Theatre Reviews
Life of Pi, Wyndham's Theatre review - visually ravishing show uplifted by astonishing puppetryFriday, 03 December 2021
When the Canadian Yann Martel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love – not with one person but with the rich imaginative landscape opened up by its religions and its animals. A struggling writer at the time, he channelled this new love into a dazzling idiosyncratic narrative about a shipwrecked Indian boy who survives 227 days at sea with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Read more... |
The Good Life, Richmond Theatre review - popular sitcom gets its own origin storyMonday, 29 November 2021
"Off-grid" wasn't a thing in the mid-'70s. Sure, people planted a few potatoes in the garden and pottered about a bit in an allotment, but nobody went the whole hog. The rat race was certainly a thing though, a fertile seam for comedies like The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Read more... |
Four Quartets, Harold Pinter Theatre review - brilliant Fiennes breathes air and physicality into Eliot's workFriday, 26 November 2021
Words flow like water in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, shimmering with allusion, swirling and eddying with the ideas and fractured philosophies of a poet at the height of his powers. Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, The Old Vic review - not quite a festive-season crackerFriday, 26 November 2021
Four years and a Broadway run on from its Old Vic debut, director Matthew Warchus and writer,Jack Thorne are still throwing everything they can at one of the most familiar stories, and characters, in English literature. Read more... |
Manor, National Theatre review – ambitious, but unconvincingThursday, 25 November 2021
After all the tides of monologue plays have ebbed, British new writing is now paddling in the pools of state-of-the-nation drama. Read more... |
The Comedy of Errors, RSC, Barbican review - Shakespearean Christmas pantoThursday, 25 November 2021
“Am I myself?” At the tangled centre of Shakespeare’s comedy of two pairs of identical twins, servant Dromio asks the question on which everything else hangs. The delivery is exasperated, the context bantering, but the words are the flimsy door onto an existential void this early play constantly threatens to tumble into. How can we know ourselves if others do not? Is it enough to be ourselves, or must we also enact and perform those roles? What if society casts us in another? Read more... |
Death of England: Face to Face, National Theatre at Home review - anti-racist trilogy ends with a bangTuesday, 23 November 2021
One of the absolute highpoints of new writing in the past couple of years has been the Death of England trilogy. Written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, these three brilliant monologues have not only explored vital questions of race and racism, identity and belonging, but have also provided a record of theatre-going before, during and after the pandemic lockdown. Read more... |
Little Women The Musical, Park Theatre review - broad brush comedy redeemed by a talented castMonday, 22 November 2021
Louisa May Alcott did not think she could write a successful book for girls. After her publisher suggested this might be the right way to deploy her talents, she declared to a friend, “I could not write a girls’ story knowing little about any but my own sisters and always preferring boys”. Read more... |
The Wife of Willesden, Kiln Theatre review - a saucy ode to BrentFriday, 19 November 2021
Zadie Smith might not be the only writer who can rhyme "tandem" with "galdem", but she’s the only one who can do it in an adaptation of Chaucer. In The Wife of Willesden, her debut play, a modern version of one of the Canterbury Tales, Smith’s talent for mixing high and low is at full power. Read more... |
Rare Earth Mettle, Royal Court review - one long unsatisfying slogFriday, 19 November 2021
Why are we indifferent to anti-Semitism? In the past few weeks the Royal Court, a proud citadel of wokeness, has been embroiled in an appalling case of prejudice by allowing a character, who is a really bad billionaire, in Al Smith’s new play, Rare Earth Mettle, to be called Hershel Fink. Stereotype, or what? 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
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Black Bag review - lies, spies and unpleasant surprises
Michael Fassbender recently starred in Paramount+’s rather laborious spy drama The Agency, but here he finds himself at the centre of a...
Weather Girl, Soho Theatre review - the apocalypse as surrea...
Can Francesca Moody do it again? Fleabag’s producer has brought Weather Girl to London, after a successful run at...
Bavouzet, BBCSO, Stasevska, Barbican review - ardent souls i...
Not to be overshadowed by the adrenalin charges of the Budapest Festival Orchestra the previous evening, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its...
First Person: singer-songwriter David Gray on how the songs...
Occasionally, when I pass my own reflection, out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the likeness of my father, shining out through the...
Sister Midnight review - the runaway bridegroom
Marriage is not often presented in cinema as a bowl of mangoes, but it’s rarely shown as so morbidly strange as in this reckless corker...
The Habits, Hampstead Theatre review - who knows what advent...
“The exercise of fantasy is to imagine other ways of life,” says one of the role-players during a Dungeons & Dragons marathon, because “...
Album: Steven Wilson - The Overview
Steven Wilson’s cinematic concept album The Overview is named for the cognitive shift required of astronauts and others who’ve observed...
Levit, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, RFH review - an...
A showstopper for starters followed by dark depths, a quirky compilation after the interval: it’s what you might expect from Iván...
Farewell Mister Haffmann, Park Theatre review - French hit o...
When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit,...