terrific Southwark Playhouse revival of The Last Five Years and as an ancillary farewell to live theatre.

Read more...

Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, Royal Court online review – the news, but better

Laura De Lisle

Edition 2 of Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, an experimental new piece of online theatre from the Royal Court, doesn’t mess around.

Read more...

A Christmas Carol, Old Vic online review - the bells have it once again

Matt Wolf

As proof that you can't have too much of a good thing, consider the return of Matthew Warchus's buoyant production of A Christmas Carol, now marking its fourth year at the Old Vic (with a lauded Broadway run last Christmas included,...

Read more...

Pantomimes 2020 round-up: what's available online

Veronica Lee

Cinderella ****

I did worry that pantomime – that most audience-driven of theatrical pursuits – might not work through the tube, but Nottingham Playhouse's warm and funny show dispels any doubts. Pandemic jokes abound (the audience must be smelly because they're sitting far apart, for instance) in writer-director Adam Penford's inventive romp.

Read more...

Troy Story, RSC online review - biting off more than it can chew

Laura De Lisle

At just under five hours, Troy Story, the RSC’s adaptation of as many tales from Greek myth, takes about a third as long as it does to recite the whole of 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...

A Complete Unknown review - how does it feel?

Being unknowable has been almost as much of a preoccupation for the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman as writing songs. Previously on film he has played...

Love Life, Opera North review - Lerner and Weill's blas...

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. But in Love Life, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s...

Vermiglio review - a simple tale, simply but beautifully tol...

Another new release opens with the sounds of people in bed playing over the credits, but these are not Babygirl’s sighs of a...

Album: Kele - The Singing Winds Pt. 3

Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand...

Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, Dudamel, Barbican review -...

Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela took the Barbican by storm last night with a thrilling account of Mahler’s...

Jenůfa, Royal Opera review - electrifying details undermined...

This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the...

German National Orchestra, Marshall, Cadogan Hall review - s...

This concert was an effusion of pure joy. Billed as the German National Orchestra, the Bundesjugendorchester (Federal Youth Orchestra), all of...

Chris McCausland, Winchester Theatre Royal review - Strictly...

By all accounts Chris McCausland had to be persuaded to take part in the most recent series of Strictly Come Dancing, which he won with...

Album: The Weather Station - Humanhood

Four of Humanhood’s 13 tracks are short, impressionistic mood pieces. Between 48 seconds and just-over a minute-and-a-half long, they...