Theatre Reviews
Institute, BBC Four review – masculinity and memory in a nightmarish world of workMonday, 20 July 2020![]()
Missing the office? Or dreading the day you have to return? What’s your relationship to the people you work with and for, and how does it intersect with your personal life? Do your paymasters know you? Do they care about you? Are there days when the routine and the hierarchy of it all just feels like a spirit-crushing game? Read more... |
Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain, Northampton Saints review - history made funnyMonday, 20 July 2020![]()
In each of its incarnations – books, television series and theatre shows – covering more than 80 titles, Horrible Histories, created by Terry Deary, has been a hit. Read more... |
Amadeus, National Theatre at Home review – wild dance at the edges of sanityFriday, 17 July 2020![]()
It is 41 years since Peter Shaffer ripped off Mozart’s respectable façade to reveal a foul-mouthed verbally incontinent child-man with no more ability to control his behaviour than his genius. Read more... |
Blueprint Medea, Finborough Theatre online review – well-meaning but clunky updateThursday, 16 July 2020![]()
Medea is the original crazy ex-girlfriend: the wronged woman who takes perfectly understandable revenge on the man who made her life hell. Read more... |
The Deep Blue Sea, National Theatre at Home review - hauntingly elegiac portrayal of Rattigan's worldFriday, 10 July 2020![]()
Helen McCrory is an actor who can inject a world of feeling into one syllable that many actors would struggle to muster in an entire script. Read more... |
Les Blancs, National Theatre at Home review – triumphant revival of forgotten classicFriday, 03 July 2020![]()
Lorraine Hansberry’s debut, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, where it opened in 1959. It is now an American classic, but it’s her last play, Les Blancs, that in the current context of the Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to institutional racism both in the US and UK feels even more relevant. Read more... |
Toast, Lawrence Batley Theatre online review - pungent adaptation of Nigel Slater's autobiographyFriday, 03 July 2020![]()
I knew what a Howard Hodgkin painting would look like before I ever saw one because of Nigel Slater. There’s a recipe in one of his very early books, Real Cooking, for “A creamy, colourful, fragrant chicken curry” which he candidly admits is “seriously unauthentic”, with ingredients that will leave some purists “really pissed-off”. Read more... |
Birdsong, The Original Theatre Company online review – a gutsy experimentThursday, 02 July 2020![]()
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling First World War novel, has been adapted quite a few times in its twenty-seven years. Read more... |
Hamilton, Disney+ review - puts us all in the room where it happenedWednesday, 01 July 2020![]()
The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, National Theatre At Home review – a mad delightFriday, 26 June 2020![]()
Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed for NT Live at the Bridge Theatre last summer, is – as it gleefully acknowledges – completely bonkers. But it doesn’t start out that way. 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

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...

“The exercise of fantasy is to imagine other ways of life,” says one of the role-players during a Dungeons & Dragons marathon, because “...

A showstopper for starters followed by dark depths, a quirky compilation after the interval: it’s what you might expect from Iván...

When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit,...

The Father of Make Believe is the latest instalment in the cinematic fantasy world that Coheed and Cambria have meticulously crafted over...

With his furious docu-essay I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck caused a stir in 2016. The film...

One Boat, Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel, captures a series of...

One of The Barnabáš Kos Case’s incidental pleasures lies in its relatively accurate depiction of orchestral life. Much of the action in...

You could plan an entire concert season around the theme of “late style”, its paradoxes and variations. For this one-off, many of us expected a...

“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang.
Tamara...