sat 16/08/2025

Theatre Reviews

I and You, Hampstead Theatre review - Young Adult drama packs emotional punch

Veronica Lee

Here's a good pub quiz question: after Shakespeare, who was the most performed playwright in America last year? Arthur Miller? Tennessee Williams? David Mamet? None of those.

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The Wild Duck, Almeida Theatre review - meta, merciless and altogether brilliant

Matt Wolf

Beware the smile that Edward Hogg wears like a shield in the opening scenes of The Wild Duck, the Ibsen play refashioned into the most scalding production in many a year by Robert Icke, here in career-surpassing form. Playing James Ekdal, the photographer previously known as Hjalmar, Hogg disarms you from the outset with a bonhomie just waiting to snap.

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A Very Very Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre review - black comedy falls flat

aleks Sierz

It's all in the title, isn't it? Martin McDonagh's surreal new play comes with a warning that not only screams its intentions, but echoes them through repetition. Okay, okay, I get it. This is going to be a dark story, a very very very dark story.

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Macbeth, RSC, Barbican review - Shakespeare's blood-boltered tragedy, tense but flawed

Heather Neill

It has been said before: Macbeth's reputation for bad luck has more to do with the difficulty of bringing off a successful production than the supernatural elements in the play.

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Wise Children, Old Vic review - Emma Rice in fun if not quite top-flight form

Matt Wolf

"What could possibly go wrong?" The question ends the first act of Wise Children, the debut venture from the new company birthed by a director, Emma Rice, who must have asked herself precisely that query at many points in recent years.

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A Guide For The Homesick, Trafalgar Studios review - warmly funny and deeply moving

Rachel Halliburton

This blisteringly intense evening at Trafalgar Studios begins with two strangers in an Amsterdam hotel bedroom and – through a series of personal revelations – ends up spanning continents.

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Company, Gielgud Theatre review - here's to a sensational musical rebirth

Marianka Swain

The most thrilling revivals interrogate a classic work, while revealing its fundamental soul anew. Marianne Elliott’s female-led, 21st-century take on George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy Company makes a bold, inventive statement, but somehow also suggests t

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Stories, National Theatre review - comic conception capers

aleks Sierz

In 2017, playwright Nina Raine's Consent, an excellent National Theatre play about lawyers and rape victims, was hugely successful, winning a West End transfer, as well as generating a lot of...

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Measure for Measure, Donmar Warehouse review - Shakespeare twice-over packs a partial sting

Matt Wolf

Shakespeare exists to be refracted and filtered through the age in which he is presented.

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The Inheritance, Noël Coward Theatre review - tangled knot of gay fairy-tale and reality

David Nice

Its roots are in an emotional truth: Matthew Lopez saw the film, then read the book, of Howards End when he was 15 and 11 years later came across Maurice. He joined the dots between an apparent period-piece offering timeless wisdom about the human condition and the gayness he found he had in common with EM Forster.

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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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