fri 20/06/2025

Theatre Reviews

Death of a Salesman, Young Vic review - new-minted revival of a masterpiece

Heather Neill

The Young Vic, a welcoming theatre with a culturally diverse audience, has been home to memorable Miller revivals before, notably Ivo van Hove's emotionally shattering, stripped-back A View From the Bridge in 2014.

Read more...

Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs), Brighton Festival 2019 review - a feverishly foul-mouthed musical comedy

Thomas H Green

Five years ago this Kneehigh Theatre production caused a stir with its vibrant modern retelling of John Gay’s 18th century satirical classic, The Beggar’s Opera. It’s currently on tour again and it’s easy to see why a revival was greenlit.

Read more...

Vox Motus: Flight, Brighton Festival 2019 review - a novel and moving experience

Thomas H Green

Flight is a show by experimental Scottish theatre company Vox Motus, adapted from the novel Hinterland by Caroline Brothers. It’s about two Afghan child refugees making their way across Europe to the fabled land of “London” and is based very directly on her own interviews with asylum seekers as a journalist.

Read more...

Rosmersholm, Duke of York's Theatre review - little-known Ibsen lands with force

Matt Wolf

The past haunts the present and looks likely to torpedo the future in Rosmersholm, the lesser-known Ibsen play now receiving a major West End revival in welcome defiance of the commercial odds.

Read more...

Other People's Money, Southwark Playhouse review - onetime Off Broadway hit retains its sting

Tim Cornwell

Deft and funny and nicely cast, what's not to like about Other People's Money, the era-defining Jerry Sterner play in revival at Southwark Playhouse? The play's 1989 premiere Off Broadway allowed for a contemporary skewering of the roaring, rapacious, uncaring 1980s.

Read more...

Small Island, National Theatre review - fun epic takes ages to warm up

aleks Sierz

Novelist Andrea Levy's 2004 masterpiece, Small Island, is a tribute to the Windrush Generation, those migrants to England from the Caribbean that came first on the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948, and then subsequently on other ships. Being British citizens by right, the discrimination that they faced in the postwar years, which culminated in the 2018 Windrush Scandal, when so many of them have been denied their legal and human rights, is a stain on recent history.

Read more...

Jude, Hampstead Theatre review - Greek tragedy for today

aleks Sierz

Edward Hall bids farewell to this venue, where he has been artistic director since 2010, with this production of a new play by Howard Brenton. The playwright has been a regular at the Hampstead Theatre, and he has enjoyed stagings of his history plays here, including 55 Days (2012), Drawing the Line (2013) and Lawrence after Arabia (2016).

Read more...

The Glass Piano, Print Room at The Coronet review – fascinating story undermined by absurdism

Rachel Halliburton

Often the greatest works of dramatic absurdism spring from the worst extremes of human experience, whether it’s Ionesco’s Rhinoceros responding to fascism, or Havel’s The Garden Party satirising the irrational cruelties of Prague’s Soviet occupiers.

Read more...

Man of La Mancha, London Coliseum review - historical work better left in the past

Marianka Swain

English National Opera continues its run of semi-staged musicals, in commercial collaboration with Grade Linnit, with a revival of this vintage oddity.

Read more...

The Half God of Rainfall, Kiln Theatre review - titanic war of the gods

aleks Sierz

If British theatre often seems to lack ambition, the same cannot be said of The Half God of Rainfall, a galaxy-hopping mythological mash-up. Written by Inua Ellams, whose Barber Shop Chronicles was a big foot-stomping hit for the National in 2017, this epic story trips across the globe and the sphere of myth, combining Yoruba gods with ancient Greek deities.

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...

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 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...