wed 30/07/2025

Theatre Reviews

One Night in Miami..., Donmar Warehouse

Veronica Lee

Kemp Powers’s play is set in a motel room in Miami on the night of 25 February 1964, after Cassius Clay (as Muhammad Ali then was) had earlier beaten Sonny Liston to gain the world heavyweight title. He is joined by two friends, the singer Sam Cooke and the American football star Jim Brown, and his political and spiritual mentor, the civil rights activist Malcolm X.

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Oil, Almeida Theatre

Matt Wolf

Ambition trumps (if you'll forgive that verb) achievement in Ella Hickson's new play, a long-aborning exercise in time-travel whose audacity of vision can't override one's impression that the final result is an effortful slog.

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A Man of Good Hope, Young Vic

alexandra Coghlan

The first thing you hear are the marimbas – music that’s pounded, punched out of the air by hundreds of fists. Later the instruments give us dances and songs, but this musical violence is never truly absent from an orchestra made up entirely of percussion. It’s the heartbeat of A Man of Good Hope, a tale whose chapters are measured out in blows, beatings, rapes and murders, whose very horizon is barred with corrugated iron.

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Shopping and F***ing, Lyric Hammersmith

aleks Sierz

Playwright Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 Royal Court debut was not the decade’s most shocking piece of theatre, but its title was, and still is, certainly the most annoying for producers and publicists. Under a Victorian law – the Indecent Advertisements Act 1889, amended by the Indecent Displays (Control) Act 1981 – the word “fuck” is banned from public display.

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Crude, Shed 36, Port of Dundee

David Kettle

It’s not often you need a passport to get into a theatre show. But then the journey required to get to Scottish site-specific experts Grid Iron’s Crude does feel like something of a pilgrimage – first get yourself to Dundee, then find the Science Centre car park, and hop on a coach to transport you deep into the restricted, ID-required heart of the city’s port.

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The Dresser, Duke of York’s Theatre

aleks Sierz

The best way to line up the stars is to offer them a chance to act in a play about the theatre. For this, Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser has a good track record: its original West End outing starred Tom Courtney; the 1983 film version had Albert Finney and Courtney again; and a 2015 BBC television version had Sirs Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen.

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Lunch/The Bow of Ulysses, Trafalgar Studios

Jenny Gilbert

The perception of Steven many-hats Berkoff as “one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain” makes sense when you see this. Here are two chamber pieces, both two-handers, written 20 years apart, which gain hugely from being run together. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine either of them having much of a life as a single entity, since even combined they make a short evening at the theatre.

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Murder Ballad, Arts Theatre

Marianka Swain

Ye olde love triangle returns, this time as the centrepiece of a rock chamber musical that premiered Off-Broadway in 2013 and now makes its UK premiere. There’s a good guy, a bad boy, and the promise of a violent end, but despite the oft-referenced roiling passions – and a storming quartet of performances – Sam Yates’s staging feels too cool and clinical for its purportedly hot-blooded subject.

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The Suppliant Women, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

David Kettle

Fleeing rape and forced marriage in their war-torn homeland, a boatload of women refugees washes up in Greece, where they beg asylum from the suspicious locals. No, not a depressingly familiar news story of our own times, but the basis of Aeschylus’s 2,500-year-old drama The Suppliant Women – an ancient work whose unmistakable contemporary resonances David Greig brings unashamedly to the fore in his brand new adaptation.

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Travesties, Menier Chocolate Factory

aleks Sierz

Is this the most dazzling play of a dazzling playwright? First staged in 1974, Travesties is the one which manages to squeeze avant-garde novelist James Joyce, Dada godfather Tristan Tzara and communist revolutionary Lenin into a story which resembles a riotous party, where Wildean pastiche, political history, debate about art, unreliable memory and song-and-dance routines stay up half the night, and howl gloriously at the moon.

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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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