UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

Glorious furniture decorates the stage, with 15th-century Venetian paintings hanging from the walls. A butler pours expensive wine and the four dinner guests congratulate him on cooking delicious food. Dessert is on its way, as is a night the five of them will never forget. Oliver Cotton's new play ...

Director John Haidar marks the 20th anniversary of Enda Walsh's award-winning Disco Pigs with a cracking new production at Trafalgar Studios. Premiered at the 1997 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the play depicts the peculiar universe created by Pig and Runt in Cork City. Born at the same time on the sam...

When we think of Kevin Elyot, one of the first things that comes to mind is his magnificent 1994 comedy My Night with Reg, a touching play about gay lives revived at the Donmar Warehouse in 2015. Elyot's first play, Coming Clean, is about to be staged at The King's Head in a week's time, and now h...

Neat freaks beware: Touch is your ultimate nightmare. This latest offering from DryWrite, the company that launched the now stratospheric Fleabag, centres on another woman with a chaotic personal life - this time, mirrored by the symphony of filth that is her cramped bedsit....

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' The opening line of Charles Dickens' classic novel seems quite apt in describing the current Regent's Park Open Air Theatre's season to date. With On the Town beset by injuries before it even started, its current production of A Tale of Two Citi...

The line between the dramatic world on stage and the real world off stage can seem very thin. Shows written hundreds of years ago speak to today; others hit even closer to home, depicting actual events happening right now. The latest offering from the Donmar Warehouse speaks to the latter. Setting t...

Even if you're not in the UK you'd have to have been living under a rock for the past couple of years to have missed the headlines about Brexit. It was inevitable that it would eventually lead to productions such as Brexodus! The Musical....

How far would you go to have a baby? What and who would you overlook to make it happen? Vivienne Franzmann has never shied away from controversial subjects in her plays. The 2012, critically acclaimed play The Witness explored the exploitative nature of photojournalism and Pests was based on heroin ...

Game of Thrones returns this weekend, but those hungry for political machinations and manipulations can also find a feast of them in Helen Edmundson's 2015 stealth thriller about a little-known 18th-century English monarch and her courtly advisors' jockeying for influence. With plenty of resonance f...

La Voix Humaine, Poulenc's one act, one soprano opera based on a play by Jean Cocteau, is a visceral, demanding, rewarding evening, ferociously up to date in every sense....

With this year's Pride still fresh in Londoners' minds, there couldn't be a more appropriate time for Joseph and David Zellnik's musical about gay US soldiers in World War Two to open in central London. It runs not far away from another high profile LGBT production, Rotterdam, which will finish its ...

Specialised in immersive and participatory community theatre, the award-winning charity SPID Theatre has developed iAm 4.0, a thought-provoking hour in which the audience take a certain amount of control....

Enter Lucy Kerbel's eminently practical book All Change Please....

It's a brave new world for the RSC, collaborating with Intel and Andy Serkis's Imaginarium Studios on a notably high-tech Tempest. But, for all the computer-generated trickery, it's the human experience and rough magic of theatre that really impress in Gregory Doran's production, now playing at the ...

Set in three bedrooms, the same emotional world under three different roofs in time, Torn Apart (Dissolution) is an intimately powerful play. BJ McNeill bares an array of human feelings and cages them on the stage in singular snapshots of differently shared lives....

In 1942, the American War Office issued a pamphlet titled 'Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain' to prepare the nation's soldiers to a life abroad defeating the Nazis. In the riotous comedy by Fol Espoir and The Real McGuffins, Americans and Brits come face to face with odd traditions, ty...

How do families work? What happens when adult children flee the nest? And what happens when you're born deaf into a hearing family? Nina Raine's funny and frank portrait of a family grappling with these issues makes its regional debut....

Bath's Ustinov Studio has become something of a European hub. Visionary director Laurence Boswell and ever-skilful translator Christopher Hampton, who first introduced us to Florian Zeller, are currently championing Daniel Kehlmann - a bestselling writer in Germany, where he published the first of 1...

King Kong (A Comedy) tries a little too hard for laughs, but captures some of the pathos of its 1933 movie inspiration in a breathless 80 minutes show.....

The world of musical theatre is being shaken up once again, as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz gets the Sh*t-faced Showtime treatment. The company's Shakespeare sibling is also in town over the summer with Much Ado About Nothing....

Shakespeare in the Squares returns after a successful introduction in 2016 with Much Ado About Nothing, this time taking on a tragedy that has been another popular choice this year - Daniel Kramer's controversial production has almost finished its run at Shakespeare's Globe, for one....

After exploring themes of vanity and corporate culture in Marius Von Mayerburg's The Ugly One, Park90 now turns its attentions towards science and the environment with Chuck Anderson's brand new play The View From Nowhere. With Brexit looming large, the economic and immigration issues have been head...

Premiering at Southwark Playhouse, Superhero is a bittersweet, funny and genuinely moving musical about a dad fighting for custody of his daughter. Colin Bradley (Michael Rouse) recounts his journey through fatherhood recollecting the small victories, hilarious moments and painful mistakes of his...

A Macbeth that stays true to the 17th century origin of the play, yet feels bang up to date with plenty for teenage fans of Game of Thrones and Shakespeare veterans to enjoy....

Hot on the heels of the success of the reworked Half a Sixpence, Stiles & Drewe team up with Julian Fellowes once more to adapt a well-loved children's book for the stage. The Wind in the Willows has premiered at the end of last year in a short tour and now has a limited London season over the summe...