Review: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
It couldn’t be done any better and puts several touring shows to shame.
Genre: Adaptation
Review: I’ll take you to Mrs Cole
A wonderful family show, adapted from the book of the same name, and I guarantee you will be singing the theme song under your breath for days.
Review: The Mill on the Floss
Stunning. This consummate, flawless production is an event for BLT and Brighton
Review: The War of the Worlds
Creative, provocative original play with surprise twists, superb physical theatre!
Review: The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys and The Laments
In nearly every way an outstanding pair of productions.
Review: The Flies
There’s nothing like the Exchange’s approach: their bi-lingual virtuosity burns questions.
Review: Little Miss Sunshine
It’s a quiet heartbreaker, with stoicism and love the only answers. Do see it.
Review: Return to the Forbidden Planet
It’s a must-see. Whatever warp factors you have to go through.
Review: The Milkman’s On His Way
As a storytelling adaptation it couldn’t be bettered. Necessary and uplifting.
Review: Berberian Sound Studio
Thoroughly absorbing, full of walking shadows who throw vivid questions.
Review: The Tell-Tale Heart
As an electric shock to schlock gothic, theatre doesn’t come much better than this.
Review: Grimm’s Tales
An exuberant Christmas production, and a miracle of compression, blocking, set-design and ensemble acting skills.
Review: Madagascar The Musical
Highly Recommended for monkeys and lemurs of all ages – quite apart from lions, zebras, hippos and giraffes.
Review: Great Expectations
An excitingly-conceived adaptation of a familiar story. Ahead lies some astonishment.
Review: Private Peaceful
This is as good as a one-person show of this kind gets. Andy Daniel should be up there above his own rows of five-star ratings.
Review: Dirty Dancing
There’s a fitting heart-warming climax to a dream of production. And a surprise to those who think they know the film.
Review: The Outsider
Like so much from The Print Room, this feels like European theatre. And we need it more desperately than ever.
Review: The Graduate
There’s so many reasons to see this production. It’s worth hanging around for returns.
Review: Achilles
Fusing dance, physical theatre, prose, and raw, dynamic acting Ewan Downie breathes new life into the ages old tale.
Review: Animal Farm
A swift and telling production that’s quick-swerving on its feet with memorable vocal projection and physical acting that’s a delight and enticement. This outstanding outdoor version feels special.
Review: Exit the King
We need such risk-taking theatre back. This outstanding production of Exit the King might just remind us how to get it.
Review: Summer Holiday
Stunning Ray Quinn and ensemble work their bobby-socks off with notable support from Rob Wicks and his band. Give No. 9 a proper MOT and it’ll strike gold too.
Review: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
It’s not shorter than before, but dare one say it, somehow Sparkier, conveying the author’s economy in a sinewy morality tale.
Review: Sense and Sensibility
An adaptation to surprise and thrill you. Jessica Swale’s made Sense and Sensibility wholly hers, and quintessentially Austen at the same time. The cast render it a delight.
Review: The Case of the Frightened Lady
This is still something of a vintage treat, and a rare opportunity to see the old master in action.
Review: The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives
The genius of this production is to keep hilarity airborne whilst slipping in something poisonous. You must see this.
Review: Act and Terminal 3
everything – set, actors, script – come mesmerizingly and painfully together.
Review: Falkland
It’s a work with much to tell us: of the unlooked-for consequences of a buried war. Of elective affinities and choosing to adopt the war-bereft, whatever condition they’re in.
Review: When the Wind Blows
BLT have produced in less than two weeks two outstandingly fine full-length productions. This latest offering confirms this theatre’s confidence in producing stark contrasts: an unfashionable yet horribly topical drop of silence into a bustling city.
Review: One Woman Alien
I can predict that by the end of its run, this should be the most outstanding one-person show you’ll see in the last week.
Review: How It Is
You’ll have to see this. It’s in no way a continuation of their previous Beckett. and it’s immersive, outstanding, unrepeatable and unimaginable anywhere else: Gare St Lazare, and in the UK, no-one but the Print Room it seems would dare to stage it.
Review: Flashdance
It’s Joanne Clifton’s night. She lives Alex, dangerously pushing every routine with an extravagance, a hunger, sexiness and raw power that makes it one of the most memorable dance performances in a musical I’ve ever seen.
Review: Flashdance
Review: Three Sisters
Poignantly well balanced exploration of the themes of a Chekhovian classic by a disabled company perfectly able to produce quality theatre
Review: Of Mice and Men
This is a first-rate revival. Everything snaps and sings with a lyric devastation that asks with Guthrie just whose land this is, in a year where presidential excesses have seen the US population ask the same question for the first time in generations.
Review: Electra
As a gifted exploration of Electra’s themes and a transposition of them to 21st century values, this is as exhaustive, detailed and convincing as you’d wish.
Review: Brighton Rock
Greene’s original will continue to tease with its unrelieved religious intensity. Otherwise for a secular age this adaptation, and this production, is as good as it gets.
Review: Medea Electronica
Like the recent Suppliants, in a very different way, Medea Electronica asks just what we mean by Greek tragedy, what our conceptions of drama without music are. An essential experience.
Review: The Snowman
The most enduring British Christmas hits are melancholy, in stark contrast to say American. There’s a profound sadness in the magic. Its not a long work, perfectly proportioned for children. It’s still the ideal winter present, especially on a first trip to the theatre.
Review: Strangers on a Train
This ATG production should reach anyone who’s curious about Warner’s rather different outcome to the original, which Highsmith herself, writing later, might well have approved of; I prefer it too.
Review: The Twilight Zone
I’d like to see a more thorough-going homage to Serling’s work in particular and it’s good he’s at least well-represented here. His acute questioning, exploration of a more human agency and refusal to play too much with inexplicable spectacle marks him out as a more earthy but far more imaginative writer too. His stories are still absolutely contemporary ones: the others have dated as the future often does.
Review: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Any first-time play-goer should have this etched as a memory forever. It can’t be anything other than outstanding. Enjoy as an early Christmas gift to yourselves.
Review: A Judgement in Stone
Definitely worth seeing if you don’t know the story, and want to experience this live. We should hail Rendell adaptations, as thrillers with depth with much to say socially about the damaged and easily-damned, brooding on injustices.
Review: The Lady From the Sea
Happy endings don’t seek the sun, though it helps. This production’s memorable not just for the matching of locale and rationale with the original, but gently aligning the two other couples into the clearer optimism of the married couple. If not all the misty tension of the original emerges, there’s certainly something to be said for allowing such light to brighten the facets of this one jewel of affirmation in Ibsen’s mature output.
Review: The Suppliant Women
In one of the most radical productions ever mounted of Aeschylus indeed any Greek tragedy we’re literally taken to its roots: as in Greece, a community chorus of fifty, twenty-one of them the suppliant women of the play’s title. In this outstanding production, everything to resurrect this astonishing vision has been invoked.
Review: The Kite Runner
David Ahmad’s anchoring central performance is enhanced by Jo Ben Ayed’s physical one. Theirs is a remarkable chemistry, radially informed by Doorgasingh and Faroque Khan’s reactions. It’s a potent, heartwarming and heartrending story, spellbindingly translated to the stage and here with more power even than before. Don’t miss it.
Review: The World of Yesterday
Stefan Zweig lends himself peculiarly to a theatrical dimension. It’s over in a blink. If you’re at all near, you won’t regret the Print Room’s opalescent sliver of magic conjuring the best out of this production.
Review: Antigone
This Antigone is outstandingly conceived, and for the most part executed. Chittenden projects tensile expectations, stillness and a powerful arc in her work. With such a cast anything might be expected.
Review: Thebes Land
It’s good to welcome the return of this cage. Franco-Uruguayan Sergio Blanco’s Thebes Land drops back into Arcola’s Studio 1 after its acclaimed run in 2016. It’s where this will go, what both prisoner Martin and writer T are left with, that begins to shine out of this extraordinary, ground-breaking work.
Review: The Wedding Singer
This is an outstandingly-conceived show, generous to cast and audience alike, superbly choreographed and performed in what might seem challenging spaces. The last blast of summer’s breath: enjoy.
