Playwright Anthony Neilson has always been fascinated by sex. I mean, who isn’t? But he has made it a central part of his career. In his bad-boy in-yer-face phase, from the early 1990s to about the mid-2000s, he pioneered a type of theatre that talked explicitly about sex and sexuality. I remember watching his searing and provocative plays, such as Penetrator (1993), The Censor (1997) and Stitching (2002), with my heart in my mouth, and my legs crossed. The content was explicit, emotionally grounded and rarely heard in public. Since then, the playwright has diversified his output, but his new Read more ...

A much tinkered-with show needs to go back to the drawing board, if this latest iteration of Strictly Ballroom: The Musical is any gauge. Having travelled across Sydney, Leeds, and Toronto on its extensively revised way to the West End, director-choreographer Drew McOnie's musical adaptation of Baz Luhrmann's enjoyably whacked-out film emerges as an overextended and bloated cartoon.Sure, the dancing grabs the attention now and again, as one might expect, and Zizi Strallen steps up to the plate as a genuinely charming female lead. But the forced grins on the cast's faces are likely to be met Read more ...

A one-time Martha and Maggie the Cat in the theatre, and a screen siren of the sort they don't make any more, might not be the first person you expect to see swaggering on to a London stage in a dark pantsuit ready to offer up two hours of song and chat. Can it really be Kathleen Turner – yes, that Kathleen Turner, whose credits range from Jessica Rabbit to Mrs Robinson in The Graduate – who is currently refashioning the American songbook to suit her own take-no-prisoners bravura, all the while revealing a capacious heart?  The fact is that Turner, to her eternal credit, Read more ...

Conflict and comedy can be unpredictable bedfellows, and Chicago playwright Joel Drake Johnson’s 2014 play occasionally risks overstretching itself in its attempts to reconcile the two – although its immediate context, the world of office politics, has a rich history of showing humanity at its worst, and such ghastliness can be painfully funny. At the same time Johnson explores a much more profound strand of social unease, the echt-American issue that is racism, the depths and ramifications of which sometimes sit uneasily with some of the surrounding elements of Rasheeda Speaking.But if there Read more ...

Back by feverishly popular demand, Jim Steinman’s mega-musical is no longer in danger of alarming unsuspecting opera-goers. A year on from its Coliseum debut, this indisputably bonkers show moves to the West End venue it was surely always destined for – that lingeringly inhabited by its rock operatic forebear. The Queen is dead; long live the Loaf.Unlike most jukebox musicals, this one originated as a theatrical concept back in the Seventies, then became an unlikely hit album instead. Unfortunately, that hasn’t blessed it with, say, a decent script, coherent plotting or satisfying Read more ...

It is, perhaps, a tale that suffers from overfamiliarity. Tina Turner’s rags-to-riches story – from humble beginnings as little Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, to her discovery, reinvention and sickening abuse by husband and manager Ike Turner, and finally her rebirth as a solo rock'n'roll star – is the stuff of showbiz legend. This new glossy but pedestrian West End musical adds little to the established narrative.The structure doesn’t help. Starting at the very beginning and racing through the years, there’s only time for broad-brushstrokes storytelling and one-note supporting Read more ...

There’s a whole universe which British theatre has yet to explore properly – it’s called the sci-fi imagination. Although this place is familiar from countless films and television series, it is more or less a stranger to our stages. With notable exceptions such as Alistair McDowall’s X and Philip Ridley’s Karagula, the imaginary worlds of humanoid robots and space travel and parallel universes are rare delights, so it’s great to welcome Thomas Eccleshare’s new Royal Court play, which in its satire at first offers an intriguing mix of Westworld and Stepford Wives. And stars Jane Horrocks. Read more ...

"What could be more serious than married life?" asked Richard Strauss, whose operas became a surprising pillar of Glyndebourne's repertoire some time after the early days dramatised in David Hare's play. "Honour" might have been the answer of conductor Fritz Busch, who unlike Strauss never made accommodations with the Nazi regime. The two ingredients, personal devotion and public integrity, are interlaced with surprising shafts of depth as well as elegance in the artistic context of The Moderate Soprano. This reviewer certainly didn't leave the Duke of York's Theatre at the end of Jeremy Read more ...

Chicago has been on, in one form or another, for a very long time. The original Broadway production in the Seventies ran for 936 performances; the 1997 London revival was the longest-running American musical in West End history; and it feels like Cuba Gooding Jr’s face has been grinning out from escalator video screens on the tube for an age. This revival at the Phoenix Theatre is uneven, but eventually finds its groove and packs a real punch of a finale.The story, as usual with this kind of musical, is somewhat thin: wannabe vaudeville star Roxie Hart (Sarah Soetart) shoots her lover dead Read more ...

You could be forgiven for not remembering the “coughing major” brouhaha in 2001, coming as it did the day before 9/11, when we had rather more pressing matters to attend to than a contestant being accused of cheating on television quiz show. But playwright James Graham has mined an entertaining confection from the affair and its subsequent court case in 2003.The matter concerns Charles Ingram (Gavin Spokes) a British Army major who appeared on a show never explicitly named in Quiz but which we know to be Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, presented in the UK by Chris Tarrant and an Read more ...

Seth Kriebel, 45, is a performer, much of whose work involves audience participation. He is bringing the show A House Repeated to the Brighton Festival 2018 between 6th and 11th May. Of American origin, born and raised near Philadelphia, Kriebel moved to the UK in 2001 and, over the last few years, has achieved increasing profile and success with shows such as Beowulf, The Unbuilt Room and We This Way.THOMAS H GREEN: Was your background in the States arts-orientated?SETH KRIEBEL: This is always difficult to try and contextualise for a British audience. Where I’m from is roughly equivalent to Read more ...

Even in its successful early days Wycherley’s 1675 comedy was notorious, but it was considered too lewd to be staged at all between the mid-Eighteenth Century and 1924. Although the play has found an affectionate place in the canon in more recent times, it makes a kind of sense to transpose the goings on of louche Restoration aristocrats to the era of the Bright Young Things, the time of its rediscovery. And the theme of the role of women, their desires and frustrations, has a continuing up-to-date resonance which adaptors Morphic Graffiti (director Luke Fredericks and designer Stewart Read more ...