UK REGIONAL THEATER REVIEWS

Daniel Ward's autobiographical tale, told as gig theatre, has plenty to say and says it well - we would be wise to listen....

An assured and emotional debut from writer Theo Griffiths deals with a family in turmoil....

This no frills Twelfth Night rattles through Shakey's comedy getting laughs along the way, but includes some artistic decisions that didn't quite land as clearly as they were, perhaps, intended to....

Once shows all its crowdpleasing credentials in this new touring production with a tremendous cast doing full justice to its score and carrying a somewhat corny plot to a standing ovation curtain....

The Union Theatre's Essential Classics season kicks off with Phil Willmott's updating of a classic with much to say about England in 2020....

The Crucible takes us to New York's bustling backstreets in this joyous revival....

Cinderella delivers a true family pantomime that mixes spectacular sets and costumes with plenty of laughs in a show that doesn't push back any boundaries, but delivers what its audience wants at Christmas....

The latest Sheffield Theatres panto hits all the traditional panto beats....

Sasha Regan revisits her 2015 production of the 1996 musical to deliver a splendid show for Christmas, with a relevance and harder edge that was missing a little four long years ago....

When on song, panto can be monumentally brilliant. An unpretentious form of theatre that can delight old and young alike. It's a shame then that this latest effort from panto behemoth Qdos is so tone deaf it makes your toes curl....

Ravens: Spassky vs Fischer takes us to Iceland in 1974 for the World Chess Championship, a clash between two very different men and two very different systems but with much that is not so different to the politics of today....

This production pares back Chekhov's original text and foregrounds key themes with just a hint that Vanya even has something to say about the key political issue of the day....

Scrooge, the ghosts and a very Tiny Tim just an arm's length away in a fine adaptation of Dickens' timeless tale....

Hunger, adapted from controversial Norwegian, Knut Hamsun's, early career novel, brings us a man alienated from an uncaring world - as much a fixture on the fringes of our city some 130 years since the book was published....

All it takes are some happy thoughts and fairy dusta??that's how the boy who never grows up is able to fly, at least. In Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Mischief Theatre's take on the JM Barrie classic certainly lifts your spirits, but mainly because not everything quite goes to plan for the young performers...

The feeling you don't conform to the mould that society expects, is a feeling familiar to most of us in our lives at some point or another. Perhaps that is what makes Funny Girl endure and continue to pack out theatres....

We all know that you should never judge a book by its cover a?' but should you ever judge a person by their name? This is the question posed to us in What's In A Name?, which has landed at Nuffield Southampton Theatres at the end of its first-ever UK tour....

Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory have a lot of fun with their London transfer of Shakespeare's battle of the sexes, but not every decision pays off and they need to be more sympathetic to the unique pros and cons of this remarkable venue....

Sheffield Theatres and Fingersmiths reinvent Charlotte Keatley's classic play about the lives of four women in one family....

The theatrical phenomenon that is The Woman In Black began in 1987, when Stephen Mallatratt adapted Susan Hill's spine-chilling work of gothic fiction for the stage. Over thirty years and countless terrified audiences later the production is still going strong....

Frank McGuinness's play is never less than engaging, Angela Murray tremendous as the woman left alone after her daughter is shot, but it's an unrelenting and demanding watch...

I Do! I Do! even with this updated book, is an old-fashioned two-hander musical that never fails to please, without ever challenging the traditional approach to the union between a man and a woman....

Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger is a best-selling memoir novel from the renowned Observer food columnist, Nigel Slater. It was adapted into a film in 2010 and has now been reworked for the stage, premiering at The Lowry in Manchester in 2018. The show is currently running at the Theatre Royal in ...

Edred, The Vampyre is a lot of fun with its fair quotient of chills thrown in and a fine example of how to stage horror, a tricky genre for theatres....

Hannah Khalil's new play grapples with some big issues for over two hours, but the biggest issue of all for any play - the drama between the characters - is absent for much of that time....