Review: The Love and War Trilogy
An enormously satisfying traversal
Review: The Love and War Trilogy
An enormously satisfying traversal
Review: The Three Graces
Greek mythology in a Brighton garden.
Review: Jekyll & Hyde
The most viscerally convulsive realisation of Jekyll or Hyde imaginable
Review: Pandora’s Jar/Honour Among Thebes
The most educative stand-up and a thrilling presentation. Oh and bloody funny on the tragedies.
Review: The Final Problem
This is certainly the way to experience The Final Problem.
Review: Fiction Romance
Now the way to think of Twelfth Night’s Antonio
Review: The Mahabharata
A dramatic sense of arrival the way the Odyssey here ended: a clash of even vaster ferocity, keening, treachery, humour, mischievousness, sacrifice and grief, joy and the agency of women.
Review: Metaphysicals
A cross between cheerfully-spun recital and quicksilver treasury
Review: Push and Pull
A quietly thrilling evening, after it goes off with a bang and a bear.
Review: The Rape of Lucrece
The definitive way to experience this troublingly great, disturbingly unresolved poem
Review: Minotaur
Love and The Labyrinth
Review: Anton Chekhov
The nearest we’ll come to meeting Chekhov. In Pennington’s masterclass.
Review: Icarus
After all the gods and their lack of choice, we come to the final instalment, the human dimension. Where we have one. A heartfelt, satisfying finish.
Review: Aphrodite
Dazzling: wise, clever twists about choice, male determination, and consequence.
Review: Pygmalion
The most profound reinvention of this particular myth I’ve seen
Review: Orpheus
A terrific reinvention, bringing gods and heroines up from the death of myth to an altered world.
Review: Persephone
Dazzling: wise, clever twists about choice, male determination, and consequence.
Review: Henry IV Part 2
An alert, dark-hued production. We have heard the chimes at midnight
Review: The Merry Wives of Windsor
A joyful fleet production, a more-than-rough magic. What renders OFS unique is their fearlessness: a humour and zest to tear into buried Shakespeare, read the entrails.
Review: Henry IV Part 1
Here the shadows fall the more convincingly to join with those chimes at midnight in Henry IV/2.
Review: 15 Heroines: 15 Monologues Adapted from Ovid
Groundbreaking. The smallest producing theatre in the West End through lockdown has become the largest.
Review: The Odyssey
A stupendous undertaking
Review: Savage Beauty
A timely retelling of the 'Antigone' story.
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A theatrical arcady on our doorstep
Review: Troilus and Cressida
We’re privileged to see this rarely-performed work moulded by OFS. A play for our times.
Review: As You Like It
Heartwarming, giddyingly vital yet clear with its own truth.
Review: Richard III
A deeply revolving production.
Review: Macbeth
A stylishly visceral production.
Review: Much Ado About Nothing
A blissfully alive production.
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Might be the finest Globe Dream
Review: The Spanish Tragedy
The OFS are taking flight with the best scratch nights the Elizabethans never had.
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This surely is the greatest Dream since Peter Brook’s landmark 1970 production.
Review: The Merchant of Venice
A fleet traversal memorable for insights the company bring during and after their performance of it
Review: King John
A tedious brief tragedy? King John is fun… It’s been said.
Review: From Henry VI Part 3 to Romeo and Juliet
Join and revel – they’re not anywhere near ended.
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
With Baum’s direction they and we discover new thresholds, new anatomies
Review: The Merry Wives of Windsor
One of the two most cogent, most fun Merry Wives of recent years.
Review: The Madness of George III
This magnificent revival poses even more urgent questions. A twitch on the thread for all of us.
Review: Coriolanus
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
Review: The Winter’s Tale
Enjoy its slow burn miracles.
Review: Richard II
Do see this.
Review: The Two Noble Kinsmen
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.
Review: Antony and Cleopatra
Supremely worth it to see a pair so famous weighing equal in their own balance, perhaps for the first time.
Review: Waiting for Hamlet
Everyone dies in the end.
Review: Romeo and Juliet
Completeness is just one reason to cherish this clean-driven clear-headed production
Review: Twelfth Night
Tamsin Greig’s extremes as Malvolia mark the first intimations of the terrible and define this production. The ground’s shifted.
Review: The Winter’s Tale
Far more than a curate’s egg, this production reveals things we’ve never seen
Review: Hamlet
In Michelle Terry’s quicksilver, quick-quipping Hamlet, much has been proved, from interpretive to gender fluidity in tragic action, that sets a privilege on being in at a beginning.
Review: One Man, Two Guvnors
Outstanding. An immediate comic classic.
Review: Women Beware Women
A stylish, timely production which redefines how we experience Middleton.
Review: Kunene and the King
A strain of greatness.
Review: Nora
Stef Smith’s brilliant riff on Ibsen’s original is revelatory
Review: The Taming of the Shrew
See it and you’ll never think of the Shrew without this groundbreaking stab at the dreams of men.
Review: Teenage Dick
Ambition treads on teenage dreams and their devastation.
Review: Henry VI
The most effective condensation of the pith of the trilogy we’re likely to see.
Review: The Duchess of Malfi
The scalpel and scruple of class and coolness breaks into tragedy and gifts us three outstanding moments
Review: Richard III
This production could draw out the poison of being dead serious in terminal bursts of laughter
Review: As You Like It
For Lucy Phelps and Sophie Khan Levy above all, this is a joyful As You Like It.
Review: The Taming of The Shrew
Highlights how good the play is just where we’re not looking for it
Review: The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon
A terrific revival
Review: Measure for Measure
An outstanding production
Review: All’s Well That Ends Well
Hannah Morrish’s Helena shines in this achingly desperate, quietly beautiful production.
Review: The Dutch Lady
A consummate production of a memorably dark comedy
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This surely is the greatest Dream since Peter Brook’s landmark 1970 production.
Review: The Sad Shepherd
A necessary production you’re unlikely ever to see anywhere else.
Review: Bartholomew Fair
If only one could see it twice: but try it at least once.
Review: Shakespeare Up Late
Sex dolls, soliloquies and the odd dollop of Hamlet
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A carnival riot of joy – with enough misdirection to evoke moonshine
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Droll
A take on Shakespeare not seen for four centuries
Review: Shakespeare in the Garden – The Comedy of Errors
Comedy capers in the sunshine
Review: As You Like It
A heartwarming revival. Jack Laskey, Bettrys Jones and Nadia Nadarajah have made a space for this As You Like It well beyond its initial moment last year.
Review: Julius Caesar
All the political tension you can handle
Review: Anon Look About You
Exceptional and vibrant, the company prove it’s one to revive.
Review: Romeo and Juliet – One Man Musical
A bravura and daring interpretation of this Shakespeare classic
Review: Rubbish Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Rubbish Shakespeare? Anything but!
Review: Rosmersholm
They compel attention, they demand we follow every sigh
Review: Mary Stuart
Again, it must be seen
Review: Peter Gynt
In McArdle’s irresistible performance you’re not likely to see a finer Gynt.
Review: Wit and Science
They render a faint scroll alive with wit
Review: The Winter’s Tale
One of the finest LLT productions I can remember
Review: Mary Stuart
It must be seen
Review: The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys and The Laments
In nearly every way an outstanding pair of productions.
Review: The Merchant of Venice
A feminist take on a Shakespeare classic
Review: The Flies
There’s nothing like the Exchange’s approach: their bi-lingual virtuosity burns questions.
Review: The Merry Wives of Windsor
The most cogent, most fun at the Globe this year.
Review: George A Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield
We now know more of Greene than upstart crows
Review: The Taming of The Shrew
Highlight how good the play is just where we’re not looking for it
Review: Henry V
The enormous energy Sarah Amankwah brings proclaims greatness in the making
Review: Henry IV Part 2 or Falstaff
The triumph of this newly-energized production is bringing the darker Falstaff to a diverse audience
Review: Henry IV Part 1 or Hotspur
A soaring remix of how the play settles a succession on congealed blood.
Review: J’n’R
A witty exploration of contemporary dating culture with a Shakespearean twist
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Enormous clarity, much heart and more than a pinch of magic. With marvellous singing.
Review: Return to the Forbidden Planet
It’s a must-see. Whatever warp factors you have to go through.
Review: Caliban’s Codex
a superbly realised piece, vying with Carding’s own outstanding Quintessence.
Review: Creditors
We’re unlikely to see a better production of this still rarely-performed disturber of ourselves.
Review: Miss Julie
It’s unlikely we’ll get a cleaner version, or a more absorbing production any time soon
Review: Quintessence
There’s a superb cliff-edge to this outstanding production.
Review: Three Sisters
This absorbing production keeps growing in the mind, like to take root.
Review: The Malcontent
Outstanding theatre.
Review: Richard II
A searingly precise essay on the corruption of entitlement.