ROYAL ALBERT HALL, ELGAR ROOM

by Clementine Scott - January 31, 2026

The Tempest is perhaps the most metatheatrical of Shakespeare's plays: the plot takes place in real time, and Prospero asks the audience to “free” him with their applause. So who better to direct than the king of theatrical deconstruction himself, Tim Crouch?...

by Franco Milazzo - January 30, 2026

If Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov were a dinner party, Richard Jones’s Russian-language revival at the Royal Opera House would be the dinner date where you arrive bright and curious and leave questioning your life choices, nursing a neat whisky in a corner. This is not an opera that gives up its secrets...

by Cindy Marcolina - February 01, 2026

Make no mistake, the writing is dated and it’s far from being a masterpiece, but the production does something that’s so specifically disturbing that it’s difficult to ignore. Bateman’s raison d’être is unnerving to begin with. Once you combine this archetypal psychopath with a jaunty synth-heavy sc...

by Cindy Marcolina - January 30, 2026

A journey through time and memory, Ballad Lines must be one of the most exciting new musicals to hit the stage in some time. We follow Sarah, an American queer woman, as she dives headfirst into her family’s roots. Through the centuries, the same melodies come back to link the women who came before ...

by Louise Penn - January 29, 2026

BIGRE/'Fish Bowl' is a glorious, inventive display of comedy clowning with the ability to engage and surprise. The timing is impeccable and the reactions sublime. It's quite silly, but it also has an emotional heart running through it as these three characters find a way to coexist in the same space...

by Louise Penn - January 28, 2026

In Mrs President, an overuse of technical gimmicks reveals the lack of a cohesive, structured script. Mrs President is ultimately a frustrating and disjointed experience, with little insight into the woman it wishes to rehabilitate. In creating the famous photographs of Mary Lincoln, almost exactly ...

by Gary Naylor - January 26, 2026

Kenneth Williams brought back to life, tics and torments intact....

by Cindy Marcolina - January 27, 2026

October 1936, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists march on East London. When they reach Cable Street, a stone’s throw from Whitechapel, they find that its people have gathered in a united front against fascism. British, Irish, Jewish, and communists are blocking the road, ready to fight....

by Cindy Marcolina - January 26, 2026

Is there a story more universally connected to the experience of girlhood than Little Women? Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 coming-of-age novel is a beloved read across the world, with its descriptions of sisterly devotion, struggle, love, and loss. The March sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy - have woven ...

by Franco Milazzo - January 24, 2026

It was probably a dark, rainy night when Francesca Marlowe came across the mysterious case of the dead asylum seeker. Plumes of vape smoke flowing from her nostrils, she turns the facts over in her head. The man had not been in the country long, or at least not long enough to accumulate deadly enemi...