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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  • Cost Of Living

    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...

  • Notre Dame de Paris

    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...

    London Coliseum
  • 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...

  • Showstoppers 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...

    Lyric Theatre
  • When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other

    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...

  • Violet

    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...

  • Cirque du Soleil's Totem

    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...

    Royal Albert Hall
  • Coming Clean

    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...

    Trafalgar Theatre
  • Sweat

    Just under the wire for 2018, the final London play opening of the year has turned out to be one of the very best. It might have even won my vote for the play of the year but for the fact that Matthew Lopez's The Inheritance long got there first.That does not, however, diminish its significant achievement: while The Inheritance has a scene that shows the utter shock and despair of a group of educated, artsy New York gay men at the election of Donald Trump, Lynn Nottage takes a far longer view...

    Gielgud Theatre
  • Caroline, Or Change

    I've now seen Caroline, or Change, six times in all - three in its original production by George C Wolfe, in each stage of its progress from off-Broadway's Public Theatre in 2003 to Broadway's O'Neill Theatre in 2004, then London's National Theatre in 2006 (where it won the Olivier for Best New Musical); and three in Michael Longhurst's new British revival, launched at Chichester's intimate Minerva last year, then transferring to Hampstead Theatre and now the West End's Playhouse Theatre. And it...

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