Franco Milazzo

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.

There’s a fine line between genius and idiocy, and, in his determined effort to “save literature”, Garry Starr doesn’t so much walk it as perform the can-can on it wearing black tails, orange flippers and nothing else. In a show that drops jaws (and, in at least one case, drawers), he flaps through a catalogue of Penguin classics, bringing each to life in a gloriously stupid way.

In Tinned Laughter’s The Bang Gang, Don Lambrini is in trouble. He got on the wrong boat leaving Palermo in 1946 and, instead of his preferred destination of the Bronx, ended up in Blackpool. Thirty years later, his “waste management” firm is under threat from local competitors and now his nemesis has sent a button man to whack him. “Fray Bentos sends his regards,” says the hitman. “Why do they only send their regards when they want to murder someone?” wails the mafia boss as the assassin’s bullets plough into him.

Ever wondered what it would be like to walk off a high street and into Ancient Rome?  Eclipso’s latest VR adventure plunges its audience into the roaring atmosphere of Rome’s Colosseum and explores a world of gladiators and gods. 

Despite the enticing cultural dissonance of its title, Black Sabbath – The Ballet is, by definition, a terrible idea. It is the conceptual equivalent of putting a tuxedo on a pit bull, or hiring Prince Andrew as your PR manager. This is what happens when the civic-minded folk at a major arts company, having dutifully listened to enough AC/DC to establish their street cred, decide they can bottle the anarchic essence of heavy metal and sell it in three-act bottles to those living off the ever-sweet smell of nostalgia and the kind of people who buy all their concert T-shirts from Vinted.

If you’re anything like me — a man of taste, decency, and a healthy suspicion of anything that smells of group therapy — you approach a one-person play about depression with the same enthusiasm you’d reserve for an unexpected colonoscopy. The title, Every Brilliant Thing, only amplified my well-fed scepticism. It sounds like it should be a self-congratulatory bumper sticker on an electric vehicle or the name of a hastily manufactured boy band.

In Calum Finlay’s Fanny, sibling rivalry and musical history occasionally seem barely more than mere pretexts for a superlative slice of Mischief-adjacent tomfoolery. When Fanny Mendelssohn finds out that not only is one of her works a favourite of Queen Victoria but her brother Felix is taking credit for it, the enraged composer begins a madcap journey from Berlin to Buckingham Palace to set the record straight.

Hofesh Shechter — the Israeli choreographer who loves to make dance and music “because I believe those things make the world a better place” — is a dreamer, but he’s not the only one. With a raft of co-producer credits reaching from London to Shanghai, Theatre of Dreams is a heartpounding continuation of his bombastic style.

The true crime genre has already provided one bona fide London smash this year in the sublime Kenrex but Łukasz Twarkowski takes a very different approach with this four-hour-long opus.

Why has the arrival of Tilly Norwood, a virtual actor apparently on the cusp of actual agent representation, caused outrage and panic among screen veterans but barely a murmur from their theatrical confrères? Julian Spooner’s take on the controversial Mistero Buffo offers one explanation why.

One minute you’re in an East London street, the next you are immediately transported to early-1970s Kingston: the style, the sounds, the rhythms, the smell of ambition and frustration. The Harder They Come at Stratford East is a vivid, energetic production that honours the cult classic film while breathing new life into it.