wed 30/07/2025

Theatre Reviews

Love's Labour's Lost/Much Ado About Nothing, RSC, Theatre Royal Haymarket

alexandra Coghlan

“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.” A sudden cold breeze blows through the endless summer afternoon of Love’s Labour's Lost in the play’s final moments. Death enters Shakespeare’s Edenic garden and innocence is lost. But what, asks director Christopher Luscombe, might happen if those songs were to return?

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Dreamgirls, Savoy Theatre

Edward Seckerson

It’s taken almost four nail-biting decades for Dreamgirls to evolve from the germ of an idea to the most anticipated musical never to have quite made it, lock, stock, and smoking barrel across the Atlantic.

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Cinderella, London Palladium

Veronica Lee

What a joy it is to have pantomime back at the Palladium, the first at this glorious theatre in 29 years. And the producers of Cinderella have pulled out the stops; a star-studded cast, a large ensemble, fabulous costumes and a live orchestra make for a magnificent three-hour entertainment.

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Love, National Theatre

Tom Birchenough

For a play that ends with 15 minutes of breath-stopping, jaw-dropping theatre that is surely as powerful as anything the departing year has brought us, Alexander Zeldin’s Love has a challenging relationship to the concept of drama itself. For the greater part of its 90-minute run, the writer seems almost to be exploring the possibilities of “fly-on-the-wall” theatre. Is that a contradiction in terms?

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Hedda Gabler, National Theatre

aleks Sierz

Theatre conventions are a funny thing. Today, it’s actually quite difficult to see a modern classic dressed in the clothes and performed on the set of its specific historical period. It has to be in contemporary dress. And in a contemporary setting. It’s almost as if producers and directors no longer trust audiences to use their imaginations – poor public, it has to be spoonfed.

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Fleabag, Soho Theatre

aleks Sierz

It’s television, not theatre, that has real power. Real cultural force. Cultural muscle. Take the case of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show, Fleabag. First staged in 2013 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it has appeared twice at the Soho since then, garnering a shelf-load of theatre nominations and awards along the way.

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Wild Honey, Hampstead Theatre

Matt Wolf

This Chekhov-intensive year comes to a muted climax with a rare sighting of Wild Honey. Michael Frayn's reappraisal of the Russian master's untitled early text is more commonly known as Platonov. There was a scorching production of the play this summer at the National as part of a Young Chekhov trilogy. A separate Broadway Platonov, adapted by Andrew Upton under the title The Present and starring his wife Cate Blanchett, begins previews next week.

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She Loves Me, Menier Chocolate Factory

Matt Wolf

There are no cartwheels, and no one does the splits, in the new London revival of that most cherishable of Broadway musicals, She Loves Me, which immediately sets Matthew Wright's Menier Chocolate Factory entry apart from the fresh sighting of the same 1963 show that swept New York last season. What one gets instead is the most deeply felt, penetratingly acted version of the piece imaginable.

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Strictly Ballroom, West Yorkshire Playhouse

graham Rickson

Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom started life as a short stage play in 1984, drawing on its creator’s own experiences in the heady world of amateur ballroom dancing. That the iconic 1992 film exists at all is something of a miracle; production funding was scarce and no distributor was willing to screen it until it was accepted for the 1992 Cannes Festival.

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Once in a Lifetime, Young Vic

David Nice

An amplified crunch in the dark, sound without vision, kicks off this take on Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's light comedy about the advent of the talking pictures. It's a typical Richard Jones leitmotif, not as fraught with horror as the baked beans of his Wozzeck or the spinning top in his Royal Opera Boris Godunov.

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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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