sun 17/08/2025

Theatre Reviews

Blueprint Medea, Finborough Theatre online review – well-meaning but clunky update

Laura De Lisle

Medea is the original crazy ex-girlfriend: the wronged woman who takes perfectly understandable revenge on the man who made her life hell.

Read more...

The Deep Blue Sea, National Theatre at Home review - hauntingly elegiac portrayal of Rattigan's world

Rachel Halliburton

Helen McCrory is an actor who can inject a world of feeling into one syllable that many actors would struggle to muster in an entire script.

Read more...

Les Blancs, National Theatre at Home review – triumphant revival of forgotten classic

aleks Sierz

Lorraine Hansberry’s debut, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, where it opened in 1959. It is now an American classic, but it’s her last play, Les Blancs, that in the current context of the Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to institutional racism both in the US and UK feels even more relevant.

Read more...

Toast, Lawrence Batley Theatre online review - pungent adaptation of Nigel Slater's autobiography

Rachel Halliburton

I knew what a Howard Hodgkin painting would look like before I ever saw one because of Nigel Slater. There’s a recipe in one of his very early books, Real Cooking, for “A creamy, colourful, fragrant chicken curry” which he candidly admits is “seriously unauthentic”, with ingredients that will leave some purists “really pissed-off”.

Read more...

Birdsong, The Original Theatre Company online review – a gutsy experiment

Laura De Lisle

Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling First World War novel, has been adapted quite a few times in its twenty-seven years.

Read more...

Hamilton, Disney+ review - puts us all in the room where it happened

Marianka Swain

The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021.

Read more...

A Midsummer Night's Dream, National Theatre At Home review – a mad delight

Laura De Lisle

Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed for NT Live at the Bridge Theatre last summer, is – as it gleefully acknowledges – completely bonkers. But it doesn’t start out that way.

Read more...

The Last Five Years, The Other Palace Digital review - socially distanced heartbreak

Marianka Swain

A musical featuring two people who are physically separated? Jason Robert Brown’s work is a shutdown natural – as this new digital theatre version demonstrates.

Read more...

Small Island, National Theatre At Home review – big-hearted story hits every beat

Laura De Lisle

A British-Jamaican man is confused. It's the Second World War, and he signed up for the RAF on the understanding that he would serve as a pilot overseas. But instead he's ended up as ground crew in a grey Lincolnshire village. "You are overseas, aren't you?" sneers his sergeant.

Read more...

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe online review - a seasonal treat

Heather Neill

What could be better for a lockdown summer night "out" than a virtual visit to Shakespeare's Globe? Simultaneously in a theatre and the open air, we can share the visible enjoyment of hundreds of others, the very opposite of self-isolation and social distancing.

Read more...

Pages

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.


latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Music Reissues Weekly: The Residents - American Composer...

George & James was originally released in March 1984. Stars & Hank Forever! emerged in October 1986. The two LPs were...

Frang, Romaniw, Liverman, LSO, Pappano, Edinburgh Internatio...

Right from the bracing brass fanfare that began this Sea Symphony, you know exactly where you were: right in the midst of the deck, with...

Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews: Ordinary Decent Criminal / In...

Ordinary Decent Criminal, Summerhall ...

Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Emmanuel Sonubi / Joz Norris

Emmanuel Sonubi, Pleasance Courtyard ...

Album: Dinosaur Pile-Up - I've Felt Better

The history of popular music is littered with bands who...

Alien: Earth, Disney+ review - was this interstellar journey...

Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie from 1979 was an all-time sci-fi/horror classic, and even an endless stream of sequels and spin-offs...

Unmoored review - atmospheric Swedish noir set on Exmoor

“When have you ever gone off alone?” scoffs Magnus (Thomas W Gabrielsson) when his wife, Maria (Mirja Turestedt), expresses the wish to go to...

Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews: Kinder / Shunga Alert / Clean...

Kinder, Underbelly, Cowgate ★...

Album: Tom Grennan - Everywhere I Went Led Me To Where I Did...

Who’d have guessed that a dude who first came to attention a decade ago guesting on a cheesy Chase & Status drum & bass track would likely...