Review Roundups: HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES Opens at Stratford East

UK premiere of Here There Are Blueberries, a co-production between Tectonic Theater Project and Stratford East is now running until 28 February at Stratford East.

Conceived and directed by Tony and Emmy Award nominee Moisés Kaufman (co-founder of Tectonic Theater Project), who is also co-writer with Emmy nominee Amanda Gronich (the pair previously collaborated on The Laramie Project), this powerful play comes to London following several acclaimed runs in the US where it was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the 2025 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play and received two Helen Hayes Awards. 

In 2007, a mysterious album featuring Nazi-era photographs arrived at the desk of a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist. As curators unravel the shocking truth behind the images, the album soon makes headlines and ignites a debate that reverberates far beyond the museum walls. Based on real events, Here There Are Blueberries tells the story of these historical photographs—what they reveal about the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and our own humanity. See what the critics are saying...

Cindy Marcolina, BroadwayWorld: This is mandatory viewing at a time when it seems to be necessary to remind that Nazis used to be put on trial. Monsters do not commit atrocities, people do. Lisa Spirling's tenure as Artistic Director is off to an excellent start.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: This 90-minute show bites off more than it can chew but that is not necessarily a weakness. The meaning of these pictures wavers yet that only proves that history is not based on absolute, pindownable truth but on incomplete stories and snapshots from among the “junk” of people’s past lives.

Mia Bai, Theatre Weekly: Ultimately, Here There Are Blueberries is less concerned with the past than with the responsibility of looking. We study the faces, searching for a sign that separates “them” from “us.” None appears. The blueberries are real; so is everything just beyond the frame.

Liam Arnold, Theatre & Tonic: I left Stratford East thoughtful, disturbed — and slightly unmoved. Here There Are Blueberries is an important, beautifully mounted piece of theatre that asks urgent questions about memory and responsibility. I just wish it trusted the power of its material enough to ask fewer of them.

Anya Ryan, Time Out: Many of the themes here are worthy of interrogation: generational trauma, the limitations of history, and how we engage with the atrocities of the past. But, despite its subject matter, the play feels sterile, cold and emotionally airless. Historians may be required to maintain professional detachment, but in the theatre we should not be held at such a distance.