mon 30/06/2025

Theatre Reviews

Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Without Sin / An Alternative Helpline for the End of the World / Two Strangers Walk into a Bar...

David Kettle

With its throbbing crowds and its performers baying for attention (and for audiences), the Edinburgh Fringe can be a hectic, raucous place. But for anyone who needs a break from the crammed-full, in-your-face stand-up gigs, thankfully three shows provide far calmer, more intimate experiences – involving just you and one other.

Read more...

La Cage Aux Folles, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre review - 40 years on, the drag show still entertains and educates

Gary Naylor

Forty years ago, the world was very different for gay men. AIDS was devastating their communities, especially in the big cities where hard-won enclaves of acceptance were being hollowed out, one sunken-eyed friend after another. Media screamed “Gay Plague” and some politicians barely suppressed their glee at the “perverts’” comeuppance.

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: The Grand Old Opera House Hotel / YOU ARE GOING TO DIE

David Kettle

The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, Traverse Theatre 

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Tennessee, Rose / The Ballad of Truman Capote

Veronica Lee

Tennessee, Rose, Pleasance Dome 

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Adults / Bacon

David Kettle

Adults, Traverse Theatre 

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Flat & the Curves / Shamilton! / I Wish My Life Were Like a Musical

Veronica Lee

Flat & the Curves, Pleasance Dome 

Flat & the Curves – Katy Baker, Charlotte Brooke, Issy Wroe Wright and Arabella Rodrigo – perform a gig-style musical comedy show with risqué material about what it means to be a modern woman. And there's a generous side helping about the inadequacy of men, too.

Read more...

The SpongeBob Musical, QEH review - musical based on popular kids' animation sinks for lack of focus

Gary Naylor

There are many things that you are not told about being a parent, a vast landscape of details that batter you with unwelcome difference from that comfortable life of Friday night prosecco and pizza. One is a whole new palette of garish colours barging into your eyeline – fluorescent yellow, eye-bleeding orange, vomity green.

Read more...

Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Casting the Runes / The Return / Woodhill

David Kettle

Casting the Runes, Pleasance Courtyard 

Read more...

Trojan Women / Thrown, Edinburgh International Festival 2023 reviews - passionate all-women productions

David Kettle

Trojan Women, Festival Theatre 

Read more...

Macbeth, Shakespeare's Globe review - uneven production of intermittent power

Gary Naylor

That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those who really should have seen through his shallowness and vaulting ambition – he even says the phrase himself – and achieves power without really knowing what to do with it.

Read more...

Pages

Advertising feature

★★★★★

A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.
The Observer, Kate Kellaway

 

Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.

 

★★★★★

This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.
The Times, Ann Treneman

 

Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.

 

Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.


latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Le nozze di Figaro, Glyndebourne review - perceptive humanit...

Over 100 years ago, John Christie envisaged Wagner’s Parsifal with limited forces in the Organ Room at Glyndebourne. He would have been...

Quadrophenia, Sadler's Wells review - missed opportunit...

The red, white and blue bull’s-eye on the front curtain at Sadler’s Wells tells us we are in the familiar territory of Pete Townshend’s...

Fidelio, Garsington Opera review - a battle of sunshine and...

Sometimes, as the first act of Beethoven’s Fidelio closes, the chorus of prisoners discreetly fade away backstage as their brief taste of...

Summer Laugh review - five comics gear up for the Fringe

Appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe has long been an expensive gig for comics. But while stand-ups may need only a microphone to ply...

Album: Brìghde Chaimbeul - Sunwise

The first five-and-a-half minutes of Sunwise’s opening track “Dùsgadh / Waking" are taken up by a drone. Played on the Scottish small...

Music Reissues Weekly: Rupert’s People - Dream In My Mind

Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was an instant phenomenon. Recorded in April 1967 and issued as a single on 12 May after pre-release play...

Intimate Apparel, Donmar Warehouse review - stirring story o...

The corset is an unlikely star of the latest Lynn Nottage play to arrive at the...

theartsdesk Q&A: director Andreas Dresen on his anti-Naz...

Andreas Dresen directs socially engaged realist films that invariably relay personal and political messages; the result can be tough but is...

Hercules, Theatre Royal Drury Lane review - new Disney stage...

Many years ago, reviewing pantomime for the first time, I recall looking around in the stalls. My brain was saying, “This is...