tue 08/07/2025

Theatre Reviews

#aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, Hampstead Theatre online review – imbued with an urgent new relevance

aleks Sierz

London’s Hampstead Theatre has recently been very successful in bringing some of its best shows to a wider public – despite coronavirus.

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Theatre Lockdown Special 2: Birthdays aplenty, songs of hope, a starry quiz - and more

Matt Wolf

As lockdown continues, so does the ability of the theatre community to find new ways to tantalise and entertain. The urge to create and perform surely isn't going to be reined-in by a virus, which explains the explosion of creatives lending their gifts to song cycles, readings, or even the odd quiz night. At the same time, venues and theatre companies the world over continue to unlock cupboards full of goodies, almost too many to absorb.

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Tiger Country, Hampstead Theatre online review - a taut drama of NHS pressure and pain

Tom Birchenough

If ever there was a “play for today”, it’s surely this.

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Treasure Island, National Theatre at Home review - all aboard this thrilling adventure story

Marianka Swain

Swaggering pirates, X marks the spot, a chattering parrot, “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum”? All present and correct.

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Theatre Lockdown Special 1: Starry podcasts, late-career Shakespeare, a celebrity basement - and more

Matt Wolf

The lockdown has been extended, but here's the good news: each week whereby we are shut inside seems to bring with it ever-enticing arrays of theatre from across the spectrum, from online cabarets to freshly conceived podcasts and all manner of archival offerings of tites both familiar and not. Below is an unscientific sampling of items of interest to look out for either at the moment or during the week ahead.

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Twelfth Night, RSC/Stratford-upon-Avon online review - inventive but underfelt

Matt Wolf

Twelfth Night is rarely long-absent from the British stage and nor is it in our current climate of streaming aplenty. This 2017 production for the RSC from the director Christopher Luscombe will soon be followed online by the National Theatre’s gender-flipped version, with Tamsin Greig as Malvolia, which actually preceded this Stratford production at the time.

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Wise Children, BBC online review – beautifully bizarre

aleks Sierz

Reviewing theatre now means reviewing film. Knowing that Emma Rice’s Old Vic 2018 production of Wise Children, her typically rambunctious version of Angela Carter’s last novel, published in 1991, has been recorded by The Space immediately raises expectations of high quality.

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Drawing the Line, Hampstead Theatre online review - modern history becomes dark farce

Marianka Swain

This week’s gem from the Hampstead’s vaults is Howard Brenton’s political drama from 2013, telling the extraordinary, stranger-than-fiction story of Cyril Radcliffe and his 1947 mission: to arrange the Partition of India in...

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Flowers for Mrs Harris, Chichester Festival Theatre online review - a warmly open-hearted weepie

Matt Wolf

18 months or so after it opened in Chichester, Flowers for Mrs Harris launches a sequence of streamed productions from the West Sussex venue just in time to allow a new British musical to join the ever-swelling ranks of theatrical offerings online.

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Jane Eyre, National Theatre at Home review - a fiery feminist adaptation

Marianka Swain

The National Theatre’s online broadcasts got off to a storming start with One Man, Two Guvnors – watched by over 2.5 million people, either on the night or in the week since its live streaming, and raising around £66,000 in donations.

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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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