Franco Milazzo

Philippe Lafeuille’s TUTU arrives at the Peacock with the air of a sugar rush and the spine of a manifesto. Beneath the sequins, beneath the tulle, beneath the knowing smirk, there is something else at work: lineage.

Phelim McDermott directing Così fan tutte is a bit like asking a Catholic priest to do Mass in full drag. You know something deliciously outrageous is going to happen. You also know, whether people will like it or not, that it might be exactly what this masterpiece out of step with modern attitudes.

Featuring two of the most awkward sex scenes you'll ever see, this acerbic comedy is a merciless meditation on teenage fumblings.

Confronting issues that echoes down the decades, american vicarious resurrects the 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr at Wilton’s Music Hall.

If Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov were a dinner party, Richard Jones’s Russian-language revival at the Royal Opera House would be the dinner date where you arrive bright and curious and leave questioning your life choices, nursing a neat whisky in a corner. This is not an opera that gives up its secrets like a West End musical handing out catchy tunes. It is, in its original 1869 incarnation, seven tableaux of conscience-stripped torment, political intrigue and chorus lines that hammer their point home with power and precision.

It was probably a dark, rainy night when Francesca Marlowe came across the mysterious case of the dead asylum seeker. Plumes of vape smoke flowing from her nostrils, she turns the facts over in her head. The man had not been in the country long, or at least not long enough to accumulate deadly enemies. The coroner’s report had all the right words in all the right places but looked about as truthful as an election manifesto. And, to cap it off, the corpse was found in a locked room after some days had passed. 

Theatre has to work extra hard in January to get people away from cosy duvets and into venues. Thankfully, Dante or Die’s I Do (created by Daphna Attias and Terry O’Donovan) has a doozie of a premise.

Let’s get the essentials out of the way. Ovo — Portuguese for “egg” — catapults you into a bug-infested universe where creepy-crawlies are given the Cirque du Soleil treatment as they jump, flip, dance and contort around a giant inflatable egg. The oval centrepiece is about 28 feet wide and 22 feet tall and, if that sounds overly precise, welcome to the world of circus where the difference between wild applause and a trip to A&E is measured in mere inches. 

Looking back over 2025, it appears I sat in a dark room and wrote barely legible thoughts into a notebook on about 150-odd occasions. By the grace of God and the BroadwayWorld UK editor, I saw a real smörgåsbord of delights, everything from highly anticipated West End theatre to opera, dance, circus, cabaret, comedy and immersive theatre.

There is a particular kind of contemporary British play that believes proximity to the dinner table equals profundity. Or human connection. Or a direct line to our stomachs, if not our hearts. It’s never really clear. Sam Grabiner’s Christmas Day (his first play since his Olivier-winning Boys on the Verge of Tears) is delivered under James Macdonald’s taut but ultimately overburdened direction and both fulfils and interrogates that tradition.

The Royal Opera House’s Turandot has now been running so long it feels less like a revival and more like a listed structure. You don’t attend it so much as pass through it, like a familiar corridor or a particularly grand roundabout. With close to 300 performances under its belt and two runs in this calendar year alone, this production has become the most frequently staged opera in Europe, second only to Zeffirelli’s La Bohème at the Met in the global endurance league. If cockroaches ever start staging Puccini after the apocalypse, this is the version they’ll use.

And now, the end is near and Phantom Peak will soon face its final curtain at their Canada Water site. Wipe away the tears, though: a new location is apparently in the works for this hilarious slice of immersive theatre.

London is a city built on ghosts. Romans, plague pits, abandoned Tube stations and the collective memory of audiences who still shudder about The Woman in Black. There’s even a theatre supposedly inhabited by a ghost dolphin called Flipper.

There are many museums dedicated to disaster, but only Britain could create one in which the exhibits are victims of its own fiscal policies. Museum of Austerity, revived at the Young Vic, is a cool, technologically-slick indictment, a moral subpoena served directly to your eyeballs through augmented-reality headsets. Grimmer than a midwinter funeral, the show is misnamed and flawed but serves as a salient reminder of how man’s inhumanity to man never ceases to beggar the imagination. 

Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo, arriving now at the Young Vic for its long-overdue European premiere, is ostensibly about the American occupation of Iraq. Really, though, Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer-nominated work is about two things: a gold-plated toilet seat stolen from Uday Hussein (son of Saddam and recreational rapist, torturer and murderer), and the sheer, unforgivable absurdity of existence.

The eighth edition of Letters Live once again proved that in an age dominated by instantaneous digital communication, nothing quite matches the resonant power of a well-preserved, handwritten letter. Staged as a dazzling, spontaneous event, the latest instalment brought together a truly eclectic mix of celebrated talent, reaffirming the show’s place as an essential fixture in the cultural calendar.

Here is something no other theatre critic will tell you: music halls are possibly the greatest secret treats in London. Given the choice between, on the one hand, getting a second mortgage so I can sit in a West End theatre with the kind of legroom that Ryanair would consider beyond the pale or, on the other, taking the tube a few more stops and discovering some vaudeville treats, I know where I’d rather be.

Yes, it’s less than a month until Christmas so time to get stuck into a yuletide favourite – albeit with an immersive theatre/cabaret twist.