Almeida Theatre
1536, Almeida Theatre review - fast and furious portrayal of women in Henry VIII's EnglandThursday, 15 May 2025
Ava Pickett’s award-winning début play, 1536, is a foul-mouthed, furious, frenetically funny ride through the lives of three young women living in Henry VIII’s England in the year of Anne Boleyn’s execution. It’s less Wolf Hall than a wolf howl of... Read more... |
Rhinoceros, Almeida Theatre review - joyously absurd and absurdly joyfulSaturday, 05 April 2025
Is the theatre of the absurd dead? In today’s world, when cruel and crazy events happen almost daily, the idea that you can satirize daily life by exaggerating its latent irrationalities seems redundant. For this reason, perhaps, revivals of plays... Read more... |
Otherland, Almeida Theatre review - a vivid, beautifully written take on the trans experienceFriday, 21 February 2025
“Who’d be a woman?... Who in their right mind would choose all that?” The question comes towards the end of a conversation where two former lovers are comparing notes on their tumultuous recent past.One of them, Jo, has just had a baby. The other,... Read more... |
The Years, Harold Pinter Theatre review - a bravura, joyous feat of storytellingMonday, 10 February 2025
Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical book Les Années charts a woman’s life across time and space, history and memory, through what the author describes as a collective consciousness. Perhaps the most satisfying thing about Eline Arbo’s... Read more... |
Angry and Young, Almeida Theatre review - vigorous and illuminating double billMonday, 07 October 2024
Why should we not look back in anger? With the Oasis reunion tour in the news recently, the title of John Osborne’s seminal kitchen-sink drama – which kicked off the whole cultural phenomenon of the Angry Young Men on its first staging in 1956 – has... Read more... |
The Years, Almeida Theatre review - matchless acting quintet makes for a must-seeThursday, 08 August 2024
The title sounds as if we ought to be in for an evening of Virginia Woolf, and, indeed, one of the astonishing women on view (Deborah Findlay) was in fact a co-star of the recent West End version of Orlando. In fact, this late-summer offering is a... Read more... |
The Comeuppance, Almeida Theatre review - remembering high-school high jinksTuesday, 16 April 2024
I’ve never been one for school reunions, but even if I had kept in touch with former classmates I think that American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance might, just might, lead me to reflect on the wisdom of revisiting the... Read more... |
King Lear, Almeida Theatre review - Danny Sapani dazzles in this spartan tragedyThursday, 22 February 2024
Less than three years after her magnificent Macbeth, Yaël Farber returns to the Almeida with another Shakespeare tragedy. Her take on King Lear (main picture) offers a full-bodied, slow-burn version of this devastating drama, where Danny Sapani... Read more... |
Cold War, Almeida Theatre review - compelling bittersweet tale of love in post-war EuropeFriday, 15 December 2023
There’s a touch of Dr Zhivago about director Paweł Pawlikowski’s screenplay for his 2018 film Cold War. Its plot is driven by the same Lara/Yuri dynamic, of an overwhelming love affair trying to outflank the forces of history. Now it's been... Read more... |
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... |
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