UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

Mixing theatre and food has become a bit of a craze in the past couple of years, so it was only a matter of time before shows involving food were introduced in festivals. Paul Flannery - who's spent ten years going in and out of the profession - and his assistant serve a delectable evening whether y...

Katie Arnstein returns to VAULT Festival after Bicycles and Fish and Sexy Lamp to complete her It's a Girl! trilogy presenting Sticky Door directed by Ellen Howard. The show details a year in her life, examining how in 2014 she started the journey to reclaim her body and mind while being severely de...

Given the turbulent times that we live in, a new stage adaptation of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin would seem like a smart choice for an ambitious theatre (or theatres, as this is a co-production with York Theatre Royal, in association with Oxford Playhouse)....

Love was in the air at the Bush Theatre this Valentine's Day with the opening of Temi Wilkey's new play The High Table. A heartfelt drama that spans generations of a Nigerian family, this is a confident debut....

In 1969, a serial killer brutally murdered three women in Scotland. Nicknamed Bible John by the police and the press, his identity is still a mystery. In the present day, four young women who are bored out of their mind while temping in an office find out that they share a mild obsession with true c...

The Paper Birds tackle all the important stuff and then some in their groundbreaking and format defying Ask Me Anything. After asking teenagers all around the countries to send them their problems and questions as if they were agony aunts, they noticed that, generally, their letters were falling int...

Flights looks into the hearts of three men whose lives in rural Ireland are not working out as they once hoped....

After the press murders their Richard III and everything seems lost, Stu McLoughlin notices that Howard Coggins looks like Henry VIII. What ensues is a hilariously impertinent, rude, crass, and occasionally blasphemous revision of history. Think of Six, turn it upside down, add a couple of hysterica...

A world premiere of a play is always an exciting thing; a potential opportunity to witness one of the very first performances of a future classic. Unfortunately, Paul Minx's new play The Dog Walker, at the diminutive Jermyn Street Theatre, is an odd and uneven experience....

Tom Stoppard's latest - and possibly final - play has few of the dramatic hallmarks you might expect from him: the dazzling linguistic flourishes, the formal trickery, the knotty metaphors and giddy metatheatricality. Instead, we have a relatively straightforward, linear piece, initially overburdene...

There must have been a two-for-one offer on the day director Barbora Horakova visited the Regietheater prop-store to kit out her Luisa Miller for English National Opera. White walls and plenty of black marker pens to daub on them; geometric structures; sinister clowns; a chorus all costumed somewher...

Three years after the National's enthralling revival of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, the playwright returns with his new adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's tragicomic 1956 parable a?' which has also been turned into an Ingrid Bergman-starring film and a Kander and Ebb musical....

If every marriage is a duel, then those of Bluebeard are full-on battles. The trailblazing German choreographer Pina Bausch's Bluebeard takes us into a mental war zone where the serrated edges of conjugal life cut deep. Radiating Bausch's singular vision and stunning theatricality, the 1977 piece re...

In just 45 minutes, Caryl Churchill's Far Away walks a tightrope between tricksy surrealism and dystopian warning but stays upright due to its sheer theatricality....

Billy (Damian Lynch) and Scarlet (Izabella Urbanowicz) meet in a damp underpass covered in graffiti. He is involved in gang crime; she is the mother of their 15-year-old son Alfie. In a London where the tunnel acts as a partition between luxury living and council estates, the characters come to term...

Electrick Village brings technology to VAULT Festival, creating an all-encompassing 360 adventure that - quite literally - transports the audience to another dimension. Met by a chirpy staff member and the creator of RawTransport - a a?oetop of the line travel companya?? - they explore the trappings...

monolog 3 presents a range of plays that explore life as it's lived today through the voices of single performers drawing on Chickenshed's uniquely inclusive approach to theatre. @CHICKENSHED_UK...

Rose and Simeon are approaching Mars while, back on Earth, Alisha and Marcus are hired as speech writers. While the latter two bicker about ethics and potential tragedy, the astronauts are coming to terms with success and mortality. Barry McStay's play The First packs a load of great ideas that, at ...

Three distinct doorways separate three different time periods. Between them stands three Nora's, played superbly by Natalie Klamar, Amaka Okafor, and Anna Russell-Martin. The eras they occupy are a post-war 1948, a vibing 1968 and a more contemporary 2018. The women are subject to political, persona...

Kate O'Flynn is in award-winning form as the baby who grows into a girl and then a woman before her life's span is through in Alistair McDowall's clattering monologue....

In yet another attempt to democratise opera, Opera Undone, the new strand of Islington's King's Head Theatre's celebrated opera offering, brings two radical interpretations of Puccini's Tosca and La bohème to the Trafalgar Studios. These are the first productions to debut in the West End....

First seen in the West End over 20 years ago, titled The Mysterious Mr Love, Karoline Leach's Tryst is the final show of the Chiswick Playhouse's inaugural season; a melodramatic mixture of psychological thriller and slightly awkward love story....

Revival Blitz! forms part of Phil Wilmott's Essential Classics season, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of VE Day. A Lionel Bart musical set in the heart of London's East End, Blitz! (also directed by Wilmott) tells the story of two neighbouring families - the Blitzsteins and the Lockes - aga...

In a small village, a girl is on her last police warning. One more offence and she's going to be locked up. Her life is spent between school and a job in a shop while she takes care about her ailing mum and 6-year-old sister. Her future is a hazy dream she's afraid to consider and her house is scatt...

The promotional poster promises us the greatest afterparty of our lives. Entering the theatre to loud music and dancing, we know we're in for as good a time as friends Andy and Yog have clearly just experienced.  Santino Smith and Scott Mackie's new play isn't simply an evening of raucous fun thoug...