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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  • Andrew Scott in rehearsal for Three Kings (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

    Full disclosure: I don't like one-person shows. As someone who, in pre-pandemic days, saw upwards of 150 shows a year on both sides of the ocean, I would take great lengths to avoid the dreaded solo fare. When social distancing restrictions started to proliferate the form on stages everywhere, I cringed, not knowing what to expect. There are exceptions to this personal rule, of course. Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag. Mike Birbiglia in The New One. Billy Crudup in Harry Clarke. Anything with...

  • Aoife Kennan and Charles Angiama in C-o-n-t-a-c-t (Photo by Pamela Raith)

    No, this isn't Contact, the "dance play" that won the 2000 Tony Award for Best Musical and was later seen on the West End. Instead, C-o-n-t-a-c-t — the letters are aptly distanced to suit the times — marks the English-language premiere of an alfresco theatre piece that premiered in Paris during lockdown and is now playing simultaneously at three separate London locations: Greenwich, Clapham, and the City financial district. I caught it at that last-named locale — an area whose footfall has been...

  • Ralph Fiennes in Beat the Devil at the Bridge Theatre

    "Dream and reality become indistinguishable." This, David Hare's engrossing new monologue informs us, was part of the bludgeoning battery of effects wrought on his body and mind, as both the playwright and a locked-down Britain battled Covid-19. It's a symptom even those of us spared direct experience of the virus will recognise: 2020 has been a surreal nightmare of terrifying invisible threat, corrupt, incompetent government, isolation, confusion, and racist violence - all of which have...

  • Sleepless, A Musical Romance

    You have to admire the energy and chutzpah behind this new musical, based on the much-loved 1993 movie Sleepless in Seattle. The project has been kicking around for over a decade, and had an outing, in a different incarnation, at California's Pasadena Playhouse in 2013. A total rewrite by a new creative team followed, and the transformed version was set to premiere in London in March - until pandemic struck, and theatres went dark. Now, with a plethora of Covid protocols in place, it arrives -...

    Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre
  • On Blueberry Hill

    Sebastian Barry, a feted novelist (who is currently the Laureate for Irish Fiction) and playwright, makes his long overdue West End debut with this London transfer for Irish new writing company Fishamble's production of On Blueberry Hill, a play that they commissioned and originally premiered as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2017. His previous plays have included The Stewart of Christendom, seen in London at the Royal Court, and Our Lady of Sligo at the National; but while fellow Irish...

  • Katherine Parkinson in Shoe Lady at the Royal Court

    The Observer's Susannah Clapp described E.V. Crowe's last play at the Royal Court, The Sewing Group in 2016, as being a "Caryl Churchill-influenced play." Now, in her fourth play for the theatre (but the first to be seen in the main house), Crowe seems to be equally indebted to Samuel Beckett, in this earnest study of a woman hobbling through life on one shoe after her other one mysteriously vanishes, which she only realises as she's going down the stairs at the tube and another woman points it...

  • Jennifer Saunders in Blithe Spirit

    In 2013, Richard Eyre directed the great Lesley Manville in a harrowing production of Ibsen's Ghosts at the Almeida that subsequently transferred to the West End's Trafalgar Studios. The ghosts in that play are metaphorical, summonsing the parental legacies of a dead father on his son.Now, Eyre tussles again with the spirits of the dead in Noel Coward's 1941 comedy Blithe Spirit, but this time they take physical form when the late wife, and subsequently (mild spoiler alert) the current wife of a...

    Harold Pinter Theatre
  • The Last Five Years Southwark Playhouse

    With just a two-person cast, and a set of stunning songs by Jason Robert Brown that provide each of them with thrilling opportunities to shine and therefore can attract the best performers to play them, its no wonder that The Last Five Years has become one of the most regularly revived musicals around. We're never far from a production somewhere, but from the numerous times I've now seen it in the UK - including at its original British premiere at London's Menier Chocolate Factory in 2006 when...

    Garrick Theatre
  • Pretty Woman: The Musical

    There have been plenty of musicals about prostitution on Broadway, like the 60s classic Sweet Charity, set in a dance hall where the hostesses available for hire as dance companions say, "Who dances? We defend ourselves to music" and The Life, a 1997 show that portrayed a gritty, pre-Disneyfied Times Square and the hard realities of street sexual exploitation and its affiliations with drug interests. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, on the other hand, which premiered in 1978 and became a...

    Savoy Theatre
  • La Cage aux Folles 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...

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