Franco Milazzo

Few words grab the attention like murder. And few genres outside immersive theatre can pull you physically into a specific time and place. So why aren’t there more immersive murder productions like this one?

Most people going to the theatre will take public transport or their own car. In September 2021, Nathan Paulin took a 600-metre walk to Chaillot - Paris’ Théâtre National De La Danse on a slackline 70 metres above the Seine.

It’s 1951 and, as the nation prepares itself for the Festival of Britain, a heinous crime has been committed. After a murder most foul, ten suspects, a killer hiding in plain sight and around two hundred passengers-cum-amateur detectives find themselves all aboard the same train. It’s fair to say that Dead On Time knows how to set a scene even before we step aboard.

A modern musical fairytale, Once On This Island is Romeo and Juliet set in the French Antilles with the two lovers on opposite sides of a race and class divide. Regent’s Park Theatre opens its 2023 season with a humdinger of a revival, a real foot-stomper that rings in the ears long after the last song finishes.

Sometimes show titles are spot-on perfect, albeit unintentionally. Porca Miseria is, in the Italian vernacular, an expression of frustration, something I would use when losing a cufflink or after sitting through a three hour-plus triptych of dance works that is, in the English vernacular, patently bobbins.

Ulla! Martians, music and mayhem: who could ask for more from an immersive show? Layered Reality’s has taken HG Wells classic story, scored It with Jeff Wayne’s much-loved album, added some very effective VR and placed it inside a dedicated space in the City of London.

Featuring a work which doesn’t even last an hour, this was never going to be an ordinary evening for the English National Opera but, even from the off, history was being written.

Nederland Dans Theater, one of the premiere dance venues in Europe, makes its first return to Sadler's Wells since 2018 bringing together three very different pieces which go from the dream-like to the very real and heart-rending.

Midnight Circle Theatre finally gets an opening night.

What’s in a name? That which we call William, Hamlet or Anne still smells as sweet when we see their historical origins in this adaptation by Lolita Chakrabarti of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel.

The title of Circa’s Humans 2.0 has a double meaning: as well as being a new iteration of their 2017 show Humans, it explores on what could be the saving future graces for our benighted species: trust, community and incredibly fit bodies.

In this contemporary dance version of the Rudyard Kipling classic, a grim future is played out against the backdrop of a climate crisis and mass human migration.

Can the best get better? In my 2022 year-end roundup, I ranked Phantom Peak as my favourite immersive show of 2022, ahead of bigger shows like Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City and TV show-based drama Peaky Blinders: The Rise. The latest iteration has a new platypus theme and even more mysteries to solve but will it be enough to retain top spot?

Who’s up for a three-hour long opera about the relatively unknown pharaoh Akhnaten? With the singing in Egyptian, Hebrew and Akkadian? With no surtitles? Based on the music of minimalist composer Phillip Glass? And with an entire troupe of jugglers? Us, that's who.

With references ripped from the headlines, this rocket-paced update of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s Accidental Death Of An Anarchist is at once both deeply political and utterly hilarious.

If John Steinbeck had been asked to create a musical, it may have looked something like this. Soundtracked by the songs of Bob Dylan, Girl From The North Country is, at heart, a bleak meditation on untimely death; not just physically due to illness, murder and suicide (though that’s here too) but also spiritually due to the death of ambition, the death of hope and, most cruelly, the death of love.

Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City is undoubtably one of the biggest and most impressive shows in London, if only by sheer physical scale. Is it worth upgrading to their VIP experience?

When Coppelius asks Swanhilda “do you derive more pleasure from running your finger along your lover’s skin or across the glass surface of your phone?”, Coppélia holds a brutal mirror up to modern society in a way no ballet has for quite some time.

Featuring its ex-Principal Dancer Alessandra Ferri, the Royal Ballet revives its epic Woolf Works.

A year ago today, Russia began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Bunker Cabaret by Ukrainian theatre company Hooligan Art Community (HAC) will mark this sombre anniversary at Somerset House with shows tonight and tomorrow.