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…
A vivid and witty recreation of politics in the late Sixties No playwright has a scalpel as sharp as James Graham's when it comes to dissecting politics; he has a brilliance and edge that st…
The stage magic is both ingenious and beguiling It's been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously whirli…
Despite its deceptive lightness, at heart this is a dark terrifying story When the Canadian Yann Patel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love " not with one person but wit…