Review: Fleabag
Original, raw, brilliantly funny and devastating. This production is Fleabag neat. Its harrowing streak of genius burns like a healing scar torn.
Genre: Online Theatre
Review: Django in Pain
Poignant, charming and meaningful play that is imaginative and vibrant in vision and message.
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: Two Billion Beats
Two Billion Beats was bursting with promise before. Now it delivers with a visceral yes.
Review: The Peabody Chronicles
A delightful piece of online drama from an enchanting bunch of actors
Review: Hamlet
Jumbo’s Hamlet strips out accretions and ghosts you into asking who or what Hamlet is. See it if you possibly can.
Review: Walden
Amy Berryman’s Walden is a remarkable play where the earth itself’s at the cross-planet, and travellers in space have inner and outer choices.
Review: A Theatrical Life
The travails of an actor's life come alive in this stark yet heartwarming journey through five decades of theatre
Review: The Dream Train
Contemplative and beautiful to watch, 4 characters interact in juxtaposed realities underscored by Bach's Goldberg Variations
Review: Misfits
An important play, tackling the deadly serious with laughter that all too easily could lead to stark tragedy.
Review: Sweet William
Naturally enriched by living with Shakespeare Michael Pennington unearths local habitations and names for him.
Review: Evening Conversations/Life Laundry
Engrossing, it should provoke. Sudha Bhuchar absolves us by being bloody funny.
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: Tom Lehrer
Another sovereign tribute. Stefan Bednarczyk brings Tom Lehrer swaggering out of retirement.
Review: On Arriving
On Arriving takes sixty minutes it seems we’ve been immersed in a Greek Tragedy of ninety. See it.
Review: Hindu Times
A religious text for our times, told in the language of the now with universal messages.
Review: and breathe…
Yomi Sode’s hybrid theatre is a compelling immersion of witness and poetry: we need more of it.
Review: The Girl Who Was Very Good at Lying
Andrews vividly conveys what it is to be an undone thing, someone unravelling tales to live.
Review: Branching Out
Three very fine and one outstanding work, Scratches – the best kind of play on depression, self-harm, black holes. Because it’s screamingly funny and deeply connected to why we do theatre.
Review: Leaves
This haunting 45-minute tale is a superb small gem from Jermyn Street’s Footprints Festival.
Review: An Evening With Flanders and Swann
A sovereign tribute. If you know Flanders and Swann, you’ll know Bednarczyk.
Review: Pandora’s Jar/Honour Among Thebes
The most educative stand-up and a thrilling presentation. Oh and bloody funny on the tragedies.
Review: Dazzling Divas
Issy Van Randwyck brings seven divas to life in this paean to tragic fulfilment.
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: After All These Years
A superb play, it should as one director present said, be in the West End. With these actors.
Review: Vagabonds My Phil Lynott Odyssey
An original off-kilter approach to elegy, tribute and becoming yourself.
Review: Two Horsemen
The glaring energy of this piece can’t disguise how it strikes profundity in its funny-bone.
Review: Hole
Don’t miss the chance to see this transcendent actor prove she possesses another dimension altogether.
Review: I Wish My Life Were Like a Musical
Flawless, a stunning pocket-sized musical you really must see.
Review: Sacrament
A revelation, superbly written and acted. Comparisons have been made with A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing. I can think of no higher praise either. You must see this.
Review: Living Newspaper #7
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch a group of young dramatists take on the future
Review: Illusions of Liberty
A finely-calibrated solo play of what it’s like to enter that tunnel of near-undiagnosable but very real illness. Corinne Walker’s both authoritative and quicksilver. Do catch it.
Review: Vespertilio
Vespertilio marks Barry McStay’s emergence as a writer of distinction. Anything he writes now should be looked out for.
Review: Jew… ish
One of the wittiest but also truthful comedies about love, identity, sexual politics and gefilte fish I’ve seen
Review: Living Newspaper #6
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch what this does with the future
Review: Outside
As with Inside, Outside not only fits us, they help us to move on, and become in their modest, unassuming and utterly transcendent way, part of how we learn to.
Review: New Moon Monologues April
As we saw in March, don’t be lulled by friendly colours and fluffy fonts. Queens of Cups again proves they’re a company to revel with and wait for heart-stopping reveals
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: Orpheus
A terrific reinvention, bringing gods and heroines up from the death of myth to an altered world.
Review: Living Newspaper #3 Royal Court Theatre
Hot off Sloane Square a team of writers, actors and creatives twist the news to truth
Review: Scaramouche Jones
Shane Ritchie’s phenomenal energy and slidings in and out of tongues, mesmerises.
Review: New Moon Monologues March
Don’t be lulled by the friendly colours and fluffy fonts. Queen of Cups is absolutely a company to watch, and its showcase productions are literally unmissable
Review: Three Stages
Three musings on loss and bereavement beautifully captured in poetry, monologue and song.
Review: Hymn
Its potency lies in a fine peeling apart by Adrian Lester and Danny Sapini, and the language that bridges it.
Review: Just Like Giving Blood
Upton’s notches of logic are nudged with brilliance, the actual narrative a granular run-up to an enormous yes.
Review: The White Hart
Winner of an OnComm award from Off West End, another Upton triumph by stealth
Review: The Official Dick Whittington – A Pantomime for 2020
It’s a joyous confection out of thin lockdown.
Review: Nine Lessons and Carols
The Almeida’s another country. They do shows differently there. A bold communing of theatre stories with the fresh poignancy of what’s happened during 2020
Review: Death of England: Delroy
Renders huge black experience into a narrative that bears it, because so well-constructed, so character-driven and so inhabited by Michael Balogun whose blaze of awakening is both benediction and clarion.
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 New Tomorrow
There’s a generosity here, a big hug. Theatre itself affirms the value of life to those who might yet shape it for the better.
