fri 20/06/2025

Theatre Reviews

Education, Education, Education, Trafalgar Studios review - politics and pupils, mayhem and music

Katherine Waters

It's the 2nd May 1997, the morning after the night that swept New Labour into power. We’re in the staffroom of a school somewhere in Britain and the teachers are jubilant. They've been glued to their TV sets for the results and have shagged and drunk through the night to crawl in with hangovers and pouchy eyes to face the day with a particular brand of frazzled optimism.

Read more...

Wife, Kiln Theatre review - queer epic is joyful and intense

aleks Sierz

In one lifetime, the many loves that once dare not speak their names have become part of everyday chatter. But it would be shortsighted to believe that ancient prejudices are easy to overcome, or that change does not run the risk of creating familiar problems.

Read more...

King Hedley II, Theatre Royal Stratford East review - concentrated, enveloping drama

Tom Birchenough

The huge achievement of the last two decades of August Wilson’s life, right up to his death in 2005, was his “American Century Cycle”, in which he charted the African American experience over that time frame decade by decade, its action set largely in the downtown Hill District of Pittsburgh where the playwright grew up.

Read more...

The Starry Messenger, Wyndham's Theatre review - Matthew Broderick gets all cosmic

Matt Wolf

A small-scale Off Broadway venture late in 2009, The Starry Messenger has arrived in London to mark the belated British stage debut of Matthew Broderick, the movie name much-loved on the New York stage.

Read more...

The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare's Globe review - a gallimaufry of acting styles

David Nice

Need Shakespeare 's Falstaff charm to be funny?

Read more...

Rutherford and Son, National Theatre review - authentic northern tale

aleks Sierz

Githa Sowerby is the go-to playwright if you want a feminist slant on patriarchy in the industrial north in Edwardian times. Her 1912 classic, Rutherford and Son, has been regularly revived over the past 30 years, and now the National Theatreis staging it yet again, this time with the ever likeable Roger Allam in the title role.

Read more...

User Not Found, The CoffeeWorks Project review - solo play set in a café offers food for thought

Matt Wolf

Who is that slithering on the floor by your foot, or coming to rest by or upon your knee?

Read more...

Berlin: True Copy, Brighton Festival 2019 review - tricksy forgery masterclass

Thomas H Green

This brilliantly conceived and executed show is about provenance in art. It’s also about our perceptions of the truth. However, it’s a show where it would be churlish to reveal too much of what goes on.

Read more...

Our Town, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre review – small-town tale that raises profound existential questions

Rachel Halliburton

Our Town was written shortly before World War Two about a small town in America in the years leading up to World War One, yet it makes its extraordinary impact by focusing its lens on details as apparently unexciting as pond-water.

Read more...

The Lehman Trilogy, Piccadilly Theatre review - stunning chronicle of determination and dollars

Rachel Halliburton

Mammon and Yahweh are the presiding deities over an epic enterprise that tells the story not just of three brothers who founded a bank but of modern America. Virgil asked his Muse to sing of ‘arms and the man’, yet here the theme becomes that of ‘markets and the man’: a tale of daring, determination and dollars that chronicles capitalist endeavour from the cottonfields of Alabama to the crash of 2008.

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... ...
Red Path review - the dead know everything
Here’s a film you might not feel like seeing. After all, Red Path tells of a 14-year-old in Tunisia who is forced to carry home the...
Album: Loyle Carner - Hopefully!

Loyle Carner’s Hopefully! is a luminous, deeply personal exploration of fatherhood, identity, and artistic reinvention, marking the South...

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...