wed 21/05/2025

Theatre Reviews

Emilia, Shakespeare's Globe review - polemic disguised as a play

Laura De Lisle

It feels like Michelle Terry’s first summer season at the Globe has been building up to Emilia for a while now. The theme is Shakespeare and race, so Othello was something of a given. It's joined by The Winter’s Tale, as if the Emilias of these two plays have been waiting for their chance to step into the spotlight.

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Edinburgh Festival 2018 reviews: Nigel Slater's Toast / Status

David Kettle

 

Nigel Slater's Toast ★★★★  

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Edinburgh Festival 2018 reviews: Daughter / Huff / First Snow/Première Neige

David Kettle

Launched just last year to celebrate the country’s 150th anniversary, CanadaHub has quickly become one of the Edinburgh Fringe’s most exciting and intriguing venues, presenting a small but richly provocative programme of work from across that vast country. Here are just three of its offerings this year.

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Little Shop of Horrors, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre review - monstrously entertaining

Marianka Swain

The resplendent partnership of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman – which produced Disney hits Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid – first took root with this 1982 Off-Broadway musical, based on a low-budget Sixties film, about a man seeking love and fortune via a bloodthirsty plant.

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Aristocrats, Donmar Warehouse review - fresh but uneven

aleks Sierz

Chekhovian is a rather over-used word when it comes to describing some of the late Brian Friel's best work, but you can see why it might apply to Aristocrats, his 1979 play which premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin before becoming a contemporary classic. You can count off the elements that remind you of the Russia master: decaying estates, feckless toffs, wistful longings and missed opportunities.

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Homos, or Everyone in America, Finborough Theatre review - a complex pattern of glee and profundity

Tom Birchenough

I’m still not entirely sure what the full associations of the title of New York playwright Jordan Seavey’s new play – its second element, at least: the first speaks for itself – may be, but with writing this accomplished any such uncertainties fall away.

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Edinburgh Festival 2018 reviews: Underground Railroad Game / On the Exhale

David Kettle

 

Underground Railroad Game ★★★★ 

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Edinburgh Festival 2018 reviews: Coriolanus Vanishes / Check Up: Our NHS at 70 / A Sockful of Custard

David Kettle

 

Coriolanus Vanishes ★★★★ 

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Silk Road (How To Buy Drugs Online), Trafalgar Studios review - Geordie chancer comes of age

aleks Sierz

The Dark Web has an intriguing sound about it. Like something out of JRR Tolkein or JK Rowling, it suggests a netherland peopled by strange creatures, and maybe even dangerous monsters. As indeed it is.

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£¥€$ (LIES), Almeida Theatre review - financial frolics at the gaming table

Matt Wolf

Theatre critics tend not to experience an 140 percent increase in their financial assets within 21 minutes. So on that remarkable front alone, the London premiere of the Belgian £¥€$ (LIES) is giddily immersive fun, at least up until such time as the Ontroerend Goed production shifts gears and sends the financial world, and our momentary prosperity, crashing down.

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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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