Review: These Trees Are Made Of Blood
A necessary piece of theatre, the band are superb; a couple of numbers will take residence in your ear. Theatrically it’s almost achieved too, and if it feels slightly clunky it’s that the brilliant conceit of political trickery can’t be sustained over the sombre facts the second act introduces us to. The end’s overwhelming. Two audience members sat quietly weeping together and could not move for minutes after. Others sat stunned.
Review: Souvenir
Uproarious “kamikaze cabaret” history of Brighton Theatre Royal told through song and amusing anecdotes.
Review: An Octoroon
Of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ brilliance there’s no doubt whatsoever. With such a wonderful cast led by the stunning Nwosu this makes the most persuasive and certainly comical case for a re-fashioning that’s now (almost) the only way we can look at the Boucicault original of this play.
Review: Wonderland
The ingredients are there: it’s a magical idea, and just needs a quieter rationale and – to make it a great show - a few more memorable numbers. But if you care for musicals, see it for an outstanding clutch of performers and a dream of something perennial.
Review: Blink
This is the most affecting bittersweet piece of theatre seen at the Fringe for a while and a masterly play. That Hall and Lacey invest it with such pathos humour and delicacy whilst working to pinpoint direction is equally winning, equally devastating and makes you dream sequels. It’s a must-see.
Germany Calling , Germany Calling, Germany Calling - "an entertaining and enlightening hour"
Review: Comedy Club for Kids
A lot of fun, a lot of laughs, a lot of joy. And (mostly) age-appropriate.
Review: Bug Camp
Paul Macauley’s garnered outstanding praise and Bug Camp adds to his reputation. All four cast give exemplary performances though Douetil and Spencer hit a top register of something teetering on tragedy, laughing over an abyss.
Review: Blocked
It’s as if Billie Piper’s Yerma does stand-up. Caroline Byrne’s Blocked reveals a writer whose images stamp a scream-out-loud theatre drawn into an arc of devastation. Curnick inhabits a performer’s meltdown from a technique and emotional agency as strong as… a recording black box. Why? Find out. Superb theatre.
Review: Woman in Mind
Some fine and one excellent performance in this Lewes Little production of Woman in Mind – Ayckbourn being a house speciality. Despite the occasional lack of shadows, there’s much to bask in and it’s more than worth seeing this production if you don’t know the play, or refreshing your memory if you do.
Review: Christopher Nibble.
"The Guinea pigs of Dandeville are munching the poor over-stretched dandelion population out of existence and heading for eco-disaster!!
Review: Die Die Die Old People Die
A stunning new work from Ridiculusmus, the multi-award winning theatre company who specialise in transforming complex mental health issues into warm, witty and accessible performance.
Review: Urinetown
This eco-warning musical can hardly be billed as feel-good but the music is. Mark Hollmann’s music and lyrics are as fresh as they were in 2001, and Greg Kotis’ book and lyrics are sadly prescient. This ambitious professional standard musical is something we almost take for granted with BLT. In festival time, we lose sight of some regular theatre work But this is overall the finest Fringe theatre event I’ve seen so far.
Review: Pals
It’s not been done like this before. This play fully deserves its accolades. Though we associate the First War Pals Battalions with the north (the Accrington for instance) this show localises it to every community it tours.
Review: According to Angelica
‘It’s about this nurse.’ Angelica, former nurse to the Capulets sets out her moonlight vegetables quite literally. The essential point is that’s it a fascinating take, and a compelling story.
Review: Plan B for Utopia
With its low tech props, starkly minimal staging, and exquisite performance, Clevillé has constructed a piece that teeters between being hilarious, heart breaking, and intensely hopeful.
Review: Cranford
A good evening out and if you’re in the area, more than recommendable. The overall production and costumes, abetted with strong pace, a good use of Coleman’s narratives and finally finally top-flight amateur performances by Jennifer Annetts, Aisling and Thomas Edie, and Charlotte Eastes, makes this a recommendable production, the most ambitious I’ve seen from these players.
Review: Don Juan in Soho
Don David Tennant’s priapic thrusts might rise above the title but of course he’s in the classic armour (aka condoms) of two guvnors, Moliere and updater Patrick Marber; it’s exhilarating. This is one play you must see, so transcendent in its theme it asks you the same questions.
Review: The Trials of Harvey Matusow
Informative, infuriatingly endearing it’s also Cohen’s first masterpiece, however small-scaled. For that reason too, it holds a particular freshness, a discovery of a remarkable voice. Or two.
Review: Tamburlaine
What Yellow Earth manage so well is to forge a contemporary life for Tamburlaine. Stylised, stylish and sassy in the best sense, this touring production make Tamburlaine accessible. With caveats noted, it renders the first early modern English language play the greatest service: a horrible relevance.
Review: Invincible
What’s so distinctive in Torben Betts is his misleading us into an almost farcical comedy that turns darker. Just as stereotypes settle, plots unravel them. The climax is devastating, not explosively but in revelatory shudders. A fine unexpectedness marks both this superb play and outstandingly-acted revival.
Review: The Kid Stays in the Picture
In the best sense this production’s stupefying, a spectacle shot through with theatrical tropes suggests that, if Evan’s revelations could be more frequent, Kid would be dramatically breathtaking too. And it is thrillingly itself.
Review: Nell Gwynn
Swale’s unique: she writes a play of feline-scratching wit that’s a feelgood hommage, where intellectual pyrotechnics never feel out of place. We’ve recently enjoyed The Libertine’s brilliantly-lit darkness revived too, and revived Nell Gwynn is the antipode to Jeffreys’ profound masterpiece. Just as clever, as fiendishly witty, Swale’s orange-girl raillery refuses the other’s command to dislike. It ends too, in a startling reality, and tenders a shock.
Review: Low Level Panic
Claire McIntyre’s Low Level Panic might seem a slight play at seventy-five minutes of apparently low-key plotting and vestigial images, but after thirty years it loses nothing in impact. Time’s conferred both an indictment and uneasy classic status to this masterly first sliver of a much-missed dramatist.
Review: The Duke of Milan
A fine curtain-raiser to a year of Massinger, a later Jacobean whose career took a while to fly, was always poor and eleven of whose plays ended as pie-liners. There’s fifteen solo-authored and many collaborations to discover, several in this year’s RND. Frances Marshall ensures a superbly spirited ensemble piece, with apposite small props and a freshness you can smell. Though three hours with a break this never once even falters; it’s as realized a performance as you could ever wish, touched with scenic brilliance.
Review: New Nigerians
As a snapshot of political compromise and impossibly contrary pressures African politicians encounter, it’s of the keenest interest. Agboluaje’s characters are vivid, and in one great scene they breathe fire.
Review: Rattle of a Simple Man
Sad prostitute meets superannuated virgin in 1962. A fine thoughtful and very welcome revival, with Leah Mooney and Des Potton bravely baring all their vulnerabilities at the least.
Review: The Cherry Orchard
A joyful sadness more nearly than most strikes the balance Chekhov mockingly prescribes in The Cherry Orchard: a comedy, grasping a clutch of infernos. Jade Wlliams’ grief-clenched crumpling as Varya perhaps steals the show but Simon Scardfield’s misery-infused Epikhodov, Abhin Galeya’s weedily gauche Trofimov and Sian Thomas’s giddy Ranevsky round out a memorable whirligig of a production.
Review: ‘Art’
Tim Key, Paul Ritter and Rufus Sewell dazzle in this Old Vic revival of ‘Art’ directed by Matthew Warchus. Reza joked of her Olivier Comedy award: ‘I’m surprised, I thought I’d written a tragedy’ and this visceral but almost (dare one say, given the subject) cubist probing of the hairline crack between the two both affirms and denies Reza’s claim she’s not a cerebral writer. She asks dangerous questions of just what the ‘art’ of friendship consists of, and why.
Review: Escaped Alone
Escaped Alone frames four women chatting in deckchairs in this everyday talk of tea and catastrophe - just as one of them steps into the void to prophesy a smorgasbord of Armageddons. The protean Churchill touches yet another dimension too. Do we have to wait to her eightieth in 2018 to proclaim her our greatest living playwright?
Review: Seeing Stars
Here’s Tycho Brahe to lead us by his gold nose. You can never start star-gazing too young; this Rust and Stardust production is a dazzling place to start. Enchanting, informative and exhilarating in equal measure; Conlon and Sommers’ singing sets a magical seal on this star-breaking look at the universe.
Review: Sunny Afternoon
What makes this outstanding is Penhall’s wit and deft charactering of core band and satellites who interact with the complexity of a play, the way the songs move the narrative forward and are given believable geneses. This outstanding musical deserves the awards its original incarnation garnered – and it brings back The Kinks forever sharing the peak of British pop with The Who, The Stones and pre-eminently The Beatles.
Review: The Wizard of Oz
It beggars belief that on one tiny stage we can be subjected to so many scene stages so expertly handled, so many backdrops and scenery shifts, not to mention a cast of twenty-two who can all sing. This production is good enough for a larger professional stage. If you get a chance, ask for a ticket or return.
Review: Motherhood:(Un)speakable, (Un)spoken
Ninety seconds into this newly-revised one-woman play, Joanna Rosenfeld - emerging in a poke of fingers from a cagoule of brown paper - over-voices herself giving witness to tens of verbatim experiences we hear. This tells us the baby’s a parasite, sucks all your nutrients, calcium from your teeth for instance, causes injury, often permanent, can kill. This is - literally - epic interior theatre.
Review: The Tempest
Walter’s is a reading riven with pained clarity – a conflicted anguish visibly traced on her face – sealing the broken majesty of this performance. It’s the pinnacle of the rough magic of a production fresh, streetwise with animated verse deliveries, vocal range and above all the new-minted, brave new world.
Review: Whose Sari Now?
This is consummate storytelling, and Moorthy’s narrative variables attest to pitch and speed, a charactering that gifts all it can to the individual and in some cases real tales. There’s much here we cannot forget.
Review: The Tempest
It’s clear something miraculous and patient is born from this simple but endlessly detailed production, releasing The Tempest into its fullest consciousness for a long time. However many Tempests you might have attended, see this one.
Review: The Shakespeare Revue
A consummate delight in this now rarest of forms; a tight song-and-dance of words. New material sizzles, inserted towards the end, the whole box of Bards from Bernard Levin’s Quoting Shakespeare to McKee’s arrangement of Shakespeare lines for a musical lights-out dances on the edge of hilarity before falling headlong into it.
Review: Comus
Spectacle costumes and use of machinery are outstanding, even by Wanamaker standards. Granted there’s a lower dramatic threshold in Comus, it doesn’t mask as it were the fact that this is the most outstanding production of Comus we’ll ever see.
Review: Guerilla Aspies
This is an absolutely necessary and enagaging show about Aspergers we need to see back. The audience was packed, and exhilarated, Wady making contact with nearly everyone but in a creative and – yes – neutrotypical way.
Review: Motherhood: (Un)speakable, (Un)spoken
Moments into this one-woman play, Joanna Rosenfeld - emerging in a poke of fingers from a cagoule of brown paper - over-voices herself giving witness to tens of verbatim experiences we hear. This tells us the baby’s a parasite, sucks all your nutrients, calcium from your teeth for instance, causes injury, often permanent, can kill. This is - literally - epic interior theatre.
Review: The Clean House
Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is paced by director Sam Chittenden with clean elegance, counterpointing the messiness of existence with the neatness of fable, and the human need to straddle, even celebrate both. In a play about the perfect one-liner, we get the joke and far from killing us it offers us a small lesson in loving.
Review: The Boys in the Band
Mark Gatiss might be the best-known of the ensemble in The Boys in the Band but delights in being just one of this nine-hander which never falters, never droops and dances words to actions in a small masterpiece that seems poised to remain contemporary forever.
Review: Amadeus
In the most spectacular production imaginable, the antagonisms between the black-suited and marzipan fight it out in this extraordinary sumptuous and consummately musical production. Far from seeming out of place, Adam Gillen’s Young Ones-style shrilling brat with his technicolour frock-coats seems almost more attuned than Salieri to his milieu. It’s naturally the corresponding gravity this production looks to though: Lucian Msmati’s supremely crafted lead sets off the quicksilver of his rival to an unprecedented extent.
Review: Blue Heart
A major Churchill season is long overdue, and her eightieth in 2018 shouldn’t be the only occasion of it. Orange Tree’s production is as good as it gets in Blue Heart.
Review: Hotel Cerise
Ellen Thomas fills the central role with warmth, quixotic generosity, occasional faded grandeurs and a bewitching illusion. Greer has otherwise ingeniously captured the Chekhovian amplitude and capacity for delicacy and tenderness in the face of death, her description of Chekhov. That’s really something.
Review: The Entertainer
Gawn Granger carries the memory of greatness and it’s this elusive elixir Archie, consummately but seedily played by Branagh, which stands in for those lost ideals Osborne’s first great character Jimmy Porter grasped at. It’s the toppling of Archie Rice’s own inner idol, or failure to do so, that sends this absorbing production out whistling into the dark.
Review: Acorn
Persephone and Eurydice, embodiers of two Greek myths, find themselves reaching out in the Underworld. Except Persephone’s an overworked bereaved junior doctor with huge attachment issues. She has to deal with a flock of Eurydices: distrait child, disturbed teenager, new mother, someone with mental distress seeking out seven dwarves in a lopped tree trunk. Welcome to the world in an Acorn.
Review: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Character-acting keeps this near-impossible-to-dramatize story a play. Since the film’s different, this charmingly-attempted soufflé of an adaptation might do the best service of all: send people in search of a ninety-page novella, and that’s in large print.
Review: The Merchant of Venice
This outstandingly layered production seethes with Antonio’s and Shylock’s polar hatred. At the end of Judgement they’re both broken. Jonathan Pryce’s Shylock details as much hatred as Antonio (Dominic Mafham exhaling melancholy) and Venetian anti-Semites direct in spittle.
Review: Imogen: Cymbeline Renamed and Reclaimed
This production sucked in a whole audience and breathed it out with laughter. Its power’s a popular, indeed populist one. And in Maddy Hill’s furious dove we’ve identified an Imogen many can reclaim, or claim for the first time.
Review: Holes
Holes sashays between naturalism and fable, some predictable some not. Noad and McGann strongly characterise. Roberts and Purchese make something special out of the comically horrifying. Richards has produced a sovereign reading of a troubled, brilliantly unequal question mark.
Review: A Room With a View
This is about as good as you could reasonably hope for. The latter half is a delight, and should send people back to the theatre for different fare, and to the book.
Review: They Drink it in the Congo
Brace’s hugely ambitious piece is whipped along with rapid dissolves and shifts by Longhurst so its stranded complexity never becomes turgid or bewildering. Central character Stef is played with brightness turned up exactly right by Fiona Button.
Review: Doctor Faustus
The RSC delights in dopplegangers: alternating the main roles of Faustus and Mephistopheles with Sandy Grierson and Oliver Ryan. Grierson’s commanding Mephistopheles does more than ringingly square off against Ryan’s smoky-voiced humanity. Aberg has though allowed the drama space to believe in itself, a darkness to believe in.
Review: The Dresser
The best revival we’re likely to see in a very long time, with outstanding performances from Stott and Shearsmith, with performances as strong in their way from Cadell and Thorpe, and not a weak link. It’s a masterly play from the inside, and this consummate portrayal of near-disaster ending in a successful one, is as good as it gets.
Review: Burning Bridges
Asperger-conditioned Sarah’s reels off her interests: ‘TV, One Direction, Bears, Ghandi, Oral Sex not necessarily in that order.’ This remarkable, necessary play explores the crisis provoked by Sarah’s single atypical act, and how it shows she’s improving - leaving domestic devastation. Shindler beautifully judges the pathos and development in each of her three main protagonists.
Review: William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (Abridged)
Always leave them wanting more is a sound theatrical maxim. RSC certainly do that.
Review: The Tobacco Merchant’s Lawyer
A one man treat that is both comic and satirical as a man of nae means tries to survive against those that have the means for survival
Review: Nel
A fast paced jam packed show, a cinematic experience without technology, a multisensory treat.
Review: Boris & Sergey: Preposterous Improvisation Experiment
Sublime puppetry and improvisation performance with lots of laughs and an underlying sensitivity
Review: A Series of Unfortunate Breakups
A bittersweet tale of 3 relationships that never quite end the way you expect
Review: Eurobeat
High production values and strong performances make this show fun for fans of Eurovision
Review: The Seagull
Olivia Vinall provides a tremulous foil for Joshua James’ vulnerable volatile Konstanin in a fresh emphasis on youth superbly undermined by Anna Chancellor and Geoffrey Streatfeild. World-class English-speaking Chekhov.
Review: Platonov
James McArdle’s vibrant, sexy quixotically self-aware Platonov is just the star of this family of actors assembled for the three Chekhov plays at the National, with perfectly judged reactions from each other like a small repertory company. In David Hare’s vivid yet faithful version - compressed by half - it’s no small feat to have finally delivered a definitive sixth masterpiece of Chekhov’s.
Review: The Plough and the Stars
The plot’s shocking volte-faces, so perfectly realized here streaked with blood and comedy, make this O’Casey’s masterpiece. Stephen Kennedy’s dipsily detailed drunk is the great turn here in a cast where Judith Roddy, Justine Mitchell, Josie Walker, and Grainne Keenan also excel in this flawless production.
Review: Unreachable
A profoundly quizzical play about directorial and film-mogul silliness, using one liners and silliness to address these questions.
Review: Joan, Babs & Sheila Too
A stunning traversal of Joan Littlewood’s life by Gemskii and Conscious Theatre. Without her, there would never have been A Taste of Honey, Oh What a Lovely War, or much of postwar British theatre.
Review: The Flick
Mesmerising exploration of three characters maintaining a failing cinema, heartbreakingly funny, mimetically riveting. One of the Nationals’ very finest new plays under the new regime.
Review: A View From Islington North
Intermittently thrilling plays from the urgent left, two premieres and a couple of small gems roughened by the tumble of Westminster and the Corporates that really must be seen - unless you’re Gideon.
Review: Wolf Meat
Profoundly silly and farcically serious show with just the kind of anarchy that offers coke to audience members. Contains brief and ghastly nudity.
Review: Pinocchio
Join Bard & Troubadour on a truly magical journary for all ages, as Pinocchio faces scoundrels, set-backs and sea monsters on his quest to become a real boy, in this loving recreation of the classic Italian fairy tale.
Review: Here All Night
Sam’s all night shiner, Beckett’s Wake and Cabaret. Haunting, funny, unmissable.
Review: Something Rotten
Scintillating subversive and original take on Hamlet’s unhappy uncle, weighed down by doubts and too many jokers. Beware of complicity.
Review: The Threepenny Opera
A coming-of-age for Rufus Norris, a wholly credible, cheekily interventionist Threepenny Opera with a few devastating critiques
Review: First Love
Conor Lovett lightens his pitch Becket’s exploration of lust, sexual disgust and the intolerable consequences of generation.
Review: The End
Conor Lovett rivets with a naturalistic pitch in this cut-down stand-up Beckett diminuendo of an ex-inmate’s prospects. More tour de force in a tour de farce of Beckett’s genius.
Review: And the Rope Still Tugging Her Feet
Compelling, downright funny yet tragic true narrative of the Kerry Baby affair of 1984. Caroline Burns Cooke triumphs as writer and actor.
Review: Comedy Club 4 Kids
Funny, warm and accessible comedy stand up for children and their parents.
Review: Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour
Lee Hall’s and Vicky Featherstone‘s sell-out Edinburgh Fringe musical comes to the Theatre Royal. It more than bears out the accolades heaped on it.
Review: The Beckett Trilogy
Conor Lovett stuns in this cut-down stand-up Beckett-novels-for-beginners-and-enders three-hour whistlestop. A tour de force as well as a tour de farce of Beckett’s genius.
Review: The Bald Prima Donna
Spirited pacey revival of Ionesco’s first play, with one stand-out performance and superbly idiomatic one. A perfect introduction to the playwright.
Review: A Dirty Get-Away!
Brilliantly silly and profound meditation on the nature of memory loss as innocence
Review: Loud Poets
Bold, loud, passionate and engaging – poetry for the masses with a wonderful energy
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