The erotic life of puppets – we discover in this show – is filled with intriguing possibilities that are denied to mere flesh and blood lovers. They can float up into the air when they kiss, glide backwards if they’re upset, and perform acrobatics that would be ambitious even for devotees of the Kama Sutra. In this revival of Greg Doran’s wonderful production – first devised in collaboration with Islington’s Little Angel Puppet Theatre in 2004 – such attributes do not divide them from the human experience but provide a wittily alternative expression of love’s highs and lows. In effect, Read more ...

French playwright Florian Zeller’s 2011 four-hander about infidelity and the deceptions it entails, translated by Christopher Hampton, returns 10 years after its UK premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory. A lot has changed in the personal communications world since its debut, but the play soldiers on with just a few appearances by early mobiles and no sign of social media.Does that matter? It makes the play something of a period piece, but its illicit liaisons are not dependent on technology. And at its heart is not so much deception as self-deception and the language we use to blank it out Read more ...

Ben Ockrent’s Relics had me hooked from the moment the safety curtain started rising: a metal number with a banner of packing tape marked FRAGILE on it. As it rose, the teddy bear that had been lying in front of it was silhouetted, hanging from it by one arm.It’s not just a cute opener. Director Michael Longhurst and his designer, Joanna Scotcher, are projecting the core of the piece with minimum means. Things in this house are fragile. And when nerdy Rob (Sam Swainsbury, pictured bottom) appears, this mini-prelude is rounded out as he silently and warily, like a kid doing something naughty, Read more ...

Post-Covid British theatre has a crush on adaptations, especially those with a star actor. So it’s easy to see why National Theatre chief Indhu Rubasingham is staging the latest sparkling verse play by Martin Crimp, whose electric version of Cyrano de Bergerac with James McAvoy conquered the West End in 2019. This time Crimp revisits Molière’s 1666 masterpiece, The Misanthrope, with Canadian superstar Sandra Oh taking on the main role, her terrific performance turning the original’s Alceste into a very contemporary Alice – I couldn’t take my eyes off her.Oh’s character, a Booker-Prize-winning Read more ...

King Charles I famously declared that Much Ado About Nothing should be renamed the "Beatrice and Benedick play". So it’s not difficult to imagine him – or indeed any fan of romantic screwball comedy – relishing Chelsea Walker’s elegant, sorbet-hued production in which Pippa Nixon’s flinty Beatrice and Ken Nwosu’s jocular, easy-going Benedick strike sparks from the off. Sometimes it takes a while for the banter to ignite in a Much Ado production, but Nixon’s wiry physicality and waspish delivery means that every insult lands with perfection. When the Messenger observes that Beatrice is Read more ...

I first became aware of the playwright Teresa Deevy, the Irish author of the Jermyn Street's imminent A Wife to James Whelan, while leafing through a production history of the Abbey Theatre through 1951 and finding her name six times between 1930 and 1936. She was among a handful of women writers who had multiple plays produced at Ireland's National Theatre.Born in 1894 in Waterford, Deevy lost her hearing at the age of 19, a result of Meniere’s disease, which ran in her family. She joined a deaf sister in London to learn how to lip-read and was captivated by the theatre, where she would Read more ...

Bloomsday doesn't just celebrate James Joyce's odyssey through so many parts of Dublin that still teem with character; it's also putatively about the same 16 June 1904 when the budding writer first walked out with Nora Barnacle and she put her hand inside his trousers to "make me a man". Do all those folk who swan around in straw hats and frilly dresses know they're marking National Hand Job day too? Have any of them read his deliciously filthy early letters to Nora?No matter; let them have their fun, but let it also be of quality homage to the towering and frequently very funny masterpiece Read more ...

O Glengarry, where is thy sting? That's likely to be one response to the bewildering Old Vic revival of David Mamet's defining (and remarkable) Glengarry Glen Ross, which I saw in its 1983 National Theatre world premiere production when I first moved to London and have loved ever since. I missed its Broadway incarnation last year, a star vehicle for a then recently-Oscar'ed Kieran Culkin and directed by Patrick Marber, the Tony-winning Englishman whose own plays (Closer, especially) have more than a whiff of Mametian ruthlessness about them. So there was every reason to see what might Read more ...

The best playwrights create word magic – and when that happens, you can’t miss it. Other writers produce journalism, or teaching materials. Sadly, for me, Christine Bacon is one of the latter, and her latest 90-minute play, A Fine Idea at the Arcola studio, is a didactic account of 80 years of international aid. Inspired by Jason Hickel’s 2017 book about global inequality, The Divide, her play is a passionately felt critique of international development which questions whether us liberals really want to change the world – or are we just more comfortable with the idea, a fine one, of helping Read more ...

Anybody who relished the blistering family rows of Bad Jews or Admissions might be surprised by what their author, Joshua Harmon, wrote next: a three-hander still based on a warring family, but this time one closely resembling his own.Hampstead Theatre has sensibly staged We Had a World in its Downstairs space, where the intimacy of its content plays directly to the onlooker. The audience here, more overtly than is usual in the theatre, plays judge and jury for what the younger version of Harmon, Joshua (Ryan Kopel), stages as a recreation of his past, aided by his “cast”: his brisk lawyer Read more ...

It’s 1959. Trinidad is fighting for independence from British colonial rule, while the US is beginning to stake its own control over the island, whether through labour exploitation or crime. Some of the locals are finding themselves torn – between a desire to escape, or to have a piece of the action. And it’s driving them towards disaster. Trinidadian British actress Martina Laird has turned to playwriting with a confident, evocative, and boldly authentic drama, set in the place of her birth, Port of Spain, and enriched by its patois. It follows its premier at the RSC’s The Other Place, Read more ...

Kurt Vonnegut’s hallucinatory countercultural classic, Slaughterhouse Five, famously took his experience of being a prisoner of war in Dresden and turned it into a story about a man abducted by aliens whose life jolts backwards and forwards in time. It’s a testament to the So It Goes theatre company that this agile production – performed by four actors – simultaneously captures Vonnegut’s eye-spinningly deadpan humour and the horror that led to this becoming one of the Vietnam era’s great anti-war narratives. Cream’s late Sixties song Sunshine of Your Life is playing as we wait for Read more ...