Review: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
This is certainly the best attempt yet to revive this musical with a new accent, and the way to see this musical. With such a company, see it anyway. It’ll prod you with questions and send you singing for answers.
Review: Best of Enemies
James Graham longs for reconcilement. Here, robbed of one he plays off the temperaments of each debater, creating a timeless no-place where each graciously concedes points. It still leaves us with Graham’s profound insight into the nature of the monster both supremely articulate men created: an inarticulate spectacle and theatre of cruelty. A must-see on Encores.
Review: Wagatha Christie
The brilliance of movement, lighting, script-editing and strong performances, with physical jokes make this a greater thing than it might be. But to wish for something more human falls into the very intrusiveness that gave rise to the trial. It’s a tribute to Wagatha Christie – and Liv Hennessy – that it raises that paradox.
Review: A Bunch of Amateurs
Directed by Jacqui Freeman, this latest LLT offering sparkles in a heart-warming tribute to amateur dramatics, with a plot denouement as dizzying as a Shakespeare comedy. There’s not a weak link here. Indeed it’s to be hoped several newcomers will return.
Review: Anna & Marina
Dovetailing invention and quotation triumphs. It’s a narrative of thrust and weave as well as tone. Overall it's terrific: one of Richard Crane’s very best works. If you care for gripping drama, can be drawn by hypnotic verse and superb acting, haste over to this unique hour.
Review: Jules et Jim
A thoroughly worthwhile, and in several senses heady undertaking. And certainly worth seeing.
Review: And Then They Came For Me
A multi-genre piece that can play anywhere, and needed now more than ever. Both to challenge denialists and most of all to illustrate the inhumanity of governments like ours towards refugees
Review: Quality Street
Don’t miss this exquisite confection. After this production, there’s possibly no return to the original. It’s a rethinking paying homage to both the sentiment, which it never upstages, and the brand and its factory-workers the comedy gave its name to.
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: Dance of Death
A hectic in the blood of 20th century drama. Its just here the hectic is realised like never before.
Review: Wish You Were Dead
There’s a good enough story for this to be recalibrated. Though If you’re a James fan, you’ll need to see this.
Review: Heathers
Rethought, rejigged, bright with humour and shadowed with plangency, this is the Heathers we’re meant to have
Review: Fisherman’s Friends: The Musical
A glorious night out, a wonderful cast and in Shahmir a mesmerising star in the making.
Review: The Shawshank Redemption
The Shawshank Redemption returns in an even stronger production than in 2015: sharper, more visceral, and with a stronger set and sound, frames even more resonant performances
Review: Hakawatis Women of the Arabian Nights
Original, bawdy, exploratory, seductive and elegaic in equal measure. A Faberge egg, continually hatching.
Review: James and the Giant Peach
With memorable music and ensemble singing added to a first-rate BLT production, there’s no better Christmas show in town.
Review: Mother Goose
This is more than panto: it’s an affirmation of something that panto here welcomes in, in our time uniquely invoking layers as only Elizabethan/Jacobean drama can.
Review: Henry V
Bracing, fresh, wholly re-thought in every line, emerging with gleaming power, menace and wit. And I defy anyone not to smile at this new take on Shakespeare’s downbeat ending.
Review: David Copperfield
A paean to live theatre; soaring seasonal spirit, struck with tenderness, joy, sorrow, plangent affirmation.
Review: The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary!
An outstanding revival, full of fierce fun, pathos and a massive tragedy for Christmas, wrapped in red bon-bons.
Review: Sarah
An unnerving testing of that space between naturalism and hallucination, redemption and blank unknowing, studded with a language that flies off the page.
Review: From Here to Eternity
Grabs you from the towards the close of Act One and doesn’t let go: from here to curtain we’re in heart-stopping eternity.
Review: The Lavender Hill Mob
Certainly enjoyable and the second act shows what it might be. There’s not a moment’s longeurs
Review: Pericles
Kelly Hunter’s team have wrought a miracle of flight, realised by an outstanding cast who here at least, make us rank Pericles with Shakespeare’s other late Romances.
Review: The Seagull
A Seagull for the initiated, a meditation rather than the play itself, it’s still a truthful distillation, wholly sincere, actors uniformly excellent
Review: Jews. In Their Own Words.
It’s Jonathan Freedland’s and Tracy-Ann Oberman’s brilliance to bring off-kilter, casual devastation to the stage; in raw unsettlings that for many keep the suitcase packed.
Review: Lost in the Willows
As a definitive staged version of Kenneth Grahame’s life, it will certainly hold the stage in its subsequent tour.
Review: Dracula
Robert Hamilton’s novel stage version of Dracula should be published and used widely
Review: Silence
More of a scattering of earth, ashes and love than simply groundbreaking. But caveats aside, groundbreaking it is.
Review: The Doctor
A triumph for all concerned. Juliet Stevenson even gains in stature. Robert Icke’s revival could hardly go better than this.
Review: Waiting For God
Sarah Mann and Nathan Ariss lead a fine company into a dash to eternity and back. With a memorable finale of two weddings and a funeral.
Review: Caligari
a 1920's silent film about power and illusion retold by a talented young company of musician/actors
Review: A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
Imaginative production of a magical realism story with intrigue, drama and subtle humour that people of all ages can enjoy together.
Review: Jack Absolute Flies Again
What Richard Bean and Oliver Chris manage is homage, both to Sheridan’s shade, his early bawdy, and despite anything a memorial to those who laughed at themselves to death. A must-see.
Review: The Poison Belt
So what could a Sussex-based sci-fi tale of 1913 by Conan Doyle – a space-borne poison belt of gas that hits the earth – possibly have to do with the week of the greatest temperatures known in the UK?
Review: Waitress
Halfpenny raises soaring music theatre, an ounce of gold in the throat and stars six inches above it.
Review: The Dance of Death
Highlights the truth of its bleak laughter. Humane Strindberg. Now there’s a thing.
Review: Cluedo
An object lesson in comic timing; a steep cut above the ‘real’ whodunnits we’re likely to see this year or next.
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: 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: Room
As a condensation and enactment of Woolf’s seminal text this can’t be improved on. The outstanding one-person show I’ve seen this Fringe.
Review: God of Carnage
Acting here is tighter than any version I’ve seen. This revival of a modern classic has to be the best of the Fringe so far.
Review: Beautiful
Outstanding, and outstandingly transferred as a tour that brings its stature with it.
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: Unsanctioned/Measure 2 Measure
You must see this intriguing, ingenious and superbly acted double bill.
Review: An Hour and a Half Late
Don’t miss this authentic, touching, devastatingly comic anatomy of a marriage as soufflé, supremely served by Rhys-Jones and Dee.
Review: THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL & MR HYDE
A highly charged reframing of the age-old mystery and horror of the pursuit of pleasure.
Review: The Da Vinci Code
Actually improves on Brown with theatrical humour and bold gestures; with a set that tells the story almost as much as the strong cast.
Review: The Cat and the Canary
If you’re a Classic Thriller Theatre Company fan, don’t hesitate. Though we can be grateful to Bill Kenwright for trying out these creaky creepies, a serious bit of thought ought to go in to just what genres they are first.
Review: Heathers
Sometimes the dark is light enough. Meanwhile enjoy an exceptional cast and talent you’ll long to see again in something finer.
Review: Dirty Dancing
There’s a fitting heart-warming climax to a dream of production. And a surprise to those who think they know the film.
Review: The Return of Sherlock Holmes
The standard story set up by a highly entertaining pair who deliver a very high standard of performance.
Review: The Twits
A summer must-see to charge you up for the autumn, and taking on the real twits ahead.
Review: Dracula
You should see this with some fine acting and a storyline making more sense of Dracula than Stoker does himself.
Review: Jeeves and Wooster Perfect Nonsense
A professional-standard production, and magnificent start to the 2020s.
Review: More Grimm Tales
A rollicking production with razored timing, musical cues and ad-libs worked in to half-second slots. A must-see.
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: There’s a Ghost in My House
Stunning. Greet the nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.
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: Love’s Poison
Whether as James Allen's play The Engagement, or as narrative, Love’s Poison should be seen or read by everyone.
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