thu 11/09/2025

Theatre Reviews

The Lodger, Coronet Theatre review - underdeveloped family drama

Laura De Lisle

The Coronet Theatre is a beautiful space – it’s a listed Victorian building, and the bar’s like something out of a film about Oscar Wilde.

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Is God Is, Royal Court review – blister, flare and burn, baby, burn

aleks Sierz

God is a tricky one. Or should that be One? And definitely not a He. So when she says take revenge, then vengeance is definitely not only hers, but ours too.

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The Memory of Water, Hampstead Theatre review – uneasy tragi-comedy

aleks Sierz

Memories are notoriously treacherous — this we know. I remember seeing Shelagh Stephenson’s contemporary classic at the Hampstead, when this venue was a prefab, and enjoying Terry Johnson’s racy staging, which starred Jane Booker, Hadyn Gwynne and Matilda Ziegler as the trio of bickering sisters, and then being blown away by his West End version, in which comedy heavyweight Alison Steadman partnered Samantha Bond and Julia Sawalha (with Margot Leicester thrown in for good measure).

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Frozen, Theatre Royal Drury Lane review - twinkling spectacle with a sincere drama at its heart

Marianka Swain

Let it snow!

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Leopards, Rose Theatre, Kingston review - a no-thrill thriller about sex and power

Ismene Brown

Is it a thriller? Is it a character study? Leopards, Alys Metcalf’s two-hander about a middle-aged white charity executive – male – and a young job applicant of mixed race – female – goes under the colours of both, but falls short of either genre.

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Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, Orange Tree Theatre review - a blast from the past with lessons for today

Gary Naylor

Even if you miss the play’s title and do not recognise the writer’s name with the heft of reputation that comes with it, as soon as you see the black man and the white woman speaking in South African accents, you know that the tension that electrifies the air between them is real.

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Rockets and Blue Lights, National Theatre review - strong, but inconclusive

aleks Sierz

For more than three decades, playwright Winsome Pinnock has been at the forefront of new writing, often experimenting with form as well as documenting the lives of black Britons.

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Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia, Almeida Theatre review - flawed theatre but a great experiment

Rachel Halliburton

An ageing Nazi, stuffed into a slightly too tight white linen suit, sits at the opposite end of the dining table to a young Jewish woman. Between them is a dish of chicken stew that we, just moments beforehand, have seen her lace with poison.

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Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury review - dazzling Disney rewrite

Gary Naylor

Bedknobs and Broomsticks has always suffered from not being Mary Poppins, the movie delayed in development and released in 1971 (it is a Sixties film in tone and technology) and always seeming to appear later on the BBC’s Christmas Disney Time programmes, after a bit of Baloo boogieing and a spoonful or two of sugar. It was probably more liked than loved.

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Edinburgh Fringe 2021: Screen 9

David Kettle

The popcorn on offer as you enter the Pleasance’s performing space at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre quickly fills the air with its rich, sugary scent. It’s a smell that sets the scene nicely for a show set in a cinema, but also an aroma that takes on increasingly heavy, cloying, sickly – and inescapable – connotations as Screen 9 progresses.

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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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