Review: The Constant Wife
An outstanding revival and adaptation, a faultless cast, an award-winning set too. Brighton has been lucky in its last three productions. This though is the gem. Outstanding.
Genre: Feminist Theatre 0
Review: 1.17am, or until the words run out
A cracking debut that picks you up and never lets go. Like any play that gifts us believable characters, it leaves you wondering what life, not just Hunter Gordon, will do with them. Highly recommended.
Review: Mrs President
Mrs President will continue to haunt and I suspect, develop. Be haunted though.
Review: The Playboy of the Western World
An impossible balance, but having seen Playboy at farce-speed, it’s good to weigh in with a loquacious backbeat of despair. Wholly absorbing.
Review: Ballet Shoes
A winter paean to wonder and possibility, Kendall Feaver’s and Katy Rudd’s Ballet Shoes has proved as evergreen as the book itself. Outstanding.
Review: Jobsworth
A must-see one-person coffee-black comedy, it lasts a full 90 minutes. Libby Rodliffe is a phenomenal performer. And uproarious.
Review: Kindling
Sarah Rickman and Ciara Pouncett have assembled a superb team. They need to revisit the script once or twice more and they’ll have a winner.
Review: We Are the Lions, Mr Manager
At a time of racialised targeting – a distraction technique born of the very forces Jayaben Desai fought – Grunwick speaks with startling relevance.
Review: Keep Your Sunny Side Up
In nearly every way exceptional. Hampshire is consummate and sets off Rouselle as worthy to inhabit Fields.
Review: Who Do They Think They Are?
A finely-written show, with tensions wrought individually to a satisfying whole.
Review: Cow/Deer
Emphatically theatre worth doing, worth attending, worth fighting to clarify and worth being changed for.
Review: Natasha Cottriall (God Save My) Northern Soul
Time will deepen the shadows and writer/actor Natasha Cottriall shows this in the very last moment
Review: Natasha Cotriall (God Save My) Northern Soul
Time will deepen the shadows and writer/actor Natasha Cotriall shows this in the very last moment.
Review: Sense & Sensibility
Austen fans can feel they’re delivered the story’s heft, if not all its socially pinched circumstance. It’s a small gem.
Review: The Wild Washerwomen, Brighton Open Air Theatre
Ella Turk-Thompson has scored something special here.
Review: AETHER
A show about knowing nothing... and it's jam packed. Lightning-quick, clever, feminist, and always entertaining show about discovery
Review: The Lolita Apologies
A sharp, two-person confrontation with Lolita’s cultural legacy, where minimal staging meets maximum emotional stakes.
Review: That’s Why Mums Go to Switzerland
A stunning portrait of three generations of women and the impossible weight one must carry.
Review: UnTethered
UnTethered could be outstanding and groundbreaking. What Tara Sirois does next could, and should, unnerve everyone; including herself.
Review: Extraordinary Women
For a bijou summer in a bottle, this can’t be beaten. Exquisite, painfully funny, and hinting at the depths Mackenzie found to his own chagrin. A gem.
Review: Lynn Nottage Intimate Apparel
Everything built up, like a corset, is unloosed. What we thought we knew we don’t. Outstanding.
Review: Claire Dowie H to He (I’m Turning into a man) Finborough
A must-see for anyone who loves breakthrough: genre-defying, then genre-defining theatre.
Review: Sarah Ruhl Eurydice
Sam Chittenden coaxes provisional miracles from her cast and space. The medium’s playful, even fun. The message though is bleak; and love is still in the letting go.
Review: La Ultima Muñeca: A Theatrical Quinceañera
Profoundly beautiful immersive theatrical work about the end of girlhood
Review: Charlie Josephine: I, Joan
Daisy Miles, supremely, Laurits Hiroshi Bjerrum and Rhys Bloy excel in a fine cast and prove this clarion of a play can rise again triumphantly.
Review: Beth & Josie EXPOSED: F*&# De$antis
A stand-up comedy show that is a big middle finger to DeSantis.
Review: Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens After The Act Royal Court Downstairs
Most of all this musical is necessary. With four outstanding multi-roling performers, a message both affirmative and defiant; and with a fierce joy that makes it a must-see.
Review: Athena Stevens Diagnosis
Over 50 minutes, a compelling, unique and disturbing vision unravels: prophesying prophesy is invisible. That’s why as many as possible should see it.
Review: Corrina O’Beirne With Ruby & I
Corrina O’Beirne ‘s a name to seek out in future and in Kempell and her cast and creatives, she’s found first-rate advocates. A must-see.
Review: Helen Edmundson The Heresy of Love
A brave undertaking – typical of Gerry McCrudden and his teams - and a rare opportunity to see this superb, all-too-topical play.
Review: Lula Mebrahtu I Am – OommoO
Everything you’ve heard is true. Lula Mebrahtu is memserising, and I Am – OommoO like its creator has vast potential.
Review: Playhouse Creatures
When Doll Common claims “Life’s like a storm. Don’t get in its way” one thinks of the stoicism of those in the eye of it, and their audience. A consummate revival.
Review: Men’s Business
A quietly phenomenal, ground-breaking play, blistering in sumps of silence. See it.
Review: Jane Upton (the) Woman
A ground-breaking play, fully deserving of its London run. Catch it there.
Review: Son of a Bitch
Anna Morris heightens tragedy and misogyny with gags, humour and farcical horror. Do catch this fleeting gem, running for just two more weeks before it touches down
Review: Khawla Ibraheem A Knock on the Roof
What and who can you choose is something more people are forced to decide as the century rolls. But Mariam’s plight is specific, ongoing, now far worse and essential viewing.
Review: Belly of the Beast
Belly of the Beast should be a set text in schools. And should definitely tour there.
Review: Treasure Island
First-rate youth theatre, creatives and cast excel: detailed, funny, not to be taken over-seriously, then quite a bit more so.
Review: Sara Farrington A Trojan Woman
An acclaimed pocket tragedy which yet carries Euripides’ weight in Farrington’s framing, it more than touches the heart: it snatches it and hands it back as a sad and angry consolation.
Review: Cutting the Tightrope: The Divorce of Politics from Art
An essential, raging and ranging collection of works flashing with humour and teeth, flecked with harrowing stories and above all love for a humanity the establishment wishes us to other and consign to tragedy. A must-see.
Review: My Fanny Valentine: Rebirthed
Megan Juniper is the Disney Princess of Gynaecology in this hilariously funny mix of stand-up comedy, musical theatre, and vagina facts.
Review: Women Who Blow on Knots
As fine a realisation as anyone could manage. The immediacy, cries, reveals are inherently theatrical and precious. A must-see.
Review: The Welkin
The sheer acting catches fire: not a weak link. With their most ambitious production ID triumph. There’s nothing like them at full stretch.
Review: Autumn
This is a partially bewitching production and it might send you back to the novel or quartet
Review: Salomé
Dramatically this is the most creative response I’ve seen live. Here, a director’s reach should exceed their grasp, or what’s a production for.
Review: Abrasion
If high school health class had been this entertaining, I would have paid far more attention.
Review: The Years
This production reminds us it’s often the least theatrical, least tractable works that break boundaries, glow with an authority that changes the order of things.
Review: Geneva Convention
As this gets quieter, it shouts more loudly. Exciting as this is, it will devastate when it finds its arc. This might ascend into something crucial.
Review: That Witch Helen
An absorbing retelling. Whatever Ridewood and Sibyl Theatre tackles next will be worth waiting for.
Review: Women’s Writes
We’ve been lucky to sit in on the first stage of a very promising conversation collaboration, and theatre piece.
Review: Richard III
In a female-led cast led by the eponymous Richard III (Michelle Terry) it’s striking that the trio of cursing women is this production’s highlight
Review: Banging Denmark
This production’s 100 minutes are so absorbing you’re not quite sure if the time’s stopped, or just your preconceptions. Stunning, a must see.
Review: The Human Body
The work’s best at its quietest, where intimacy doesn’t need shouting. It’s still an intriguing development, as Kirkwood, as in her magnificent The Welkin, interrogates the condescensions of history.
Review: London Zoo
A masterly play in the making. It goes where very few dare, and in an environment we think we know. Very highly recommended.
Review: Cowbois
Cranford’s gone Wild West, via the Court and RSC. Cowbois is of course daft. But it’s magnificent in its silliness, contains wonderful – and truthful – moments. Deadly serious can have you rolling in the aisles and still jump up for the revolution.
Review: The Good John Proctor
A valuable corrective to anticipate both real events and Arthur Miller’s take on Abigail Williams
Review: The House of Bernarda Alba
Adaptor Alice Birch takes the House apart like Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture. Harriet Walter is magnificent: staring out like a jailor, patrolling. Hainsworth remains hypnotic and terrible, joyously sexual and headlong as her Juliet in self-destruction.
Review: The Good Dad (A Love Story), The Mitfords
Now a superb double-bill, and makes a compelling case for these two shows to be yoked together, with their intertwining of family, sisterhood, abuse and terrible consequences.
