Halloween is the season when London’s theatres let the bats out of the belfry, and any venue with a draughty corridor suddenly has a ghost story to sell. Battersea Arts Centre has gone one better. It has cast itself as the haunted house, and in Immersive Octopus’s latest stab at a scare, the bui…
London City Ballet (LCB) is a company on the rise. Christopher Marney’s rebirth of the company was only three years ago. Now they are filling the house at Sadler’s Wells with the great and the good of the ballet world present for opening night.…
After being taken on a lengthy tour of the UK and Ireland, Only Human comes to the West End as Brown’s first appearance since 2022’s Showman, a post-pandemic show filled with highly personal insights. Its follow-up Unbelievable saw Brown remain backstage as co-creator, writer and co-director (al…
While both the film and the autobiography have entered our cultural heritage as testimonies of the Nazi era – the poverty it brought, its violence, its misery – this new rendition inhabits a different realm. Thom Southerland debuts Szpilman’s own compositions in an invariably morose piece of t…
It’s Les Mis if you squint. A musical based on turbulent French history, doomed love, and flags brandished like a crusaders’ Warhammers. Except this is not the longest running musical in West End history. This is its weird cousin Martin Guerre.…
Though the originating Disney team doesn’t seem to be involved, the vibe of the film is perfectly maintained. Bryan Louiselle takes over the musical aspect, adapting and producing the soundtrack as well as writing new songs. David Simpatico writes the book: his script can be a bit cheesy and strai…
Coming-of-age plays are not new, but they vary hugely in quality and impact. Danny Lee Wynter's new work, Ilford Boy is a witty, sensitive and beautifully performed piece of theatre that will warm your soul and break your heart…
The Orange Tree's Tom Littler is not afraid of variety. After staging a delightful and clever version of Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing, set in the grounds of a Richmond school, he has turned to T.S. Eliot’s 1936 verse drama, Murder In The Cathedral, set in the church opposite …
The idea that “art is not a mirror but a hammer” has been attributed to Bertolt Brecht, deployed by Leon Trotsky and could serve as the epitaph for Sarah Kane’s repertoire, not least her final work.…
Whether intentionally or not, London’s opera houses have leaned hard into the Halloween season with an unspoken theme of “go bleak or go home”. Over in Covent Garden, there’s a revival of Philip Venables’s 4.48 Psychosis (adapted from Sarah Kane’s final play, completed shortly before she…
They say the truth is stranger than fiction - but they forget it’s also much more relatable! Every Everyday is a 45-minute, real-time snapshot of the totally ordinary and yet completely unusual lives of everyone and anyone, delivered via a naturalistic improvised piece that is...
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