West End
The Spoils, Trafalgar StudiosFriday, 03 June 2016
“The most interesting characters are initially difficult to like,” proclaims Jesse Eisenberg’s would-be filmmaker protagonist, in case his cringe comedy’s mission statement was otherwise unclear. Ben is an outlandish collage of unlikeable qualities... Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet, Garrick TheatreThursday, 26 May 2016
Trouble remembering in which country Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers cross paths? Branagh’s panting paean to Fellini will sort you out. Stylish as a monochromatic Vogue spread, and as self-consciously Italian as Bruno Tonioli guzzling lasagne in a... Read more... |
Doctor Faustus, Duke of York's TheatreTuesday, 26 April 2016
Blood, sexual violence, power games and lashings of nudity. Not Game of Thrones, whose new season has just premiered (yes, he’s really dead. Well, for now) – and whose shadow Kit Harington is trying to escape – but Jamie Lloyd’s graphic take on... Read more... |
People, Places & Things, Wyndham's TheatreThursday, 24 March 2016
Recovery depends on honesty, but Emma – not her real name – lies for a living. Duncan Macmillan’s searing play, getting a well-deserved West End transfer from the National, complicates the familiar story of addiction and rehab by making its... Read more... |
The Painkiller, Garrick TheatreFriday, 18 March 2016
The fourth production in Branagh’s Garrick season is the revival of an odd-couple romp he brought to the Lyric, Belfast in 2011. Sean Foley (best known for his superlative Branagh-directed Morecambe and Wise tribute The Play What I Wrote) adapts and... Read more... |
The Maids, Trafalgar StudiosTuesday, 01 March 2016
“Murder is hilarious,” quips Zawe Ashton’s scheming maid, and in Jamie Lloyd’s high-octane, queasily comic revival of Jean Genet’s radical 1947 play, it really is. It’s also lurid, strange, bleak and powerfully transcendent, as befits a piece that... Read more... |
We Made It: Stufish Entertainment ArchitectsSunday, 21 February 2016
While most set designers come from an art or theatre background, Ric Lipson has parlayed his architectural training into an unusual skillset: designing not just what goes on inside entertainment venues, but the buildings themselves. At his studio... Read more... |
Mrs Henderson Presents, Noël Coward TheatreWednesday, 17 February 2016
War bad, theatre good. That’s about the level of insight available from this amiable show, transferring after a successful run in Bath. It’s one of the weaker entries in the ever-popular backstage genre, sharing Vaudevillian DNA with Gypsy and a... Read more... |
Hand to God, Vaudeville TheatreTuesday, 16 February 2016
There will be blood. And expletives. And puppet sex that makes Avenue Q look positively monastic. But perhaps most shocking of all is that beneath the eye-wateringly explicit surface of Robert Askins’ provocative farce, which began life Off-Off-... Read more... |
The End of Longing, Playhouse TheatreFriday, 12 February 2016
Jack is an alcoholic. Stephanie is a whore. Joseph is stupid. Stevie is a broody neurotic. These identifiers are proudly proclaimed in the first minute of Matthew Perry’s debut play, but if you weren’t paying attention, fear not: they will be... Read more... |
Red Velvet, Garrick TheatreWednesday, 03 February 2016
Lolita Chakrabarti’s impassioned debut has only gained topicality since its 2012 Tricycle incarnation. Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars of the Roses and #OscarsSoWhite, among others, have fanned its flames, while quips about a paranoid Russian regime... Read more... |
Eddie Izzard, Palace TheatreFriday, 22 January 2016
Eddie Izzard tells us at the top of a show lasting two-and-a-half hours that he's on the home straight in a mammoth tour taking in 28 countries. He first performed Force Majeure in 2013 and now, in a slightly rebooted form, he parks it in the West... Read more... |
