Review: Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons
Think Nick Payne’s Constellations meets Zamyatin’s We. If you love new theatre, worth queuing for returns.
Genre: Theatre 0
Review: Glenda and Rita Live at The Rialto
Alexander Joseph and Ro Robertson team return in triumph.
Review: Sitting Pretty
When you see this show return, it’ll be outstanding, and in the frame for awards.
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: After All These Years
A superb play, it should as one director present said, be in the West End. With these actors.
Review: Chamberlain: Peace in Our Time
A light-filled small gem of a show, tuning into wireless crystals of a lost world.
Review: Between Two Waves
A play about the Climate Crisis, family, photography and being screwed by insurance.
Review: The Vertical Hour
The definitive Fringe revival of a mainstream play this year. Absorbing, baggy, intimate. See it.
Review: There’s a Ghost in My House
Stunning. Greet the nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.
Review: The Lady in the Van
Sarah Mann and her company will surely return with this gem of transubstantiation.
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: Bag Lady
This could develop into something special. Thoroughly recommended as an industrial-strength ice-breaker.
Review: I Wish My Life Were Like a Musical
Flawless, a stunning pocket-sized musical you really must see.
Review: Sacrament
A revelation, superbly written and acted. Comparisons have been made with A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing. I can think of no higher praise either. You must see this.
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: Illusions of Liberty
A finely-calibrated solo play of what it’s like to enter that tunnel of near-undiagnosable but very real illness. Corinne Walker’s both authoritative and quicksilver. Do catch it.
Review: Vespertilio
Vespertilio marks Barry McStay’s emergence as a writer of distinction. Anything he writes now should be looked out for.
Review: Jew… ish
One of the wittiest but also truthful comedies about love, identity, sexual politics and gefilte fish I’ve seen
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: New Moon Monologues April
As we saw in March, don’t be lulled by friendly colours and fluffy fonts. Queens of Cups again proves they’re a company to revel with and wait for heart-stopping reveals
Review: Icarus
After all the gods and their lack of choice, we come to the final instalment, the human dimension. Where we have one. A heartfelt, satisfying finish.
Review: Orpheus
A terrific reinvention, bringing gods and heroines up from the death of myth to an altered world.
Review: Living Newspaper #3 Royal Court Theatre
Hot off Sloane Square a team of writers, actors and creatives twist the news to truth
Review: Scaramouche Jones
Shane Ritchie’s phenomenal energy and slidings in and out of tongues, mesmerises.
Review: New Moon Monologues March
Don’t be lulled by the friendly colours and fluffy fonts. Queen of Cups is absolutely a company to watch, and its showcase productions are literally unmissable
Review: Don’t Know Him From Adam
An interesting two hander well performed by a couple of experienced pros.
Review: Twenties
A rights of passage story which manages to tell the salutary tale of enthusiasm over experience.
Review: Adam
An astonishing performance of a personal journey that whispers in anger leads you to positives humanity throughout.
Review: Hymn
Its potency lies in a fine peeling apart by Adrian Lester and Danny Sapini, and the language that bridges it.
Review: We are the lions Mr. Manager
A great revisiting of the 70’s in an agit prop retelling two hander, of a time past but a prejudice still present
Review: Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday
A throwback performance to when Music Hall was King, Queen and Pearly Dreams.
Review: Before After
A pristine, heartwarming Valentine of a musical, starring a pair of real-life lovers, it deserves a real-life run
Review: The Water Cooler
A unique take on the problems of today which does manage to bring new perspective to the issue we face regarding race and mental wellbeing.
Review: The White Hart
Winner of an OnComm award from Off West End, another Upton triumph by stealth
Review: The Official Dick Whittington – A Pantomime for 2020
It’s a joyous confection out of thin lockdown.
Review: A Feast for the Senses! Creative, Imaginative and Heartfelt – Christmas Carol by Manual Cinema
Creative Imaginative and Heartfelt visual storytelling - theatre, shadow puppets, original live music!
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: Lament for Sheku Bayou
An astonishing story lamented and told in an extraordinary fashion that resonates and poetically demands change.
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: The Merry Wives of Windsor
A joyful fleet production, a more-than-rough magic. What renders OFS unique is their fearlessness: a humour and zest to tear into buried Shakespeare, read the entrails.
Review: Henry IV Part 1
Here the shadows fall the more convincingly to join with those chimes at midnight in Henry IV/2.
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: A Coward Coupling
Family Album is possibly the most disastrous production this already unfortunate play has ever sustained. More, Coward would declare it’s a travesty; of genius. Hands Across the Sea is pitch-perfect in a slightly outré version of what Coward meant.
Review: Troilus and Cressida
We’re privileged to see this rarely-performed work moulded by OFS. A play for our times.
