Ava Pickett’s debut has arrived in the West End trailing so much hype it could power the National Grid. This is smart, funny, properly upsetting theatre, even if the final stretch doesn’t quite stick the landing the rest of the evening promises. It’s a historical drama that refuses to behave like one: a study of […]
We Had a World is a memory play, one man’s autobiographical account of the two women who raised him, staged as an act of theatrical reconstruction rather than straight narrative. Downstairs at the Hampstead Theatre, the audience sits on three sides of a bare, warmly lit playing space, close enough to feel like eavesdroppers on […]
Marianne Elliott’s revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a gorgeous, glittering trap, and it knows it. Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel is a drama of seduction and revenge among the bored aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, and this is, remarkably, its first outing on the National’s stage. The Marquise de Merteuil […]
One of my favourite Broadway shows, Beetlejuice The Musical, has hit the West End looking like it has been dragged backwards through a haunted fairground, force-fed six espressos and told to behave itself in front of Andrew Lloyd Webber. It certainly doesn’t do that, though this is a very good production rather than a fully […]
Robert Icke is back in London with another classic text taken apart and reassembled. This Romeo & Juliet at the Harold Pinter Theatre is occasionally too clever for its own good, but it has Sadie Sink at its centre, and that, frankly, is enough. The strictly limited revival, running until 20 June, hands the title […]
Stefan Bednarczyk has spent decades at the piano making other people’s evenings, and now, at 65, he is quite rightly making one of his own. Before I Forget… is a warm, wry, occasionally devastating tour through a life lived in cabaret rooms, rehearsal pianos and the wings of other people’s shows. The premise is disarmingly […]
Ryan Craig’s The Holy Rosenbergs is one of those rare plays that trusts its audience enough to leave them genuinely unsettled. Written in the shadow of the Intifada, this revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory arrives now, against the backdrop of Gaza, with the force of a piece that knew it would be back. The […]
There’s a production lurking inside this Yentl that fully earns the five-star raptures it collected in Melbourne and Sydney – and occasionally, gloriously, you catch a gleam of it. But somewhere between Sydney Opera House and the back end of Baker Street, something of that electric charge has vanished. Kadimah Yiddish Theatre’s bilingual drama – […]
Hadestown has the finest score in the West End right now, and almost everything else you could reasonably ask for except a reason to care. That this folk-opera cult phenomenon can be so bewitching to listen to and so inert to experience is, depending on your tolerance for theatrical enigma, either the point or the […]
Hampstead Downstairs has been quietly cornering the market in thrilling studio theatre, and with Aaron Loeb’s R.O.I. (Return on Investment) it may have found its most audacious investment yet. This is a play tightly wound, relentlessly intelligent, and unlike anything else on a London stage. Loeb, making his UK debut after acclaimed Off-Broadway work including […]