Shakespeare's cross-dressing comedy gets the high-seas treatment, but loses the poetryThe Globe's artistic director Emma Rice has made no secret of her desire to go out with a bang, in …
Familiar company faces can't quite compensate for an odd choice of settingMen playing boys playing girls, women and men, all female parts convincingly falsettoed and high musical standa…
Emma Rice's revival is a wonderful synthesis of artformsTristan & Yseult has become something of a calling card for Kneehigh, which was founded in 1980 and is now the unofficial Nat…
Finn from Star Wars dominates a radical rewrite of Georg Büchner classicWelcome back John Boyega. Less than a decade ago, he was an unknown budding British stage actor, then he took off as …
A sprawling, Chekhovian saga, unknowingly written in yet sensing the year of the DonaldThe subtitle of Richard Nelson's new trilogy suggests an anti-Trump polemic. Instead, its miraculous, a…
Post-modern cabaret star plays mischief with the ghosts of Brighton's historic Theatre Royal Dream palace, cesspit and church; celebrated, mopped (by Marlene Dietrich, no less) and fucked: B…
Greg Hicks' arch machinator lifts an otherwise under-nuanced productionThere may never have been a time when Shakespeare's Richard III did not have contemporary relevance, but surely ne…
World premiere of Siddhartha Bose's new play empties seats by packing too much inA whacking great story has gone largely untold in British theatre: the legacy of colonialism in India, i…
Felicity Kendal follows with difficulty where Maggie Smith once gloriously led You have to hand it to Felicity Kendal: this ever-game actress is fearless about treading in the footsteps of t…
Reason versus dogma under the starsNever mind breaking the fourth wall, Joe Wright and the Young Vic have smashed the other three as well. This isn't simply because their engaging production…
Female sexuality " as voiced by a male comicThis monologue first saw the light of day at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015. It's a frank " very frank " piece about female sexuality by an anonymou…
Cheerful, physically extraordinary Australian outfit enthrall at the Theatre RoyalThere is a sequence in theatrical circus troupe Casus' new production, Driftwood, where three of the five me…
Lee Hall's sublimely foul-mouthed choristers storm the Duke of York's TheatreSacred and profane, trivial and profound blissfully combine in this irresistible, Olivier Award-winning…
Celebrated Moscow company delivers something far from contemporarySovremennik is Russian for "contemporary", and ever since its founding in the Soviet Union's 1950s Thaw, Moscow's Sovreme…
Greek tragedy stripped of its ambiguity and depthGreek tragedy provides an unending source of material for the stage: in no other theatrical form have the labyrinths of human nature been so …
Rory Stewart's Iraq nation-building memoir makes for fluent if sketchy theatre"This is the most fun province in Iraq" isn't the sort of sentence you hear every day on a London stage. On…
New twist on the biblical story gets bogged down in a portentous production Is God female? It says a lot about Yaël Farber's overblown new version of this biblical tale that, near the end…
Beach-set show for children musters more laughs from grown-ups than expectedThere are two types of family-friendly entertainment; the kind you'd happily watch a bit of whether you have small…
Mee the sound magician behind 'Enron', 'London Road' and now Yaël Farber's 'Salomé'No one ever went to the theatre for the sound design. Indeed, only t…
Stephen Unwin's debut play explores Nazi Germany and eugenics How do you tell a story as complex as the eugenics movement, which is pursued afresh in writer-director Stephen Unwin's new…
Tony Kushner's great work arrives anew in London "We live past hope," or so remarks the AIDS-afflicted drag queen-turned-prophet, Prior Walter (Andrew Garfield), late in Angels in Ameri…
Classic Moscow adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's no-hope novel creates a worldTime runs on different lines in Russian theatre to our own. 83-year-old Galina Volchek co-founded Moscow…
Well-meaning but uneven comedy bursts at its seams with mismatched themesTime travel, Brit pop, Sleeping Beauty. Classical ballet, the ravages of alcoholism, serial poisoning. There's plenty…
Caroline-era play makes a compelling return to the stage James Shirley is a rarely performed 17th-century playwright whose oeuvre has generally been consigned to theatrical study and researc…
New epic from the 'Jerusalem' playwright is a breathtaking experienceI hate the kind of hype that sells out a new play within minutes of tickets becoming available. I mean isn't there someth…