Genre: Dark Comedy 0
Review: Scenes with girls
Scenes with girls owns a buzz, a life, a difference about loving that gives it a sliver of unique.
Review: The Winterling
A triumph. Nearly flawless, it must be seen by anyone interested in contemporary drama.
Review: A Day in the Death of Joe Egg
Over 50 years on, this still sets benchmarks. Its power to enthral, to appal can never date.
Review: All’s Well That Ends Well
Hannah Morrish’s Helena shines in this achingly desperate, quietly beautiful production.
Review: Fleabag
Original, raw, brilliantly funny and devastating. This production is Fleabag neat. Its harrowing streak of genius burns like a healing scar torn.
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: Umbrella Man
Start your Fringe day with a bang in the hands of a very talented poet and storyteller
Review: The House of Influenza
A solo show of many zany characters exploring what one might do in a suburban zombie attack if an over indulgence in horror movies is your only frame of reference
Review: Hitler’s Tasters
You will stumble out at the end completely bowled over by the power of this play
Review: The Mayor’s Debate of Tranquility, Nebraska
A darkly wry commentary on decorum in American politics
Review: Little Miss Sunshine
It’s a quiet heartbreaker, with stoicism and love the only answers. Do see it.
Review: Henry IV Part 2 or Falstaff
The triumph of this newly-energized production is bringing the darker Falstaff to a diverse audience
Review: INK Festival Feast From the East
I’ve not seen a festival of short plays to compare with these.
Review: The Glass Piano
A bewitching mix of deconstructive magic and fabulous therapy, it’s above all Grace Molony who brushes distinction into this already distinctive production.
Review: Mary’s Babies
Maud Dromgoole’s proved more than adroit, skilful, and deliciously risk-taking. A must-see.
Review: Rotterdam
Rotterdam’s an outstanding play about sexual identity, choices, and above all what it means to transition.
Review: Loving Androids
A beautifully-constructed play, small in compass, big in scope and deft at managing the transitions
Review: Shipwreck
A superb ensemble piece. Of all dramas on these interesting times in America, it’s the one truly necessary.
Review: Cyprus Avenue
Devastating drama about the DNA of bigotry; and it all starts in surreal farce.
Review: The Lady From the Sea
A groundbreaking production. Even outside its unique terms it’s outstanding.
Review: The Tell-Tale Heart
As an electric shock to schlock gothic, theatre doesn’t come much better than this.
Review: Allelujah!
Bennett’s exhorting us to fight back with laughter and rage in this riveting, timely play. It’s a sad and angry consolation.
Review: The Little French Lawyer
Make friends with this troubling, deeply fascinating, vitally sour play.
Review: Stories
Utterly compelling. Anything Nina Raine writes now is routinely expected to touch greatness. No pressure.
Review: Cock
A superb revival of Bartlett’s warmest, most ground-breaking, perhaps most enduring play so far.
Review: Measure for Measure
The most thoughtful and thought-provoking recreation of a Shakespeare play this year.
Review: Happy Now?
However fine the original 2008 cast, you won’t miss them with this company’s revival of a stunning contemporary play. See it.
A completely absorbing experience packed into a pulsing interior. Don’t miss it.
Review: The Graduate
There’s so many reasons to see this production. It’s worth hanging around for returns.
Review: Home, I’m Darling
It’s a moment when rejoicing to concur with the general public, as Samuel Johnson once did over Gray’s Elegy, is the only thing to do.
Review: Fear Itself
funny, dark and frightening - a psychological thriller that will keep you on your toes
Review: Katie Johnstone
Most of all you take away the sheer bravura of Georgia May Hughes’ throwing everything up in the air. She carries the energy to a cheery bleakness. And you want to cheer.
Review: The Merchant of Venice
Exceptional in many things, it’s almost a classic production and definitely worth a detour for.
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 Winter’s Tale
If Sicilia and its dense expressive syntax could rise elsewhere, this might be altogether remarkable. As it is, enjoy its slow burn.
Review: No One is Coming to Save You
No One is Coming to Save You makes me want to see a lot more of Nathan Ellis.
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: Fleabag
Original, raw, brilliantly funny and devastating. This production is Fleabag neat. Its harrowing streak of genius burns like a healing scar torn.
Review: Confidence
This is a must-see in reviving the theatrical profile of a fine dramatist for too long shrouded in the digital of radio and TV when the acoustic world is claiming her back.
Review: Blank Tiles
A heartrending tragic-comedy one-man show about memory, Scrabble and Alzheimer’s.
Review: Into the Woods
This is an outstanding first-class revival, but more, it’s intimate knowing and innocent at the same time: it sports a residual wisdom beyond its brief.
Review: Blue Sky Thinking
Many arts-driven people forced into the corporate world might well see this play answers their condition like few others.
Review: When the Wind Blows
BLT have produced in less than two weeks two outstandingly fine full-length productions. This latest offering confirms this theatre’s confidence in producing stark contrasts: an unfashionable yet horribly topical drop of silence into a bustling city.
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: The Sorrowful Tale of Sleeping Sidney
This is a gem of many colours. Do see it. The miraculous construction’s matched by Jordan’s storytelling and sense of dark mischief. In Jordan’s hands it’s a re-possession of lost innocence by a strange sleight of a knowing child.
Review: How It Is
You’ll have to see this. It’s in no way a continuation of their previous Beckett. and it’s immersive, outstanding, unrepeatable and unimaginable anywhere else: Gare St Lazare, and in the UK, no-one but the Print Room it seems would dare to stage it.
Review: Grotty
Know the Dalston lesbian scene? Verbally and dramatically as well as breaking new ground, this sings. Do see Grotty at the Bunker and be illumined. It’s rare to see such brutal tenderness laugh itself to the lip of the balcony.
Review: Nine Night
Natasha Gordon emerges as a playwright whose capacity to balance seven characters in profound ambivalence – and shuddering proximity - to each other is both thrilling and wholly assured. Anything Gordon does now must be eagerly anticipated.
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: Instructions For Correct Assembly
As an ingenious commentary on everything from genetic manipulation to over-determining children’s achievements, Instructions For Correct Assembly is a necessary unforgettable object lesson, in all senses.
Review: Reared
Reared is above all forgivingly funny, John Fitzpatrick’s comedy exquisite in group dynamics but sometimes on a telling image also contains create one of the most gripping story-telling scenes in recent drama.
Review: Bad Jews
This is a play supremely worth seeing: for its flayed comedy, acerbic wit, farce-dipped dynamics, monster roles, wincing and raw truths. It’s a triumph from all parties in the best NVT American vein. Don’t miss it.
Review: Female Parts
Adult Orgasm Escapes from the Zoo. That title, from the 1983 version of one of the plays presented here summarises what you can expect. Sadly, subversion has to be rationed. Franca Rame and Dario Fo’s five short plays from 1977 Female Parts, get two outings – they’re joined in a similar bid for self-determination by OneNess Sankara’s The Immigrant, the first black woman in space. Go: it’s likely someone will vault over your head.
Review: Humble Boy
Jones really deserves her place in the forefront of contemporary dramatists. Humble Boy confirms its own place, pivotal to he oeuvre which has grown more robustly and cleverly than the thematic flora or indeed bees that ululate to the end.
