Review: Heisenberg
If flawed it’s a fascinating, intimate piece given new life and with luck a new performing tradition. The most compelling two-hander now playing.
Genre: Adaptation
Review: The Inseparables
A transfixingly beautiful production, with often superb acting, especially from Lara Manela
Review: The Shark is Broken
Essential theatre for anyone who enjoys new plays with more wit than several comedies. A must-see.
Review: Lula Mebrahtu I Am – OommoO
Everything you’ve heard is true. Lula Mebrahtu is memserising, and I Am – OommoO like its creator has vast potential.
Review: The Importance of Being Oscar
Alastair Whatley takes the joy of the sorrow, and makes it his own. Unmissable if you can squeeze in.
Review: Calamity Jane
See this for the onstage musicians and above all Carrie Hope Fletcher giving Calamity soul as well as heart. Highly recommended.
Review: The Secret Garden/Bleak Expectations
Deliciously wholesome satire, this is a deliriously-paced, superbly-acted production.
Review: Dr Strangelove
Steve Coogan reigns supreme, and a cast like John Hopkins then Giles Terera are a gift to both Coogan and the show.
Review: Men’s Business
A quietly phenomenal, ground-breaking play, blistering in sumps of silence. See it.
Review: Macbeth
ETT’s gallimaufry stimulates, frustrates, occasionally fascinates. A more selective through-line would have revealed a mineral gleam, a new earth of tyranny.
Review: Alterations
We must be grateful for this compelling revival, and wait for more from the National’s Black archive.
Review: Peter James Picture You Dead
Twists are delicious. If you enjoy Peter James, or thrillers with a light touch, don’t hesitate. Solidly recommended.
Review: Chekhov Three Sisters
There’s a rapt self-communing in this production of Three Sisters. A must-see, it glows long after you’ve left it.
Review: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Brighton Theatre Group is a chocolate factory all on its own. Nothing in Wonka is as magical as the vision, reach and grasp of this company. It’s perhaps their finest production yet.
Review: Vaughan Williams, J.M. Synge Riders to the Sea
Betteridge’s prologue is certainly worth seeing even if you know the work, and won’t need persuading. And after the opera, the rest is surf, and silence.
Review: The Last Laugh
This is a must-see. Never outstaying its welcome, you can leave this show after 85 minutes, but stay for that Q&A. I envy everyone the night I won’t be there for it.
Review: Birdsong
If you think on peace in these distracted times, love theatre, can absorb it at its most epic, then this will thrill and overwhelm you. A must-see.
Review: Macbeth
It’s still a phenomenal feat and even if you know Macbeth, it’s still a must-see for how a quintessence can be dusted off.
Review: The Devil May Care
Do see this particularly for an outstanding performance from Burrows and an exceptionally fine one from Woodhouse. This adaptation remains an exhilarating reminder of what a difference a century makes.
Review: Treasure Island
First-rate youth theatre, creatives and cast excel: detailed, funny, not to be taken over-seriously, then quite a bit more so.
Review: Zinnie Harris, Douglas Hodge, Johnny McKnight 101 Dalmatians The Musical
A perennial tale in essence makes this a Christmas must and New Year resolution: for all of us under ten in the holidays.
Review: Helen Edmundson (adaptor) Anna Karenina
With Diane Robinson’s team there’s a vibrant retelling, superbly produced
Review: Ballet Shoes
A paean to wonder and possibility, dreaming to some purpose. Like other winter growths, this should prove a hardy perennial, evergreen as the book.
Review: Sara Farrington A Trojan Woman
An acclaimed pocket tragedy which yet carries Euripides’ weight in Farrington’s framing, it more than touches the heart: it snatches it and hands it back as a sad and angry consolation.
Review: The Box of Delights
The finest Christmas box imaginable, and the go-to for a seasonal show. If you can get in.
Review: Shakespeare in Love
The mystery’s in the ensemble, the production, its bewitching leads. It’s a mighty reckoning in a little room.
Review: Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art
An essential, raging and ranging collection of works flashing with humour and teeth, flecked with harrowing stories and above all love for a humanity the establishment wishes us to other and consign to tragedy. A must-see.
Review: Stranger Than the Moon
Essential for anyone interested in Brecht or 20th century drama, it’s far more: starkly entrancing, then engrossing over 110 minutes.
Review: Women Who Blow on Knots
As fine a realisation as anyone could manage. The immediacy, cries, reveals are inherently theatrical and precious. A must-see.
Review: 1984
This is the fleetest most theatrical version I’ve seen for some time. Telegraphic in its conveying a nightmare world, it nevertheless does so by lightning strokes.
Review: Autumn
This is a partially bewitching production and it might send you back to the novel or quartet
Review: Salomé
Dramatically this is the most creative response I’ve seen live. Here, a director’s reach should exceed their grasp, or what’s a production for.
Review: Eurydice
Stella Powell-Jones coaxes provisional miracles from her cast and space. The medium’s playful, even fun. The message though is bleak; and love is still in the letting go.
Review: The Cat and the Canary
An exceptional ensemble delivering a delirious twist on a tale that truly deserves it. Unmissable.
Review: Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabaret
Who could object to its urgency, or its starry messenger? A gem.
Review: Gareth Strachan Project M.E. The Rock Inn Pub
Strachan proves he can pull together serious talent who believe in his work. It’s a step up in all directions
Review: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
This desperate elegy of betrayal, straight from Le Carré’s own hurt, will haunt you with the truth of its despair.
Review: Pride and Prejudice
An unalloyed delight, compressing the story but revealing things even those who know the novel will take back to it.
Review: 1984
Withintheatre has created an excellent piece of dramatic theatre that has gravitas and is provocative.
Review: The Years
This production reminds us it’s often the least theatrical, least tractable works that break boundaries, glow with an authority that changes the order of things.
Review: The Grapes of Wrath
Absorbing and essential, Grapes of Wrath is here as complete as you could wish.
Review: John Fowles adapted Mark Healy The French Lieutenant’s Woman
This is BLT. How they manage it might stupefy a newcomer. A must-see.
Review: ECHO
Ultimately, the most telling line ”We are all immigrants across time” defines what remains an extraordinary experience
Review: All’s Well That Ends Well
Don’t go expecting searing insights, but do go for a crack ensemble who will surely turn many to Shakespeare. An endearing and uplifting enterprise.
Review: Mnemonic
Mnemonic is treasurable, eloquent, a rare passport. It remembers what hope, connectedness and peace smelt like. It’s worth remembering that.
Review: The Beckett Trilogy
It’s reading Beckett in flashes of lightning and laughter. Conor Lovett stuns in this cut-down stand-up Beckett-novels-for-beginners-and-enders three-hour whistlestop. A tour de force as well as a tour de farce of Beckett’s genius.
Review: Kafka
It’s Klaff’s improvisatory edge, founded on absolute technique and clear-headed text, that finds an exit where none was signposted. Magnificent.
Review: Heart’s Desire/L’Amore Del Cuore
Anyone admiring Churchill, ferocious comedy or excited by a rare UK foray into Italian theatre must see this.
Review: The Kite Runner
Spellbindingly translated to the stage and here with more power even than before. Don’t miss it.
Review: Geneva Convention
As this gets quieter, it shouts more loudly. Exciting as this is, it will devastate when it finds its arc. This might ascend into something crucial.
Review: That Witch Helen
An absorbing retelling. Whatever Ridewood and Sibyl Theatre tackles next will be worth waiting for.
Review: Women’s Writes
We’ve been lucky to sit in on the first stage of a very promising conversation collaboration, and theatre piece.
Review: The English Moor
Richard Brome’s 1637 The English Moor marks a new departure for Read Not Dead. You might say with this play it’s Read to be Dead.
Review: Little Women
There’s heartbreak and joy here. If you don’t know it, be surprised and moved at this hidden fringe gem, realised by this team in delicately-cut facets.
Review: Laughing Boy
Stephen Unwin directs his own play as a sweep of storytelling, laughter and devastation.
Review: The Other Boleyn Girl
Mike Poulton’s text gleams and snaps. Lucy Bailey’s production of it thrills and occasionally overwhelms, dazzling in its maze of missteps. A must-see.
Review: An Officer and a Gentleman
What brings this musical home is the drawing-together of threads that hang loose in Act One. And finally you believe in a story that doesn’t flinch from darkness and sings its distress. Thoroughly enjoyable.
Review: The Valley of Fear
Blackeyed have kept their telling as lean as Holmes’ hawk-like face, and it pounces. If you admire 221b at all, see it this week.
Review: Dream of a Ridiculous Man
A definitive telling of that rarest thing, an uplifting Dostoevsky tale. It’s unlikely to be rendered better than this.
Review: The Motive and the Cue
An extraordinary production. Thorne’s vision is capped by a riveting performance by Gatiss, who glows with the still, sad music of Gielgud’s humanity.
Review: Macbeth
It’s a phenomenal feat and even if you know Macbeth, it’s still a must-see for how a quintessence can be dusted off.
Review: In and Out of Chekhov’s Shorts
Outstanding. After this, there’s no other way to tell Chekhov dramatically that he’s not already nailed down in a play himself. Chekhov would have loved it.
Review: Sister Act
In short, a fabulous example of British talent, now endangered, bringing quadruple threat to a magnificent production. Not all such mainstream shows on tour even approach outstanding, but this truly is.
Review: Rika’s Rooms
Emma Wilkinson Wright manages the narrative as an odyssey punctuated by screams. It’s a pretty phenomenal performance and the actor is so wholly immersed in Rika you know you’re in the presence of something remarkable.
Review: Good-Bye
Wholly absorbing, wholly other, it’s a gem of the Coronet’s dedication to world theatre.
Review: Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening
This is as fresh as an AI paint set, and far more transgressive than the original. The fizziest, most outrageous assault on common decency since – I’ll leave it to the gibbons. A must-see.
Review: Oliver!
You’re not going to see anything this special in most (if any) revivals, however luxury-cast. In stripping-back, then regrowing a complete ensemble with even lesser songs, this is the most complete Oliver! we’re likely to see.
