Theatre Reviews
Don't Destroy Me, Arcola Theatre review - a theatre history curioWednesday, 17 January 2024
British Theatre abounds in forgotten writers. And in ones whose early work is too rarely revived. One such is Michael Hastings, best known for Tom & Viv, his 1984 biographical drama about TS Eliot and his wife Vivienne, so in theory it’s great to see this playwright’s 1956 debut, Don’t Destroy Me, being revived at the Arcola by director Tricia Thorns’ Two’s Company, whose remit is the discovery and resuscitation of long-ignored work. Read more... |
The Good John Proctor, Jermyn Street Theatre review - Salem-set drama loses some of its power in LondonSaturday, 13 January 2024
It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it plays into a founding psychodrama of the USA - the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Read more... |
The Enfield Haunting, Ambassadors Theatre review - muddled revisiting of famous paranormal eventsFriday, 12 January 2024
Reports of supernatural events are always met with either willing belief or dismissive scepticism. The "camps" generally don't have much to say to each other: belief in immovable logic, discounting the weird as merely the so-far unexplained, can be as entrenched as its opposite. In the case of the ghostly goings-on in Enfield, sincerity and mischief are also stirred into the mix. Read more... |
1979, Finborough Theatre review - niche subject matter finds a strong resonanceSaturday, 06 January 2024
If a week is a long time in politics, what price 44 years? And 3500 miles? Turns out, not much, as Michael Healey’s sparkling play, 1979, proves that events all that time ago and all that way across the Atlantic maintain a remarkable relevance today. Read more... |
This Much I Know, Hampstead Theatre review - an intellectual game with a slight emotional payloadSaturday, 23 December 2023
How do you make a play out of Stalin’s defecting daughter Svetlana, the psycho-economic theories of Daniel Kahneman and a fictionalised version of Derek Black, the son of a leading American white nationalist? Read more... |
The Motive and the Cue, Noel Coward Theatre - National Theatre transfer excels in the West EndWednesday, 20 December 2023
Plays about the theatre tend to go down well with audiences. Why wouldn’t they? The danger is that they become too cosy as actors and audience smugly agree on the transcendence of the artform. Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue comes perilously close to falling into that trap, but, in the end, its wider preoccupations with old age, change, and the perils of the new, make it a rewarding and sometimes even challenging evening. Read more... |
Rock 'N' Roll, Hampstead Theatre review - exciting music, uneven stagingMonday, 18 December 2023
There is a song by Syd Barrett, founder member of Pink Floyd, called “Golden Hair”. It’s on his album The Madcap Laughs, released in 1970, a couple of years after he left the band, and every time I hear it I feel like I’m falling in love again. It also features in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 epic, the aptly named Rock ’N’ Roll, now revived at the Hampstead Theatre by playwright and director Nina Raine. Read more... |
The House with Chicken Legs, Queen Elizabeth Hall review - a potential charmer swamped by its settingMonday, 18 December 2023
There are probably two distinct audiences for the latest adaptation from Les Enfants Terribles, The House with Chicken Legs: the young teens who lapped up the fantasy novel by Sophie Anderson on which it is based, and the adults who came with them. The latter may not be as enraptured as fans of the book by the piece’s staging, not to mention its almost three-hour length. Read more... |
Ulster American, Riverside Studios review - knockabout comedy with an acid biteSaturday, 16 December 2023
David Ireland’s Edinburgh Fringe hit Ulster American is essentially a play about a play that a Hollywood big name has been cast in by a leading English theatre director. Appropriately, it stars two actual Hollywood “big names”, Woody Harrelson and Andy Serkis, the latter seen here for once without motion-capture tags or prosthetics. Welcome back. Read more... |
Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Phoenix Theatre review - formidable stagecraft unlocks new depths to the popular seriesFriday, 15 December 2023
Stranger Things has shown us over four seasons that the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down can be the seat of many things: terror, mystery, camaraderie, compassion. As it turns out, it can spawn great theatre, too, for Stephen Daldry’s much-anticipated stage production of the prequel to the Netflix mega-hit has finally summoned its demonic energy to take the West End by storm. Read more... |
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★★★★★
‘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*
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