London Theatre Reviews

Read the latest London theatre reviews on the newest openings across the West End and beyond. Discover more about the latest must-see West End shows, Off-West End productions, and why you need to see shows in London. Scroll through our full theatre reviews listings of London musicals, plays, and live events from our London Theatre critics.

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  • Photo credit: Craig Hamilton and Lucinda Turner (Photo by Mark Senior)

    Nearly a year into this decade and it's fair to say life isn't exactly as "roaring" as we may have wanted. So, to get gladrags on, clink glasses and be a guest of Jay Gatsby's latest party was a much-needed life tonic. But for all the loaded splendour and sophistication a title like The Great Gatsby carries in popular culture, its immersive theatre adaptation struggles to hit the aspirational high that it's striving to achieve.Stepping into the marvellous party, it's apparent that even Jay...

    Gatsby's Mansion
  • Yolanda Mercy in Quarter Life Crisis (Photo by Helen Murray)

    Quarter Life Crisis, Yolanda Mercy's hit one woman show, initially staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017 and now been remounted for the Bridge's current repertory season, is a charmingly performed, neon-streaked exploration of growing up and growing into one's self. It also operates as an inadvertent ode to London pre-Covid. Main character Alicia drifts through the city, from Camberwell to Streatham, from Peckham to the West End, popping into rammed house parties, sweaty clubs, raucous...

  • The Last Five Years at Southwark Playhouse

    The last five years? Hell, what about the last seven months? That's how long it's been (give or take a week) since Jonathan O'Boyle's terrific Off-West End revival of Jason Robert Brown's musical theatre mainstay saw its original run truncated by Covid-driven lockdown. In fact, I was among the audience on that fateful Monday (March 16) when L5Y, as this show is famously known in shorthand, was one of the very few shows to perform that evening, the rest of London theatreland having gone dark in...

    Garrick Theatre
  • Tamsin Greig in Nights of the Garden of Spain at the Bridge Theatre (Photo by Zac Nicholson)

    Any season of work that's taking place in a London theatre at the moment is worthy of five stars in my book. The Bridge Theatre's proving that there is no business like showbusiness, with its Talking Heads season allowing audiences to witness — quite simply — acting masterclasses from Britain's finest actors. After Alan Bennett's monologues were revived on our screens earlier this year, it seems fitting to the British "keep calm and carry on" mentality that we're still able to enjoy these...

  • Imelda Staunton in Lady of Letters at the Bridge Theatre (Photo by Zac Nicholson)

    At this point, Alan Bennett's Talking Heads are an institution in and of themselves. Having screened twelve of Bennett's miniature character studies on the BBC during lockdown, The Bridge has transplanted eight of these monologues into their autumn repertory season. Playing Sandwiches (originally written in 1988) and Lady of Letters (1998) are undeniably dated (references to community policing in Lady of Letters feel particularly antiquated), but are still quintessential Bennett — banally funny,...

  • Inua Ellams in An Evening With an Immigrant

    Poet and playwright Inua Ellams cuts an initially unassuming figure — simply dressed in Converse and a t-shirt, perched on a high stool, clutching a notebook and speaking into a microphone, An Evening With An Immigrant is a self-consciously low-key production — really, more of a poetry reading than a piece of theatre. There's nothing flashy about it — just a writer and his words. It's testament to Ellams's extraordinary talent that this autobiographical show is as engrossing as it is. Tracking...

  • Michael Sheen in rehearsal of Faith Healer (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

    Social distancing? That would have been the last thing on your mind during the recent livestream from London's venerable Old Vic of Faith Healer, the ever-shifting and seismically intimate drama that was seen across four days as part of that playhouse's In Camera series of plays performed against an empty auditorium. (Their previous offering, the remarkable Three Kings with Andrew Scott, was seen just two weeks previously.)Premiered on Broadway in 1979 where it did a fast fade, Brian Friel's...

  • Ryan Anderson as Pippin, center, and the cast of Pippin (Photo by Bonnie Britain Photography)

    I'll say this about Pippin, the 1972 Broadway musical currently receiving its third London revival within nine years, it gets stranger with every viewing. I'm too young (albeit not by much) to have seen Bob Fosse's original production, though I vividly recall the commercial that gave us a minute of the show for free and made history as the first musical to do so. If you wanted to see the other 119 minutes, you had to head to the Imperial Theatre.And lo and behold the music from that fabled...

    Garden Theatre
  • Lesley Manville in The Bed Among the Lentils at The Bridge Theatre (Photo by Zac Nicholson)

    Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues, which chronicle the quiet turmoil of lives behind ordinary suburban front doors, have been on an extraordinary journey. They made landmark TV when they first appeared in 1988, with a second series a decade later and various stage versions over the years.Then this June, mid-lockdown, they arrived back on our screens, along with two new playlets, offering a curious kind of bittersweet comfort. Now eight of those 2020 productions transfer to the stage as...

  • Kristin Scott Thomas in The Hand of God (Photo by Zac Nicholson)

    Alan Bennett's monologue series Talking Heads is ingeniously booby-trapped. It may look, at first glance, a little safe: all teapots, cosy, unflattering knitwear, and well-kept, conventional suburbia. But pull back the net curtains, and these characters are surviving domesticity in extremis, their personal crises sometimes assuming the proportions of classical tragedy. That could hardly be more true of the pitch-black, bloody tale The Outside Dog (1998), the first in this double bill of playlets...

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