Review: She-Wolves
Informative story-telling about historic women rulers and how they have been represented and mis-represented through time.
Genre: Historical 0
Review: For Queen And Country
The British soldier who became a Parisian nightclub drag queen to spy on the Nazis. An accomplished piece.
Review: Admiral
A compelling and important subject brought to life by the charismatic Christopher Tajah
Review: Dad’s Army
You feel you’ve been part of an invited audience at one of the original TV productions
Review: Shake the City
A real play bursting out of its hour-plus length; with complex interaction, uncertain journeys, each character developing a crisis of isolation only resolved by sisterhood
Review: Julius Caesar
If you’re a habitual groundling, go before this production vanishes back on tour
Review: Cancelling Socrates
Howard Brenton touching eighty is at the height of his powers. Tom Littler has assembled a pitch-perfect cast, reuniting two from his outstanding All’s Well. This too.
Review: Henry VIII
A wonderful score and musicians, above all Bea Segura’s titanic act of shrivelling, make this a must-see.
Review: The Father and the Assassin
There’s no finer dramatisation of India’s internal conflicts. Shubham Saraf’s Gandhi-killer Godse stands out in this thrilling ensemble and storms it too.
Review: Straight Line Crazy
Danny Webb gives the performance of his life. Ralph Fiennes is coiled majesty. Two-and-a-half hours of such material have rarely been so thrilling.
Review: Airswimming
Superb revival of Charlotte Jones’s play about two women incarcerated for fifty years for bring different. With a standing ovation of such force that convention had to be broken with the actors forced back on stage.
Review: Marys Seacole
No simple swapping of heirs and originals, but a dream of the future by Seacole, or equally present dreams raking the past. Do see this.
Review: Spirit of Woodstock 2 – The Sequel
There’s no greater writer/performer working in Brighton, or Sussex, and Spirit of Woodstock Parts I and 2 is Jonathan Brown’s most dazzling show to date.
Review: The Misfortune of the English
Pamela Carter’s schoolboys embody human connectedness, warmth, a final camaraderie before the chill of history. Unmissable.
Review: Hangmen
Assured, idiomatic performances. And Martin McDonagh’s distinction resonates in a manner peculiar to him alone.
Review: The Paradis Files
Not so much an event as a concentration of Errollyn Wallen’s genius celebrating the life of blind composer Maria Theresia van Paradis, in Graeae’s world-class production
Review: Ghost Boy: a playwright’s progress
If you want a single account of the heady days of 1960s-70s British theatre, this has to be it
Review: Beautiful
Outstanding, and outstandingly transferred as a tour that brings its stature with it.
Review: A Splinter of Ice
Absorbing. With such an acting masterclass the play’s a bewitchingly-voiced fugue on the limits of belief and betrayal.
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.
Review: Di and Viv and Rose
A first-rate revival of this heartwarming play, surprising you with grief, and joy
Review: Relatively Speaking
With his new production director Robin Herford, most associated with this play, brings pace, panache, and more than a dose of Ayckbourn’s generosity of spirit
Review: The Midnight Bell
An outstanding ballet by any standards. One that like its inspiration Patrick Hamilton will last.
Review: Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied Tunisia
A profound parable for co-existence and its sometime impossibility, perpetually skewed by others’ disruptions.
Review: This Beautiful Future
Heartstopping. There’s an absoluteness here we need. We must prove desperate for it or die ourselves.
Review: Sweet William
Naturally enriched by living with Shakespeare Michael Pennington unearths local habitations and names for him.
Review: Troy Story
Again the most educative stand-up and a thrilling presentation. Oh and bloody funny on war, male sexuality and the Bechdel Test.
Review: Staircase
A first-rate revival of a play that with its ostensible shock-value in aspic, reveals subversions and a clever structure so unsettling we should all look in the mirror and wince.
Review: Pandora’s Jar/Honour Among Thebes
The most educative stand-up and a thrilling presentation. Oh and bloody funny on the tragedies.
Review: Chamberlain: Peace in Our Time
A light-filled small gem of a show, tuning into wireless crystals of a lost world.
Review: The Vertical Hour
The definitive Fringe revival of a mainstream play this year. Absorbing, baggy, intimate. See it.
Review: The Lady in the Van
Sarah Mann and her company will surely return with this gem of transubstantiation.
Review: Ghosts
The ultimate guilty pleasure, and not necessarily in a good way, as the slavery past of Glasgow is blown open in a gentile narrative manner
Review: 15 Heroines: 15 Monologues Adapted from Ovid
Groundbreaking. The smallest producing theatre in the West End through lockdown has become the largest.
Review: Troilus and Cressida
We’re privileged to see this rarely-performed work moulded by OFS. A play for our times.
Review: Love Love Love
Epic eavesdropping casts that ultimate spell: reading ourselves by flashes of lightning.
Review: Amadeus
In the most spectacular production imaginable, Lucian Msamati’s supremely crafted lead sets off the quicksilver of his rival Adam Gillen.
Review: Les Blancs
A superb realization of Lorraine Hansberry's unfinished masterpiece - a classic of Ibsenite proportions
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 Sound of Music
Phenomenal singing all round. A more than solid recommendation for that alone.
Review: Wonderland
Outstanding. Surely the definitive study of the dignity of physical labour, and breaking of its amity.
Review: Afterplay
Miraculously-attuned. A wafer-thin but absolutely genuine slice of Chekhov. Do see it.
Review: Swive
A Hilliard rather than Holbein, it’s the velocity of Elizabeth’s survival that enthrals
Review: Hunger
An exemplary, scrupulous production so starkly contemporary, it makes Hunger contemporary forever
Review: Richard III
This production could draw out the poison of being dead serious in terminal bursts of laughter
Review: My Brilliant Friend Parts One and Two
Cusack and McCormack give the performances of their lives
Review: Frankenstein
There’s a clean sharp fusion between these two writers that heralds something special.
Review: Hitler’s Tasters
You will stumble out at the end completely bowled over by the power of this play
Review: Taboo
A chilling glimpse into the world of a little known but influential woman from the Nazi era.
Review: Scarlett Fever: The Great Southern Search
Old Hollywood meets tribal acting in an engaging piece of physical theatre.
Review: Paul Duncan McGarrity: A Practical Guide to Storming Castles
The most entertaining archaeologist since Indiana Jones
Review: All I See Is You
Funny, upsetting and with just the right amount of teenage angst - it’s 1960’s UK. This is a coming of age story where queer men are never truly permitted to come of age.
