Theatre Reviews
The Greater Game, Southwark PlayhouseThursday, 22 September 2016
Michael Head's new play is based on the book They Took the Lead by Stephen Jenkins, which tells the true story of events at Clapton Orient (now Leyton Orient) Football Club during the First World War, when 41 men associated with the east London team – players, backroom staff and supporters – joined up en masse to fight the Kaiser. Three never returned and several others were seriously injured. Read more... |
No Man's Land, Wyndham's TheatreWednesday, 21 September 2016
We are lost in the wood. In the limbo state between dream and reality, memory and present, youth and age, companionship and seclusion, life and death, struggle and success, fame and obscurity. Pinter often visits that place of in between, but the elusive and haunting No Man’s Land – electrifyingly presented by two of our greatest thespians – dwells deep within it. Read more... |
Things I Know To Be True, Lyric HammersmithSaturday, 17 September 2016
Growing up is a kind of grief: losing the person you once were to embrace the person you will become. That loss can fracture familial relationships, forced to adjust and reform as offspring alter, challenge, question and move away – physically, emotionally or both. Read more... |
The Alchemist, RSC, BarbicanThursday, 15 September 2016
The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in red pen. In this transfer from Stratford's Swan Theatre director Polly Findlay plays things 17th-century straight, allowing her audience to make the connection with just a little help from an irreverent new epilogue. Read more... |
Torn, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 15 September 2016
The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is memory – what really happened, and who is most to blame? In actor-playwright Nathaniel Martello-White’s new drama, this war zone is crossed and re-crossed with passionate vigour in a minimalist production that has some strong points and some frustrating aspects too. Read more... |
Doctor Faustus, RSC, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 14 September 2016
What price a human soul? That’s the question Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus asks – a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still less for theology, how do you reframe the question? Director Maria Aberg offers a deft if not always entirely coherent answer in her breathless, punky take on the play for the RSC. Read more... |
Jess and Joe Forever, Orange Tree TheatreMonday, 12 September 2016
We’re living in the age of the small play. Although there are plenty of baggy epics around on our stages, they are outnumbered by the small and short two-hander, whether it's John O’Donovan’s gloriously titled If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You at the Old Red Lion or the equally gloriously acted Counting Stars by Atiha Sen Gupta at Theatre Royal Stratford East. Read more... |
The Inn At Lydda, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseFriday, 09 September 2016
Part Biblical melodrama, part Carry On Up The Colosseum, with a bit of Horrible Histories thrown in for good measure, it’s hard to see how John Wolfson’s wildly uneven The Inn at Lydda graduated from a rehearsed reading last season to a full-blown production. Director Andy Jordan does what he can with this historical mishmash, but there’s no disguising the fundamental flaws in the play’s construction. Read more... |
The Emperor, Young VicFriday, 09 September 2016
She gave us the most moving King Lear years before the news broke that Glenda Jackson would be playing the role. Only Mark Rylance has recently matched the malicious wit of her Globe Richard III. Read more... |
Labyrinth, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 08 September 2016
Ever since Lucy Prebble’s hit masterpiece, Enron, opened our eyes to the possibilities of staging plays about global finance in a thrillingly theatrical way, the hunt has been on for another story that can be as informative and as well staged. Step forward Beth Steel, whose Wonderland, her previous play at this address, looked at Yorkshire miners in the 1980s Miners Strike. Read more... |
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★★★★★
‘A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.’
The Observer, Kate Kellaway
Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.
★★★★★
‘This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.’
The Times, Ann Treneman
Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.
Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.
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