UK REGIONAL THEATER REVIEWS

What if, instead of being based in a castle in Denmark in the late Middle Ages, Hamlet was set at a backyard barbecue in the United States in modern times? That’s exactly what audiences witness in James Iijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Fat Ham, which follows Juicy (Olisa Odele), a young, queer b...

Anyone who thinks Lily Allen's simply an upstart pop star plonked onstage to pull in the punters and rake in the cash, well, you can think again. She's delightfully dangerous and destructive – so much so you can't take your eyes off her – in Matthew Dunster's new cheeky version of Ibsen's Hedda ...

Marisha Wallace, Broadway’s current Sally Bowles, has had a career in New York and London marked by starring roles in musicals about women surviving tough circumstances. As we find out in her debut live recording, Live in London, her own life hasn’t been much different....

Joanna Bowman brings Shakespearean Italy to The Other Place at the RSC with her new production of his first play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. At a pacy 90 minutes (without an interval) and set in the round, the play is reimagined for the present day with a talented cast of actor-musicians - an idea...

There's something inherently magical about outdoor theatre, especially when the theatre is in such beautiful surroundings as Kilworth House's. Watching Rydell High's disco ball throw tiny swirling lights across the theatre's tented roof as the cast hand-jive beneath it and night falls outside, it's ...

There are only a few names that, when spoken, hold such a weight that you feel almost as if you cannot carry them. Anne Boleyn, dare I say, is one of the most pivotal. Her story is one that is either at the forefront of your mind, or it should be. And bearing witness to it, in the home where she was...

Don’t Rock the Boat tries to be a wild ride down the Thames as the title suggests, but it only lightly bumps into its chaos. The cast make a valiant effort with the material and its set beautifully fits the Mill at Sonning, but its outdated nature makes me question who this play is for in 2025....

What did our critic think of MARY POPPINS at Birmingham Hippodrome?...

Adapted from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, director Richard Jones’s glorious Falstaff makes a welcome return to Glyndebourne, losing none of its charm or deft comedy. It is playful, witty and a pure delight....

It's a bold move for the Royal Shakespeare Company to slip in a remake of W Somerset Maugham's 1920s lesser-known comedy about infidelity in amongst more serious offerings like King Lear and Timon of Athens....

Fiennes captures the voice and gait of actor-manager Sir Henry Irving and Miranda Raison conveys the intuitive nature of actress Ellen Terry in a superb production by director Jeremy Herrin in Fiennes' new season at Theatre Royal Bath....

The Watermill Theatre may be small, but this Jesus Christ Superstar is epic on biblical levels. Exuberant, dynamic yet intimate, if you’re on the lookout for an alternative stripped back Andrew Lloyd Webber revival this summer, this one is worth taking a holy pilgrimage...

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...