UK / WEST END THEATER REVIEWS

Before Taylor Swift versus Charli XCX - but after The Beatles versus The Rolling Stones - came Blur versus Oasis. David Niven's debut comedy at Birmingham Rep takes us back to the summer of 1995, when temperatures and egos both soared and the nation was gripped by the chart battle between Oasis’ �...

#MeToo and cancel culture needs a new angle sadly lacking in humdrum new play...

While most people knew Chadwick Boseman for his blockbuster appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as T’Challa/Black Panther, the actor was also a playwright and director. His early career was spent treading the boards in New York, where he became a Drama League Directing Fellow at 24 years ...

Multi-award-winning Cynthia Erivo is having a pretty good year: still riding high on the success of the Wicked films and nominated for an MBE in the 2026 New Year Honours list, she is now going back to her stage roots in Kip Williams's adaptation of Bram Stoker's gothic masterpiece, Dracula. Antici...

Two best friends, the ghost of Katie’s brother, a secret. When Roni shows up at Charlie’s old flat, she finds Katie rummaging through his things while a party is in full swing upstairs. When Charlie died months prior, Katie disappeared from Roni’s life, leaving her without a place to stay and ...

The Shitheads is the perfect example of the importance of the Royal Court to London’s present day new theatre scene. The debut play from poet Jack Nicholls, this is a show that swings big... and the result is unlike anything else currently playing in the city....

Josh Sharp’s ta-da! is a million miles a minute ride through everything from queerness to quantum theory, told through 2000 powerpoint slides. And despite being exactly as mental as it sounds, it really works....

War is over. The Labour Party has won a historic majority and will form a government anchored by socialist principles (fancy that), the NHS about to be born - and financed. The world was turning upside down and, so too, was the humble kitchen of the not so humble manor house of a peer who took the n...

Delicious comic timing carries the humour with an effervescent pace, while the cultural aspect of the script adds a bittersweet layer to it. It’s genuinely funny, with a quick sting in the tail. Natasha Kathi-Chandra’s direction is unhurried, leaning into Khan’s deliberate restraint in buildin...

The two old favourites are no longer in Whitehall, but need each other just as much...

In his book, A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis wrote, 'The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal'. It's that deal that William Nicholson's poignant play explores in the true story of Lewis's late-in-life love, marriage and loss. Thoughtful, tender and touching, Shadowlands examin...

Harold Fry was never meant to be a hero. An ordinary man in an ordinary life until a letter from a long-lost friend sends him out the front door… and he keeps on walking. From Devon’s quiet lanes to the windswept streets of Berwick-upon-Tweed, his journey becomes a pilgrimage of love, redemption...

Sometimes a play is far more valuable than what the four walls of a theatre can hold. 2007: history will never be the same after the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum gets a hold of a photo album from 1940s Germany. As the archivists leaf through the pages, the day-to-day routine of Nazi officers stati...

If anyone still thought Terence Rattigan a staid drawing room playwright, his 1963 play Man and Boy ought to put an end to that. Anthony Lau’s version doesn’t always elevate the source material to its full potential, but it presents a case for giving the text another look....

Showbusiness is rife with affairs; it’s the reason tabloids exist. While these days paramours trade in texts and DMs, epistolary correspondence used to be the currency of illicit romances. It was the case for one George Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell (née Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner)....

First seen in Chichester last summer, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry now makes its joyful arrival into London. Based on the 2012 novel by Rachel Joyce which became a 2023 film, the show is a musical that cleverly acts as a snapshot of modern Britain and a study into the complexities and darkn...

The opening tableau of Miles sticks in the mind: a man writhes atop a piano, as though something long-dormant within him is being woken up. Similar sequence recur throughout the show, conveying a man both at one with his music and at war with it....

If you input “what does death smell like?” into Google, you’ll get a variety of results saying that it depends on the conditions of the body. That’s what Linda searches after she hasn’t seen her neighbour in some time. Life at Laurel House will never be the same; loneliness kills in Farah ...

Featuring two of the most awkward sex scenes you'll ever see, this acerbic comedy is a merciless meditation on teenage fumblings....

Despite its title, Elton John is far from the central focus of Henry Naylor’s blisteringly paced one-man show, Monstering the Rocketman. Instead, the target of Naylor’s pen is British journalism, and specifically the thriving 1980s tabloid press....

Confronting issues that echoes down the decades, american vicarious resurrects the 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr at Wilton’s Music Hall....

If it's not quite as slick as it might be, this oldies show can still push a lot of the right nostalgia buttons...

Whitney White collapses time and space to insert new perspectives into old plays...

Japanese company Chiten Theatre returns to the Coronet with an energetic adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler. Directed by Motoi Miura with a translation by Ikuo Kameyama, it’s accompanied by experimental rock trio kukangendai. It’s an entertaining, fascinating production, presented in...

When Penelope’s father passes away in England, the family divides: where should he be buried? His Greek Cypriot sister thinks ancient tradition should take over, but his wife refuses to move his body abroad. An ugly feud erupts. The plot of The Ophiolite has a lot of potential. Philip de Voni’s ...