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.
Genre: Comedy 0
Review: Showstopper: The Improvised Musical
An improvised musical with a bizarre plot that they somehow manage to pull off
Review: Megadate
A side splitting new show from Tim Key who is exploring the troubling world of dating
Review: As You Like It
A ripping discovery, a spontaneity and transparent skin to the process makes this thrilling. An As You Like It for the moment, certainly. But a moment of change.
Review: The Comedy of Errors
This is a light-footed, thump-fisted, limp-wristed and eye-poppingly uproarious production.
Review: Jumpy
You begin to wonder how life, not the playwright, will treat these playhouse creatures. De Angelis has hit a true vein. You must see this delirious state-of-the-pause play.
Review: The Chalk Garden
Not quite the last drawing-room comedy. But the Janus-faced prophesy of plays that took thirty years to catch up. Chichester’s season of women dramatists is one of the treasurable things of 2018.
Review: Legally Blonde
You must see this. Apart from the heroic production itself, if there’s one outstanding performer it has to be Lucie Jones with Rita Simons’ superb support. Jones' voice is stunning, stratospheric, above all characterful.
Review: The Fabulous Bäckström Brothers
An operatic clown show, first performed in Helsinki in September 2014.
Review: Tits in Space
A show with a wise sweetness at its core; a brightness to cast the growing shadows out there.
Review: The Morning After The Life Before
A perfectly rendered, heart-warming, necessary light in the darkest of moments.
Review: Crazy For You
This is a blast of the purest kind. You have to see it. In terms of talent on display worked to a supreme ensemble pitch, this is quite simply the most stunning pure musical I’ve seen this year.
Review: Arr We There Yet?
A Madcap Mashup of Circus and Storytelling with a Little Tango for Extra Spice
Review: The Tempest
A superb, fleet outdoor Tempest. What it has to lack in quiet subtlety, it more than makes up in fleet humour with dispatch, keen wit, warmth, and truth.
Review: Whaddya Know – We’re In Love!
There’s first-class musical entertainment here, crouched under the disguise of a schoolboy plot. Irresistible.
Review: Waiting For Curry
Susanne Crosby’s Waiting for is a four-hander with a social reckoning, and very unexpected plot point. The audience was packed. There’s a quietly sad magic to this low-key play; people recognize themselves in it. It speaks.
Review: Eastward Ho!
This is one of the most exuberant and superbly orchestrated Read Not Deads I’ve seen.
Review: The Way of the World
A triumphant revival. What’s striking isn’t just the clockwork plotting but the amplitude, even insouciant luxury Congreve allows his characters to unfold in. It comes together in this rich, endlessly self-fascinated masterpiece from a master of self-effacement.
Review: The Country Wife
A dazzling revival. If you don’t know the finale, with its superb resolution, this 1920s-style production is a memorable way in, with its clarity, its comedy and its last dangerous kiss. Stunning. Do see it.
Review: Quartet
Like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, there are now two endings to Quartet. You must see this if you know the film only, or care about music, ageing, friendship and achingly lost love.
Review: Bad Jews
This is a play supremely worth seeing: for its flayed comedy, acerbic wit, farce-dipped dynamics, monster roles, wincing and raw truths. It’s a triumph from all parties in the best NVT American vein. Don’t miss it.
Review: Present Laughter
Gary Essendine’s rampant again. Will Liz Essendine with Miss Reed’s help work out a five-point peace plan as all the writhing lovers seemingly wish to embark on the same boat for Africa (pronounced Efrica, out of that Streep echo)? Will her blithe response to all latch key claimants that they spent the night at her flat make any difference? Do find out. A gem.
Review: Sara Pascoe: Lads Lads Lads
A one woman comedy stand up: break up sex, incest and being too 'tampony'.
Review: Beyond Therapy
You want Bruce and Prudence to be happy till the lights go down, and to do that it needs a supreme breathlessness, then a slow exhalation at the very end. Worth seeing still.
Review: Misalliance
Shaw’s 1910 extraordinary Misalliance starts as fizzing drawing-room verbosity and comes to rest only after an aircraft’s crashed in on it, with two aviators – one a feminist acrobat – and a gun-toting clerk pops out of the home’s Turkish bath. Often vintage Shaw, half English drawing-room, half French farce.
Review: The Messiah
Incestuous stars, passing of the ears, deep heat as a condition not an old muscle unguent. The dotty felicities of Patrick Barlow’s language in The Messiah directed by Rod Lewis are easily masked in the Norman Wisdom-like pratfalls of his hapless duo. Unless you add Mrs Flowers; and you should.
Review: Young Marx
It was a canny idea to kick off the first commercial theatre venture in years with a new comedy by the Marx Brothers – albeit set in 1850, and by a zany ancestor of Groucho’s band. Rory Kinnear’s Karl Marx is a gloriously edged reading of selfishness and fundamental idealism sitting uneasily with insensitivity
Review: When We Are Married
This is an enchanting play, with a small bitter aftertaste only lurking under the candy coating. Priestley’s lines are so beautifully constructed that they often carry the performance. Happily they get much more than that here: it’s an example of LLT ensemble-work mostly perfectly fired and romping neatly into the annals.
Review: How the Other Half Loves
Ayckbourn’s genius shows how literally times are changing in this early masterpiece portraying a sexual liberation more pervasive than the noisier one raging all around 1969: it shows how far the revolutions has as it were penetrated. Strachan’s brilliance is so complete, so identified with this particular play, you forget how superbly founded it is.
Review: The Great Duke of Florence
This is one of the very finest RNDs and with the consummate cast and minimal props, Morell makes more than an embryo production of this extraordinarily fine play. It’s like a brilliant, vividly realised sketch of something that could run.
Review: Katharine Ryan – Glitter Room
Witty banter about the trials and tribulations of life as a single mother
Review: Rules for Living
Sam Holcroft modestly demurs her comedy Rules for Living is truly Ayckbournesque: she merely aspires to master some of his technique. It’s Season’s Greetings designed for robots. It’s a variation worth nailing though, not least because it interrogates a therapy many believe works.
Review: Timeshare
There’s a fizz and pop to this play: Miguel the electrician has electrocuted himself. He’s done more than that though. Philip Ayckbourn should be feeling just a little proud of the professionalism of the cast, crew and his own script.
Review: The Custom of the Country
Like the recently-mounted The Elder Brother, though far more complex, The Custom of the Country is a work crying out for production. It’s had one or two, though this spirited, superbly idiomatic, wacky and unfailingly inventive company ought to be proud their efforts lifted this heavy-texted work to the pitch of laughter. Even when occasionally it wasn’t at first intended, they made sure it soon was.
Review: A Little Murder Never Hurt Anybody
With BLT there’s never anything less than carat quality production and as usual some treasurable performances. Do see this rarity and you’ll end up agreeing with playwright Ron Bernas, and the team here.
Review: The Elder Brother
Like Shakespeare and as we now know with Middleton in Measure for Measure, Fletcher and Massinger enjoyed a posthumous collaboration. It’s powerful, stellar in imagery and reach, something rare in comedy and perhaps only found in Shakespeare.
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.
Review: Sappho and Phao
It’s the conversations that make this courtly piece delectable. It’s Selina Cadell though who seals the quality of this revival. Her magically inflected words occasion a running benediction; it’s fitting she centres the curtain-call.
Review: Prom Kween
Come shimmy your sequined ball gown sister this is an hour of supercharged feel good musical fun -with a heart.
Review: FAG/STAG
Heartfelt, funny and direct – what does it mean to have your best mate stand by you when you’re stuck being your worst self.
Review: Murder She Didn’t Write – The Improvised Murder Mystery
Top class improv from a top flight troupe of practitioners.
Review: Rightly or Wrongly, forBetter or Worse, the Fact is This is Tom Little
A wild ride of delicious word-play and storytelling from this instantly endearing comedian
Review: Sorry I Killed Your Cat
“‘Abigail’s Party’ urbanised, sexualised and amplified into oblivion”
Review: It’s No Job for a Nice Jewish Girl
A debut solo show exploring the drive to fit in, with a bit about being a pop star.
Review: Mary Go Nowhere
An acerbic take on living the modern suburban American ‘dream’ with lovely ensemble performances and laugh out loud dialogue.
Possibly the longest title of any play associated with the scribblings of Shakespeare.
Review: F*ck Boys for Freedom
Late night comedy that saws the knuckle off rather than comes near it.
Review: La Cage aux Folles
La Cage aux Folles one might say comes home to Brighton’s Theatre Royal in this revival by Bill Kenwright Productions directed by Martin Connor. There’s no mystery why Brighton gets two weeks of this.
Review: Chips and Cheese
A popular Glaswegian snack turns into a funny comic journey round yer nan and yer papa meeting yer English boyfreend.
Review: Steve Gribbin : Shunted Again
The train not standing at the platform won’t now be coming or going anywhere.
Review: Trygve Wakenshaw & Barnie Duncan: Different Party
Delightfully eccentric and inventive physical comedy!
Review: Kit Hesketh-Harvey and James McConnel – Pheasant Laughter
Beguiling badinage and ballads from two doyens of the Fringe.
Review: The Handlebards : As You Like It
All the world’s a stage. Well, at least this bit of the Royal Botanic Gardens.
