Review: White Pearl

The finest new play from the Court this year, gleaming and deadly


Review: Hysteria

In all the flurry of Fringe, don’t miss this gem.


Review: Freak

A play everyone should see – and a first-rate revival.


Review: The Glass Piano

A bewitching mix of deconstructive magic and fabulous therapy, it’s above all Grace Molony who brushes distinction into this already distinctive production.


Review: Mary’s Babies

Maud Dromgoole’s proved more than adroit, skilful, and deliciously risk-taking. A must-see.


Review: Rotterdam

Rotterdam’s an outstanding play about sexual identity, choices, and above all what it means to transition.


Review: The Price

An outstanding production, rescuing a classic from attic shadows.


Review: Loving Androids

A beautifully-constructed play, small in compass, big in scope and deft at managing the transitions


Review: Bodies

Still masterly, and in this rare revival, a must-see.


Review: Shipwreck

A superb ensemble piece. Of all dramas on these interesting times in America, it’s the one truly necessary.


Review: Cyprus Avenue

Devastating drama about the DNA of bigotry; and it all starts in surreal farce.


Review: The Double Dealer

I doubt if there’s ever been a production as good as this.


Review: The Tell-Tale Heart

As an electric shock to schlock gothic, theatre doesn’t come much better than this.


Review: Allelujah!

Bennett’s exhorting us to fight back with laughter and rage in this riveting, timely play. It’s a sad and angry consolation.


Review: Stories

Utterly compelling. Anything Nina Raine writes now is routinely expected to touch greatness. No pressure.


Review: Cock

A superb revival of Bartlett’s warmest, most ground-breaking, perhaps most enduring play so far.


Review: Measure for Measure

The most thoughtful and thought-provoking recreation of a Shakespeare play this year.


Review: Happy Now?

However fine the original 2008 cast, you won’t miss them with this company’s revival of a stunning contemporary play. See it.


Review: The Graduate

There’s so many reasons to see this production. It’s worth hanging around for returns.


Review: Home, I’m Darling

It’s a moment when rejoicing to concur with the general public, as Samuel Johnson once did over Gray’s Elegy, is the only thing to do.


Review: The One

This breaks rules as it makes them. See it.


Review: Fear Itself

funny, dark and frightening - a psychological thriller that will keep you on your toes


Review: Katie Johnstone

Most of all you take away the sheer bravura of Georgia May Hughes’ throwing everything up in the air. She carries the energy to a cheery bleakness. And you want to cheer.


Review: The Merchant of Venice

Exceptional in many things, it’s almost a classic production and definitely worth a detour for.


Review: Flesh and Bone

Warren’s East London heritage is similar to other writers, and it’s his time to re-tell it now, with new notes and a love of language that muscles in and won’t let go.


Review: The Winter’s Tale

If Sicilia and its dense expressive syntax could rise elsewhere, this might be altogether remarkable. As it is, enjoy its slow burn.


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: Fleabag

Original, raw, brilliantly funny and devastating. This production is Fleabag neat. Its harrowing streak of genius burns like a healing scar torn.


Review: Confidence

This is a must-see in reviving the theatrical profile of a fine dramatist for too long shrouded in the digital of radio and TV when the acoustic world is claiming her back.


Review: Blank Tiles

A heartrending tragic-comedy one-man show about memory, Scrabble and Alzheimer’s. 


Review: Into the Woods

This is an outstanding first-class revival, but more, it’s intimate knowing and innocent at the same time: it sports a residual wisdom beyond its brief.


Review: Blue Sky Thinking

Many arts-driven people forced into the corporate world might well see this play answers their condition like few others.


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: The Sorrowful Tale of Sleeping Sidney

This is a gem of many colours. Do see it. The miraculous construction’s matched by Jordan’s storytelling and sense of dark mischief. In Jordan’s hands it’s a re-possession of lost innocence by a strange sleight of a knowing child.


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: Grotty

Know the Dalston lesbian scene? Verbally and dramatically as well as breaking new ground, this sings. Do see Grotty at the Bunker and be illumined. It’s rare to see such brutal tenderness laugh itself to the lip of the balcony.


Review: Nine Night

Natasha Gordon emerges as a playwright whose capacity to balance seven characters in profound ambivalence – and shuddering proximity - to each other is both thrilling and wholly assured. Anything Gordon does now must be eagerly anticipated.


Review: The Prudes

Neilson’s piece twists an unexpected root out of recent debates over power and sexual abuse the Royal Court has addressed so consistently. Uniquely Neilson’s made the faintly horrible full-on hilarious.


Review: Instructions For Correct Assembly

As an ingenious commentary on everything from genetic manipulation to over-determining children’s achievements, Instructions For Correct Assembly is a necessary unforgettable object lesson, in all senses.


Review: Reared

Reared is above all forgivingly funny, John Fitzpatrick’s comedy exquisite in group dynamics but sometimes on a telling image also contains create one of the most gripping story-telling scenes in recent drama.


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: Female Parts

Adult Orgasm Escapes from the Zoo. That title, from the 1983 version of one of the plays presented here summarises what you can expect. Sadly, subversion has to be rationed. Franca Rame and Dario Fo’s five short plays from 1977 Female Parts, get two outings – they’re joined in a similar bid for self-determination by OneNess Sankara’s The Immigrant, the first black woman in space. Go: it’s likely someone will vault over your head.


Review: Humble Boy

Jones really deserves her place in the forefront of contemporary dramatists. Humble Boy confirms its own place, pivotal to he oeuvre which has grown more robustly and cleverly than the thematic flora or indeed bees that ululate to the end.


Review: All’s Well That Ends Well

This is an All’s Well to believe in, and plucks, just this once, a happiness Helena so richly deserves with a husband who equally doesn’t.


Review: True West

Another winning piece of Americana from NVT, now the go-to on the south coast for anything pointing true west.


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: Grimly Handsome

If you want theatre to change your life a little and wonder where our DNA and urges trek to, you could do infinitely worse than shiver here.


Review: Dear Brutus

The clarity and truth Jonathan O’Boyle and his cast bring to this tricky, infinitely moving and sometimes maddening play, couldn’t be bettered. It’s a magically sad examining of how we limit ourselves, shutting off the forest of possibilities. Quite outstanding.


Review: The Bashful Lover

What this production enjoys in particular is a fizzing energy: nothing sags in Eastop’s expert cut and parry of Massinger’s final flight. The actors’ cracking pace reflects the martial tang of the play. Finally it’s the mutual understatement and mobile intelligence - etched on their faces – of Wicks and Eyre that make this already crackling reading treasurable.


Review: The End of Hope

The End of Hope is anything but what its lugubrious poetic title advertises, cackling with jokes and expletives. This superb hour-long play is more than the sum of its hilarities, which is saying something. The heart comes pounding through the mouse suit. Do see it.


Review: Beginning

Beginning is the kind of play we all know we need: wincingly heartwarming, devastatingly joyous. It’s quite wonderful. Don’t miss it.


Review: Deathtrap

Levin’s fiendish cleverness tightropes between real thriller and comedy. Paul Bradley’s a tour-de-force of jocular unpleasantness. Beverley Klein’s turn as psychic ten Dorp steals the show and wraps it in nebulous wails of ‘danger’. The production’s a triumph of tone too. Be very – entertained.