fri 27/06/2025

Theatre Reviews

Red Speedo, Orange Tree Theatre review - two versions of American values slug it out

Helen Hawkins

Before Lucas Hnath wrote Red Speedo, he had heard a 2004 speech at a hearing investigating baseball doping that declared the practice “un-American”. That started him thinking about the concept of fairness.

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ECHO, LIFT 2024, Royal Court review - enriching journey into the mind of an exile

Helen Hawkins

The Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour is many things, some seemingly contradictory: a) a clever, poetic playwright who uses high-tech elements in his work to inventive effect; b) a mischievous presence who likes to appear in his own highly unusual plays; c) a man in pain who is traumatised by his self-imposed exile from Iran

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The Hot Wing King, National Theatre review - high kitchen-stove comedy, with sides of drama

Tom Birchenough

There’s an exuberant comedy from the start in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, which comes to London after an initial Covid-truncated Off Broadway run which brought her a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Roy Alexander Weise’s production puts in all the energy it can find and then more, doing its best to balance that comedy with the more serious themes, such as family responsibility, and a man’s role in the world, with which it is interspersed.

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Hello, Dolly!, London Palladium review - Imelda Staunton makes every line a deal-broker

David Nice

Jerry Herman is the king of pep. Way too much of it in the first 20 minutes of the recent revue Jerry’s Girls had me screaming for a breather, but here the opening cavalcade, gorgeous overture included, intoxicates thanks to Dominic Cooke‘s razor-sharp direction. And the two torch songs, "Before the Parade Passes By" and the title number, begin in pathos before Imelda Staunton flashes her high-heeled party shoes.

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The Baker's Wife, Menier Chocolate Factory review - loving reappraisal doesn't entirely, well, rise

Matt Wolf

The Baker's Wife closed on the way to Broadway in 1976, since which time Stephen Schwartz's stubbornly resistent if sweetly scored musical has been revived and reworked all over the map, not least by Gordon Greenberg.

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More Than One Story review - nine helpings of provocative political theatre

Helen Hawkins

A stark end-title at the end of this collection of short films sums up the dire situation the UK is in: one in five people,14 million Britons, are now living in poverty. 

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Visit from an Unknown Woman, Hampstead Theatre review - slim, overly earthbound slice of writer's angst

Helen Hawkins

Who was Stefan Zweig? It's likely that it's mostly older folk who studied German literature at A-level who have encountered this superb Viennese writer in his native language, though his short story from 1922, Letter to an Unknown Woman, eventually emerged as a starry Hollywood film in 1948.

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Grud, Hampstead Theatre review - sparky investigation of a geeky friendship

Helen Hawkins

Sarah Power, the writer of Grud, now in the Hampstead’s smaller space, is a self-confessed geek who excelled at science at school. She also had an alcoholic parent, and both autobiographical strands have turned up trumps in this, the second of her plays to be produced professionally. 

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Skeleton Crew, Donmar Warehouse review - slow burn that satisfyingly catches fire

Helen Hawkins

For a long stretch of its first half, Dominique Morrisseau’s 2016 award-winner, Skeleton Crew, seems a conventional workplace drama, though in a much gentler key than Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. But this slow burn catches fire.

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Next to Normal, Wyndham's Theatre review - rock musical on the trauma of mental illness

Gary Naylor

We open on one of those suburban American families we know so well from Eighties and Nineties sitcoms - they’re not quite Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, but they’re not far off. As usual, we wonder how Americans have so much space, such big fridges and why they’re always shouting up the stairs.

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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.


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