Review: Machinal
This triumphant revival by Ustinov Studios and the Old Vic might finally encourage exploration. You must see this.
Genre: Tragedy
Review: Macbeth
It’s a phenomenal feat and even if you know Macbeth, it’s still a must-see for how a quintessence can be dusted off.
Review: Hide and Seek
An absorbing two-hander with as unexpected an ending as Lauren Gunderson’s I and You
Review: The Duchess of Malfi
There’s so much to admire here that it’s a happy duty to urge you to see it, if you can, any way you can.
Review: King Lear
This smouldering production – fast-talking or timeless - fully engages with the play. It makes almost perfect sense: and two families’ DNA ring true as rarely before.
Review: Othello
With institutional racism and trauma compounded in a feedback loop, this Othello’s a timely, and timeless broadside on everything toxic we inhale and expel as venom.
Review: Cold War
Cold War ends with a draining-out of hope in Anya Chalotra and Luke Thallon; a desolate beauty the cast certainly earn.
Review: The House of Bernarda Alba
Adaptor Alice Birch takes the House apart like Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture. Harriet Walter is magnificent: staring out like a jailor, patrolling. Hainsworth remains hypnotic and terrible, joyously sexual and headlong as her Juliet in self-destruction.
Review: Ghosts
Tom Hill-Gibbins emphasises the original’s shock in conversational prose-style too. Stripped to a straight-through 100 minutes is hurtles like the Greek tragedy with reveals it essentially is.
Review: Los finales felices son para otros
An exquisite industrial and Argentinian take on Richard III
Review: Portia Coughlin
Alison Oliver’s appeared in the outstanding revival of the year till now: Dancing at Lughnasa. Now she leads the other one. If you see one play this month, make it Portia Coughlin.
Review: A View from the Bridge
Here, the hurtling much shorter second act contains a thrilling impulsion and catastrophe that had the audience on its feet. Mostly that’s responding to a great play, but latterly this production carries that charge.
Review: The Changeling
The closer Ricky Dukes sticks to the original, the more accessible, visceral, true this production is.
Review: Blood Brothers
This reinvigorated classic has overwhelming impact: as story, as lyric fable, as terrible moral for these distracted times.
Review: This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Based on the writing of poet Tadeusz Borowski and the paintings of Arnold Daghani This Way For The Gas bears explosive witness to shape the pulse of that post-Holocaust world. Bill Smith, Angi Mariano and their colleagues have wrought an enormous service. In the last great reprise of 'Never' we realise we're seeing the finale of an emerging masterpiece.
Review: Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria
Fringe-historical gold, which means very good indeed. It doesn’t mean Copenhagen, with Frayn’s subtle collisions and collusions. It’s a different, desperately joyous animal that signs its truth and shames the world.
Review: The Yellow Wallpaper
Stephanie Mohr’s adaptation is a remarkable manifestation (no other word seems more apt) of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story The Yellow Wallpaper, an important realisation of a key feminist awakening. It’s good enough for you not to want it depicted in any other way.
Review: The Father and the Assassin
There’s no finer dramatization of India’s internal conflicts. Hiran Abeysekera’s Gandhi-killer Godse stands out in this thrilling ensemble and storms it too.
Review: Birthright
There’s no denying Birthright’s sheer power, authenticity and perennial struggle played out between natural justice and lagging custom. It’s the breakthrough work of a masterly writer, whom only the Finborough look set to revive, as they have here. We’d be impossibly poorer without the Finborough.
Review: Romeo and Juliet
One of the finest OFS productions. Its velocity, tumbling comedy and bawdy, tragedy through lightning brawls, rapier-wit foiled in quicksilver, rapiers foiling wit, headlong teen despair, the exaltation of love flown in lyric sonnets and defying stars: it’s all here, principally because of three outstanding actors. The Romeo of newcomer Isabella Leung, who’s never played Shakespeare in her life, the return of Catie Ridewood as Juliet. And the return from that golden season of 2021: David Samson as Mercutio.
Review: Shakespeare in Love
You’ll forget the film; you might even forget any staged version of Lee Hall’s in the West End. The mystery’s in the ensemble, the production, its bewitching leads Lewis Todhunter and Melissa Paris. With Claire Lewis’ direction, Michael James’ music, and Graham Brown’s movement direction to the fore, it’s a mighty reckoning in a little room – seamlessly transferred to an ampitheatre.
Review: Macbeth
The strangeness of this Macbeth wraps in those three Witches/Murderers plus Seyton, slowly perambulating their trolleys around. The eerie, in Schmool’s sustained chords, remains. The horror, elsewhere.
Review: The Accrington Pals
Actors and director can take pride in mounting this intensely moving play, especially in the sheer flow they all bring to Act Two, blazing an arc of ever-growing tensions. It could carry anywhere. ACT did it some service, and must know it.
Review: The Goat
Martin Malone more than revives Edward Albee’s 2002 masterpiece The Goat, at the New Venture Theatre; he rethinks how we can receive it. An exemplary revival of a play Michael Billington named one of his 101 Greatest – even over Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Make up your own mind; see it. Martin Malone more than revives Edward Albee’s 2002 masterpiece The Goat, at the New Venture Theatre; he rethinks how we can receive it. An exemplary revival of a play Michael Billington named one of his 101 Greatest – even over Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Make up your own mind; see it.
Review: Romeo and Juliet
It’s not just that Isis Hainsworth’s Juliet is the sun here, though her outstanding performance is the heart of this Romeo and Juliet. This is one of the most thrilling, sometimes harrowing Romeo and Juliets I’ve seen. Fittingly a world where sun and extinction flash and vanish, it’s the Shakespeare production of the summer.
Review: Phaedra
Stone suggests only someone as demonstrably damaged and damaging as Helen (Phaedra), in other words a politician, might pursue self-destruction so relentlessly; and devastate so many. It’s brilliantly achieved elsewhere than with the core relationship.
Review: Titus Andronicus
One of the Globe’s most lucid recent productions; and the most consistently-realised aesthetic. It knows what it is: a stunningly thought-through, musically inspired production.
Review: The Crucible
A Crucible of searing relevance; by grounding it in its time, it scorches with clarity.
Review: Julius Caesar
If you’re a habitual groundling, go before this production vanishes back on tour
Review: King Lear
Rarely has a Cordelia and Fool scaled such equal terms with such a Lear, rendering a kind of infinity.
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: The Last
Chittenden’s done a great service not only to Mary Shelley’s novel, but to the way we imagine. And Amy Kidd’s exemplary.
Review: Anne Boleyn
If it’s drama you’re after in Brighton Fringe, this is one of the two or three essential stops. Thrilling, authoritative, with Greene the jewel in a sparkling ensemble.
Review: When We Dead Awaken
Ibsen’s elusive masterpiece is so rarely performed seeing it is an imperative. Played with such authority as here, in Norwegian and English, it’s not a luxury but a must-see.
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: Macbeth
Building out of Macbeth a recurring epic of structural violence not ended with one overthrow, sets the seal on this outstanding production.
Review: Romeo and Juliet
A fleet, brilliantly upending, wholly relevant take on the Verona-ready toxicity feeding male violence and young depression
Review: This Beautiful Future
Heartstopping. There’s an absoluteness here we need. We must prove desperate for it or die ourselves.
Review: The Rape of Lucrece
The definitive way to experience this troublingly great, disturbingly unresolved poem
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: The Spanish Tragedy
The OFS are taking flight with the best scratch nights the Elizabethans never had.
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 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: 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: Frankenstein
The acting scales cliff-edges of unreason. One remembers the scale of betrayal and loss of redemption
Review: Romeo and Juliet
Completeness is just one reason to cherish this clean-driven clear-headed production
Review: Hamlet
In Michelle Terry’s quicksilver, quick-quipping Hamlet, much has been proved, from interpretive to gender fluidity in tragic action, that sets a privilege on being in at a beginning.
Review: Women Beware Women
A stylish, timely production which redefines how we experience Middleton.
Review: Blood Brothers
The blend of definitive and new cast members in a recent classic has overwhelming impact: as story, as lyric fable, as terrible moral for these distracted times.
Review: The Duchess of Malfi
The scalpel and scruple of class and coolness breaks into tragedy and gifts us three outstanding moments
Review: Richard III
This production could draw out the poison of being dead serious in terminal bursts of laughter
Review: Frankenstein
There’s a clean sharp fusion between these two writers that heralds something special.
Review: I Run
A vivid solo performance of a man running furious, powerful and heartbroken into the grief of his dead daughter.
Review: The Mill on the Floss
Stunning. This consummate, flawless production is an event for BLT and Brighton
