UK REGIONAL THEATER REVIEWS

You could be forgiven for thinking that there isn’t much more to be said about Le nozze di Figaro, the most performed opera in Glyndebourne’s history. However, Mozart’s classic role subversion comedy is deceptive in its simplicity: beneath the farce and improbable plot twists is a complex web ...

Nick Cope’s vibrant live show, I’VE LOST MY BOBBLE HAT!, is a polished, thoughtful, and musically rich experience that confirms his standing as one of the UK’s most respected musical family entertainers....

Even ardent opera fans may struggle to recall the story or the score for Mazeppa. Based on a poem by Pushkin, Tchaikovsky's opera has been unjustly overshadowed by his Eugene Onegin. Last staged at the London Coliseum in 1984, Grange Park Opera have landed a coup by engaging the English National O...

It was only February when we headed to Stratford-upon-Avon to review Hamlet, so it comes as quite the surprise to head through green fields speckled with sheep for the same play a mere four months later. Elsinore might have been a massive moving ship back then, but it’s receiving an astonishing ov...

Midsummer Nightmare, created by Midnight Circle Productions, is a Gothic adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is currently touring outdoor spaces in the UK. The particular performance I attended was in the garden of Keats House, which works perfectly as the poet John Keats who ...

Fancy something sweet? Flumps, the debut full-length play by Essex writer Emma Jo Pallett, has arrived at the Mercury Theatre’s Studio. Originally performed at Colchester Fringe in 2022, Pallett’s dark comedy has since been in development with the Mercury, now becoming their brand-new Studio Ori...

Just how much fun can you have at an oratorio about a Old Testament tale of jealousy, madness and death? Well, quite a lot as it happens at the return of Barry Kosky's remarkable production of Handel's Saul. This staging is opera at its most theatrical, with severed heads, a breast-feeding witch, a ...

Grange Park Opera has opened its new season with a crowd-pleaser. Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly remains problematic, with its story of a Japanese teenage geisha, impregnated and cruelly abandoned by an American lieutenant. However, it is still wildly popular, mainly due to its ravishing score....

What could be more pleasing than an evening of extracts from George Eliot's diaries and novels read by Hermione Norris (Cold Feet, Spooks, The Salt Path) and actor/singer/songwriter SuRie?...

Giffords Circus: Laguna Bay takes audiences and transports them from a 600-seat tent in Chiswick House and Gardens to a beach resort in 1950s America, with sunglasses and leather jackets aplenty....

A medieval mystic and a scribe walk into a 21st-century dorm room . . . No, that’s not the start of a joke. It’s the beginning of Talking to Margery, a play written and directed by Zoë Alexander in which famed mystic Margery Kempe (Denise Evans) and her devoted scribe (Jamie Izzet) somehow end ...

As someone who used to be obsessed with yoga, I knew that I wanted to see Namaste Blisters, a comedy show written and performed by Kym Nelson, a former yoga teacher, that promises to reveal the “stereotypes, secrets and absurdity of the yoga industry.”...

Space Planet Mission: The Improvised Sci-Fi Epic’s title is pretty self-explanatory - the cast of the show will be putting on a sci-fi-themed improvisational show, coming up with an entirely new story before the audience’s eyes. An added bonus? There is a live musician accompanying the improvisa...

When a show begins with a content warning about balloons, '80s music and danger, you know you’re in for an interesting one. The Giant Balloon Show, performed by Dizzy O’Dare, mixes balloon tricks with a playlist from the 1980s to make a show for all ages, but there’s one catch - the actual gia...

An unmissable evening of beautiful words from Thomas Hardy (read by National Treasure Anton Lesser) and music from Orchestra of the Swan at Stonehenge....

PEAR: Phobia makes quite the interesting promise to its audience. Patrick and Hugo McPherson, 6’7” identical twins, proclaim that, by the end of the show, there will be no more fear in the world. Take that, Fleabag....

Glenda & Rita: Live has a simple concept - Glenda Swing and Rita Herringbone, two former movie stars, are moving from the screen to the stage in an attempt to win back the fame that has faded for them. The catch? They’re still stuck in the world of black-and-white. Literally....

The City of Ladies, described as an “offbeat comedy exploring the radical ladies of the past through puppetry, drag, and special hats,” has quite the unique premise. Two muses, Ladies Rectitude and Reason, visit a medieval woman named Christine de Pizan, who is struggling with what it means to b...

Written and performed by Fay Downie, Puck: A Fairy’s Tale gives a backstory to the sprite from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the servant of Oberon who loves to pull pranks and cause chaos. Downie is joined creatively by Olivia Mace, who takes on both the role of director and dramatu...

The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show has quite a fun concept for a Fringe show - audience members are greeted with a croissant, a strawberry and a choice of a hot drink before taking their seats for the performance. Instead of just being one play in an hour, audiences see multiple “bite-size” ten-mi...

The Elmer Adventure, inspired by David McKee’s beloved patchwork elephant, bursts onto the stage with a kaleidoscope of colour and charm....

If theatre is, at its best, a mirror held up to society then The Ladyboys of Bangkok offers that reflection in rhinestones, feather boas, and a kaleidoscope of pop anthems....

There’s something quietly powerful about Have You Met Stan?, a new original musical by Bart Thiede, that has just had its final show at the Brighton Fringe. Set within the everyday hum of a pub, this Irish-Polish queer love story has sincerity and charm as it delves into the meet-cute between Seá...

In Split Ends, writer-performer Claudia Schnier blurs the lines between autobiography and artifice with an intensity that lingers long after the house lights come up. Billed as a part-stand-up, part-puppetry piece, this visceral one-woman show defies easy categorisation—and that’s part of its po...

Opera buffa is an ever-popular genre of the art, and more than two centuries after its composition, Rossini's Il barbière di Siviglia remains one this genre's most often staged operas. The music and lyrics are pure genius, but the success of this particular opera comes from an inherent understand...