Theatre
Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, New Adventures, Sadler's Wells review - 30 years on, as bold and brilliant as everMonday, 16 December 2024
How do you refresh a masterpiece? Bringing back his first and still greatest hit, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne seems to have changed only minor details since its 1995 premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Its core brilliance is untouched.As usual with Bourne,... Read more... |
The Little Foxes, Young Vic review - timeshifted production blurs the play's focusSaturday, 14 December 2024
The Young Vic has opened under a new artistic director with a puzzle play. The puzzle is, why stage this piece today?The key themes of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play look promising on paper: a strong-willed woman battling her brothers for an... Read more... |
The Legends of Them, Royal Court review - reaching out for serenityFriday, 13 December 2024
I live in Brixton, south London. To get to the tube, I have to cross Windrush Square. Since 2021, I go past the Cherry Groce memorial, which honours the woman who was wrongfully shot by the Met in 1985, an event which sparked the riots I remember so... Read more... |
The Producers, Menier Chocolate Factory review - liberating taboo-busting fun for grown-upsWednesday, 11 December 2024
There is something deliciously perfect about the timing of The Producers’ arrival at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In these twitchy times, Mel Brooks’s scurrilous Hitler musical lands like a stinkbomb in a parfumerie.Swastikas are everywhere, even... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, RSC, Barbican review - visually ravishing with an undercurrent of violenceWednesday, 11 December 2024
Hermia is a headbutting punk with a tartan fetish, Oberon looks like Adam Ant and Lysander appears to have stumbled out of a Madness video. Yet Eleanor Rhode’s exuberant A Midsummer Night’s Dream – which has transferred from a triumphant run at... Read more... |
The Devil Wears Prada, Dominion Theatre review - efficient but rarely inspiredWednesday, 11 December 2024
It's second time only quasi-lucky for The Devil Wears Prada, the stage musical adaptation of the much-loved Meryl Streep film from 2006 that nosedived in Chicago a few summers ago and has resurfaced on the West End to see another day.Refitted with a... Read more... |
Hansel and Gretel, Shakespeare's Globe review - too saccharine a retelling for our timesSaturday, 07 December 2024
Growing up within a few hundred yards of a major dock, I hardly knew darkness or quiet – the first time I properly felt their terrible beauty was on the Isle of Man ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, its voids still vivid half a century on.... Read more... |
The Importance of Being Earnest, National Theatre review - no shortage of acid-tipped delightSaturday, 30 November 2024
If Harold Pinter’s work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then Oscar Wilde’s represents the stiletto in the Victorian sponge – at a time when the stiletto was a slim dagger used for assassination. Beneath the... Read more... |
Twelfth Night, Orange Tree Theatre review - perfectly pitched sad and merry musical mayhemSaturday, 30 November 2024
It's all too easy to underplay the melancholy of Shakespeare's comedy of divided twins, misplaced – sometimes narcissistic – love, drunken frolics and a Puritan given his comeuppance. Tom Littler's decision to present the action in a very English... Read more... |
The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, The Other Palace - all Greek to meSaturday, 30 November 2024
Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a... Read more... |
Expendable, Royal Court review - intensely felt family dramaFriday, 29 November 2024
British theatre excels in presenting social issues: at its best, it shines a bright light on the controversial subjects that people are thinking, and talking, about. Emteaz Hussain’s excellent new play, which opens at the Royal Court, is based on... Read more... |
The Purists, Kiln Theatre review - warm, witty, thoughtful and un-wokeFriday, 29 November 2024
Watching Dan McCabe’s 2019 play, older folk might be reminded of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s indelible lyrics, “Can blue men sing the whites, or are they hypocrites…?” The Purists moves the question into the 21st century in a teasing but very... Read more... |
