Franco Milazzo

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.

Arvind Ethan David’s new spin on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has finally beamed itself aboard Riverside Studios, trailing a marketing comet tail long enough to blot out a falling whale.

David Kwong loves words the way chefs love food: obsessively, indulgently and with a eagerness to serve ever more and more of their treasured discoveries. In The Enigmatist, his puzzle-box of a show, that affection becomes both the engine and the anchor.

If you only see one circus show this year, you should try and get out more but Sophie's Surprise Party at Underbelly Boulevard is an excellent choice for people who don't mind having their jaws occasionally scrape the ground.

The stories about the latest entry in the Royal Albert Hall’s Film In Concert series are insane. There was the intense secrecy over that moment, Daniel Craig’s secret cameo, Mark Hamill’s perma-beard and then the issues with Harrison Ford’s long hair and broken foot. With a sky-high budget north of 500 million dollars, the most anticipated movie of 2015 went on to break the $2bn barrier at the box office and JJ Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens is now the sixth-highest grossing flick ever made. 

A poetic response to a remarkable work of anti-theatre.

Ani has a problem. Well, two problems, but they are on very friendly terms: she’s addicted to hardcore porn and her boyfriend Liam has had enough of seeing it when they're in bed. She doesn’t care so she cums, he goes, and - even before the door slams - she’s back on her phone scrolling through an endless feed of videos.

They may be strangers on a train but, in Tom George Hammond’s two-and-a-bit-hander, Shirley and Kieran are not here to swap murders but to discover what real happiness looks like.