Genre: Drama 0
Review: The Approach
Three women. Three lives. Three conversations spanning half a decade. Woven and connected and Isolated and reconnected.
Review: Re: Production
An exceptionally well-crafted tale of how irony and IVF melt together but cannot break true love.
Review: Female Transport
A tale of transport to the colonies with punishment, exploitation and solidarity at the heart of a straightforward tale, told in an intimate setting.
Review: The Odyssey of Homer
A classic romp through a classic tale which shows enthusiasm and some flair.
Review: That Daring Australian Girl
This is an empathetic and heartfelt account of a life that has been, until now, ‘hidden from history.’
Review: A Joke
A joyful leap into the unknown. These incredible performers take you on masterclass of japery.
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: The Meeting
Quieter than Humble Boy, The Meeting juggles ideas as adeptly, and heart more fully perhaps than any Jones play. There’s every reason to celebrate Jones’ return to the stage.
Review: Lovesong
It remains a highlight of the season, a mostly wonderful celebration of this rare gift from Abi Morgan. Let’s have more drama like this.
Review: In the Night Time (Before the Sun Rises)
This production’s sheer inventiveness, the feral truth of the acting and fabulously exploding set surely reinvent something; and land this drama where it should be: in the bleak dark before a bleached-out dawn.
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: Romeo and Juliet
This Romeo and Juliet has all the pace and heart any production, modern-dress or period, demands. Karen Fishwick’s radiant Juliet is the soul that imprints itself on it.
Review: Believe As You List
A work rich in a few characters and poignant recognitions touching some of Massinger’s greatest. It’s the larky stoic Berecinthius though, who adds a dimension to the Caroline stage.
Review: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
It’s not shorter than before, but dare one say it, somehow Sparkier, conveying the author’s economy in a sinewy morality tale.
Review: Hamlet
In Michelle Terry’s quicksilver, quick-quipping Hamlet, much has been proved, from interpretive to gender fluidity in tragic action, that sets a privilege on being in at a beginning.
Review: As You Like It
A ripping discovery, a spontaneity and transparent skin to the process makes this thrilling. An As You Like It for the moment, certainly. But a moment of change.
Review: Sense and Sensibility
An adaptation to surprise and thrill you. Jessica Swale’s made Sense and Sensibility wholly hers, and quintessentially Austen at the same time. The cast render it a delight.
Review: Spun
The genius and universality of this play is that Hussain writes stingingly of what it’s like to be working-class as well as Asian.
Review: One For Sorrow
Cordelia Lynn’s a compelling dramatist whose political imagining is swept into musical paragraphs, landing on rhythmic details, pitches of self-betrayal.
Review: The Case of the Frightened Lady
This is still something of a vintage treat, and a rare opportunity to see the old master in action.
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: Sir Thomas More
This the second RND this year easily maintains the bar set so high by Eastward Ho! It’s fleet, superbly characterised in major parts but inevitably John Hopkins takes the palm for centring a superbly-realized portrayal.
Review: Section 2
This is an urgent, compellingly written stunningly acted piece of naturalistic drama. It should be filmed for mental health awareness week, and acted wherever possible.
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: Lonely Planet
If you know Angels in America, you’ll be grateful for Dietz’s concentration and economy. Much reckoning is packed into a little room.
Review: Utility
It’s a great phase of U. S. playwrighting, driven by women, and we’re lucky to be living in the middle of it. Schwend unleashes unexpected miracles and is one reason to see this hushed superlative of a play.
Review: The Chalk Garden
Not quite the last drawing-room comedy. But the Janus-faced prophesy of plays that took thirty years to catch up. Chichester’s season of women dramatists is one of the treasurable things of 2018.
Review: Machinal
Only when we see the best of Sophie Treadwell’s other thirty-eight plays will Machinal’s lonely pinnacle be augmented. This triumphant revival by the Almeida could signal the start. You must see this.
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 Daughter-in-Law
This is as pitch-perfect as we’re likely to get for a very long time. Ideas and instincts at war drive this play out of its apparent bounds but not out of Eastwood. And its aftermath is a hushed miracle.
Review: Translations
In this pitched-perfect National Theatre production in the Olivier, Translations taps as close to its power as it can. This is the version for a generation.
Review: Translations
In this pitched-perfect National Theatre production in the Olivier, Translations taps as close to its power as it can. This is the version for a generation.
Review: Act and Terminal 3
everything – set, actors, script – come mesmerizingly and painfully together.
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: random/generations
In a season featuring not before time several superb women dramatists – Enid Bagnold and Charlotte Jones follow – starting with tucker green is a proud moment for Chichester.
Review: Elephant’s Graveyard
It’s in NT’s best American vein. Forget Rehearsed Reading. It’s the real thing.
Review: And The Rope Still Tugging at Her Feet.
An Energetic Performance That Packs an Emotional Punch
Review: The Morning After The Life Before
A perfectly rendered, heart-warming, necessary light in the darkest of moments.
Review: Falkland
It’s a work with much to tell us: of the unlooked-for consequences of a buried war. Of elective affinities and choosing to adopt the war-bereft, whatever condition they’re in.
Review: An Evolution of a Sexual Bean
The Funny and Empathetic Show Our Inner Teenagers Needed to See
Review: Blank Tiles
A heartrending tragic-comedy one-man show about memory, Scrabble and Alzheimer’s.
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: Coldstream: Critical Threat
"A poignant, contemporary, powerfully evocative play asking some uncomfortable questions"
Review: Under The Skin
An uninvited journalist knocks on the door of a Holocaust survivor, for an unexpected interview.
Review: Dial M for Murder
This production of Dial M for Murder is in the best traditions of the house. A superb entertainment, suavely and consummately executed with some depth, it must feel reassuring to tread in such a solidly realised black and white world.
Review: Not Talking
Not Talking is a superb, affirmative debut play, up there with Bartlett’s finest, prophetic of much later work.
Review: Macbeth
There’s a visceral intent and bravery, a willingness to tear though every received nostrum, some wild use of the revolve with an admittedly frantic cast trying to catch a magic roundabout, that suggests something magnificent could be made of it all. The rationale’s an urgent one: in a post-Trump post-Brexit post-climate-refugee state we could even be looking at this world soon.
Review: The Fall
It’s a play which for theme, formal handling and ingenuity would be highly recommendable alone. Coupled with the excitement of ten young actors getting the measure of this and themselves provides a thrilling reach into tomorrow, including the tomorrows we hope never come.
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: King Charles III
This is an outstanding production, one of the two or three finest amateur ones I’ve ever seen. It can hold its head amongst consummate professional ones.
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: 4.48 Psychosis
An outstandingly imaginative, fearless recreation of Kane’s testament in another medium. It triumphs and is easily the most remarkable, necessary opera to have been produced in years.
Review: Moormaid
Bott asks serious questions. How can a terrorist redeem themselves, and how do individuals negotiate this? Can art play any part in rehabilitation?
Review: Absolute Hell
This can’t be seen as anything less than a triumph of Ackland’s skein of characters caricatures and remarkable vision – which Hill-Gibbins consummately brings off. We’re not used to this scale, perhaps, from this period either. It’ll take some time to settle, and can’t be essayed too often with such a cast. But it is treasurable.
Review: The Writer
This is necessary, exciting, playful, and still unsettling, not just because of what it asks but the manner of narration. It’s also seminal.
Review: Mayfly
Mayfly’s a play conscious of its deft artistry. Equally though it’s a work that despite its buzzing coincidences never loses the pulse of its profound ache. That’s why it’s so heartbreakingly funny, tender, even affirmative. A superb debut, the first it’s to be hoped of many others here. Joe White’s one to watch, and so is the magnificent Orange Tree, invariably staging a mighty reckoning in a little room.
Review: The Winslow Boy
It’s a uniformly excellent cast. For Tessa Peake-Jones and particularly Aden Gillett, Timothy Watson and above all Dorothea Myer-Bennett, this is a treasurable revival of a now classic play, whose themes are every week recalled in political injustices visited by government on defenceless people. ‘Let right be done’ is as sadly relevant as ever.
