Review: I’m Not Running
Compelling dissection of what hampers the mindset of our main progressive party.
Genre: Mainstream Theatre 0
Review: Antony and Cleopatra
Supremely worth it to see these characters weighing equal in their own balance, perhaps for the first time.
Review: Private Peaceful
This is as good as a one-person show of this kind gets. Andy Daniel should be up there above his own rows of five-star ratings.
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: The Outsider
Like so much from The Print Room, this feels like European theatre. And we need it more desperately than ever.
Review: Eyam
A ringing, tolling end to a pioneering season. This play must have a life – and already possesses a miraculous importunity.
Review: Aristocrats
Turner terraces a reading of Aristocrats that heightens Friel’s study in dislocation.
Review: Cyrano de Bergerac
A delightful night of theatre in an ensemble piece that brings the leid o oor land tae life fur the fowk tae tak delight wi
Review: Dance Nation
As an airborne metaphor for how you get to be grown-ups, what it does to you, Dance Nation takes as it were some beating.
Review: Copenhagen
A superb revival that can hardly be bettered, it’s more than enough to persuade us of Copenhagen’s classic status.
Review: The Play That Goes Wrong
A play about amateurs no amateur company should even dare contemplate. There’s genius in the timing of all this. Outstanding.
Review: Emilia
This is a necessary, thrilling play, its energy and message spill straight into the audience.
Review: Home, I’m Darling
It’s a moment when rejoicing to concur with the general public, as Samuel Johnson once did over Gray’s Elegy, is the only thing to do.
Review: The Death of Edgar Allan Poe
Equal parts ghost story, biography, gothic theatre, and poetry, The Death of Edgar Allan Poe is a funeral to which you should not be late.
Review: That Daring Australian Girl
This is an empathetic and heartfelt account of a life that has been, until now, ‘hidden from history.’
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: 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: Summer Holiday
Stunning Ray Quinn and ensemble work their bobby-socks off with notable support from Rob Wicks and his band. Give No. 9 a proper MOT and it’ll strike gold too.
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: This Is Elvis
Inevitably this stands or falls by Steve Michaels, but it could only be outstanding if the whole production revs around it, and this one fires into life, never letting up. This Is Elvis. Elvis lives. End of.
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: The Winter’s Tale
If Sicilia and its dense expressive syntax could rise elsewhere, this might be altogether remarkable. As it is, enjoy its slow burn.
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: Jumpy
You begin to wonder how life, not the playwright, will treat these playhouse creatures. De Angelis has hit a true vein. You must see this delirious state-of-the-pause play.
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: Legally Blonde
You must see this. Apart from the heroic production itself, if there’s one outstanding performer it has to be Lucie Jones with Rita Simons’ superb support. Jones' voice is stunning, stratospheric, above all characterful.
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: 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: Crazy For You
This is a blast of the purest kind. You have to see it. In terms of talent on display worked to a supreme ensemble pitch, this is quite simply the most stunning pure musical I’ve seen this year.
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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
Review: The Way of the World
A triumphant revival. What’s striking isn’t just the clockwork plotting but the amplitude, even insouciant luxury Congreve allows his characters to unfold in. It comes together in this rich, endlessly self-fascinated masterpiece from a master of self-effacement.
Review: Son of a Preacher Man
Son of a Preacher man has real potential. It’s easily more than a cut above a jukebox musical, and Revel-Horwood’s work particularly coupled with Herbert’s musical arrangements is exemplary. As is the marvellous and marvellously hard-working ensemble.
Review: Flashdance
It’s Joanne Clifton’s night. She lives Alex, dangerously pushing every routine with an extravagance, a hunger, sexiness and raw power that makes it one of the most memorable dance performances in a musical I’ve ever seen.
Review: Flashdance
Review: The Country Wife
A dazzling revival. If you don’t know the finale, with its superb resolution, this 1920s-style production is a memorable way in, with its clarity, its comedy and its last dangerous kiss. Stunning. Do see it.
Review: Summer and Smoke
Sometimes it fees as if Williams’ characters can’t breathe without their intrinsically skew-sided unhappiness. Ferran’s Alma though takes on a life that transcends this and makes one wonder again.
Review: Quartet
Like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, there are now two endings to Quartet. You must see this if you know the film only, or care about music, ageing, friendship and achingly lost love.
Review: Julius Caesar
Together with several definitive and newly-founded interpretations, it’s Hytner’s lithe political thriller that emerges by contrast as a physical assault on the senses. From out of the smoke and flashes of this outstanding production, there’s jumpings-on and off as participants run up from all sides and even jostle people out of the way.
Review: Bad Jews
This is a play supremely worth seeing: for its flayed comedy, acerbic wit, farce-dipped dynamics, monster roles, wincing and raw truths. It’s a triumph from all parties in the best NVT American vein. Don’t miss it.
Review: Humble Boy
Jones really deserves her place in the forefront of contemporary dramatists. Humble Boy confirms its own place, pivotal to he oeuvre which has grown more robustly and cleverly than the thematic flora or indeed bees that ululate to the end.
Review: Of Mice and Men
This is a first-rate revival. Everything snaps and sings with a lyric devastation that asks with Guthrie just whose land this is, in a year where presidential excesses have seen the US population ask the same question for the first time in generations.
Review: Brighton Rock
Greene’s original will continue to tease with its unrelieved religious intensity. Otherwise for a secular age this adaptation, and this production, is as good as it gets.
Review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
There have been classic accounts to eclipse this production, but Jack O’Connell in particular throbs with a ferocious identification few can have matched. Here too, director Benedict Andrews takes Maggie literally about who’s now the stronger, and Sienna Miller seizes her chance. It’s a riveting conclusion, for the right reasons.
Review: All’s Well That Ends Well
This is an All’s Well to believe in, and plucks, just this once, a happiness Helena so richly deserves with a husband who equally doesn’t.
Review: John
After Annie Baker’s outstanding The Flick in 2016 also in the Dorfman, her 2015 play John written two years later, has raised expectations that punch the roof of this intimate space. Whatever the premise, her priorities remain: the aching possibility of love in bleak solitudes inside or out, of healing, of forgiveness for the past, recent or historic.
Review: Belleville
Poots and Norton achieve a quivering fright and tenderness that alone make this a must-see. but if a touch incredible in one choice, it shows Herzog’s ability to combine the new post-naturalism with a rare character-driven ride to apotheosis, recalling dramas more ancient and elemental.
Review: The Snowman
The most enduring British Christmas hits are melancholy, in stark contrast to say American. There’s a profound sadness in the magic. Its not a long work, perfectly proportioned for children. It’s still the ideal winter present, especially on a first trip to the theatre.
Review: Rita, Sue and Bob Too
A first-class revival of a timely, still-urgent play, from an untimely-ripped dramatist, this is a must-see for anyone who cares about British drama, British history, and its more thoroughly-beleaguered people.
Review: Strangers on a Train
This ATG production should reach anyone who’s curious about Warner’s rather different outcome to the original, which Highsmith herself, writing later, might well have approved of; I prefer it too.
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: Titus Andronicus
The nadir in this ‘wilderness of tigers’ of late Rome is laughter. It’s devastating. Tears can’t express it any more. The production restores the centrality of Titus’ and Lavinia’s suffering against a moral and military decay about to sweep a ruined country. It’s a land where decent military advisors can no longer operate. We don’t need to look far for parallels in a world where this drama’s unpredictability seems everyday news. A Titus for our times, yes but this Titus fits all times, and restores the terrible to stare back at us. It’s what we hope to avoid, which makes it essential.
Review: Misalliance
Shaw’s 1910 extraordinary Misalliance starts as fizzing drawing-room verbosity and comes to rest only after an aircraft’s crashed in on it, with two aviators – one a feminist acrobat – and a gun-toting clerk pops out of the home’s Turkish bath. Often vintage Shaw, half English drawing-room, half French farce.
Review: Antony and Cleopatra
This is above all Josette Simon’s play as Cleopatra, with Antony Byrne nobly matching her by the hilt of something at least. Even at a late stage, Shakespeare dissolves all our previous assumptions. This production allows us to see them plain. It’s worth the illumination.
Review: Julius Caesar
Andrew Jackson’s backgrounding of current events in his production is shrewd: by suggesting film-sets with subtle obliquity he backs us into the glare of a Trump stadium, those overarching lights playing on all of us. It’s a superb conception, in some respects outstanding; in one, definitive.
Review: Dear Brutus
The clarity and truth Jonathan O’Boyle and his cast bring to this tricky, infinitely moving and sometimes maddening play, couldn’t be bettered. It’s a magically sad examining of how we limit ourselves, shutting off the forest of possibilities. Quite outstanding.
Review: Young Marx
It was a canny idea to kick off the first commercial theatre venture in years with a new comedy by the Marx Brothers – albeit set in 1850, and by a zany ancestor of Groucho’s band. Rory Kinnear’s Karl Marx is a gloriously edged reading of selfishness and fundamental idealism sitting uneasily with insensitivity
Review: Barber Shop Chronicles
Barber Shop Chronicles is a breath-taking revelation for those of us who had small inkling of a world in miniature. The act of barbering is more than an exchange of service with fringe benefits: it’s a profound act of human adjustment, including that vital glance in the mirror.
Review: A Judgement in Stone
Definitely worth seeing if you don’t know the story, and want to experience this live. We should hail Rendell adaptations, as thrillers with depth with much to say socially about the damaged and easily-damned, brooding on injustices.
Review: The Lady From the Sea
Happy endings don’t seek the sun, though it helps. This production’s memorable not just for the matching of locale and rationale with the original, but gently aligning the two other couples into the clearer optimism of the married couple. If not all the misty tension of the original emerges, there’s certainly something to be said for allowing such light to brighten the facets of this one jewel of affirmation in Ibsen’s mature output.
Review: How the Other Half Loves
Ayckbourn’s genius shows how literally times are changing in this early masterpiece portraying a sexual liberation more pervasive than the noisier one raging all around 1969: it shows how far the revolutions has as it were penetrated. Strachan’s brilliance is so complete, so identified with this particular play, you forget how superbly founded it is.
Review: The Suppliant Women
In one of the most radical productions ever mounted of Aeschylus indeed any Greek tragedy we’re literally taken to its roots: as in Greece, a community chorus of fifty, twenty-one of them the suppliant women of the play’s title. In this outstanding production, everything to resurrect this astonishing vision has been invoked.
Review: Coriolanus
It’s a Coriolanus memorable for its patient elaboration of the political as well as personal forces the central character’s torn apart by, and an active interrogation of the nature of democracy. We’re left with a broken Coriolanus between the twin pillars of what he loves most.
Review: The Kite Runner
David Ahmad’s anchoring central performance is enhanced by Jo Ben Ayed’s physical one. Theirs is a remarkable chemistry, radially informed by Doorgasingh and Faroque Khan’s reactions. It’s a potent, heartwarming and heartrending story, spellbindingly translated to the stage and here with more power even than before. Don’t miss it.
Review: The Wonderful World of Dissocia
A thoroughly decent reprisal of a modern classic that asks more questions than provides answers but gives us a polar bear instead
Review: The Real Thing
To luxuriate in a witty play with valiant emotional gambits, you’ll have to see The Real Thing for yourself. Fox bestrides this production like a hopeful monster who’s got lucky. He’s irresistible, and especially in the second half, enjoys the support of an energised cast. Do see this.
Review: Albion
Victoria Hamilton dominates, but Albion’s a fine ensemble piece. Goold has given Albion the air it needs, and it breathes back: chilly, autumnal, an unsettling parable on forcing an identity of ourselves.
Review: Beginning
Beginning is the kind of play we all know we need: wincingly heartwarming, devastatingly joyous. It’s quite wonderful. Don’t miss it.
Review: Insignificance
This masterly ensemble piece affirms relativity as a human agency, for which physics provides analogues but no solutions. Insignificance will be signifying for a long half-life, and this pacey production ensures its probing at fragility won’t be lost in brilliant collisions.
Review: Saint George and the Dragon
This is an unsettling, unsettled play. Creating its own world, it asks something of substance no-one else is quite doing – not even Rory Mullarkey previously in The Wolf From the Door. His adaptation of the Oresteia for the Globe has after all come between. It’ll be intriguing to see where this big-boned, big-themed dramatist will venture next.
Review: Rules for Living
Sam Holcroft modestly demurs her comedy Rules for Living is truly Ayckbournesque: she merely aspires to master some of his technique. It’s Season’s Greetings designed for robots. It’s a variation worth nailing though, not least because it interrogates a therapy many believe works.
Review: Knives in Hens
A play easily moving to classic status, this production supremely re-affirms its poetic ambivalence, opening up more than itself, even the play’s medieval setting. It persuades of a world crookedly trekking straight towards us.
