Review: Anna & Marina
Dovetailing invention and quotation triumphs. It’s a narrative of thrust and weave as well as tone. Overall it's terrific: one of Richard Crane’s very best works. If you care for gripping drama, can be drawn by hypnotic verse and superb acting, haste over to this unique hour.
Review: The Way Old Friends Do
In a show celebrating the revival of friendship, twice, through the love of a non-binary ABBA tribute band, it’s good to know who you can rely on. You can rely on this scintillating, bittersweet play too. Absolutely recommended.
Review: No I.D.
The celebration of acceptance and being wholly comfortable in your own body for the first time in your life transmits to everyone. It should make you more comfortable, knowing how Tatenda Shamiso radiates the joy of his, bestowing a kind of benediction. A quietly groundbreaking show.
Review: Jules et Jim
A thoroughly worthwhile, and in several senses heady undertaking. And certainly worth seeing.
Review: Quality Street
Don’t miss this exquisite confection. After this production, there’s possibly no return to the original. It’s a rethinking paying homage to both the sentiment, which it never upstages, and the brand and its factory-workers the comedy gave its name to.
Review: Phaedra
Stone suggests only someone as demonstrably damaged and damaging as Helen (Phaedra), in other words a politician, might pursue self-destruction so relentlessly; and devastate so many. It’s brilliantly achieved elsewhere than with the core relationship.
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: The Only White
A vital play that needs to seen. See it here and subsequently a well-deserved transfer or revival.
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: SAP
SAP will endure as both a superb play and key witness in a struggle for acceptance, to be heard. See it.
Review: Out of the Frying Pan
If you know Judy Upton as a playwright you might have an inkling what to expect in this debut fiction. Witty, observant, self-deprecating, very funny, full of subversive glee, with its own moral field. I’d put nothing past this extremely gifted writer
Review: BLACK SUPERHERO
Sharp, shapely dialogue, sizzling humour, ambitious theatricality a compelling story wrapped in baggy metaphors. There’s never a moment when the play’s proved less than engaging, sometimes riveting. A must-see debut play.
Review: Wish You Were Dead
There’s a good enough story for this to be recalibrated. Though If you’re a James fan, you’ll need to see this.
Review: Mad(e)
A mind-altering experience, and in writer and director one of the most inspiring partnerships I’ve seen
Review: Graceland
Understanding traumatic narrative from the outside: seeing through a skylight, darkly. An impressive debut
Review: Romeo and Julie
A gentle, heart-warming, occasionally hilarious play, and strikes a fresh redemptive note in Gary Owen’s work. Callum Scott Howells and Rosie Sheehy blaze across this play like meteors inexorably entering the earth’s orbit, seemingly doomed to break up or worse. And did I say it showers screamingly funny one-liners too?
Review: Sound of the Underground
It’ll remain one of the break-out, breakthrough, certainly ground-breaking shows this year.
Review: A Mother’s Song
An incredible musical feat of centuries of connection made through song, motherhood and a dazzling sense of bridging continents and time with ballads.
Review: In the Net
See In the Net for its ambition, its occasionally gorgeous language, Offie-worthy lighting and in Carlie Diamond, an actor to greet and watch, making I predict one of the most assured debuts of the coming year.
Review: Irrelevant
Keith Merrill and Debbie Chazen have crafted an Everywoman (and man) for whoever’s gifted yet still never makes it. Look forward to a lot more of this kind from Merrill’s Le Gallienne.
Review: Hakawatis Women of the Arabian Nights
Original, bawdy, exploratory, seductive and elegaic in equal measure. A Faberge egg, continually hatching.
Review: Mother Goose
This is more than panto: it’s an affirmation of something that panto here welcomes in, in our time uniquely invoking layers as only Elizabethan/Jacobean drama can.
Review: 12:37
The Finborough produces marvels, though this one, without losing its dazzling, tight DNA, deserves the widest possible transfer.
Review: Henry V
Bracing, fresh, wholly re-thought in every line, emerging with gleaming power, menace and wit. And I defy anyone not to smile at this new take on Shakespeare’s downbeat ending.
Review: David Copperfield
A paean to live theatre; soaring seasonal spirit, struck with tenderness, joy, sorrow, plangent affirmation.
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: Sarah
An unnerving testing of that space between naturalism and hallucination, redemption and blank unknowing, studded with a language that flies off the page.
Review: Here
A major talent with a distinct voice, and the consummate assurance to express it with stamp and precision
Review: The Lavender Hill Mob
Certainly enjoyable and the second act shows what it might be. There’s not a moment’s longeurs
Review: Not One of These People
Worth 95 minutes of anyone’s time, you come out heavier with the weight of where you’ve been.
Review: The Seagull
A Seagull for the initiated, a meditation rather than the play itself, it’s still a truthful distillation, wholly sincere, actors uniformly excellent
Review: Cher A New Musical
See it here first before you feel compelled to travel to pay West End prices.
Review: Jews. In Their Own Words.
It’s Jonathan Freedland’s and Tracy-Ann Oberman’s brilliance to bring off-kilter, casual devastation to the stage; in raw unsettlings that for many keep the suitcase packed.
Review: Dracula
Robert Hamilton’s novel stage version of Dracula should be published and used widely
Review: Silence
More of a scattering of earth, ashes and love than simply groundbreaking. But caveats aside, groundbreaking it is.
Review: I, Joan
The title role goes to Isobel Thom, making their professional debut: the greatest I’ve ever seen.
Review: Breathless
A pitch perfect drama with crafted bittersweet comedy which explores the challenges of navigating life whilst not coping with a mental health disorder.
Review: A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain
A powerful story with mythical qualities about life in the hostile environment
Review: Born Under a Bad Sign
A brilliant exploration of what hope can do when you follow a team that’s not one of the big two…
Review: Swell
A fascinating drama based around the effects of impending environmental catastrophe rather than the science of it.
Review: S.O.E.
Well balanced and effective theatrical homage to the bravest and most selfless act that could be imagined.
Review: Look no hands
A fascinating tale, a great bike and a glimpse into an unusual manifestation of PTSD
Review: A Wilde Life
Oscar Wilde is in a bar in Paris and wants to talk about himself - what could possibly go wrong?
Review: The Girl Who Was Very Good At Lying
An outstanding powerful, imaginative and funny exploration of the stories we tell to escape who we are and where we are.
Review: Cicely and David
An intriguing glimpse into the friendship that started the modern hospice movement (and is a fund raiser for the Hospices of Hope - Ukraine Appeal)
Review: Palimpsest
A very creative and funny show about going on a date and finding yourself in a show.
Review: About Money
A fantastic dramatic performance of a very difficult topic performed in an exceptionally authentic manner
Review: Decision – An Irish Dance Play
Joyous, poignant and inventive fusion of theatre and Irish dance.
Review: Earwig
A fast-paced elegant exploration of female emancipation in the 1920’s world of entomology (things with wings that sting!)
Review: Ghislaine/Gabler
A spell binding multi layered exploration of privilege, entitlement, and the desire to control…
Review: Tinted
A drama about blurred lines of consent as a young visually impaired woman negotiates sex and relationships.
Review: One of Two
Wry, poetic and just plain angry - a comedy drama from a young Scot about him, his twin and why life has treated them differently.
Review: Around the World with Nellie Bly
An intrepid 19th century traveller in the hands of a first class 20th century story teller. A perfect reminder than adventures aren’t just for boys!
Review: The Last Return
A highly entertaining ensemble performance that is a masterclass in characterisation and comedic timing
Review: Triple Bypass: Three Ten Minute Plays About Living for Death and Dying for Life
Three great wee plays performed with a degree of skill
Review: Truth’s a Dog that must to Kennel
'Stand up meets metaverse' - Bravo, Tim Crouch, the Fool we need to interpret our sad, new world.
Review: The Kettling
Highly effective piece of youth theatre drama ostensibly covering climate change but including a whole lot more
Review: Boris the Third
A lighthearted telling of Boris Johnson’s less than successful acting career. Slapstick abounds!
Review: Jesus, Jane, Mother & Me
A Brilliant Fringe Acting Debut in a Scintillating and Ultimately Shocking Play.
Review: Move Fast and Break Things
Intriguing impactful story, characters and fascinating video and puppetry!
Review: All Of Us
As Ken Tynan once said of another debut, I don’t think I could love someone who doesn’t love this play.
Review: The Poison Belt
So what could a Sussex-based sci-fi tale of 1913 by Conan Doyle – a space-borne poison belt of gas that hits the earth – possibly have to do with the week of the greatest temperatures known in the UK?
Review: Shake the City
A real play bursting out of its hour-plus length; with complex interaction, uncertain journeys, each character developing a crisis of isolation only resolved by sisterhood
Review: That Is Not Who I Am
Lucy Kirkwood prophesies what’s in store with savage fury, and no-one’s exempt, least of all her.
Review: The Southbury Child
Perfectly freighted; each character pitched with just enough choice to make us wonder what life, not Stephen Beresford will do with them. Outstanding.
Review: Cluedo
An object lesson in comic timing; a steep cut above the ‘real’ whodunnits we’re likely to see this year or next.
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