Review: Relatively Speaking
With his new production director Robin Herford, most associated with this play, brings pace, panache, and more than a dose of Ayckbourn’s generosity of spirit
Genre: Mainstream Theatre 0
Review: What If If Only
Churchill’s anatomy of grief is what abides. Its emotional plangency and pulling the future open is unique.
Review: The Midnight Bell
An outstanding ballet by any standards. One that like its inspiration Patrick Hamilton will last.
Review: Twelfth Night
With Michelle Terry as Viola, one of the most touching and truthful Twelfth Nights I’ve seen.
Review: Romeo and Juliet
A fleet, brilliantly upending, wholly relevant take on the Verona-ready toxicity feeding male violence and young depression
Review: Dirty Dancing
There’s a fitting heart-warming climax to a dream of production. And a surprise to those who think they know the film.
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: Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied Tunisia
A profound parable for co-existence and its sometime impossibility, perpetually skewed by others’ disruptions.
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Even more than 2019, a carnival riot of joy – with enough misdirection to evoke moonshine
Review: This Beautiful Future
Heartstopping. There’s an absoluteness here we need. We must prove desperate for it or die ourselves.
Review: Sweet William
Naturally enriched by living with Shakespeare Michael Pennington unearths local habitations and names for him.
Review: Evening Conversations/Life Laundry
Engrossing, it should provoke. Sudha Bhuchar absolves us by being bloody funny.
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: Tom Lehrer
Another sovereign tribute. Stefan Bednarczyk brings Tom Lehrer swaggering out of retirement.
Review: On Arriving
On Arriving takes sixty minutes it seems we’ve been immersed in a Greek Tragedy of ninety. See it.
Review: and breathe…
Yomi Sode’s hybrid theatre is a compelling immersion of witness and poetry: we need more of it.
Review: Staircase
A first-rate revival of a play that with its ostensible shock-value in aspic, reveals subversions and a clever structure so unsettling we should all look in the mirror and wince.
Review: The Girl Who Was Very Good at Lying
Andrews vividly conveys what it is to be an undone thing, someone unravelling tales to live.
Review: Branching Out
Three very fine and one outstanding work, Scratches – the best kind of play on depression, self-harm, black holes. Because it’s screamingly funny and deeply connected to why we do theatre.
Review: Leaves
This haunting 45-minute tale is a superb small gem from Jermyn Street’s Footprints Festival.
Review: An Evening With Flanders and Swann
A sovereign tribute. If you know Flanders and Swann, you’ll know Bednarczyk.
Review: Romantics
As ever consummate, fine performances, and probing memorably into women Romantic poets
Review: Dazzling Divas
Issy Van Randwyck brings seven divas to life in this paean to tragic fulfilment.
Review: The Mahabharata
A dramatic sense of arrival the way the Odyssey here ended: a clash of even vaster ferocity, keening, treachery, humour, mischievousness, sacrifice and grief, joy and the agency of women.
Review: The True Story of the Little Girl who thought she was The Second Coming of Jesus Christ
Every little girl dreams of being special, but Ellie Rose doesn’t just dream – she knows she’s special.
Review: The Rape of Lucrece
The definitive way to experience this troublingly great, disturbingly unresolved poem
Review: Shaw Shorts
A joyous, heady and oh-so-welcome return to this intimate yet high-kicking theatre. An absolute must-see.
Review: Vagabonds My Phil Lynott Odyssey
An original off-kilter approach to elegy, tribute and becoming yourself.
Review: Two Horsemen
The glaring energy of this piece can’t disguise how it strikes profundity in its funny-bone.
Review: Hole
Don’t miss the chance to see this transcendent actor prove she possesses another dimension altogether.
Review: Living Newspaper #7
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch a group of young dramatists take on the future
Review: Living Newspaper #6
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch what this does with the future
Review: Living Newspaper #5
Like all the Royal Court’s Living Newspaper series, we need this. Watch.
Review: Outside
As with Inside, Outside not only fits us, they help us to move on, and become in their modest, unassuming and utterly transcendent way, part of how we learn to.
Review: Living Newspaper #3 Royal Court Theatre
Hot off Sloane Square a team of writers, actors and creatives twist the news to truth
Review: Hymn
Its potency lies in a fine peeling apart by Adrian Lester and Danny Sapini, and the language that bridges it.
Review: The Official Dick Whittington – A Pantomime for 2020
It’s a joyous confection out of thin lockdown.
Review: Nine Lessons and Carols
The Almeida’s another country. They do shows differently there. A bold communing of theatre stories with the fresh poignancy of what’s happened during 2020
Review: Death of England: Delroy
Renders huge black experience into a narrative that bears it, because so well-constructed, so character-driven and so inhabited by Michael Balogun whose blaze of awakening is both benediction and clarion.
Review: 15 Heroines: 15 Monologues Adapted from Ovid
Groundbreaking. The smallest producing theatre in the West End through lockdown has become the largest.
Review: The New Tomorrow
There’s a generosity here, a big hug. Theatre itself affirms the value of life to those who might yet shape it for the better.
Review: Love Love Love
Epic eavesdropping casts that ultimate spell: reading ourselves by flashes of lightning.
Review: Amadeus
In the most spectacular production imaginable, Lucian Msamati’s supremely crafted lead sets off the quicksilver of his rival Adam Gillen.
Review: The Deep Blue Sea
Helen McCrory plumbs the erotic despair of Hester Collyer’s abandoned woman in this absorbing revival of Rattigan’s masterpiece.
Review: Shoe Lady
Katherine Parkinson inhabits that breaking through the office crust asphyxiating us
Review: Les Blancs
A superb realization of Lorraine Hansberry's unfinished masterpiece - a classic of Ibsenite proportions
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This surely is the greatest Dream since Peter Brook’s landmark 1970 production.
Review: Coriolanus
A Coriolanus memorable for politics sinewed with personal forces: an active interrogation of democracy. And in Josie Rourke’s production Tom Hiddleston’s someone riven by intimations of his true self
