fri 01/08/2025

Theatre Reviews

The Majority, National Theatre review – a minority interest

aleks Sierz

A new plague is sweeping British theatre: audience participation.

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Edinburgh Fringe 2017 reviews: Pike St / Box Clever / Sugar Baby

David Kettle


Pike St ★★★★

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Edinburgh Festival 2017 review: The Divide

David Kettle

A society that segregates men and women, prescribes what women can learn, read, wear, even which words they can say. A society willing to sacrifice its own people to maintain its repressive theocratic orthodoxy. Sound familiar?

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Proms 34 & 35 review: Oklahoma!, John Wilson Orchestra - music triumphs, words and drama suffer

David Nice

Only one thing could equal the "wow!" factor of seeing and hearing a youngish Hugh Jackman launch into “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’“ at the start of the National Theatre’s 1998 staging of Oklahoma!: John Wilson and his orchestra trilling and swooning their perfectly-balanced way through the Overture at the Proms...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2017 reviews: Adam / Eve / Nassim

David Kettle

Eve ★★★★

Transgender issues are high on the agenda at this year’s Fringe, with the energetic Testosterone at the Pleasance and the breezy You’ve Changed from Northern Stage at Summerhall among the stand-outs.

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Edinburgh Festival 2017 reviews: Rhinoceros / Flight

David Kettle

 

Rhinoceros ★★★★★

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Apologia, Trafalgar Studios review – Stockard Channing shines bright as a 1960s radical

aleks Sierz

The 1960s were “hilarious”, says one young character in this revival, starring Broadway icon Stockard Channing, of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2009 family drama at the Trafalgar Studios. How so?

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Coming Clean, King's Head Theatre / Twilight Song, Park Theatre reviews - gay-themed first and last plays falter

David Nice

Like his smash-hit My Night With Reg, Kevin Elyot's first and last plays have a role to play in the history of gay theatre, but do they work? Emphatically not in the case of Twilight Song (★★), completed – one is tempted to say, sketched – shortly before his death in 2014, though four out of five actors at the admirable Park Theatre give it their best shot.

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Road, Royal Court review - poetry amidst the pain

Matt Wolf

Who'd have guessed that the London theatre scene at present would be so devoted to the numinous? Hard on the heels of Girl from the North Country, which locates moments of transcendence in hard-scrabble Depression-era lives, along comes John Tiffany's deeply tender revival of Jim Cartwright's vaunted 1986 play Road, which tempers its landscape of pain with an abundance of poetry.

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The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾, Menier Chocolate Factory review – more than feel-good summer fun

Peter Quantrill

Back in Margaret Thatcher’s middle England, teenagers got by somehow. Without recourse to wands or Ballardian games of extinction, we survived adolescence with the help of a story full of people we knew. People (a bit) like us. Every year I re-read Sue Townsend’s chronicles of Adrian Mole, hopeless lovestruck bard of Leicester. And each year he grew up with me, as experience uncovered the texture of Mole’s life.

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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.


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