FringeReview UK
Years: 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015
FringeReview UK 2020
Brenton powerfully concertinas a continent’s politics and one artist’s refraction of it. Wong is outstanding
15 Heroines: 15 Monologues Adapted from Ovid
Groundbreaking. The smallest producing theatre in the West End through lockdown has become the largest.
This surely is the greatest Dream since Peter Brook’s landmark 1970 production.
Stoppard looks at society’s phantom limb ethic. Even when it’s gone it aches, and it aches to have someone opting out.
Andrew Lloyd-Webber 50th Birthday Live from the Royal Albert Hall, 1998
The great discovery was the multi-roling Marcus Lovett, sexy and lethal, able to attack several roles and convince you he was born for them, even into them.
Supremely worth it to see a pair so famous weighing equal in their own balance, perhaps for the first time.
Barber Shop Chronicles is a breath-taking revelation for those of us who had small inkling of a world in miniature.
Nothing so convincing has been done with this legend. It deserves many revivals.
A Coriolanus memorable for politics sinewed with personal forces: an active interrogation of democracy. And in Josie Rourke’s production Tom Hiddleston’s someone riven by intimations of his true self
Renders huge black experience into a narrative that bears it, because so well-constructed, so character-driven and so inhabited by Michael Balogun whose blaze of awakening is both benediction and clarion.
The acting scales cliff-edges of unreason. One remembers the scale of betrayal and loss of redemption
Frankenstein (alternate version)
The acting scales cliff-edges of unreason. One remembers the scale of betrayal and loss of redemption. Benedict Cumberbatch here is Frankenstein, Jonny Lee Miller the Creature. The alternate version aired first is still available.
Will leave you in a heap and wonder what else Lauren Gunderson has written that comes near this.
Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
A salutary reminder of how a great musical talent and collaboration started
A superb realization of Lorraine Hansberry's unfinished masterpiece - a classic of Ibsenite proportions
Epic eavesdropping casts that ultimate spell: reading ourselves by flashes of lightning.
The Almeida’s another country. They do shows differently there. A bold communing of theatre stories with the fresh poignancy of what’s happened during 2020
Completeness is just one reason to cherish this clean-driven clear-headed production
Helen McCrory plumbs the erotic despair of Hester Collyer’s abandoned woman in this absorbing revival of Rattigan’s masterpiece.
This magnificent revival poses even more urgent questions. A twitch on the thread for all of us.
A fleet traversal memorable for insights the company bring during and after their performance of it
There’s a generosity here, a big hug. Theatre itself affirms the value of life to those who might yet shape it for the better.
The OFS are taking flight with the best scratch nights the Elizabethans never had.
We’re looking at a bright Book of Hours. Barrie Rutter’s done it profound service, adding a warmth and agency that opens up this pageant. This is hopefully just the first of many such he’ll bring to the Globe.
Do catch it, and match the feelgood price with nudging theatres towards opening night.
Tells us more truthfully then any play has, the heroism that hardens, the sacrifice that endures.
First-rate theatre. In Joshua James’ Ben Gunn and above all Pasy Ferran’s Jim, we see stars rising quicker than Arthur Darvill’s superb Silver can point them out.
Tamsin Greig’s extremes as Malvolia mark the first intimations of the terrible and define this production. The ground’s shifted.
Outstanding. Surely the definitive study of the dignity of physical labour, and breaking of its amity.
