UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

Vincent Van Gogh's is one of those life stories that we love to retell. There are countless museums, films and documentaries cataloguing the tormented and tragically suicidal post-impressionist painter, and the Doctor Who episode dedicated to him is absolutely tear-jerking....

Sometimes theatre shows don’t work out. Some can feel like watching a train wreck in slow motion, and others build a brick wall without any mortar to keep the pieces together. It takes nothing, maybe a slight push for the latter to disintegrate. I Could Use a Drink is a mix of both under director ...

Wonderville's varied cast of magicians and illusionists keep the pace high in a rip-roaring family show that provokes delight and, yes, wonder....

“So much pain was filled with happiness, at last!” There’s a reason why we call a lengthy, adverse journey “an odyssey”. In 24 books and over 12’000 lines Homer follows Odysseus, the “Master of plots and plans” and King of Ithaca, on his adventures after the decade-long Trojan War. A...

Urban dwellers know that a fox swaggering the streets like she owns them is nothing unusual these days. The merging of town and country, and the question of whether the fox is invading human territory (or is it the other way round with humans claiming zones that really belong to foxes?) are particul...

“My filter goes when I’m nervous!” That’s how we meet Jane Sinclair. The scenario is simple and normal: the 23-year-old young woman is being interviewed for a job. The cold and professionally detached poise of her potential new manager clashes with Jane’s tendency to over-share, but this o...

“It isn’t where you came from; it’s where you’re going that counts” said jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. It’s almost as if Hymn embodies this quote. Written by Lolita Chakrabarti (of Red Velvet and the staged version of Life of Pi fame) over lockdown, the play had its premiere in a sold-out...

Get yourself a pint and a pizza and enjoy a comedy like they did at The Globe, 400 years ago....

Mrs Thatcher has forced a No Confidence vote in the Commons and the Labour Party are fighting to survive it - and we're calling the shots!...

Leave it to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s most colourful musical to date to pull London out of the lockdown blues! After closing down with the rest of the West End last year, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat comes back to the Palladium starring Theatreland’s sweetheart Jac Yarro...

An unflinching examination of power and gender roles told through the perspective of a student-teacher relationship that is unafraid to pose difficult questions of its audience....

It’s a beautiful thing for the theatre community to be able to be together and connect again. And connecting, in a human sense, is the key theme of Emma Rice’s production of Bagdad Cafe....

The last time Reg was breaking hearts on a London stage was at the Apollo Theatre back in 2015. Simpler times. Much has been said and many comparisons have been drawn between the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and everything that’s happened in this pandemonium of a pandemic....

In October 1938, Orson Wells broadcast a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. He converted the story of alien invasion into a series of dramatic news bulletins, which inadvertently inspired mass panic across America. This incident is seen by some as the original source of ‘fak...

babirye bukilwa’s …cake is an equally heartbreaking and heartwarming exploration of love of all kinds. Part of a trilogy of work from the writer, this story is the prequel to bukilwa’s acclaimed play …blackbird hour, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting, the Bruntwoo...

The hottest Hamlet on the scene is an octogenarian. But Ian McKellen’s latest stage appearance in Windsor is far from being a geriatric production. In the run up to their opening, McKellen and the company described it as “age blind”, almost an experiment to see how the visual aspect of a Shake...

Before Clueless or Mean Girls came Heathers, a cult 1988 film satirising the explosive consequences of painful social pressures in an American high school. Laurence O'Keefe and Kevin Murphy’s award-winning musical version now bounces back into the West End for a 12-week run with a brand new vigou...

Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo is sensational in Benedict Lombe’s full-length debut currently running at The Bush Theatre. Directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike, the piece is an explosive and complex exploration of identity, belonging and self-love. Moving through tumultuous Congo, post-Apartheid South Africa, ...

There’s a song by Brad Paisley titled “Little Moments” where the American singer-songwriter celebrates the small instances and idiosyncrasies that make life worth living. Ben Barrow and Lucy Ireland’s new song-cycle From Here feels like the spirit of that ballad was given the space and breat...

At a time when we're getting too many words, words, words from a bumbling Prime Minister and his cronies, what a relief to discover a charming, kind and life-affirming silent movie-style production that harks back to simpler times. The enticing live piano score by composer Zoe Rahman, is the dialogu...

What do Dua Lipa and a French comedy from the 18th Century have in common? Absolutely nothing. They might do in a different adaptation of Pierre de Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance, but not in Quentin Beroud and Jack Gamble’s....

In 1941 two leading physicists secretly met in Nazi-occupied Denmark to discuss the race between Hitler and the allies to create the nuclear bomb. These men were Werner Heisenberg, a German working on Hitler's bomb programme, and his old mentor Niels Bohr, a half-Jewish Dane with links to the United...

What sells better than sex? In Anna X, the answer is clear: exclusivity. Inspired by the true story of the socialite scammer Anna Sorokin, Joseph Charlton’s play marks the conclusion of Sonia Friedman’s Re:Emerge season at the Harold Pinter Theatre with a boy-meets-girl tale on steroids. In Dan...

Right when summer starts kicking in and restrictions slowly ease, Iris Theatre is putting on an eclectic range of shows at The Actors’ Church in Covent Garden. With bunting all around the grounds and flowers blooming, the new musical The Red Side of the Moon couldn’t have asked for a better ambi...

South Londoners are given a voice from beyond the grave in six beautifully rendered monologues from, and for, Covid times....