UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

Many great performers tackle Lear every year. From Laurence Olivier and Michael Gambon to Ian McKellen and Simon Russell Beale, it’s become somewhat of a tradition for dramatic actors to take on one of Shakespeare’s biggest challenges once their hair starts to grey. Less often, a female actor co...

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

Clever (even a bit too clever at times) sequel that picks up Ibsen's action 15 years later in a world that has the intractable problems many of us have today....

Three women gather in a waiting room to receive the results of their genetic testing. Through palpable tension, they (over)share and confess their deepest secrets, regrets, and hopes. From desperately wanting children, having four of them, or never having been the motherly type, their lives are rule...

August Wilson’s Jitney, a play about Black taxi drivers in Seventies Pittsburgh, last opened in London in October 2001. Cloaked in the resonance of 9/11 and a nation still in shock, it walked away that year with the Olivier award for Best New Play. Two decades on, thoughts run to the Obama preside...

What did our critic think of AN EVENING WITH JOE STILGOWith his latest album’s dropping on the musical theatre scene a few months ago, Joe Stilgoe brought to the attention of all his listeners the figure of Frank Matcham, the turn-of-the-century English architect who specialised in theatres and mu...

The Royal Opera House's 2003 production gets a much-needed injection of Japanese authenticity while retaining, even enhancing, its moral of how men can abuse their power, as husbands and as colonial occupiers....

The theatricality of gender takes centre stage in Paul Miller's take on Marivaux’s 1724 comedy....

Highly physical, beautifully danced and sexy as all hell, Sir Matthew Bourne’s acclaimed ballet The Car Man made its debut in 2000 and now returns to London with an imaginative new staging at the Royal Albert Hall....

What did our critic think of THE GUNPOWDER PLO“Remember, remember the fifth of November” is a turn of phrase etched in the brains of millions of children. The plan was to assassinate James I and overthrow the government in one swift move during the Opening of Parliament in 1605. Led by Robert Ca...

Harry Hill and Steve Brown pack plenty of laughs into the life of an ex-PM who only ever wanted to be Mick Jagger - until he spied the seductive allure of power...

While Romeo and Juliet have charmed and stirred audiences for over five centuries, another unofficial couple from Shakespeare’s tragedy has instilled doubt and curiosity. Mercutio and Tybalt, sworn foes, are tied together by an invisible string of admiration and attraction....

Socrates: enigmatic Greek philosopher and generator of many a good quote. Accused of sacrilege and corrupting the young minds of Athens, he was sentenced to death by forced poisoning. He might be revered as the founding father of Western philosophy, but he was a dangerous presence back in Attic time...

A new play on the disintegration of civil society is well-timed, but too bitty in its structure to engage fully with its material or its audience...

Cally's life is turned upside down when she embarks on an affair with her childhood crush...

“By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you will be happy. If you get a bad one, you will be a philosopher.” Socrates may not have actually said those words but, even apocryphally, they express a cynicism about marriage that pervades through history to the modern day....

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 ...

It’s been a while since Mark Ravenhill’s had a show on in London. After The Cane premiered to stellar reviews at the Royal Court in 2018 and the musical adaptation of The Boy in the Dress (for which Ravenhill wrote the book) opened in Stratford-upon-Avon the year after, The Haunting of Susan A i...

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...

Richard Jones' new production drips with bacchanalian flare. But something is missing from the allure....

Though flawed in its structure, this passionate new play has an important role to play in a scandal that continues to stain our city and our country...

This new play brings the issue of mediating relationships in a changing, hybrid world to the fore without losing drama's essential components of character, plot and pace....

Richard Wagner had many strong ideas when it came to music, especially his operas. Reducing the runtime to a mere 60 minutes and concentrating on excerpts that focus on the love story between the titular characters, is Japanese choreographer and dancer Saburo Teshigawara’s adaptation a success?...

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 ...

Looking for something endlessly inventive, ridiculously energetic, child-friendly yet racier than an MP's browsing history? Machine de Cirque has it all....