Review: Men’s Business
A quietly phenomenal, ground-breaking play, blistering in sumps of silence. See it.
Genre: International
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: A Good House
A play deeper than the satire which propels it. And subtly layered enough to brush the epic. A stunning smack between the eyes and a must-see.
Review: Helen Edmundson (adaptor) Anna Karenina
With Diane Robinson’s team there’s a vibrant retelling, superbly produced
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: 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: Re:Incarnation
Powerhouse Afrodance celebrating the creative energy of Lagos, presented by Dance Consortium
Review: ECHO
Ultimately, the most telling line ”We are all immigrants across time” defines what remains an extraordinary experience
Review: The Beckett Trilogy
It’s reading Beckett in flashes of lightning and laughter. 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 Kite Runner
Spellbindingly translated to the stage and here with more power even than before. Don’t miss it.
Review: The Trials of Magnus Coffinkey
Of the 115 (mostly London) shows I’ve seen this year so far, it ranks as the most profound, and one of the very finest.
Review: The Melancholy of the Tourist
Paradise is found and lost in an intimate, visually compelling installation
Review: Lived Fiction
Unique, spellbinding, groundbreaking; above all makes everyone more alive to the possibilities of being human.
Review: Good-Bye
Wholly absorbing, wholly other, it’s a gem of the Coronet’s dedication to world theatre.
Review: Rika’s Rooms
Emma Wilkinson Wright manages the narrative as an odyssey punctuated by screams. It’s already a phenomenal performance and the actor is so wholly immersed in Rika you know you’re in the presence of something remarkable
Review: Cold War
Cold War ends with a draining-out of hope in Anya Chalotra and Luke Thallon; a desolate beauty the cast certainly earn.
Review: Phantasmagoria
There seem enough potential endings to make what happens neither predictable, nor entirely obvious. A first-rate cast with enough residual fascination in the characters they create to wonder at what life, and not just Deepika Arwind, might do to them. The terror is existential and we should ask what it might do to us.
Review: Los finales felices son para otros
An exquisite industrial and Argentinian take on Richard III
Review: Passing
A mesmerising play, one that won’t fade and whose topicality will only reverberate more. The dialogue’s consummate and touching, the gradual reveals of blindness – and blandness - to racism on a memory-trip with a disastrous family album, releases a slow detonation of all that’s wrong still. One of my comedies of the year. Pretty outstanding.
Review: This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Based on the writing of poet Tadeusz Borowski and the paintings of Arnold Daghani This Way For The Gas bears explosive witness to shape the pulse of that post-Holocaust world. Bill Smith, Angi Mariano and their colleagues have wrought an enormous service. In the last great reprise of 'Never' we realise we're seeing the finale of an emerging masterpiece.
Review: The Yellow Wallpaper
Stephanie Mohr’s adaptation is a remarkable manifestation (no other word seems more apt) of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story The Yellow Wallpaper, an important realisation of a key feminist awakening. It’s good enough for you not to want it depicted in any other way.
Review: The Father and the Assassin
There’s no finer dramatization of India’s internal conflicts. Hiran Abeysekera’s Gandhi-killer Godse stands out in this thrilling ensemble and storms it too.
Review: Mother Courage and Her Children
Beautiful production with stylised movement and physical acting
Review: Chevalier – Hobbyhorse Circus
A very sweet and well-executed homage to the circus horse, ideal for families with small children or those still young at heart.
Review: Yours Unfaithfully
In Miles Malleson’s play, full of probing discussions, there’s a refusal to tilt at solutions. You feel he’s lived along the line; his provisionality speaks with permanence. That’s what makes it so remarkable.
Review: Under the Kunde Tree
There’s much to learn here, and as theatrical spectacle this is the intimate intimating the epic. Clarisse Makundul has given us a powerful work, and I’d urge you to see it.
Review: Lovefool
Though it might be red-topped as a Fleabag for the abused, it’s so much more excoriating. It’s also a work profoundly moving, necessary and – particularly for Gintare Parulyte - an act of courage. Lovefool’s on till May 26th; do rush to this 55-minute must-see.
Review: You Bury Me
An essential play so rich in its one-hour-forty you emerge dazed with possibilities. Director Katie Posner hopes it’ll change you. So do I.
Review: Pussycat in Memory of Darkness
Neda Nezhdana’s play is a world: not simply a map of pain and war footage. Both essential and in the mesmerising Kristin Millward’s and Polly Creed’s hands, with this team, it’s almost a compulsory visit.
Review: Django in Pain
Poignant, charming and meaningful play that is imaginative and vibrant in vision and message.
Review: Dinner With Groucho
McGuinness produces one of his finest works wrought from the sawdust of others and rendered it the burst of stars that irradiate the end.
Review: Silence
More of a scattering of earth, ashes and love than simply groundbreaking. But caveats aside, groundbreaking it is.
Review: Circus Abyssinia: Tulu
Vibrant music, excellent acrobatic skills, fast paced with colourful lights and costumes!
Review: Mary, Chris, Mars
Imaginative - and will appeal to families with an interest in space, astronauts and object/shadow puppetry.
Review: The Father and the Assassin
There’s no finer dramatisation of India’s internal conflicts. Shubham Saraf’s Gandhi-killer Godse stands out in this thrilling ensemble and storms it too.
Review: Rice
Do see this work of understated virtuosity, rich in character, substance, a shape-shifting singularity.
Review: Statements After an Arrest under the Immortality Act
An important, scorching revival, Statements explores the limits of love in a forcing-house of oppression and racism.
Review: Mary Stuart
A new take on Schiller’s play that removes the men and truly heightens the drama.
Review: Misfits
An important play, tackling the deadly serious with laughter that all too easily could lead to stark tragedy.
Review: Troy Story
Again the most educative stand-up and a thrilling presentation. Oh and bloody funny on war, male sexuality and the Bechdel Test.
Review: Two Horsemen
The glaring energy of this piece can’t disguise how it strikes profundity in its funny-bone.
Review: Frankenstein
Imaginative, Exquisitely Haunting and Moving - Visual Storytelling at its best!
Review: Les Blancs
A superb realization of Lorraine Hansberry's unfinished masterpiece - a classic of Ibsenite proportions
Review: Three Sisters
This spectacular production beats with a fervour and purpose few adaptations achieve. Ellams has made Three Sisters new.
Review: Hunger
An exemplary, scrupulous production so starkly contemporary, it makes Hunger contemporary forever
Review: #We Are Arrested
Peter Hamilton Dyer carries this celebration of the conscience to be fully human
Review: My Brilliant Friend Parts One and Two
Cusack and McCormack give the performances of their lives
Review: A Letter to a Friend in Gaza
Amos Gitai’s curating hope from the ruins, impelling the audience to construct a narrative.
Review: Sadness and Joy in the Life of Giraffes
Rodrigues is a dramatist we need to see far more of.
Review: Taboo
A chilling glimpse into the world of a little known but influential woman from the Nazi era.
Review: The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys and The Laments
In nearly every way an outstanding pair of productions.
Review: What I Never Told You (Lo Que Nunca Te Dije)
An intimate glimpse into one couple’s relationship.
Review: The Flies
There’s nothing like the Exchange’s approach: their bi-lingual virtuosity burns questions.
Review: The Lady From the Sea
A groundbreaking production. Even outside its unique terms it’s outstanding.
Review: Underground Railroad Game
The most radical piece of American theatre I’ve seen, and certainly the bravest. See it.
Review: A Life On The Silk Road
An Epic and Unique Journey Through Dance, Music, Puppetry, and Physical Theatre
Review: HUFF
A gut-wrenching tale of Indigenous brothers caught in a torrent of solvent abuse in the wake of the death of their mother.
Review: First Snow / Première neige
Inventive bilingual collaboration where family tensions merge with debate around cultural identity
Review: £￥€$ (Lies)
By the end of this you’ll know far more about the banking sector than even Robert Peston explains. Now go and play them for a fool.
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: 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.
