All articles by Rachel Halliburton
Slaughterhouse Five, Southwark Playhouse review - engagingly slick account of Vonnegut's eccentric vision
Rachel Halliburton
Tue, 06/09/2026 - 09:10
A versa…
War Horse, National Theatre review - this tour de force is going to be a hit all over again
Rachel Halliburton
Wed, 06/03/2026 - 13:27
The OIivier is exploi…
Care, Young Vic review - profoundly sobering and strangely uplifting
Rachel Halliburton
Fri, 05/29/2026 - 10:10
Alexander Zeldin's play is a deeply moving m…
Mother Courage and Her Children, Shakespeare's Globe review - a post-apocalyptic vision of a world corrupted by violence and greed
Rachel Halliburton
Wed, 05/20/202…
Sherlock Holmes, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre review - gleefully madcap and unashamedly cerebral
Rachel Halliburton
Sat, 05/16/2026 - 11:44
Joshua James p…
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe review - a riot of crowd-pleasing absurdity
Rachel Halliburton
Fri, 05/01/2026 - 11:25
★★★★ A M…
In the Print, King's Head Theatre - a moment that changed the newspaper industry for ever
Rachel Halliburton
Wed, 04/22/2026 - 09:58
★★★ IN THE …
Åukasz Twarkowski's production dazzles without illuminating
It's truly thrilling to see the Barbican embracing big concept long-form theatre again, seeking out productions that are as con…
James Graham's play transfixes the audience at every stage
For the first part of Punch it feels as if you're riding a roller coaster, watching the world speed and loop past as you see it fro…
A visually virtuoso work with the feel of a gripping French TV drama
So often the focus " in the coverage of a royal wedding " is the story of the woman wearing the bridal dress. While every…
The actors skilfully evoke the claustrophobia of family members trying to fake togetherness
The Gathered Leaves is set on the tectonic plates of a middle-class family reunion, in which three…
Emma Pallant and Katherine Pearce are formidable opponents to Falstaff's buffoonery
Shakespeare's Prince Hal may have rejected Sir John Falstaff as a symbol of his misspent youth, but the re…
This transfer from Regent's Park Open Air Theatre sustains its magic
It's always a risk when a production changes venue. In the curious alchemy of live performance, no-one can be sure whethe…
Story of self-discovery through playing the piano resounds in Anoushka Lucas's solo show
This charmingly eloquent semi-autobiographical show " which first played at the Bush Theatre in 2022…
Ince's fidelity to the language allows every nuance to be exposed
A society ruled by hysteria. Lurid lies that carry more currency than reality. There's no shortage of reasons that Arthur Mi…
This wild, intelligent play is a tour de force till the doom-laden finale
Ava Pickett's award-winning début play, 1536, is a foul-mouthed, furious, frenetically funny ride through the lives…
Sean Holmes' Western-style production brings a flamboyant start to the Globe's summer season
Holsters, Stetsons and bluegrass music bring a distinctive flavour to this Wild West riff on Rome…
The production gets stronger in the second half as the shadows of tragedy begin to loom
In 2012, an eight-hour long version of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby arrived in London a…
KT Tunstall's new score brings bite and momentum to a high octane evening
Before there was Barbie: The Movie, before there was Legally Blonde, there was Clueless, the Valley Girl movie that …
Missed opportunity to create a rich drama from this intriguing historical encounter
Why is it so hard to write a decent play about Bach? Maybe, in part, because there are no words that can e…
Bush's writing is as fresh as a sea breeze and as lyrical as birdsong
"Who'd be a woman?... Who in their right mind would choose all that?" The question comes towards the end of a conversat…
Diamond-sharp banter and an endorphin fizz make this one of the best parties in town
Over the last few months, celebrity-driven West End productions have suffered some inglorious crashes - n…
The script turns dry-as-dust diplomatic detail into nothing less than an adrenaline sport
It took a while for journalists to identify the chain-smoking, Machiavellian figure who was a perman…
This latest incarnation of the show is a wild, spinning ride through different forms of reality
This feels like the theatrical equivalent of being in a centrifuge " a wild, spinning ride thr…
This psychedelic mashup conveys a sci-fi-style alternate reality
Hermia is a headbutting punk with a tartan fetish, Oberon looks like Adam Ant and Lysander appears to have stumbled out of a …
Oscar Wilde speaks just as strongly to the 21st century as he did to his own
If Harold Pinter's work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then Oscar Wilde…
Kubrick's humour doesn't always detonate as it should in Armando Iannucci's version
Even by Stanley Kubrick's standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. Af…
This 'Shrew' has many fine elements but ultimately they don't coalesce
A recent Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 2.1 million people in the UK had been victims of domestic ab…
A production that feels as if it could erupt into cabaret at any moment
To proclaim that you're playing gender games with Shakespeare's As You Like It seems a little like announcing that you…
The scenes overlap so that characters are besieged by their past, present and future
Rebecca Frecknall's Romeo and Juliet burns like ice, paring back and tightening the script so that love a…
The play is stripped down to expose sinister undercurrents of nationalism and honour-culture
It begins in darkness. All that can be heard is the sound of a human struggling painfully for bre…
Engaging adaptation and sympathetic playing still leave viewers longing for more detail
It's particularly poignant to watch this story in the knowledge that a little over a year after US-led…
The central character is put in the dock but has ample evidence to get out
Hell hath no fury like a teenager scorned. In this perplexing play, we see a highly successful doctor put on trial …
The fact is that Joan of Arc was, by anyone's standards, unique
This raw, joyous, irreverent take on Joan of Arc made headlines before opening night for its depiction of the fifteenth-centur…
Multi-talented musical cast delivers va-va voom in Sally Cookson's reimagined Narnia
This bold reimagining of Sally Cookson's innovative 2017 production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardro…
Tom Hollander as powerbroker Boris Berezovsky switches between brazen charm and hubristic rage
To watch a Peter Morgan drama is to have a fly-on-the-wall's perspective of modern history. Ove…
How physical transition is etched into the story of our world
Pinocchio is one of our most irreverent metamorphosis stories, and in this visually ingenious blend of film and stage performanc…
The disconnect between rhetoric and genuine meaning feels very contemporary
Kathryn Hunter's performance as Lear forges its heat from contradictions. She is as frail as she is strong, as det…
Gecko boldly sculpts surreal alternative realities to our predicted worlds
You never forget your first Gecko production. I experienced mine almost 20 years ago at the Battersea Arts Centre, …
A ten-foot golden phallus is launched from the musicians' gallery
Boris Johnson was of course not the first British leader to engineer a split with Europe for personal gain. This strikes you…
Inter-generational story from a Northern mining town melds naturalism and tragedy
Anne-Marie Duff blazes across the stage like a meteorite in Beth Steel's excoriating drama about the changes…
Naomi Wallace's writing is brave and uncompromising
Jude is the kind of girl that no-one would want to mess with " she can dance like a demon to Eric Clapton, skewer an ego in seconds and hi…
This production carries as much emotional heft as it exudes riotous comedy
Lucy Bailey's joyous, visually ravishing Much Ado About Nothing opens on a sombre note. On stage there is laughter …
You go into a dimension where you operate through instinct as much as intellect
Punchdrunk's latest epic undertaking may be inspired by the legend of Troy, but this is nothing less than a da…
★★★ THE 47TH, OLD VIC Mike Bartlett's ambitious Trump satire doesn't quite hit its target
As a playwright, how do you handle an arse-fixated arch-disrupter?
Megalomania is…
Mike Bartlett's raucous chronicle of London in the age of Boris Johnson
If Nero fiddled while Rome burned, then Boris Johnson has played the whole sodding orchestra. Between the parties, the…
The soundtrack features musicians ranging from Robyn and Dua Lipa to Cardi B
Jane Austen's waspish vision revealed the vanities, delusions and cynical financial calculations that underpinned…
Director Rufus Norris uses the Olivier's revolving stage like a virtuoso
With its violent storms, bombed out cities and stories of families ripped apart by war, Small Island feels very much …
The author Thomas Melle had his animatronic double created for this intelligent show
It's the vulnerability of the robot that strikes you in this subtle, intelligent production from the Germ…
Scattergun subversion is undermined by psychological miscalculations
Hamlet isn't often played for laughs. When David Tennant took the comedic approach in the RSC's 2008 production, it was t…