UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

It has been a quarter-century since Patrick Marber's Closer debuted, but this play, in which everyone screws everyone in every sense of the word, has lost absolutely none of its epic brutality....

Jean Paul Gaultier deploys dance, music and video to tell the tale of a life that laughed at convention but had hard work, technical mastery and a generosity of spirit at its heart...

John Heffernan and Katherine Parkinson lead a superb cast in a brilliant realisation of director, Simon Goodwin's, conceptualisation of Shakespeare's comedy....

Cynthia Erivo, just a few weeks away from beginning rehearsal for the Wicked movie, in which she is playing Elphaba, pops into BBC Proms to give audiences a night they'll never forget. The Grammy, Emmy and Tony award-winning artist provides the audience with special renditions of some of her favouri...

Sh!t-faced Shakespeare doesn’t take itself too seriously and puts bawdy entertainment at the top of the agenda; whether Shakespeare himself would give the thumbs up (or perhaps some other finger) is a question for another day....

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...

In a sparsely decorated London council flat, a father and son have been keeping secrets. It takes less than an hour for Mamet Leigh's new play to unpack the question of selfhood in the context of immigration....

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 splendid central performance illuminates a play full of humour that also smuggles in deeper considerations on the character of art in a changing world...

Jack Absolute Flies Again! Originally scheduled for the Spring of 2020, it took two years, a director change, and a cast reshuffling for the show to get off the ground. It finally lands at the Olivier in a flashy production that has very little substance. One wonders how such a play ended up on one ...

Get your flat-cap ready and brush up your Brummie accent: the immersive Peaky Blinders: The Rise has arrived in London....

A ball pit, inflatable flamingos, beanbags, a pink shiny wall, beach balls, and a giant avocado. Walking into the transformed Studio at The Other Palace is like stepping into a pink and green Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, where unexpected fun lies around every corner....

Pennyroyal is a small, but almost perfectly-formed, triumph....

No, no, it isn’t déjà vu: Anything Goes really is back at the Barbican less than a year after it last opened there. ...

“I thought I was being romantic, but I’m just being drunk and gay”. Everything changes when Bex starts serving at Lori’s catering company. Lori is a polished high-end chef enamoured of food and what it can give people, while Bex is a working-class young woman whose go-to meal is chicken nugg...

Australian drag variety show Yummy: Iconic features of quintet of performers dishing out an upbeat blend of dance, circus, burlesque and as much as lipsyncing as they can cram in. Will this tasty mix of talents leave you satiated or craving something more substantial?...

Russell Thomas, Christopher Maltman and Hrachuhi Bassénz excel in an emotional and relevant production of Verdi's adaptation of Shakespeare's masterful study of jealousy, ruthlessness and much more....

A regime has fallen and the new ruling class is gearing up to take over. Allegiances run on the razor’s edge and “Today’s patriot can become tomorrow’s traitor”. United Kingdom, 2022? No, Soviet Union, 1991. Peter Morgan thrusts us in a universe where 1.3 billion is an understated sum as h...

Starring and written by JJ Green, A-Typical Rainbow has a particular mission: to give the audience a mind’s eye view of what it was like for him to be an autistic child and young man. For better and for worse, it very much succeeds in its mission....

Now I’ll come right out and say it: I really wanted to like this play. After a lovely meal and inspired by the genuine passion that clearly unpins everything at this theatre, I was excited to get engrossed in Simon’s comedy – but the story didn’t grab me....

The tale of the RMS Titanic has been etched in the minds of millions for a century. The shattered dreams of those 1,500 who lost their lives against an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean on the 15th of April 1912 still stun us in horror, but James Cameron's epic romance has been making us dream and...

Many interpretations have been given to Franz Kafka’s novella A Report to an Academy, with academics taking different roads. Published in 1917, an ape, trapped and abused by humans, learns their behaviour not out of desire to assimilate but to survive. The fact that it’s the work of a German-spe...

What can be better than watching The Tempest on the night when Prime Minister Boris Johnson's spell was finally broken? Surely, it's a good time to reflect on the play's exploration of power, illusion, loss, revenge and redemption....

What did our critic think of 300 Thoughts For Theatremakers: A Manifesto For The Twenty-First Century Theatremaker?...

The infamous Count explains his history to his prisoner and expands on his hatred of the British Empire...