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, …