London Theatre Reviews

Review - Pinter 7 starring Danny Dyer and Martin Freeman at the Harold Pinter Theatre

For the last six months, something remarkable has been happening at the Harold Pinter Theatre - it has been given over to a seven-part season of brief celebrity-cast runs of all of the theatre's namesake playwright Harold Pinter's short plays, sometimes presented in rep, to mark the 10th anniversary of his passing. It's been bracing and brilliant to be able to see these plays, from the earliest part of his career to its final lap, back to back. For completists, there's been nothing better (I...

Review - Home, I'm Darling at the Duke of York's Theatre

The West End may be catching up with the times, but it's via characters who either live, or want to live, in the past. This month and next, contemporary women playwrights are seeing two new plays of theirs transfer to town - Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's historical Emilia, set 400 years ago, will come from Shakespeare's Globe to the Vaudeville, while Laura Wade's smart and engaging Home, I'm Darling, set today but whose characters try to live in an imagined version of the 1950s, has just arrived at the...

Review - Cost of Living starring Adrian Lester at Hampstead Theatre

The UK premiere of last year's Pulitzer Prize-winning play - premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2016 and seen Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2017 - is the 100th world, European or UK premiere at Hampstead Theatre since Edward Hall began his tenure as artistic director there in 2010.So it's a numeric milestone - but it also marks a more important cultural one: the play puts disabled lives centre stage - and boldly (though this shouldn't be bold at all) - uses disabled actors...

Review - Leave to Remain at the Lyric Hammersmith

First things first, relax: despite the title, Leave to Remain has nothing to do with Brexit. Instead, it is a fascinating new musical about the individual struggles of a gay couple looking to marry for more reasons than just love. It marks the musical theatre debut for established Bloc Party songwriter Kele Okereke, who brings his fresh sound to the stage. American Alex and Londoner Obi have been together for ten months, but reach an impasse when Alex's firm are relocated to Abu Dhabi (no...

Review - Notre Dame de Paris returns to London at the London Coliseum

In the onslaught of tried-and-already-tested imports that are arriving on our shores in the coming months from Broadway, here's a musical from the other side not of the pond but of the channel: a 20-year old Paris-born phenomenon which, during its London run at the Coliseum, will play its 5,000th worldwide performance, having played in no fewer than 23 countries in eight languages.It was previously seen in London in a commercial run at the Dominion back in 2000, when it was presented in an...

Review - Showstoppers! The Improvised Musical celebrates 1,000 performances at The Other Palace

Getting on stage and performing a brand new show for the first time is a daunting task for any actor. Now, add into the mix that you won't know what you will do on stage until the curtain rises and that's exactly what the Showstoppers have managed to achieve 1,000 times.Creating a new, full-length musical every night, the Showstoppers are an improvised musical theatre troupe that perform a full length improvised musical, based entirely on audience suggestions. With an Olivier Award to their...

Review - Cate Blanchett in When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other at the National Theatre

This is the single most 'exclusive' theatre event since the Tom Hiddleston Hamlet at RADA in 2017: demand for tickets was anticipated to be so high that prospective theatregoers had to likewise enter a heavily over-subscribed lottery for the chance to actually buy them.But here's the good news for those who didn't succeed in getting them: they were the lucky ones. It's just torture, on both sides of the footlights. (But the actors, I assume, knew what they were getting themselves into having...

Review - Violet at Charing Cross Theatre

You can wait for ages for two Off-Broadway musicals set around a road trip to arrive in London, and then both arrive at once: Violet, originally premiered in 1997 (and more recently seen in a new Broadway version in 2014), has just received its professional London premiere at the Charing Cross Theatre; and in March the 2013 musical version of the 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine will come to the Arcola.But Violet also marks another auspicious West End moment: with Caroline, or Change playing just...

Review - Cirque du Soleil's Totem at the Royal Albert Hall

Cirque du Soleil's annual post-Christmas London residency at the Royal Albert Hall has become as synonymous with this grand concert venue as the summertime BBC Proms; and while some of the nine big top and arena shows they've brought here over the years since they first appeared here in 1996 have felt excessively padded and occasionally even generic, Totem could be said to be totemic of this brand at its fantastic best.That's when a true theatricality informs the usual parade of astounding feats...

Review - Kevin Elyot's Coming Clean at Trafalgar Studios

It's funny how plays can make you feel your age by being very specifically of their time - yet also make you realise that both everything and nothing has changed, too.Seeing Kevin Elyot's first play Coming Clean returns to the London stage at Trafalgar Studios, 37 years after its world premiere at the Bush, where I was to find myself transported back to pretty much where my own gay life in London had begun. I had seen it as a student then, down in London from university, just as I was starting...