fri 23/05/2025

Theatre Reviews

School Play, Southwark Playhouse

Will Rathbone

Hot on the heels of Katherine Soper's award-winning Wish List, about the UK benefits system in crisis, and John Godber's This Might Hurt, about an NHS in crisis, comes this play about our education system in crisis.

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The Wild Party, The Other Palace

Marianka Swain

The Other Palace’s housewarming party certainly lives up to its billing as a wild one – wet and wild, in fact, as the first three rows are sporadically doused with bathtub gin.

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See Me Now, Young Vic

aleks Sierz

Sex workers come in all shapes and sizes. Everyone knows that. But why do they do it? Why does anyone take the risk of being intimate with a stranger for money?

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The Winter's Tale, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

David Kettle

In the end, it’s all about Mamillius. It’s he – the young son of Leontes of Sicily – who launches director Max Webster’s really quite magical new production of Shakespeare’s credibilty-busting tragedy-cum-comedy at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, suggesting it’s all a child’s made-up story in the first place.

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Richard III, Schaubühne Berlin, Barbican

David Nice

Hated the Schaubühne Hamlet (same lead actor, same director as this latest Shakespeare auf Deutsch); loved Ivo van Hove's Toneelgroep Kings of War, with Hans Kesting's Richard III on the highest level alongside the Henrys V and VI.

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A Clockwork Orange, Park Theatre

aleks Sierz

There are few modern literary fables that really resonate in the wider culture. And most that do are dystopias. Think of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or even Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And, of course, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

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Travesties, Apollo Theatre

Ismene Brown

Tom Stoppard’s humungously funny play Travesties was born out of a piece of James Joyce doggerel about how a British diplomat sued him for the cost of two pairs of trousers. It’s like this.

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Beware of Pity, Complicite & Schaubühne Berlin, Barbican

David Nice

Prolific, fitfully great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's two biggest popular biographies, Marie Antoinette: The Story of an Average Woman and Mary Stuart, would be a gift for any screenwriter, given their fully realised dramatic scenes.

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The Pitchfork Disney, Shoreditch Town Hall

aleks Sierz

Playwright Philip Ridley has one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary theatre. His imagination is laced with sci-fi images and an East End gothic sensibility, and his mastery of storytelling continues to surprise and delight.

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The Glass Menagerie, Duke of York's

Jenny Gilbert

The writing of Tennessee Williams, said his contemporary Arthur Miller, planted “the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theatre”.

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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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