Genre: Magical Realism

Review: Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!
A cost-of-living revolution in St James Street? You’d better believe it as Triada Theatre kick off the weekend with Dario Fo’s 1974 Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! at the Lantern Theatre. Superb, energised theatre, rough occasionally, but mostly very-well performed, imaginatively staged, rapturously received. Now get out on the streets.

Review: SAP
SAP will endure as both a superb play and key witness in a struggle for acceptance, to be heard. See it.

Review: Cocky and the Tardigrades
Bonkers brilliance. Cocky couldn’t have been premiered with two more stunning actors, and the author’s flawless stepping-in remains remarkable.

Review: Far Away
Our greatest playwright since Beckett and Pinter. An outstanding revival. Hesitating?

Review: You Stupid Darkness!
Bleakly funny, with flickers of tragedy, to make you see how redemptive kindness is

Review: Sary
The imaginative force, language and unsettled serenity of this work demands a sustained run.

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: Outlying Islands
A first rate-revival of a small classic. Do seek out this rare, dream-like play.

Review: The Tell-Tale Heart
As an electric shock to schlock gothic, theatre doesn’t come much better than this.

Review: Metamorphosis
If you decide on one storytelling piece of theatre in this half of the Fringe, I doubt you’ll do better than experience this.

Review: The Twilight Zone
I’d like to see a more thorough-going homage to Serling’s work in particular and it’s good he’s at least well-represented here. His acute questioning, exploration of a more human agency and refusal to play too much with inexplicable spectacle marks him out as a more earthy but far more imaginative writer too. His stories are still absolutely contemporary ones: the others have dated as the future often does.

Review: The Missing Special
It’s all in the maths obsession. Think Nick Payne’s Constellations with a tighter focus on one event and its outfall and rewind. It’s a clever but also heartening play, which also asks what time does to two individuals who dream of the one direction but wake up without interpreting each others’ dreams, or finding when they do they’re different. And what to do.

Review: Babette’s Feast
Maxwell’s script of Babette's Feast helps conjure Buckhurst’s cast into conjurers. They’re both dream-inducing and hyper-alert, their timing and balletic movements spellbinding and unforgettable. It’s one of the finest recent productions from a theatre raising the most consistent magic in London.

Review: Blindfold: The Night of the Hunt
Four actors led by writer/director Sofia Stavrakaki enact what’s clearly a prison of a circus, people forced to perform a ritual of trouping for the delectation of a whip-cracking elite. A summary hardly does justice to the atmosphere this production evokes or the meta-language burning through the glares of hallucinated prey. You’ll know whether it’s for you if you like Beckett or European theatre

Review: Out of Blixen
Everything in Out of Blixen is realized with a magical economy. Kathryn Hunter’s s in her fluid element here, morphing into twelve-year-old girls and seasoned dowagers to her own directed paces The Europhilic Print Room has transformed the Coronet’s circular space into a consistent vision of 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: 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: The Rita Hayworth of this Generation
Dynamic, fascinating, hilarious and entertaining one woman show