London Theatre Reviews

Review - La Cage aux Folles [The Play] at the Park Theatre

The Park Theatre scored a deserved hit in 2016 with its tender, heartfelt revival of Mart Crowley's still-groundbreaking 1968 play The Boys in the Band, a play that put 1960s New York gay life on stage with zinging dialogue and painful honesty, but also a gnawing sense of anxiety that propelled its characters' 'otherness' that still resonates today (as it powerfully did again when it was given an all-star, proudly all-gay cast Broadway outing in 2018). La Cage Aux Folles, a Parisian stage hit...

Review - Be More Chill at The Other Palace

After the homegrown Everybody's Talking About Jamie and Broadway import Dear Evan Hansen, Be More Chill is another new musical about the growing pains and everyday terrors of high school students who are misfits and trying to either blend in or stand out from the crowd. (Broadway has also offered Mean Girls and The Prom, also set in high schools, the first of which has become an enduring hit but the second closed last summer).But more than any of those shows, this one is not just a musical but a...

Review - Caryl Churchill's A Number at the Bridge Theatre

At 81, Caryl Churchill is still going strong: last year, the Royal Court premiered a quartet of her latest short plays, Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp., while the National revived possibly her most famous play, Top Girls.And now, just a week after the Donmar Warehouse revived her 2000 play Far Away, the Bridge Theatre now revives the play that came immediately afterwards, A Number, in 2002. All of these plays were originally premiered at the Royal Court, and it's fascinating to see all of these...

Review - Upstart Crow starring David Mitchell at the Gielgud Theatre

West End and Broadway stages have long been a recycling centre for successful film titles, usually becoming musicals but occasionally plays (like The Graduate that played at this address); now TV series are also increasingly making the transition, like Only Fools and Horses (still at the Haymarket) and now Upstart Crow, Ben Elton's sitcom here renamed with a definitive article to become The Upstart Crow, but hardly making for a definitive piece of theatre.This isn't to say it isn't a perfectly...

Review - Nora: A Doll's House at the Young Vic Theatre

In 2012 the Young Vic scored a notable triumph with a production of Ibsen's A Doll's House, starring Hattie Morahan in vibrant, tenacious form as Ibsen's increasingly desperate heroine who commits a fraud to protect her sick husband and their family, only to have him cruelly reject her when he finds out what she's done - and then she famously finds her own independence to walk away from him. That production earned Morahan both the Evening Standard and Critics' Circle Awards for best actress, and...

Review - The Visit at the National Theatre

After three consecutive openings earlier in the week of shows that ran for an hour or less each, the revival of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1956 queasy portrait of moral revenge The Visit at the National Theatre now runs longer than all three of them put together, clocking in at over three and a half hours, including two intervals. But it's a long day's journey into night for diminishing dramatic returns, even as the townsfolk of Slurry, a beleaguered, poverty-stricken industrial town in western New...

Review - Caryl Churchill's Far Away at the Donmar Warehouse

They say that short is sweet, but it isn't necessarily so. As ever, it is Caryl Churchill - theatre's greatest disruptor - that breaks that rule, with this tense, brooding and brilliantly incisive theatrical short that packs more into 40 minutes than most playwrights achieve in two or three hours. Interestingly, the Donmar Warehouse is duly treating it as a main course, not an appetiser, with tickets at their usual scale of prices, from £10 to £40, so for some in the audience it works out at a...

Review - Pet Shop Boys musical Musik at Leicester Square Theatre

Musicals, like films, sometimes have sequels, though the history of them is littered with more failures than successes, as witness the heavily abbreviated runs of Bring Back Birdie (the sequel to Bye Bye Birdie), The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) and Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge (which closed out-of-town before reaching Broadway).But Musik is something entirely different: it's a very ripe, clever and frequently hilarious cabaret spin-off from a 2001...

Review - Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt at the Wyndham's Theatre

The last new Tom Stoppard play to open directly in the West End was Indian Ink - itself based on an earlier radio play - which premiered at the Aldwych Theatre twenty-five years ago. All of his plays since then have mostly been seen first at the National, including the three-part The Coast of Utopia, Arcadia and The Invention of Love (the latter pair of which then transferred to the West End), with one other play Rock 'n' Roll originating at the Royal Court in 2005 (though its West End transfer...

Review - Death of England starring Rafe Spall at the National Theatre

Back in 2005, I interviewed Clint Dyer when his production of a musical called The Big Life was about to transfer from Stratford East to the Apollo Theatre, and he became the first black British director to direct a musical in the West End. As he told me then: "The wonderful thing about being black in this country is that as a black person you have an amazing opportunity to be the first at a lot of things."Now, as he directs and co-authors (with Roy Williams) a new play Death of England at the...