Sunday, August 29, 2021
Royal Court Upstairs, LondonAs delivered by the Dutch singer Wende, the diffuse nature of assorted words that “can only be sung” take on the force of nature
I often wish I had been in Pa…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:06AMSunday, August 22, 2021
Gillian Lynne theatre; Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, LondonAndrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical, sparkily scripted by Emerald Fennell, goes to the ball at last. And Carousel gets a salty …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:54AMSunday, August 15, 2021
Olivier; Noël Coward theatre, LondonLesley Sharp is magnetic in Kae Tempest’s ferocious reworking of Sophocles, while Lily Allen makes a spookily quiet West End debut
It is rare for an au…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:48AMSunday, August 1, 2021
Old Vic, LondonWarm, wily and gloriously playful, Emma Rice’s adaptation of the 1987 film is another motel-and-ballad show triumph for the Old Vic
It is, says director Emma Rice, a story t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:36AMSunday, July 25, 2021
Theatre Royal Windsor; Harold Pinter theatre; Bush, LondonIan McKellen’s wonderfully assured Prince of Denmark is a double-edged sword; The Crown’s Emma Corrin can do far more than Diana…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:54AMSunday, July 18, 2021
Chichester Festival theatreDaniel Evans’s production bursts with energy as it foregrounds an anti-racist message in the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic
I have always flinched from the sedu…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:03AMSunday, July 11, 2021
Vaudeville; Theatre Royal Stratford East, LondonThe first two of four new casts work their magic differently in Nick Payne’s irresistible multiple realities play. And April De Angelis make…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:18AMSunday, July 4, 2021
Bridge; Lyric Hammersmith, LondonSimon Russell Beale is Bach to his fingertips in Nina Raine’s intermittently brilliant tale of the great composer’s domestic labours. And a fine triple b…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:48AMSunday, June 27, 2021
Notting Hill carnival and Dylan Thomas’s radio masterpiece come to the stage, while no one does lockdown like Beckett
It is an unlikely phenomenon in the West End. Women slamming their arg…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:54AMSunday, June 20, 2021
Hampstead theatre, LondonThe ingenious struggle of a new generation of entrepreneurs is charted in Dawn Walton’s bright revival of Alfred Fagon’s prescient 1975 play
Alfred Fagon’s pla…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:48AMSunday, June 13, 2021
Dorfman; Theatre Royal Stratford East, LondonGhosts confront bureaucracy and memory; and a murdered man’s spirit inspires his twin sister to tackle racial injustice
Here are ghosts bringin…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:18AMSunday, June 6, 2021
Pinter; Kiln; Old Vic/online
Gemma Arterton’s failed astronaut confronts her overachieving sister in Amy Berryman’s debut play; wheelchair user Amy Trigg transfixes with her witty monolo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:03AMSunday, May 30, 2021
Shakespeare’s Globe; Duchess theatre, LondonSeated groundlings make history at the Globe’s carnivalesque Dream. And Jack Holden conjures memories of the onslaught of Aids
As if by magic,…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:42AMSunday, May 23, 2021
Available onlineJulie Hesmondalgh as a food bank volunteer and Frances de la Tour in glinting Alan Bennett headline this sharp set of five plays filmed in and around the city
As theatres reo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:03AMSaturday, May 8, 2021
Pitlochry Festival theatre, onlineJohn Byrne revisits the terrain of his 1977 hit spoof Writer’s Cramp to follow the fortunes of artist Pamela Crichton Capers in this dizzy audio drama
Pel…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:33AMSunday, April 25, 2021
Available onlineBen Brown’s new play imagining the author’s Moscow meeting with his former MI6 colleague fails to truly chill
The theatre is rich in dramas about the Cambridge spies. Ala…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:42AMSunday, April 11, 2021
National Theatre/Sky ArtsBuckley and O’Connor head a terrific cast in this imaginatively pared down, made-for-TV production
What an accomplished example of pandemic-style drama: a sleek fu…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:06AMSunday, March 28, 2021
Pitlochry Festival theatre; Crucible Sheffield; podcast; all available onlineMark Ravenhill tenderly explores his mother’s life; monologues and music from Sheffield; and actors talk about …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:54AMSunday, March 21, 2021
RSC onlineA motion-captured Puck and computer-generated forest of fairies hint at possible futures for live performance
At 7pm on Tuesday more than 7,000 people were watching. At a later per…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:48AMSunday, March 14, 2021
Old Vic, London; available onlineJade Anouka sprints through American history, while all is calmly, inexorably revealed in Kiri Pritchard-McLean’s subtle play about gaslighting
The Old Vic…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:42AMSunday, March 7, 2021
Old Vic, London; available onlineSolo voices reverberate in these archive performances of Maxine Peake’s play about a woman in prison, and Ella Hickson’s roaming story of escape
I have o…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:18AMThe actor on his pandemic poetry jukebox, life lessons of the Moomins, the pros and cons of Twitter, and how to reboot regional theatre
Samuel West, 54, one of the best verse speakers of his…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:18AMSunday, February 28, 2021
Almeida, London; Soho theatre, London; both available onlineAdrian Lester and Danny Sapani work as one in Lolita Chakrabarti’s brilliantly realised study of male friendship. And a breathle…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:24AMSunday, February 21, 2021
MZG Theatre Productions; available onlineJanie Dee impresses in a smart production of a Terence Rattigan solo work bound up in class issues
Terence Rattigan has long been rescued from the th…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:54AMSunday, February 14, 2021
Original Theatre; available onlineSian Clifford and Nikesh Patel rehearsed for two days on Zoom before being filmed in a studio in Lorien Haynes’s impressively naturalistic bereavement sto…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:36AMSunday, January 31, 2021
Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, live streamPlaying multiple roles – and all the music – four young actors dazzle in Eline Arbo’s superb staging of Édouard Louis’s brutal coming-of…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:36AMSunday, December 27, 2020
Royal Court, London, online; Bristol Old Vic onlineMore than 60 writers and 200 freelancers get to work on the Royal Court’s inspired latest venture, while the Bible gets a Bristol twist
…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:48AMSaturday, December 26, 2020
Our critic looks back on dazzling state-of-the-nation monologues and valiant virtual reimaginings, Ovid and Oliver Twist
Dance: Sarah Crompton’s five best of 2020
The Observer critics’…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:32PMSunday, December 20, 2020
Noël Coward; Lyric, London A brisk new backstage farce was overtaken by events, while Henry VIII’s splendid singing wives were silenced once more as London entered tier 3
All gone. And at…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:24AMSaturday, December 19, 2020
It can be a role as career-defining as Hamlet. Dan Leno, who starred at Drury Lane every Christmas from 1888 to 1904, was the first great pantomime dame: a tiny ex-clog dancer with a top-kno…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:54PMSunday, December 13, 2020
Almeida; Bridge; Big House; Hampstead, LondonAs theatres ease into the new normal, the Almeida and Big House celebrate connection and isolation, while Nicholas Hytner’s A Christmas Carol d…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06AM 
