UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

In the much-cited 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score, the Dutch psychotherapist Bessel van der Kolk wrote of how the human body can be undone and rewired by traumatic experiences. In Iron Fantasy, comedy duo She-Goat have absorbed this idea into their musical comedy, and explored if and how one can ...

Australian adaptation of the original story, not the film, packs a punch...

Known for her evocative, folk-infused sound, Manic Street Creature sees Memon take the reins as writer and composer as well as performer, bringing her distinctive voice to a personal story of second-hand trauma. First performed at the Fringe in 2022, it’s now back in a new production at the Kiln.�...

The best of Irish playwriting lands at the Barbican in an exciting project. An audience of one steps into a booth blindly for a play they don’t get to choose. Six five-minute one-act shows penned by Enda Walsh, Marina Carr, Mark O’Rowe, Joy Nesbitt, Louise O’Neill and Katie Holly are offered o...

Sarah McGuinness is best known for her work producing whimsical indie documentaries about the standup comedian Eddie Izzard; in her one-woman show, though, there are only passing references to this. To put a finger on what the show is about is no easy task, because it’s a confused jumble of autofi...

Park Theatre’s latest double bill presents two recent works from an emerging writer, both centring average queer London lives, and the lengths we’ll go to to present the versions of ourselves we want the world to see. Both are somewhat overblown in their execution, but at their best they are ima...

At the Menier Chocolate Factory, the revival of Ryan Craig’s The Holy Rosenbergs arrives with the weight of history attached to it. When it first appeared at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe Theatre in 2011, it was a sharp entry into a conversation about Jewish identity, family loyalty and moder...

In spite of being one of the most difficult genres to stage, horror theatre is having its moment. The Woman in Black might have closed at the Fortune three years ago (almost to the day!), but the success of Paranormal Activity at the Ambassadors is proof that audiences are hungry for some spooky dra...

When it premiered at Soho Theatre in 2012, Blink was a whimsical oddity, an ode to two eccentric loners falling in love. In 2026, it takes on a darker tone, with the subtitle “a parasocial love story” foreshadowing things to come....

Musical set in the late 1950s with a strong message for today...

Her name may not be widely known today, but Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s musical legacy is felt down the decades. George Brant’s play about her relationship with gospel singer Marie Knight is retelling not just a woman’s life, but the birth of an entire new genre....

A revival marking twenty years of a remarkable education initiative, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank: Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe demonstrates accessible theatre at its very best. Directed by Lucy Cuthbertson, this fast paced ninety minute production captures the essence of Shak...

Arthur Miller's later works are usually overshadowed by his earlier masterpieces. Is it time for reappraisal? With rising antisemitism across the world, what can Miller’s 1994 confrontation of anti-Jewish racism tell us in 2025?...

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....

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....

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...

“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....

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 ...

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. ...

“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...

George Eliot’s Middlemarch was, and is, radical for its acknowledgement of how society places limits on even the most ambitious and idealistic of its inhabitants. In his new play, Alexi Kaye Campbell explores how that notion of compromise may have affected Eliot herself, both to her own benefit an...

To Maury With Love at Theatre Royal Drury Lane celebrated composer Maury Yeston’s 80th birthday with songs from Titanic, Nine, and Grand Hotel. Featuring the London Musical Theatre Orchestra, the charity concert supported Bowel Cancer UK, delivering strong performances despite limited context and ...

The premise of What I’d Be is disarmingly simple: two estranged sisters sit on a bench in a small town, and talk. In one unflinchingly cathartic hour of theatre, they’ve ricocheted from outright resentment to reconciliation....

Innovative take on familiar comedy proves hit and miss as lovers and fairies fight...

f we’re speaking technically, a dramatised lecture is an educational performance that joins drama and academia in order to make the topic more entertaining to the public. In this case, Conradi offers an engaging one-man show that makes the bulky five acts of Peer Gynt accessible and smooth. He lig...