It's a triumphant West End transfer for this big-hearted British musical Everybody's been talking about Everybody's Talking About Jamie since its Sheffield Crucible debut earlier this y…
Brand new musical builds high production on a shaky structural base During the 19th century, Tiger Bay in Cardiff was the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution and the most multicultura…
Seminal 1976 film resonates anew as Breaking Bad star gets 'mad as hell'Outrage knows no time barrier, as the world at large reminds us on a daily basis. So what better moment for …
Finely judged two-hander about death and how to survive itShould Brexit ministers need help understanding the cultural mindset of their continental counterparts, they might consider a subscr…
It's a tough play to bring off but underpowered acting doesn't helpCoriolanus is post-tragic. It never horrifies like Macbeth or appals like King Lear, though its self-damaging pro…
Jonathan Lewis on working with ex-servicemen and women to tell their stories through dramaI was invalided out of the army in 1986. I'd been an army scholar through school and had a bursary a…
All-star cast in modern American classic celebrate the ideal of the dealAmerican classics dominate the straight plays in London's West End. Whenever a producer wants to revive a straight dra…
Uninspired treatment of Brecht's 1939 antiwar tractOne of the questions that can be asked of Brecht is whether for a modern audience his Verfremdungseffekt " or alienation effect " s…
New play about getting away from it all by Peep Show writer fails to enlightenIs Buddhism a path to finding spiritual enlightenment " or just an excuse for not facing your personal problems?…
The Scottish actor on the National Theatre staging of Network and going back to Shetland"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to stand for it!" In 1976 American anger about the state of the nat…
How the musical about a boy who wanted to go to the school prom dressed as a girl was createdI'd always wanted to write a musical, but I didn't start actually trying until four years ago. No…
New play about storytelling examines a children's book craze " and its repercussionsHarry Potter has a lot to answer for. The phenomenal success of J K Rowling's books, and of their film ver…
Emma Rice exits with a sweet-toothed musical in the Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseIt's all a bit Dairy Milk. That was, to wrap it in purple foil, the critical reaction to Les émotifs anonymes when…
It probably seemed like a good idea at the timeAlthough playwright John Pielmeier, who has written this stage adaptation of The Exorcist, reckons that "I adapted the novel, not the film," th…
New adaptation of Patrick Hamilton novel is thinly written and poorly stagedThe second world war is central to our national imagination, yet it has been oddly absent from our stages recently…
The generational torch gets passed in off-kilter Terry Johnson revival Terry Johnson's award-winning 1982 play Insignificance hasn't been seen in London since the playwright directed a 1995 …
Brand-new London theatre is wonderful, but its first show is disappointingGiven the rather uneven record of the National Theatre at the moment, there's already a certain nostalgia for the da…
A brilliantly British take on the Dr Seuss kids' classicWith mentions of Theresa May, cricket jumpers and DMs, Trump slurs and a host of characters with Northern accents, The Old Vic's …
This site-specific revival of 1953 courtroom drama works like a treatSome site-specific theatre feels like a really good fit. You could say, in this case, that it seems like poetic justice. …
New play about gay parenthood suffers from an identity crisisA new baby is like an alien invasion: it blows your mind and it colonises your world. For any couple, parenthood can be both exal…
Darkly comic two-hander opens daringly and goes nowhere In David Ireland's new hour-long two-hander " a co-production between Soho Theatre and west London's Orange Tree " two str…
Ibsen's great human comedy weathers a sea-change from fjord to Caribbean islandWhat a profoundly beautiful play is Ibsen's The Lady from Sea. It stands in relation to the earlier, relat…
The new artistic director of the international showcase of live art and performance says what's comingSince its inception in 1997 Fierce, Birmingham's International Festival of Live Art…
It's Fifty Shades of Auditioning in this tricksy erotic comedy A hit on Broadway, David Ives's steamy two-hander now boasts Natalie Dormer and David Oakes, well-known for their screen w…
Doctor Foster writer explores Englishness with enormous metaphoric zealProlific writer Mike Bartlett is the most impressive penman to have emerged in British theatre in the past decade. The …