Hampstead Theatre
Lotus Beauty, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs review – uneasy mix of comedy and tragedyMonday, 23 May 2022
Theatre is slowly recovering from the effects of the pandemic, and many shows which were cancelled because of the first lockdown are now finally getting a staging. The latest is Satinder Chohan’s Lotus Beauty, her loving portrait of a Punjabi family... Read more... |
The Breach, Hampstead Theatre review - profoundly uncomfortable work that burns like iceMonday, 16 May 2022
Jude is the kind of girl that no-one would want to mess with – she can dance like a demon to Eric Clapton, skewer an ego in seconds and hit an apple from thirty feet with a knife. Yet in a play that’s so uncompromising it could give Neil LaBute a... Read more... |
First Person: playwright Naomi Wallace on finally hearing her work performed in EnglishSaturday, 23 April 2022
The Breach is a coming of age story and an age-in-the-making story. The play takes place in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1990s, switching back and forth between teenagers in Louisville and their older selves 15 years later. The promise of the... Read more... |
The Fever Syndrome, Hampstead Theatre review - ambitious family drama falls shortWednesday, 06 April 2022
The Fever Syndrome has an ambition that places itself firmly in the tradition of the great American family drama (comparisons with Arthur Miller feel the most appropriate), a piece in which the reassessment of ties of blood is played out against a... Read more... |
The Forest, Hampstead Theatre review - puzzling world premiere from Florian ZellerWednesday, 16 February 2022
If Florian Zeller isn’t a Wordle fan, I’d be very surprised. As with the hit online game, the French playwright likes to offer up a puzzle for the audience to solve, clue by clue, before the curtain falls. His latest play, The Forest, which had its... Read more... |
Folk, Hampstead Downstairs review - thoughtful play about folklorist Cecil SharpThursday, 06 January 2022
Cecil Sharp, heritage hero or imperialist appropriator? If you attended school in the first half of the 20th century, you would have sung from his collections of English folk songs, and probably gritted your teeth and performed the country dances he... Read more... |
Best of 2021: TheatreThursday, 30 December 2021
There was no live theatre at the start of 2021, just a return to the world of virtual performance and streaming to which we had become well accustomed, and very quickly, too. So imagine the collective surprise come the start of this month as show... Read more... |
Peggy For You, Hampstead Theatre review - comedic gold, and a splinter of ice, from Tamsin GreigTuesday, 21 December 2021
Was Peggy Ramsay a “woman out of time”? The celebrated London literary agent, who nurtured the talents of at least one generation of British playwrights, surely counted as a legend in her own lifetime (she died in 1991). Has she lasted beyond it?... Read more... |
little scratch, Hampstead Downstairs review - a maverick director surpasses herselfMonday, 15 November 2021
Katie Mitchell’s desire to bust the boundaries of theatre has taken a brilliant turn. Over her long and distinguished career as a director she has been tirelessly inventive, injecting stylised movement into Greek tragedy, projecting film onto giant... Read more... |
'Night, Mother, Hampstead Theatre review - despair in sotto-voceTuesday, 02 November 2021
‘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... Read more... |
The Memory of Water, Hampstead Theatre review – uneasy tragi-comedyMonday, 13 September 2021
Memories are notoriously treacherous — this we know. I remember seeing Shelagh Stephenson’s contemporary classic at the Hampstead, when this venue was a prefab, and enjoying Terry Johnson’s racy staging, which starred Jane Booker, Hadyn Gwynne and... Read more... |
Big Big Sky, Hampstead Downstairs review - a perfectly realised character studySaturday, 07 August 2021
Get to Swiss Cottage early because Bob Bailey’s set for Tom Wells's new Hampstead Downstairs play Big Big Sky is a feast for the eyes. Angie’s cafe has the scrapey chairs, the tables you know will wobble a little if you get that one (and you... Read more... |
