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.
Genre: Theatre 0
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: Living Newspaper #5
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch.
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: Don’t Know Him From Adam
An interesting two hander well performed by a couple of experienced pros.
Review: Twenties
A rights of passage story which manages to tell the salutary tale of enthusiasm over experience.
Review: Adam
An astonishing performance of a personal journey that whispers in anger leads you to positives humanity throughout.
Review: Hymn
Its potency lies in a fine peeling apart by Adrian Lester and Danny Sapini, and the language that bridges it.
Review: We are the lions Mr. Manager
A great revisiting of the 70’s in an agit prop retelling two hander, of a time past but a prejudice still present
Review: Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday
A throwback performance to when Music Hall was King, Queen and Pearly Dreams.
Review: Before After
A pristine, heartwarming Valentine of a musical, starring a pair of real-life lovers, it deserves a real-life run
Review: The Water Cooler
A unique take on the problems of today which does manage to bring new perspective to the issue we face regarding race and mental wellbeing.
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: A Feast for the Senses! Creative, Imaginative and Heartfelt – Christmas Carol by Manual Cinema
Creative Imaginative and Heartfelt visual storytelling - theatre, shadow puppets, original live music!
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: Lament for Sheku Bayou
An astonishing story lamented and told in an extraordinary fashion that resonates and poetically demands change.
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.
Review: A Coward Coupling
Family Album is possibly the most disastrous production this already unfortunate play has ever sustained. More, Coward would declare it’s a travesty; of genius. Hands Across the Sea is pitch-perfect in a slightly outré version of what Coward meant.
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: The Deep Blue Sea
Helen McCrory plumbs the erotic despair of Hester Collyer’s abandoned woman in this absorbing revival of Rattigan’s masterpiece.
Review: Beauty and the Beast
Nothing so convincing has been done with this legend. It deserves many revivals.
Review: Shoe Lady
Katherine Parkinson inhabits that breaking through the office crust asphyxiating us
Review: Groomed
A scorching autobiographical tale of abuse that manages to tell us the story of the abused as well as introduce us to the teacher responsible.
Review: Contractions
A fascinating take on a fast paced modern play that truly picks apart the commercialization of our employee status.
Review: Les Blancs
A superb realization of Lorraine Hansberry's unfinished masterpiece - a classic of Ibsenite proportions
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: The Understudy
Do catch it, and match the feelgood price with nudging theatres towards opening night.
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: Waiting for Hamlet
A delight for the ears as two haunting characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet explore things Kingly before one makes his final, and first entrance.
Review: Electrolyte
A pulsating tale of a mental breakdown in a gig theatre piece that works on all levels.
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: Barber Shop Chronicles
Barber Shop Chronicles is a breath-taking revelation for those of us who had small inkling of a world in miniature.
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: Frankenstein (alternate version)
The acting scales cliff-edges of unreason. One remembers the scale of betrayal and loss of redemption. Benedict Cumberbatch here is Frankenstein, Jonny Lee Miller the Creature. The alternate version aired first is still available.
Review: #AIWW The Arrest of Ai WeiWei
Brenton powerfully concertinas a continent’s politics and one artist’s refraction of it. Wong is outstanding
Review: A Separate Peace
Stoppard looks at society’s phantom limb ethic. Even when it’s gone it aches, and it aches to have someone opting out.
