Review: The Fabulous Bäckström Brothers
An operatic clown show, first performed in Helsinki in September 2014.
Genre: Theatre 0
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: Fleabag
Original, raw, brilliantly funny and devastating. This production is Fleabag neat. Its harrowing streak of genius burns like a healing scar torn.
Review: Act and Terminal 3
everything – set, actors, script – come mesmerizingly and painfully together.
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: Tits in Space
A show with a wise sweetness at its core; a brightness to cast the growing shadows out there.
Review: Games by Henry Naylor
Two stars of the German athletics world have to deal with anti-Semitic discrimination at the 1936 Olympics
Review: Hamlet (An Experience)
This production of the Bard's famous play certainly lives up to its subtitle
Review: random/generations
In a season featuring not before time several superb women dramatists – Enid Bagnold and Charlotte Jones follow – starting with tucker green is a proud moment for Chichester.
Review: Elephant’s Graveyard
It’s in NT’s best American vein. Forget Rehearsed Reading. It’s the real thing.
Review: The Morning After The Life Before
A perfectly rendered, heart-warming, necessary light in the darkest of moments.
Review: The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety
A melange of music, spoken word and performance, musing on mental health.
Review: A Taco Truck on Every Corner…or Dreaming in English
One woman uses six characters to give a snapshot of the messy political divide in contemporary America
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: Creation (Pictures for Dorian)
A Transformative Night of Voyeurism and Exploring The Nature of Beauty
Review: Falkland
It’s a work with much to tell us: of the unlooked-for consequences of a buried war. Of elective affinities and choosing to adopt the war-bereft, whatever condition they’re in.
Review: An Evolution of a Sexual Bean
The Funny and Empathetic Show Our Inner Teenagers Needed to See
Review: Blank Tiles
A heartrending tragic-comedy one-man show about memory, Scrabble and Alzheimer’s.
Review: The Tempest
A superb, fleet outdoor Tempest. What it has to lack in quiet subtlety, it more than makes up in fleet humour with dispatch, keen wit, warmth, and truth.
Review: Into the Woods
This is an outstanding first-class revival, but more, it’s intimate knowing and innocent at the same time: it sports a residual wisdom beyond its brief.
Review: My Father Held A Gun
"A passionate, storytelling show with live cinematic music about war and peace, acts of heroism, and the love for life."
Review: Blue Sky Thinking
Many arts-driven people forced into the corporate world might well see this play answers their condition like few others.
Review: Whaddya Know – We’re In Love!
There’s first-class musical entertainment here, crouched under the disguise of a schoolboy plot. Irresistible.
Review: If I Catch Alphonso, Tonight!
Jenner’s moved out of the comfort zone of his Coward years which suit him particularly, or straight acting. It’s a remarkable feat.
Review: When the Wind Blows
BLT have produced in less than two weeks two outstandingly fine full-length productions. This latest offering confirms this theatre’s confidence in producing stark contrasts: an unfashionable yet horribly topical drop of silence into a bustling city.
Review: One Woman Alien
I can predict that by the end of its run, this should be the most outstanding one-person show you’ll see in the last week.
Review: She Wolf
So what did Harvey Weinstein and the fifteenth century European ruling classes have in common? Exactly. A lot. English has achieved a phenomenal amount. She co-ordinates everything as she directs and manages her own minimal props.
Review: The Odditorium Tribute to Ken Campbell
of you and won’t let go. Most theatre makers of whatever stripe are pretty clear Ken’s a game changer.
Review: Coldstream: Critical Threat
"A poignant, contemporary, powerfully evocative play asking some uncomfortable questions"
Review: Under The Skin
An uninvited journalist knocks on the door of a Holocaust survivor, for an unexpected interview.
Review: Blaas (Blow)
Tender, otherworldly, explorative and extraordinary, this is an exquisite show that is more than worth the trip out of town.
Review: Waiting For Curry
Susanne Crosby’s Waiting for is a four-hander with a social reckoning, and very unexpected plot point. The audience was packed. There’s a quietly sad magic to this low-key play; people recognize themselves in it. It speaks.
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: Pigspurt’s Daughter
Guardian obituary, 2008. ‘Ken Campbell was one of the most original and unclassifiable talents in British theatre of the past half-century.’ It just happens that his daughter Daisy is both that and far more. She’s one of the most cunning crafters of comedy and storytelling in the anti-business
Review: Not Talking
Not Talking is a superb, affirmative debut play, up there with Bartlett’s finest, prophetic of much later work.
Review: Eastward Ho!
This is one of the most exuberant and superbly orchestrated Read Not Deads I’ve seen.
Review: Proxy
Caroline Burns Cooke uses storytelling and physical performance to breath life into this true story of Munchausen by proxy.
Review: The Sorrowful Tale of Sleeping Sidney
This is a gem of many colours. Do see it. The miraculous construction’s matched by Jordan’s storytelling and sense of dark mischief. In Jordan’s hands it’s a re-possession of lost innocence by a strange sleight of a knowing child.
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: The Start of Something
A finely crafted set of interwoven monologues telling three women’s stories of love and loss
Review: The Fall
It’s a play which for theme, formal handling and ingenuity would be highly recommendable alone. Coupled with the excitement of ten young actors getting the measure of this and themselves provides a thrilling reach into tomorrow, including the tomorrows we hope never come.
Review: How It Is
You’ll have to see this. It’s in no way a continuation of their previous Beckett. and it’s immersive, outstanding, unrepeatable and unimaginable anywhere else: Gare St Lazare, and in the UK, no-one but the Print Room it seems would dare to stage it.
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: 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: Grotty
Know the Dalston lesbian scene? Verbally and dramatically as well as breaking new ground, this sings. Do see Grotty at the Bunker and be illumined. It’s rare to see such brutal tenderness laugh itself to the lip of the balcony.
Review: For King and Country
Terrific immersive fun. If you want to know what might have happened in an alternative December 1940, this is as exciting, informative and perhaps as authentic experience as you could encounter.
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: 4.48 Psychosis
An outstandingly imaginative, fearless recreation of Kane’s testament in another medium. It triumphs and is easily the most remarkable, necessary opera to have been produced in years.
Review: Moormaid
Bott asks serious questions. How can a terrorist redeem themselves, and how do individuals negotiate this? Can art play any part in rehabilitation?
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 Prudes
Neilson’s piece twists an unexpected root out of recent debates over power and sexual abuse the Royal Court has addressed so consistently. Uniquely Neilson’s made the faintly horrible full-on hilarious.
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: The Gulf
Gould’s team have made this as authentic as some of U. S. casts who travelled over from The New York Public Theater for the Nelson plays. There’ll always be some who don’t get this kind of theatre, but there’s an increasing appetite for and understanding of it. When you do, like Kendra’s Betty, you’ll be hooked.
Review: Instructions For Correct Assembly
As an ingenious commentary on everything from genetic manipulation to over-determining children’s achievements, Instructions For Correct Assembly is a necessary unforgettable object lesson, in all senses.
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: Reared
Reared is above all forgivingly funny, John Fitzpatrick’s comedy exquisite in group dynamics but sometimes on a telling image also contains create one of the most gripping story-telling scenes in recent drama.
