UK REGIONAL THEATER REVIEWS

At its core, Trio’s biggest wound is a self-inflicted one. It undercuts its own capacity for dramatic impact due to its structure, with each character taking turns to discuss the events of their tumultuous shared history in the past tense, emotionally removed from each historic detail and inherent...

The Wellspring is a new father and son two-hander by award-winning playwright Barney Norris (Visitors, Eventide, Nightfall) and novelist (Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, Undercurrent); and his father - pianist, composer and broadcaster David Owen Norris....

Football opera land perfectly between the Women's Euros and the Men's World Cup finding plenty of common ground to delight fans of both art forms...

In a fabulously fast-paced and funny tribute to Spike Milligan, writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman affectionately convey how the extraordinary Anglo-Irishman creates The Goon Show....

The sinister chords of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' 'Red Right Hand' ring out as Tommy Shelby stands, flanked by family members, with the light glinting from the razor blade sewn into his wool tweed cap. It's a scene familiar to any fan of the global hit TV show Peaky Blinders. But something's diffe...

A debate about folklore versus fact, and whether history is just 'a collection of lies we've decided upon'. Are ghost stories a projection of our fears? Who do you believe in the end?...

Sugar Baby made its debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2017. A compelling one-man play by Alan Harris, this new production directed by Natasha Haws is a wonderfully wild ride....

Christopher Shinn's play brims with interesting politics but is too often bogged down in overly-familiar personal issues...

A terrifically trippy child's world on speed in a Victorian toy theatre within a theatre, conjured up by inventive 81-year-old Gilliam, and his co-director and choreographer, Leah Hausman....

Not an easy play to watch, but a fascinating analysis of some of humanity's darker corners...

They say good things come in small packages. This adage certainly applies to Theatre Royal Bath’s larger-than-life double bill of Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra and newly commissioned ballet, Minotaur, in the diminutive Ustinov Studio....

From Erich Kastner's classic 1949 novel, to the 1961 movie starring Hayley Mills and the 1998 remake featuring Lindsay Lohan, The Parent Trap has been delighting families for generations. Its newest incarnation comes in the form of this charming new musical, produced by Kenny Wax and directed by Tre...

It's Prohibition-era New York, but not as you know it. The speakeasies and gang tensions are present and correct, but the mobsters and showgirls look like children, and the machine guns fire cream instead of bullets....

Six years after it closed in the West End, the first new staging of Billy Elliot The Musical has opened at the Leicester Curve, made possible by liaison with the original filmmakers. Though it is a bold departure in many ways from the beloved original production, its story endures and continues to r...

Charles Dickens' novels are filled to the brim with characters who capture different elements of the human condition - evil and good and, crucially, plenty in-between. Perhaps the most fascinating of them all - at least she was to me when first I read Great Expectations in my mid-20s - is Estella, P...

It’s tough to keep a musical juggernaut like Les Misérables going. It’s even tougher to keep it feeling fresh, night after night for well over 35 years. Where others have faltered, Les Misérables has kept marching on to its own revolutionary drum beat. ...

A delightfully entertaining performance full of energy and talented young stars....

Gregory Doran brings the RSC's decade long History cycle to its conclusion with a worthy, if wordy, Richard III...

Funny, frightening and thought-provoking, The Southbury Child cannot quite keep all its plates spinning, but is bold in its ambition and execution...

It's been over a century since John Millington Synge's Irish play The Playboy of the Western World was first performed, and almost 40 years since Mustapha Matura transported the story to Trinidad in the original version of Playboy of the West Indies. Sadly, Matura passed away in 2019 before he finis...

Often cited as one of the best movie musicals ever made, the 1952 romantic comedy Singin’ In The Rain, starring Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, has a special place in many people's hearts. It was first adapted for the West End stage in 1983 and since then there have been multiple ...

Forty years on from its debut at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in London in 1982, Michael Fryan’s farce-within-a-farce, Noises Off, returns to Pitlochry Festival Theatre as part of their 2022 summer season. The comedy was last performed in Pitlochry in 2010 and this marks the first professional ve...

The sun is certainly shining on Perthshire, as Pitlochry Festival Theatres celebrates the opening of its recently renovated building. A cheery actor-musician revival of The Proclaimers’ jukebox musical Sunshine on Leith opens their 2022 summer season, a co-production in collaboration with Capital ...

Gamble is a show about gambling addiction. Informed by Walker’s own experiences of being the partner of a gambling addict, the multi-media show marries glorious levels of glamour with the humbling testimonies of those who have had issues with gambling....

If there's such a thing as the perfect recipe for a musical, then Waitress has surely found it. Like each of Jenna's delicious freshly-baked pies, the show achieves the ideal balance of sweet and sour. By turns hilariously funny, heart-wrenchingly sad and achingly sweet, Waitress knows how to take t...