fri 20/06/2025

Theatre Reviews

Edinburgh Festival 2019 reviews: Enough / Spliced

David Kettle

Enough ★★★★   

Read more...

Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear the Musical, National Theatre review – gleefully subversive family musical

bella Todd

A great hunk of rotting meat hangs centre stage, suspended over a rusty wheelbarrow. A figure in a bloody butcher’s apron picks through the stalls, searching for cans of ‘xxxtra cheap lager’. From the direction of the band, sinister Wurlitzer sounds begin to stir the air.

Read more...

The Girl on the Train, Duke of York's Theatre review - boozy psycho-thriller rolls clunkily into town

Heather Neill

It may help if you love the book. It was a runaway bestseller, so fans must be legion, but a suspenseful story which depends on memories being obscured by prodigious boozing, and featuring a trio of women best described as "flaky", all defining themselves too much by their relationships with unreliable men, is not to everyone's taste.

Read more...

Peter Pan, Troubadour White City review - off to a flying start

Tom Birchenough

London’s Troubadour White City theatre has got off to a, literally, flying start.

Read more...

Barber Shop Chronicles, Roundhouse review - riotous theatre at its best

Katherine Waters

Emmanuel (Anthony Ofoegbu) runs Three Kings Barbers in London. His assistant, Samuel (Mohammed Mansaray), is the son of his erstwhile business partner, who is currently in jail. Emmanuel is boss, surrogate father and — occasionally — verbal punching bag: Sam is a whizz with the shears and just as cutting with his tongue. 

Read more...

Blues in the Night, Kiln Theatre review - hard times, hot tunes

Marianka Swain

It’s too darn hot, BoJo is in Downing Street, and we’re all going to Brexit hell – so we might as well sing the blues.

Read more...

The View UpStairs, Soho Theatre review - well-intentioned but needs a rewrite

Matt Wolf

If good intentions were all, The View UpStairs would be Gypsy.

Read more...

The Bridges of Madison County, Menier Chocolate Factory review - Iowan romance fizzles

Marianka Swain

Robert James Waller’s bestselling, though critically panned, 1992 romance novel was reincarnated in the Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep-starring film, and then again in Jason Robert Brown and Marsha Norman’s Tony-winning 2013 musical – both adaptations wisely sloughing off some of the original’s schmaltz and sappiness.

Read more...

The Night of the Iguana, Noël Coward Theatre review - Clive Owen and Lia Williams burn bright

aleks Sierz

One of the glories of contemporary London theatre is its revivals of classic American drama. Year after year, audiences are able to revisit and enjoy the great landmarks of postwar American playwriting from greats such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard and David Mamet (recently joined by the likes of Lynn Nottage).

Read more...

Equus, Trafalgar Studios review - passionate intensity

Tom Birchenough

When he gave Martin Dysart, the troubled psychiatrist protagonist of Equus, a line in which he speaks about “moments of experience” being “magnetised”, Peter Shaffer might almost have been talking about theatre itself.

Read more...

Pages

Advertising feature

★★★★★

A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.
The Observer, Kate Kellaway

 

Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.

 

★★★★★

This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.
The Times, Ann Treneman

 

Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.

 

Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.


latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
The Buccaneers, Apple TV+, Season 2 review - American advent...

Edith Wharton hadn’t finished her novel, The Buccaneers, when she died in 1937, but it was completed in 1993 by Marion Mainwaring. The...

The Midnight Bell, Sadler's Wells review - a first repr...

Rarely has a revival given a firmer thumbs-up for the future of dance-theatre. Yet Matthew Bourne’s latest show, first aired at the tail-end of...

Album: HAIM - I Quit

Haim’s profile just grows and grows. Since their last album, youngest sibling Alana’s starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s whimsical Seventies...

Aldeburgh Festival, Weekend 1 review - dance to the music of...

This year’s Aldeburgh Festival – the 76th – takes as its motto a line from Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound. The poet speaks of despair “...

Bonnie Raitt, Brighton Dome review - a top night with a char...

If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of...

Hidden Door Festival 2025 review - the transformative Edinbu...

"When I was your age, I worked in a corrugated cardboard factory!" is a phrase my father was fond of telling me as a teenager, presumably in an...

Edward Burra, Tate Britain review - watercolour made mainstr...

It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but...

Joyceana around Bloomsday, Dublin review - flawless adaptati...

It amuses me that Dubliners dress up in Edwardian finery on 16 June. After all, this was the date in 1904 when James Joyce first walked out with...

Stereophonic, Duke of York's Theatre review - rich slic...

The tag “the most Tony-nominated play of all time” may mean less to London theatregoers than it does to New Yorkers, but Stereophonic,...