Almeida Theatre
A Mirror, Almeida Theatre review - unconvincing and contrivedFriday, 25 August 2023![]() This is a play about censorship in a totalitarian state – but, no, I’m not reviewing The Pillowman again. Instead, I’m watching A Mirror by Sam Holcroft, a playwright who – as her 2015 play Rules for Living amply illustrated – is interested in... Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet, Almeida Theatre review - muscular action interspersed with moments of telling stillnessMonday, 19 June 2023![]() Rebecca Frecknall’s Romeo and Juliet burns like ice, paring back and tightening the script so that love and death are constant bedfellows. She underscores her vision with a thrilling, furious physicality, interspersing explosive fight scenes with... Read more... |
Patriots, Noël Coward Theatre review - crash-bang brilliant Putin comedy does it againThursday, 08 June 2023![]() With apocalyptic floods pouring through the Kakhovka dam, and millions of Ukrainians displaced or bereaved, it doesn’t feel decent to be laughing at a witty black comedy about his rise from nonentity to full-blown tyrant. On the other hand, how can... Read more... |
The Secret Life of Bees, Almeida Theatre review - stirringly delivered musical about civil rightsTuesday, 25 April 2023![]() The cast of The Secret Life of Bees first parade onto the Almeida stage hefting big glass storage jars full of a golden substance: honey. The jars glow as if they are beacons, lights that guide. Which they turn out to be.Most of the people in this... Read more... |
Women, Beware the Devil, Almeida Theatre review - bewitching, up to a pointThursday, 23 February 2023![]() A man in modern garb reads a tabloid newspaper and makes smarmy wisecracks about the malaise of contemporary Britain – strikes, NHS waiting lists and the rest of it. But hang on a minute: isn’t this meant to be a period drama? Lulu Raczka’s new... Read more... |
A Streetcar Named Desire, Almeida Theatre review - Patsy Ferran rises above fussy stagingFriday, 13 January 2023![]() It’s a long way from the dank chill of an English winter to the stultifying heat of a New Orleans summer, but we’ve been here before at this venue. Five years on from their award-winning Summer And Smoke, Rebecca Frecknall is back in the director’s... Read more... |
Tammy Faye, Almeida Theatre review - Elton John's often dazzling new musicalFriday, 28 October 2022![]() I’ll confess to a certain schadenfreude when the American televangelists who seemed so foreign to us Brits were led away to be papped on their perp walks, ministers in manacles: One big name after another skewered on their own hubris, gulling the... Read more... |
The Doctor, Duke of York's Theatre review - Juliet Stevenson will see you nowMonday, 10 October 2022![]() Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-... Read more... |
The Clinic, Almeida Theatre review - race and the status quoWednesday, 14 September 2022![]() As Dipa Baruwa-Etti’s latest play, The Clinic, reminds us, the Tory party has a strong showing of Black MPs – Badenoch, Cleverly, Kwarteng. It was finished long before the latest Cabinet appointments, but presciently picked those three names, all... Read more... |
Patriots, Almeida Theatre review - a brilliant drama from Peter Morgan about rampant Russian power gamesWednesday, 13 July 2022![]() To watch a Peter Morgan drama is to have a fly-on-the-wall’s perspective of modern history. Over the last two decades he has chronicled everything from David Frost’s bid to interview Richard Nixon to the disintegration in the relationship between... Read more... |
The House of Shades, Almeida Theatre review - Anne-Marie Duff blazes in Beth Steel's excoriating new dramaWednesday, 18 May 2022![]() Anne-Marie Duff blazes across the stage like a meteorite in Beth Steel’s excoriating drama about the changes sweeping through a Northern mining town over the course of five decades. As Constance Webster, a frustrated miner’s wife, her angry energy... Read more... |
'Daddy' A Melodrama, Almeida Theatre review - production exuberance carries a new play of promiseMonday, 11 April 2022![]() Danya Taymor’s production of “Daddy” A Melodrama has a huge exuberance: a tour de force in itself, it's also a scintillating introduction to the work of Jeremy O Harris. The young American dramatist earned considerable attention, and acclaim for the... Read more... |
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