Walking into Salomé at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, you have a sense of foreboding. If anything, the whole experience of getting into the theatre felt more like airport security than theatre. Bags were being searched, full pat downs and even water bottles were being confiscated from the audience. The bar was shut so no buying […]
James Graham’s Punch, directed by Adam Penford, arrives at the Apollo with all the subtlety of its title. It is urgent, unvarnished and at times unbearably heavy-handed. But when it connects, it hits with force. Based on Jacob Dunne’s memoir Right From Wrong, the play traces the aftermath of a single reckless punch thrown by a nineteen-year-old […]
Penn & Teller at the London Palladium is a magic comedy show, starring Penn Jillette as the talker and Teller as the near silent foil. It marks their first West End residency as part of their 50th anniversary tour. The show unfolds in two acts, each built around a handful of major set piece tricks […]
This is a dark comedy by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran about a young Adolf Hitler who visits a new kind of doctor in Vienna, Sigmund Freud, and keeps reappearing in Sigmund Freud’s life as Europe tilts toward disaster. The opening is brutal and direct. Adolf’s father whips him with a belt for bedwetting while […]
Interview at Riverside Studios promises sharp conflict but delivers mixed rewards. Adapted and directed by Teunkie Van Der Sluijs from Theo van Gogh’s original film, this two-hander pits Robert Sean Leonard’s Pierre, a jaded political journalist, against Paten Hughes’s Katya, an actor-influencer living in a fashionable Brooklyn loft. What begins as a perfunctory profile spirals […]
The current production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not one to miss. A combination of humour, an Edwardian playroom setting, and the use of all the characters being played by ‘children’, makes for an entertaining 90 minutes for all ages, and particularly younger audiences. This production is one of Shakespeare’s most well known […]
Griff Rhys Jones arrives on stage with the easy authority of someone who has been performing for decades. He has built his career on charm, improvisation and comic authority, but Cat’s Pyjamas exposes the limits of that formula when the material is weak. Billed as an evening of stories, observations and reflections, the show is […]
The West End has no shortage of spectacle-heavy musicals, but few lean on technical wizardry as nakedly as Back to the Future. This stage adaptation of the 1985 film is a noisy, restless machine whose strongest asset is its special effects. The DeLorean roars, the clock tower trembles, and the stage seems to liquefy into […]
This raw, one-act drama delivers more confusion than clarity at first, but eventually develops sharp energy as it carves a modest but memorable path through youth, class, and survival. It’s a gritty drama by writer-co-director Sam Edmunds, co-directed with Vikesh Godhwani, staged at Southwark Playhouse Borough. The central performance is by Nathaniel Christian as ‘The […]
It’s rare to see a play that doesn’t shy away from discomfort, and this one certainly doesn’t. Inter Alia is a drama written by Suzie Miller, directed by Justin Martin, starring Rosamund Pike as Crown Court Judge Jessica Parks, with Jamie Glover as her husband Michael and Jasper Talbot as their son Harry. On the […]