Genre: Tragedy
Review: Macbeth
ETT’s gallimaufry stimulates, frustrates, occasionally fascinates. A more selective through-line would have revealed a mineral gleam, a new earth of tyranny.
Review: Chekhov Three Sisters
There’s a rapt self-communing in this production of Three Sisters. A must-see, it glows long after you’ve left it.
Review: Vaughan Williams, J.M. Synge Riders to the Sea
Betteridge’s prologue is certainly worth seeing even if you know the work, and won’t need persuading. And after the opera, the rest is surf, and silence.
Review: Macbeth
It’s still a phenomenal feat and even if you know Macbeth, it’s still a must-see for how a quintessence can be dusted off.
Review: Helen Edmundson (adaptor) Anna Karenina
With Diane Robinson’s team there’s a vibrant retelling, superbly produced
Review: Sara Farrington A Trojan Woman
An acclaimed pocket tragedy which yet carries Euripides’ weight in Farrington’s framing, it more than touches the heart: it snatches it and hands it back as a sad and angry consolation.
Review: Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art
An essential, raging and ranging collection of works flashing with humour and teeth, flecked with harrowing stories and above all love for a humanity the establishment wishes us to other and consign to tragedy. A must-see.
Review: The Ungodly
The Ungodly which playwright Joanna Carrick also directs is different, and special. No wonder it transfers to Off-Broadway next spring. An outstanding piece of theatre.
Review: The Wild Duck
This production carries one truth that refreshes: strip all the directors’ concepts and editing, and for once truth will set Ibsen, and ourselves as free as it imprisons its characters. Outstanding.
Review: Salomé
Dramatically this is the most creative response I’ve seen live. Here, a director’s reach should exceed their grasp, or what’s a production for.
Review: Eurydice
Stella Powell-Jones coaxes provisional miracles from her cast and space. The medium’s playful, even fun. The message though is bleak; and love is still in the letting go.
Review: Coriolanus
Certainly a Coriolanus blazing with extrinsic relevance, it brings clarity to a play that can seem an unmitigated grey
Review: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
This desperate elegy of betrayal, straight from Le Carré’s own hurt, will haunt you with the truth of its despair.
Review: The Bible in Early Modern Drama: Robert Owen The History of Purgatory
Dr Will Tosh leads a discussion The Bible in Early Modern Drama. Absorbing.
Review: Richard III
In a female-led cast led by the eponymous Richard III (Michelle Terry) it’s striking that the trio of cursing women is this production’s highlight
Review: The Trials of Magnus Coffinkey
Of the 115 (mostly London) shows I’ve seen this year so far, it ranks as the most profound, and one of the very finest.
Review: Company RAus’s Dido
A multimedia portrayal of Dido's love and loss, in sound, light and solo dance
Review: Magpie
This really has no place in the Brighton Fringe. Perhaps the Festival. What is a slice of the darkest Sean O’Casey doing at a 9pm slot? Outstanding.
Review: Laughing Boy
Stephen Unwin directs his own play as a sweep of storytelling, laughter and devastation.
Review: Frozen
Frozen is far more than a thriller: it’s an interrogation into the limits of what evil-doing is, what redemption and some capacity to forgive might be, and its consequences: and above all it ends in a thaw cracking like a Russian spring.
Review: The Other Boleyn Girl
Mike Poulton’s text gleams and snaps. Lucy Bailey’s production of it thrills and occasionally overwhelms, dazzling in its maze of missteps. A must-see.
Review: Machinal
This triumphant revival by Ustinov Studios and the Old Vic might finally encourage exploration. You must see this.
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
