Genre: Comedic 0
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: The Lady Vanishes
A first-class production. Crisply paced, beautifully detailed, this ensemble is flawless, the finest Bill Kenwright’s team have produced
Review: Sam Morrison: Hello, Daddy!
Accomplished and fruity comedy from a young gay comedian who’s already mastered stand up.
Review: Flo & Joan : Before the screaming starts
Following their Sell Out 2018 run Flo & Joan are back and better than ever.
Review: Beep Boop
A one man mime and physical comedy theatre show with a live digital soundscape, exploring society’s uneasy obsession with online life and the curious delusional pull away from an actually lonely reality.
Review: Where Are You Really From?
Quirky, creative, and thoroughly entertaining exploration of cultural identity
Review: Gone Edinburgh
Scottish folk music peppered with social justice themes and mischievous grins
Review: The Birth of Death
“A profoundly moving and disarmingly funny journey, looking at death and how we approach it…”
Review: History Of Ireland
“A slick combination of politically driven theatre, dance and comedy with more than a touch of the Blarney…”
Review: The Adventures of Abhijeet
Entertaining and well performed by the compelling cast in this zany edgy world!
Review: Grimm’s Tales
An exuberant Christmas production, and a miracle of compression, blocking, set-design and ensemble acting skills.
Review: Square Rounds
Proud Haddock have delivered their own stamp on Harrison’s verse-play, and it’s mostly thrilling
Review: A Beginner’s Guide to Populism
A satire of sound bites and xenophobia, expressing the danger of stoking a community’s ignorance, fear and hatred
Review: Square Go
Masculinity and absurdity with a swagger and a cheek tae talk so it is, thrown in wi yer ma and yer brother as we see a hilarious fight for the right tae … hide.
Review: Erewhon
A fascinating adaptation of a novel of its time, presented in a concept of its time but in a timeless fashion for a modern audience.
Review: When the Friendship has Sailed
A gentle comedy with one really fun device; the singing goldfish.
Review: A Modern Guide to Heroism and Sidekickery
Not Just for Comic Fans, Modern Guide Inspires the Underdog Hero in All of US
Review: Voldemort and the Teenage Hogwarts Musical Parody
An hour of delightful escapism for muggles, witches and wizards
Review: An Abundance of Tims
The one white male solo comedy show you absolutely should see this Fringe.
Review: Honey’s Happening
Welcome to Honey's Happening where pineapple surprise and party games are sure to bring about world peace
Review: A Joke
A joyful leap into the unknown. These incredible performers take you on masterclass of japery.
Review: Casting Off
Three generations of women 'Cast Off' all stereotypes of what they can, should and be able to do.
Review: Pity
Those receptive to those energies unleashed in the Ionesco, or more fitfully in Saint George and the Dragon will readily see Mullarkey’s almost unique position. What he writes next might define him.
Review: Exit the King
We need such risk-taking theatre back. This outstanding production of Exit the King might just remind us how to get it.
Review: Flesh and Bone
Warren’s East London heritage is similar to other writers, and it’s his time to re-tell it now, with new notes and a love of language that muscles in and won’t let go.
Review: The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives
The genius of this production is to keep hilarity airborne whilst slipping in something poisonous. You must see this.
Review: The Fabulous Bäckström Brothers
An operatic clown show, first performed in Helsinki in September 2014.
Review: Arr We There Yet?
A Madcap Mashup of Circus and Storytelling with a Little Tango for Extra Spice
Review: One Woman Alien
I can predict that by the end of its run, this should be the most outstanding one-person show you’ll see in the last week.
Review: Pigspurt’s Daughter
Guardian obituary, 2008. ‘Ken Campbell was one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in British theatre of the past half-century.’ It just happens that his daughter Daisy is both that and far more. She’s one of the most cunning crafters of comedy and storytelling in the anti-business
Review: The Prudes
Neilson’s piece twists an unexpected root out of recent debates over power and sexual abuse the Royal Court has addressed so consistently. Uniquely Neilson’s made the faintly horrible full-on hilarious.
Review: Random Selfies
This is sweet, fleet story-telling with just the right amount of pitch and yaw for anyone to take, without it becoming too dark or didactic. Ten-year-old Lola’s engaging, and in Natalia Hinds’ hands utterly believable, energetically inhabited with a sense of fun clearly relished by this revelatory actor.
Review: Black Men Walking
There’s a resolution and a few late epiphanies. It’s an important work, satisfying in its refusal to over-imbue a situation which needs less plot-driven conflict than to lay open its stories like a knap of stone revealing the shine.
Review: Old Fools
There’s truths to discover here. Indeed, to remember love, happiness and life vigorously to combat the oblivion surrounding it. It’s still a hidden gem of a piece, and you should see this brief hour-long odyssey, either to reflect from its early evening finish or if visiting, as a sweetly sad, perhaps wiser prelude to whatever you choose from the later lights.
Review: The Woman in the Moon
This superb production has shifted our sense of Lyly’s pre-eminence still further. Lyly hugely influenced Shakespeare like no other writer. Lyly remains the Globe’s Read Not Dead greatest rediscovery, and this production underscores that more fully and emphatically than even before, in unexpectedly to this bold, necessary reading.
Review: Peter Goers is Hard Rubbish
"Goers has a story to tell, a joke (or three) and some genuinely interesting anecdotes"
Review: How To Be a Kid
More than an enchanting diversion Sarah McDonald’s play does ask just how quickly we need to grow up, even when we have.
Review: The Open House
It’s a wholly original drama, and if you like the super-naturalist verismo of Amy Herzog’s Belleville recently at the Donmar or Annie Baker’s John at the National, you’ll enjoy this sidling from that. It’s conceptually even more original. Do see this. It’s a masterly play - in a theatre famed for its dishevelled uniqueness.
Review: Ken
Terry Johnson’s two-hander might seem a low-key hommage but his script’s brilliant. It’s a re-affirmation of Campbell’s comic epic theatre, and inspires you to look out for what his daughter Daisy might be bringing to us at the Brighton Festival.
Review: My Mum’s a Twat
‘Have you ever tried to sustain a relationship with a twat?’ Some debuts establish more than a new voice. Anoushka Warden’s My Mum's a Twat certainly revels in its compelling and sassy distinctiveness; but it nails to this a cause. Beyond this though is the thrill of a debut writer with the tang of their own voice stinging the air. As Warden says about something else: ‘You’ll have to take my word on that.’ So see it.
Review: Large Trash Print
This very fine 2007 work by Jonathan Brown strikes a blow for tolerance and inclusivity now as it did a decade ago. Brown’s superlative writing and acting is ridiculously confined to this city.
Review: The Bashful Lover
What this production enjoys in particular is a fizzing energy: nothing sags in Eastop’s expert cut and parry of Massinger’s final flight. The actors’ cracking pace reflects the martial tang of the play. Finally it’s the mutual understatement and mobile intelligence - etched on their faces – of Wicks and Eyre that make this already crackling reading treasurable.
Review: The Real Thing
To luxuriate in a witty play with valiant emotional gambits, you’ll have to see The Real Thing for yourself. Fox bestrides this production like a hopeful monster who’s got lucky. He’s irresistible, and especially in the second half, enjoys the support of an energised cast. Do see this.
Review: Insignificance
This masterly ensemble piece affirms relativity as a human agency, for which physics provides analogues but no solutions. Insignificance will be signifying for a long half-life, and this pacey production ensures its probing at fragility won’t be lost in brilliant collisions.
Review: Man in a Room & The Ruffian on the Stair
One brave attempt on a recent play cast as it were in the dark; and one really fine stab at another darkness, in Orton’s debut one-act play.
Review: B
We need more Calderon and more of the Court’s excellent International Playwrights programme. ‘Those who are still laughing’, Brecht claimed grimly, ‘have not heard the terrible news.’ Yet he always laughed and Calderon, in William Gregory’s idiomatic translation ensures this piece is memorable because we laugh, scratch our heads, perhaps look furtively at our bags.
Review: Dreamboats and Petticoats
It’s back again. Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s nine-year dream Dreamboats and Petticoats returns to Theatre Royal, Brighton with a cast and creatives deserving high praise for creating the lightest touch out of slight narrative. Those who’ve seen it should start marvelling at the musicianship, and those who haven’t will increasingly join in.
Review: Summer’s Last Will and Testament
It might be Summer’s Last Will and Testament, but whether Summer’s or Will Summers Henry VIII’s fool, is a riddling not only Nashe but the superb Edward’s Boys from King Edward VI School Stratford determine on our guessing. An extraordinary production. It’s good to know these Edward’s Boys are preserved on DVD.
Review: Shakespeare for Kids : Toil and Trouble
Fun forty-five minute introduction to Shakespeare. For parents as well as their offspring.
Review: The Tempest
You won’t forget the spectacle. But it’s the lonely spectators of their own powers that’ll beat on your mind. Gregory Doran’s RSC production realizes that more fully than ever before. Simon Russell Beale’s riven letting-go of a man’s potency relinquished along with his moral son sounds deeper plummets still.
Review: Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Marianne Elliott with her superb cast and ramped-up effects towards the end ensure this episodic freewheeling fantasia hooks you compulsively, beating you over the head with angels’ wings as Part One shuts them hypnotically and we’re suspended.
Review: All or Nothing
Carol Harrison’s written the band proud and plangent; her split hero strategies work to make this one of the best possible storylines of a British band, given hell-bent Marriott burning his talent at both ends, just like the decade.
Review: The Rise and Fall of Little Voice
Jim Cartwright’s 1992 play with music The Rise and Fall of Little Voice sings out of damage into heartbreak and redemption. Those who don’t know the play or its outcome should see this, even those who have. Jade Clarke making her second LV might now be the go-to choice in this part of the country for some time to come. LLT’s on its best form, and following the éclat of Mr Foote’s Other Leg the other highlight of the season.
Review: Ink
James Graham’s Ink persuades us of the combustion following a challenge to a cornered editor with everything to lose; and the irony of the most ruthless media operator in living memory given a desperate, humbling masterclass. In their friction it’s not only the Sun that bonfires every liberal vanity, but our naked selves.
