London Theatre Reviews

Review - Dear Evan Hansen at the Noel Coward Theatre

Everybody's Talking About Jamie has just celebrated its 2nd birthday in the West End, a joyous musical about a British teenager embracing and asserting his gay drag identity at a Sheffield school at which he defiantly and unapologetically decides to go to his end of year prom in a dress. But now everybody will also be talking about Evan Hansen, another teenager at the centre of a musical, but this one's American and far more emotionally insecure.If Jamie, as both a show and a character, has a...

Review - Touching the Void at the Duke of York's Theatre

Probably the most famous stage direction in all of world drama is "Exit, pursued by a bear" in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. But in terms of sheer challenges to realise on stage, surely Peter Shaffer's instruction in his 1964 play The Royal Hunt of the Sun, "they cross the Andes" is an even bigger ask. But directors love a challenge: that play's original director John Dexter is said to have told the playwright, "If you take this line out, I'm not directing the play". It was no doubt a similar...

Review - Mary Poppins starring Zizi Strallen and Charlie Stemp at the Prince Edward Theatre

Mary Poppins, the eponymous airborne professional nanny of the PL Travers stories and the 1964 live-action Disney feature, has flown back into the West End, to the original home - the Prince Edward Theatre where this frequently stunning stage version first took flight back in 2004. And just as Mary Poppins is on a magnificent mission to heal a divided family, so the show has returned at exactly the moment it is most needed, to heal a divided nation as we hurtle into yet another divisive...

Review - Death of a Salesman at the Piccadilly Theatre

I previously welcomed this ferociously fine revival of Arthur Miller's 1949 Pulitzer and Tony-winning play when it originally opened at the Young Vic in May - and now that it has deservedly transferred to the West End's much larger Piccadilly Theatre, which has more the double the number of seats, it's worth seeing all over again if you've already seen it. And there's no excuse to miss it if you've not; but hurry: it's only here for eight weeks.This is a play of epic stature, and it receives a...

Review - Dave Malloy's Ghost Quartet at the Boulevard Theatre in Soho

While Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman's Ghost Stories is currently on its third West End run, a 2014 Off-Broadway musical about more spectral hauntings Ghost Quartet has arrived to open Soho's brand-new Boulevard Theatre. And if there are any ghosts (whether or not wearing nipple tassels) lingering on this site from its former life as the Raymond Revue Bar, the strip club that existed here from 1958 to 2004, they ought to be celebrating this venue's gorgeous re-birth as an extremely flexible and...

Review - Soho Cinders at the Charing Cross Theatre

Just as Stiles and Drewe's most internationally successful musical collaboration Mary Poppins, originally premiered in 2004, has returned to the West End (for which they provided both new songs and rewrites to the original Sherman Brothers film score), this altogether more modest but no less delightful musical from the same composer-lyricist team that was first seen in 2011 is also now back in town. And it couldn't be more welcome. Like Mary Poppins, it is a redemptive kind of fairytale, but...

Review - Translations returns to the National Theatre

It couldn't be more timely for the National Theatre to be reviving its stirring, magnificent 2018 production of Brian Friel's Translations at this precarious point in our national history when Britain's tortuous relationship with Ireland is being recalibrated once again in the ongoing arrangements being negotiated for our departure from the European Union.Friel's history play, set in a hedge-school (an unlicensed, makeshift rural school) in a Gaelic speaking community in Baile Beag (Ballybeg) in...

Review - Lungs starring Claire Foy and Matt Smith at The Old Vic

Playwrights often sit down to ambitiously write a play that aims to answer life's big questions. In Duncan Macmillan's drama Lungs, he aims to answer little questions in a big way, which mean the absolute world to its central characters.Those characters are just a pretty normal, nameless couple. He, played by Matt Smith, is a gigging musician while she, played by Claire Foy, is a PhD student. Together they wrestle through their conversations with whether they should bring a baby into a world...

Review - Solaris at the Lyric Hammersmith

West London's Lyric Hammersmith was the original birthplace of two current West End shows, Noises Off (both in its first production and the new revival newly transferred to the Garrick) and Ghost Stories (now back for a second run at the Ambassadors Theatre). Just as Ghost Stories offers a spooky theatrical buffet of otherworldly tales happening on earth, Solaris - based on a futuristic sci-fi novel by Stanisław Lem, originally published in 1961 - is a story set on a space station that's...

Review - Groan Ups at the Vaudeville Theatre

Kids are well and truly back to school, and it's also true of the West End. Joining Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (set in the fictional Hogwarts, beginning as Harry's son Albus enrols) and Everybody's Talking About Jamie (about a year 11 student at a Sheffield comprehensive school) now is Groan Ups, a new play co-written by and starring Mischief Theatre co-founders Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields. Groan Ups follows five students from year two (aged six) and emerging teenagers...