sun 17/08/2025

Theatre Reviews

Love in a Wood, Jermyn Street Theatre review - stars gather remotely for a lively online presentation

Heather Neill

Swaggering rakes, posturing fops, sexual intrigue, illicit encounters, wit, artifice, wigs, fans and beauty spots - these are familiar ingredients of Restoration comedy. It is a louche world where the word "mask" is associated with naughty goings on under cover of darkness rather than health worries, and where social distancing and restraint have no place.

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Peter Pan: The Audio Adventure review - the perfect bedtime story

Laura De Lisle

The blurb for Peter Pan: The Audio Adventure, Shaun McKenna’s new adaptation of JM Barrie’s classic, tells us, with a...

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Dick Whittington, National Theatre at Home review - colourful and amiable entertainment

Veronica Lee

In a much-depleted and truncated pantomime season that withered on the vine, the National Theatre's debut production of Dick Whittington lasted only four performances before the show was cancelled; it has now released this recording, which will be available throughout the current lockdown.

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Best of 2020: Theatre

Matt Wolf

"Goodbye": The single word lingered heavily in the air last March 16, as the scripted closing both of the terrific Southwark Playhouse revival of The Last Five Years and as an ancillary farewell to live theatre.

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Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, Royal Court online review – the news, but better

Laura De Lisle

Edition 2 of Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative, an experimental new piece of online theatre from the Royal Court, doesn’t mess around.

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A Christmas Carol, Old Vic online review - the bells have it once again

Matt Wolf

As proof that you can't have too much of a good thing, consider the return of Matthew Warchus's buoyant production of A Christmas Carol, now marking its fourth year at the Old Vic (with a lauded Broadway run last Christmas included,...

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Pantomimes 2020 round-up: what's available online

Veronica Lee

Cinderella ****

I did worry that pantomime – that most audience-driven of theatrical pursuits – might not work through the tube, but Nottingham Playhouse's warm and funny show dispels any doubts. Pandemic jokes abound (the audience must be smelly because they're sitting far apart, for instance) in writer-director Adam Penford's inventive romp.

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Troy Story, RSC online review - biting off more than it can chew

Laura De Lisle

At just under five hours, Troy Story, the RSC’s adaptation of as many tales from Greek myth, takes about a third as long as it does to recite the whole of the ...

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A Christmas Carol, Dominion Theatre review - brash and bustling and snowy, too

Matt Wolf

The twelve days of Christmas have nothing on the flotilla of Christmas Carols jostling for view this season, each of which is substantially different enough from the next so as to give Dickens's 1843 story its prismatic due.

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The Comeback, Noël Coward Theatre review - frantic farce with touches of vaudeville

Veronica Lee

Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen together form The Pin, a sketch duo who have won much critical acclaim and full houses in the Edinburgh Fringe shows. They have also added a huge social media following in 2020 with their lockdown skits spoofing the new Zoom age. Now they move into theatre with – what is it?

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Advertising feature

★★★★★

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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