UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

Following an acclaimed run at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, A Partnership plays for a limited time at Battersea's Theatre503. The intimate studio setting works well for a play of this nature, immediately inviting us into the world of its two protagonists. Written by and starring Rory Thomas-Howes,...

Ruby Thomas' debut play is a delicious mix of humour, intelligence and desire. Playing at Hampstead Downstairs and directed by Guy Jones, the production is an energetic attack at the conventional monogamous relationship so many people find themselves in....

Holly (Martha Godber) is a talented girl who lives on a Council estate in Hull with her Dad (Jamie Smelt). Her mum left them when she was ten and nothing's ever been the same. When she goes off to London to attend university, she has to come to terms with her protective father and a life that's not ...

Sir Ian McKellen. On stage. Talking about theatre. That's it a?' five stars (could it ever be anything else?). But, before you click off Broadway World, let me tell you a few reasons why Ian McKellen On Stage is one of the most enjoyable nights in a theatre I've ever had....

This adaptation of Giles Foden's novel takes us into the heart of Idi Amin's regime...

Athol Fugard's 1982 play, set in 1950s Port Elizabeth, is inspired by his own boyhood in apartheid-era South Africa a?' as Fugard says in a programme note, it's a?oethe most intensely personal thing I have ever writtena??. Like his teenage character Harold (Fugard's actual first name), his father wa...

If any show proves that physical comedy is timeless, it's One Man, Two Guvnors, which brings a subversive 18th-century Italian comedy onto the 21st-century stage, and then promptly pushes it down the stairs to uproarious laughter....

This Merchant of Venice is aimed at schoolchildren and it's a fantastic experience for them. It's also pretty good for anyone, whether a 100+ Shakespeares veteran like me or a first-timer....

Emily (Julia-Maria Arnolds) is heading to a?oethe villagea?? to try to fix things with her boyfriend, who's actually decided not to go with her after all. Daniel (Duarte Bandeira) is a young man on his way back home from the city. Their loneliness and hunger for something more finds fertile ground w...

After the 2003 film and the 2009 play, there can be few people who are not aware of the story of the Yorkshire Women's Institute members who posed nude for a charity calendar. Calendar Girls-The Musical is the latest incarnation of the story written by Take That's Gary Barlow and Tim Firth. After a...

Laura Wade isn't the first to tackle Jane Austen's unfinished novel, abandoned in 1805, but she is the only one so far to write herself, the struggling adaptor, into the text. This witty, ingenious and surprisingly philosophical play, which premiered at Chichester last year, merges Austen with Piran...

Museum Pieces consists of four monologues and tells the story of four individuals who are forever changed, perhaps scarred, by a reality television show in which the contestants appear naked. Following on from his successful production of Four Loyalty Cards, this marks writer and director Jamie Chri...

Claire Skinner and Toby Stephens reunite for the first time in 18 years in Peter Nichols seminal 1960's play about parents coping with a disabled child. Does A Day in the Death of Joe Egg stand the test of time?...

Almost twenty years after she charmed hearts on the big screen, Amélie is taking to the stage in a bid to change lives and spread joy in the smallest of ways, with the biggest of hearts....

At a time of confusion, uncertainty and political chaos, never has there been more to talk about; and never has our country needed more reason for light relief and laughter. Fresh in its first week, Andy Parsons brings his Healing the Nation tour to Nuffield Southampton Theatres....

Following on from their phenomenal, Oliver-Award winning spectacle Blak Whyte Gray, which I saw last year, world-renowned dance company Boy Blue present their new show at Barbican Centre. The one-act piece is a massive triumph, again leaving me completely in awe of the company's work....

King John's themes are horribly present in today's febrile political climate making it exactly the right time to revive one on Shakespeare's less performed plays....

There was so much love at the Kiln Theatre last night. People from Brent and beyond came to celebrate the community production about an area consisting of 149 different languages. Residents from all walks of life graced the stage to demonstrate how beautiful the call for kindness can be....

The time is now for The Scottish Play; over the past couple of years there has been a glut of Macbeths, no doubt inspired by the extraordinary ongoing political events. This time it's Chichester's turn, with director Paul Miller reuniting with John Simm for a second Shakespeare (the pair teamed up f...

Caryl Churchill returns with a new quartet of shorts a?' and, at 81, she's still one of the most daring, formally inventive and linguistically dexterous playwrights working today. There's never any sense that her work could slide into another medium; it requires theatre's abstract arena, its live-wi...

Three chefs are preparing for service on an Airbus from Beirut to London. While Nora Schmidt's (Georgina Strawson) menu is about to debut with the guests in first class, on the ground at Heathrow spirits are starting to heat as alert is rising....

At the G7 summit last month, the wives of the world leaders were pictured together by Donald Tusk walking not across a zebra crossing as per The Beatles but through a garden. Tusk's caption described them as “the light side of the Force.” Yet, this picture did little to suggest these women were ...

Arthur Miller's modern classic A View from the Bridge is faithfully revived in this co-production between York Theatre Royal and Royal & Derngate, Northampton....

This new illustrated companion volume to Irene Sankoff and David Hein's Tony and Olivier Award-winning musical Come From Away, which tells the remarkable true story of a small Newfoundland town that welcomed stranded air passengers on 9/11, is just as beautifully and thoughtfully crafted as the show...

Tragedy was Lorca'sdomain, and fabric of his plays are about the darkest parts of collective human behaviour. Yaël Farber's production at the Young Vic is unrelentingly harrowing, and utterly captivating....