Theatre
Mary, Hampstead Theatre review - compelling study of power politicsWednesday, 02 November 2022
Scottish playwright Rona Munro is both prolific and ambitious. After her trilogy of historical dramas, The James Plays, was staged in 2016, she continues to work on her cycle of seven works, covering the years from 1406 to 1625, which are designed... Read more... |
‘Stripping naked the process of making theatre’: Martin Crimp talks about his latest playMonday, 31 October 2022
The fictional world is our world, but at the same time it’s another place. We want our writers to invent interesting characters, gripping plots and to take us to unexpected places. We want them to delight us, and sometimes to fright us. We want to... Read more... |
Tammy Faye, Almeida Theatre review - Elton John's often dazzling new musicalFriday, 28 October 2022
I’ll confess to a certain schadenfreude when the American televangelists who seemed so foreign to us Brits were led away to be papped on their perp walks, ministers in manacles: One big name after another skewered on their own hubris, gulling the... Read more... |
Elephant, Bush Studio review - stirring solo show from rising star Anoushka LucasThursday, 27 October 2022
It lasts only an interval-free 60 minutes, with an upright piano as its only prop, but Anoushka Lucas’s one-woman show Elephant in the Bush’s Studio space prompts an epic trigger warning. It will discuss “racism, Empire, colonialism, classism,... Read more... |
Something in the Air, Jermyn Street Theatre review - evocative London mood musicTuesday, 25 October 2022
As its title suggests, Peter Gill’s Something in the Air is an elusive piece – it’s about catching at instinct, responding to intuition, bringing together overlapping hints of present and past lives. From these different stories, spun out of lived... Read more... |
Marvellous, @sohoplace review - silly, singular and sentimentalMonday, 24 October 2022
Opening a theatre should be a celebration, says Nica Burns, the West End power behind this new theatre which is situated next to Tottenham Court Road tube. The co-owner of Nimax Theatre group, she has come up with an elegantly gleaming 600-seat... Read more... |
Blues for an Alabama Sky, National Theatre review - superb cast and production for this period hitSaturday, 22 October 2022
The cynical might think Pearl Cleage’s play had been expressly written to address the over-riding issues in today’s USA – abortion and contraception rights, gun control, homophobia, racism. But the cynical would be wrong, as Blues for an Alabama Sky... Read more... |
The Solid Life of Sugar Water, Orange Tree Theatre review - two-hander gets a punchy refreshFriday, 21 October 2022
This is not a play for the squeamish: here be blood and cum and unsavoury descriptions of genitalia, male and female, that make you wonder why humans relish sex so much. And it’s all played out in the close quarters of the small in-the-round... Read more... |
My Neighbour Totoro, Barbican review - dazzling stage adaptation of a Japanese classicThursday, 20 October 2022
As 10-year-old Satsuki observes as she arrives in the countryside with her little sister Mei, “We’re not in Tokyo anymore” – and they’re not in Kansas either, but there is a tang of Oz in the air. The 1988 Studio Ghibli film, My... Read more... |
Good, Harold Pinter Theatre review - brilliant but half-bakedThursday, 13 October 2022
“The bands came in 1933.” So begins C P Taylor’s Good, a play that tries its hardest to resist being Googled. It was first performed by the RSC in 1981; this production, starring David Tennant as a mild-mannered German professor who gradually... Read more... |
The Doctor, Duke of York's Theatre review - Juliet Stevenson will see you nowMonday, 10 October 2022
Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-... Read more... |
The Band's Visit, Donmar Warehouse review - still waters run bittersweetMonday, 10 October 2022
Not much happens but, in its way, everything does in The Band's Visit, the gentle, sweet-natured musical that rather unexpectedly stormed Broadway late in 2017 and is just now receiving a notably empathic London debut.Broadway... Read more... |
