If you think you know Fiddler on the Roof (if you can hum the opening bars of ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ or picture Topol’s Tevye, arms akimbo beneath a painted shtetl sky), prepare to have your expectations upended at the Barbican. Jordan Fein’s revival, fresh from its sold-out run at Regent’s Park Open […]
Shucked breezes into Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre like a shot of sunshine after a week of drizzle. It is a loud and proud musical comedy that mixes folk tale silliness with a contemporary wink; part hoedown, part stand-up set, all set to a country-pop score. You sit beneath the trees, stare at a crooked […]
The Magician’s Table is billed as a wake for fictional magician Dieter Roterburg. Candlelight flickers across velvet drapes, a lone accordion sighs in the corner and ‘mourners’ clutch cocktails while swapping stories about a man who never existed. The production is not a play in the traditional sense but an immersive close-up magic event. There […]
Talk about a star-studded cast. This ambitious reimagining of Ibsen’s The Master Builder shifts the story to contemporary America and, crucially, centres on the women who orbit the title character. Playwright Anna Raicek keeps the bones of the original, but transplants them into a sleek modern drama that speaks to the #MeToo era and the […]
The stage is a picture-perfect English garden, all pastel foxgloves and iced-cake fences. Yet within minutes George Bernard Shaw’s anarchic spirit starts slicing through the prettiness. Director Dominic Cooke delivers the play in a single breath, about one hour forty minutes, stripping away interval niceties so the ideas land before they cool and your bladder […]
A heavy desk, rows of well thumbed Hansard volumes and the tell tale scent of pipe smoke set the scene of this 1970s political play. Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky unravel their ninety minute political comedy drama The Gang of Three with disarming ease, inviting you to eavesdrop on a trio of Labour heavyweights who […]
‘Faygele’ is Yiddish for ‘little bird’, though it’s more often hurled as a slur against gay men. Shimmy Braun’s script, drawn from personal experience, carves out a bold narrative within the American Orthodox Jewish community – a world rarely seen on stage, and even more rarely with this kind of candour and specificity. Walk into […]
Lindsay Posner’s revival of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea has journeyed from a small studio in Bath to the grand Theatre Royal Haymarket, proving once again that the quietest tragedies can command the biggest rooms. From the first moment, as you see the apparent corpse and anticipate its discoverers, a faint smell of gas […]
A Not-So-Secret Spy Caper (Plot Synopsis) It’s London in the swinging 1960s, and a not-so-secret mission is underway. In a swanky hotel straight out of a Bond film, covert agents from the CIA and KGB have converged in pursuit of a rogue British agent and a stolen top-secret file . Add to this mix an […]
You shuffle into Southwark Playhouse clutching a free sheet called Retro while a marshal in high visibility orange bellows spoof announcements through a megaphone. Inside the auditorium a battered Piccadilly Line carriage awaits complete with sticky blue seats, route maps and the faint whiff of stale sock thanks to the first passenger who proudly whips […]