Clementine Scott

In the much-cited 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score, the Dutch psychotherapist Bessel van der Kolk wrote of how the human body can be undone and rewired by traumatic experiences. In Iron Fantasy, comedy duo She-Goat have absorbed this idea into their musical comedy, and explored if and how one can regain control over one’s body.

Sarah McGuinness is best known for her work producing whimsical indie documentaries about the standup comedian Eddie Izzard; in her one-woman show, though, there are only passing references to this. To put a finger on what the show is about is no easy task, because it’s a confused jumble of autofiction, metatheatre and campy musical comedy, which rarely elevates itself beyond an extended therapy session.

Park Theatre’s latest double bill presents two recent works from an emerging writer, both centring average queer London lives, and the lengths we’ll go to to present the versions of ourselves we want the world to see. Both are somewhat overblown in their execution, but at their best they are imaginatively conceived, wryly observational slices of life.

When it premiered at Soho Theatre in 2012, Blink was a whimsical oddity, an ode to two eccentric loners falling in love. In 2026, it takes on a darker tone, with the subtitle “a parasocial love story” foreshadowing things to come.

Her name may not be widely known today, but Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s musical legacy is felt down the decades. George Brant’s play about her relationship with gospel singer Marie Knight is retelling not just a woman’s life, but the birth of an entire new genre.

Somewhere between 20,000 and 300,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula, were trafficked into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during the Second World War: the so-called ‘comfort women’. Writer-performer Minjeong Kim’s one-woman show tells just one of their stories.

“We’ve died, we’ve been reborn, but we still have our memories,” a character reflects at one point. He’s talking about the years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and this sense of war as existential is everywhere in Ukrainian playwright Polina Polozhentseva’s understated fable.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch was, and is, radical for its acknowledgement of how society places limits on even the most ambitious and idealistic of its inhabitants. In his new play, Alexi Kaye Campbell explores how that notion of compromise may have affected Eliot herself, both to her own benefit and to her detriment.

The premise of What I’d Be is disarmingly simple: two estranged sisters sit on a bench in a small town, and talk. In one unflinchingly cathartic hour of theatre, they’ve ricocheted from outright resentment to reconciliation.

If anyone still thought Terence Rattigan a staid drawing room playwright, his 1963 play Man and Boy ought to put an end to that. Anthony Lau’s version doesn’t always elevate the source material to its full potential, but it presents a case for giving the text another look.

The opening tableau of Miles sticks in the mind: a man writhes atop a piano, as though something long-dormant within him is being woken up. Similar sequence recur throughout the show, conveying a man both at one with his music and at war with it.

Despite its title, Elton John is far from the central focus of Henry Naylor’s blisteringly paced one-man show, Monstering the Rocketman. Instead, the target of Naylor’s pen is British journalism, and specifically the thriving 1980s tabloid press.

“Domestic matters are more your domain than mine,” a husband says to his wife in the middle of her working day, echoing a thousand gaslighting, supposedly liberal men who’ve come before and since. There are audible gasps from the audience.

The Tempest is perhaps the most metatheatrical of Shakespeare's plays: the plot takes place in real time, and Prospero asks the audience to “free” him with their applause. So who better to direct than the king of theatrical deconstruction himself, Tim Crouch?

MAGA womanhood is a curious paradox, observed with interest across the pond after a third of women under 30 voted for Trump in 2024. How can so many women not only tolerate but actively promote policies that seek to harm them, and how can the general public recognise their grift for what it is?

Haven’t we all wanted to have a chat with our inner child at some point? And what if the inner child is not quite as faultless and innocent as we may think?

The stage is immediately set for a confrontation. We the audience are looking down the length of a Victorian dining table, lit from beneath, poised perfectly for domestic rows to erupt before the meal is even served.

Opera as a whole may be too reliant on museum pieces, on endless identikit revivals designed to secure bums on seats. But in the case of Richard Eyre’s 1994 La traviata, the old adage might be true: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Lyle Kessler’s Orphans was first performed in 1983, but you wouldn’t know that from this production. The tiny stage feels overcome by Sarah Beaton’s design, retro but not too retro, a space immune to the passing decades.

Twenty or so dancers parade before an oversized Art Deco clock, to the familiar strains of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ from a brass band offstage. In other words, the stage is set for a reassuringly old-fashioned taste of the Golden Age of movie musicals.