National Theatre
Death of England: Michael / Death of England: Delroy, Soho Place review - thrilling portraits, brilliantly performed, of rebels without a causeThursday, 15 August 2024
Two boys in east London, one Black, one white, grow up together, play pranks at school, then decades later have a tempestuous falling out. That’s the main narrative arc of these twin plays, but it accounts for none of their extraordinary richness... Read more... |
The Grapes of Wrath, NT Lyttelton review - a bleak journey into migrant purgatoryFriday, 09 August 2024
It’s a brave company that embarks on a staging of John Steinbeck’s award-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. A grim study of human goodness in an unrelentingly cruel universe, it’s a long slog for both cast and audience.Steinbeck based his novel... Read more... |
The Hot Wing King, National Theatre review - high kitchen-stove comedy, with sides of dramaSaturday, 20 July 2024
There’s an exuberant comedy from the start in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, which comes to London after an initial Covid-truncated Off Broadway run which brought her a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Roy Alexander Weise’s production puts in all the... Read more... |
Boys from the Blackstuff, National Theatre review - a lyrical, funny, affecting variation on a television classicThursday, 30 May 2024
Prolific playwright James Graham was born in 1982, the year Alan Bleasdale's unforgettable series was televised. From Nottingham rather than Liverpool, Graham recognised in his own surroundings the predicaments of the main characters, the bonds... Read more... |
London Tide, National Theatre review - haunting moody river bluesSaturday, 20 April 2024
“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this description, by Charles Dickens in his 1865 novel, Our Mutual Friend, of his character Sloppy’s ability to read... Read more... |
Standing at the Sky's Edge, Gillian Lynne Theatre review - heartwarming Sheffield musical arrives in the West EndFriday, 01 March 2024
Can there be anyone from Sheffield who has not seen Standing at the Sky’s Edge, possibly several times? This is the once local show, opening at the Sheffield Crucible in 2019, playing at the National Theatre's Olivier in 2023, and now bringing a... Read more... |
Hadestown, Lyric Theatre review - soul-stirring musical gloriously revamps classical mythsThursday, 22 February 2024
Doom and gloom, we are told, may have abounded in the classical underworld, but Hadestown suggests otherwise. Returning to London five years after its run at the National Theatre, this time with a slew of Tony Awards, this bracing musical... Read more... |
Dear Octopus, National Theatre - period rarity is a real pleasureFriday, 16 February 2024
Sisters are doing it for themselves, just as families as a whole are, too, on the London stage these days. Dear Octopus follows Till the Stars Come Down and The Hills of California as the third domestic drama I've seen in the last 10 days and... Read more... |
Till the Stars Come Down, National Theatre review - exuberant comedy with a dark edgeSaturday, 03 February 2024
The National Theatre is meant to represent the whole nation – and not just the metropolitan middle classes. So it’s really good to see that Beth Steel – who comes from an East Midlands working-class background and was once writer in... Read more... |
Kin, National Theatre review - heartfelt show makes its demands, but yields its rewardsWednesday, 17 January 2024
Waiting in the National Theatre’s foyer on press night, a space teeming with people speaking different languages, boasting different heritages – London in other words – news came through that leading members of the government had resigned because... Read more... |
The Motive and the Cue, Noel Coward Theatre - National Theatre transfer excels in the West EndWednesday, 20 December 2023
Plays about the theatre tend to go down well with audiences. Why wouldn’t they? The danger is that they become too cosy as actors and audience smugly agree on the transcendence of the artform. Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue comes perilously... Read more... |
Infinite Life, National Theatre review - beguiling new comedy about a world of painMonday, 04 December 2023
A sun deck with seven pale-green padded loungers is the latest setting for the latest National Theatre premiere from American playwright Annie Baker to people in her inimitable way. In her hands this banal space is as dramatically charged as... Read more... |
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