James Inverne enjoyably reconstructs the rivalry between Puccini and Leoncavallo Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini's Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer …
Beth Steel makes a stirring West End debut with her poignant play for today The 2024 play at the National Theatre that put writer Beth Steel squarely centre-stage has now received a West End…
An early Lynn Nottage work gets a superb cast and production The corset is an unlikely star of the latest Lynn Nottage play to arrive at the Donmar Warehouse, 2003's Intimate Apparel. After …
David Adjmi's clever and compelling hit play gets a crack London cast The tag "the most Tony-nominated play of all time" may mean less to London theatregoers than it does to New Yorkers, but…
This Dream is a great night out, especially for Shakespeare first-timers It's a sign of the inroads that the term "immersive" has made in theatreland that it now gets jokily namedropped at t…
Sarah Ruhl turns her bond with a student into a lesson in how to love In 2012, the award-winning American writer Sarah Ruhl met a Yale playwriting student who became a special part of her li…
David Ireland pits a sober AA sponsor against a livewire drinker, with engaging results The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic d…
Richard Bean has turned Mamet's steel trap into an amusing puzzle There is so much that is right about Jonathan Kent's new production of House of Games " the casting, the staging, the direct…
John Lithgow gives a masterclass in delivering a 'human booby trap' When Mark Rosenblatt was preparing his debut play, the miseries of the assault on Gaza were still over the horizon. Now th…
The Irish actor Stephen Rea is a silent-movie Krapp to treasure In the Stygian darkness of a bare room, a table on a low platform with a light hanging overhead starts to emerge. Then a door…
An ideal revisiting of Patrick Marber's play about risking all to move ahead Patrick Marber's powerful debut about gambling men is 30 years old, born as the Eighties entrepreneurial boom was…
De Beauvoir's novel gets an often charming but undemanding staging The Finborough has once again performed the miracle of creating a whole world in its intimate space: this time, inter-war …
Amy Ng's take on two Chinese titans needs more dramatic ballast The writer Amy Ng has made a sterling effort in digging up the true story behind her new play at the Kiln, Shanghai Dolls, but…
Writer-actor Keelan Kember floods the stage with a torrent of gags but few ideas Keelan Kember's play Thanks for Having Me may look like a vehicle for Kedar Williams-Stirling (Sex Education,…
Johnson Willis captures the anarchic energy and wit of the late guitarist Resurrecting the origins of old rock stars is becoming quite the thing, After cinema's Elton John, Freddie Mercury…
Julia McDermott triumphs as a Californian weather girl coping with fires inside and outside her head Can Francesca Moody do it again? Fleabag's producer has brought Weather Girl to London, a…
Jean-Philippe Daguerre tries to mix a farcical comedy of manners with the holocaust When Yasmina Reza's cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another…
Perfectly judged performances enhance a subtle staging of Nick Payne's two-hander Nick Payne, the writer of Constellations, has created another 90-minute zinger for two actors. This one is m…
Tamsin Greig and Celia Imrie shine in a multifaceted portrait of motherhood The theatre director Anna Mackmin has written and directed an extraordinary play about a mother and daughter relat…
Is it a dance piece with added text, or a stripped down play with excess choreography? The opening scene of the Old Vic's Oedipus is dominated by a giant backdrop of a skull-like face, eyes …
Still inventive and fun but short on sharp shocks How excited Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton must have been to learn that the venue for their Inside No 9 stage show was haunted, by an …
An intimate staging and superb casting make this a superior West End production Into a world of grooming gangs, human trafficking and senior prelates resigning over child abuse cases comes …
Matthew Bourne's masterly reinvention has become a classic itself How do you refresh a masterpiece? Bringing back his first and still greatest hit, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne seems to have ch…
Lillian Hellman's family feud set in 1900 Alabama doesn't survive a confused updating The Young Vic has opened under a new artistic director with a puzzle play. The puzzle is, why stage this…
Director Patrick Marber does Mel Brooks's 1967 musical proud There is something deliciously perfect about the timing of The Producers' arrival at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In these twitc…