HEN & CHICKENS THEATRE

by Clementine Scott - March 03, 2026

Somewhere between 20,000 and 300,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula, were trafficked into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during the Second World War: the so-called ‘comfort women’. Writer-performer Minjeong Kim’s one-woman show tells just one of their stories....

by Jo Caruana - March 03, 2026

The filter-like haze hits you first. Then the occasional lighting, the tiled ceiling, and the faint whiff of the 80s. But it's the arrival of two extraordinary performances – Madelyn Smedley's fizzing, fearless Rita and Julius D'Silva's weary, cynical Frank – that makes Reading Rep Theatre's Edu...

by Laura Jones - March 02, 2026

Staged at the cavernous Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Sea Witch arrived with the sort of fanfare usually reserved for tried-and-tested crowd-pleasers. Instead, this world premiere exposed the perils of unveiling an unpolished new musical on one of the West End’s most imposing stages....

by Matthew Paluch - March 02, 2026

Sci-fi, like most things, is an acquired taste, and not something you often find related to dance. Enter The Coronet Theatre for once again pushing the boundaries of avant-garde programming. Last And First Men (2024) by Neon Dance is a multimedia work that definitely gets the brain working in pre-p...

by Franco Milazzo - February 27, 2026

It appears Tosca Rivola is back for a sequel of sorts. After last year’s debacle that was Diamonds and Dust - a production she co-created with Dita Von Teese that promised the moon, delivered a pebble, was 'paused' shortly after its press night and then, two months later, quietly cancelled - the A...

by Clementine Scott - February 26, 2026

“We’ve died, we’ve been reborn, but we still have our memories,” a character reflects at one point. He’s talking about the years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and this sense of war as existential is everywhere in Ukrainian playwright Polina Polozhentseva’s understated fable....

by Debbie Gilpin - February 26, 2026

The 2026 edition of the London Handel Festival, which kicked off last week, is running under the theme of From Heavenly Harmony. The five-week event aims to “enrich lives through Handel’s music”, with concerts and recitals taking place in a variety of venues across London - last night saw The ...

by Franco Milazzo - February 26, 2026

If you have ever suspected that opera might benefit from fewer Valkyries and more vaudeville, Opera Locos is here to confirm your prejudice and then sing it at you in Italian....

by Cindy Marcolina - February 26, 2026

The sudden passing of her father kick-starts a profound identity crisis in Lenore. Why didn’t her life dramatically change when he died? She remembers witnessing what the loss of a parent did to a schoolmate when she was younger, that instant transformation into a shell of who she was beforehand. ...

by Cindy Marcolina - February 25, 2026

“What a thing to have a mother!” That’s how Anna Ziegler’s new play ends. Studies show that it takes two to five years for a blended family to become a cohesive unit, and when Jennifer marries John, his daughter Delilah refuses to cooperate. Jennifer badly wants to be in Delilah’s life. In...