wed 11/06/2025

Theatre Reviews

Ubu Roi, Cheek by Jowl, Barbican Silk Street Theatre

David Nice

Or, The Lord and Lady Macbeth of the Seizième, as imagined by a bourgeois teenager who fancies himself to be Bougrelas, heir to the Polish throne. That's one way of looking at the concept so dazzlingly carried through by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod with the French wing of their Cheek by Jowl Company.

Read more...

Table, National Theatre

aleks Sierz

The family can be a knot of hatred as well as a cradle of love. Rather late in this new play by Tanya Ronder comes a scene in which a separated husband and wife try to untangle this knot, and end up by tightening it. And this takes place around a table, which is silent witness to this epic tale which spans more than a century, and uses nine actors to create some 23 participants over six generations.

Read more...

Once, Phoenix Theatre

David Benedict

People sneer at musicals for endless reasons: they hate Broadway brashness, non-naturalistic lurches in and out of song, the sentimentality. One of the least acknowledged reasons, however, is because their plots – predictability plus songs – have zero tension. And you know what? Placed in the witness box, many a musical emerges guilty as accused.

Read more...

Narrative, Royal Court Theatre

aleks Sierz

Anthony Neilson is the wild man of new writing. However, this reputation, which has been provoked by shock-fests such as Penetrator (1993) and Stitching (2002), belies the fact that some of his best work, such as The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2004), exudes a warm humanity and offbeat humour. But perhaps the most significant thing about some of his recent work has been his concern with process.

Read more...

My Perfect Mind, Young Vic Theatre

Carole Woddis

"And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." So speaks King Lear towards the end of his monumental journey of self-knowledge that has taken the mad monarch from the highest to the lowest reaches of human experience.

Read more...

The Thrill of Love, St James Theatre

aleks Sierz

Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, is a cultural icon, the image of the peroxide blonde who spells big trouble. An influence on Diana Dors in the 1956 film Yield to the Night, she was played by Miranda Richardson in Dance with a Stranger in 1985. Last year, a new biography, Carol Anne Lee’s A Fine Day for a Hanging, was published. Now, playwright Amanda Whittington tracks down this fraught and troubling figure.

Read more...

Molly Sweeney, The Print Room

Heather Neill

Molly Sweeney has been blind since early childhood. Supported by her understanding father, she has grown into a confident, independent woman. Then her new husband Frank and an ambitious ophthalmologist, Mr Rice, suggest that it might be possible to restore Molly's sight and she undergoes two operations. Partially sighted, she has to learn how to find her way in a mysterious new world where nothing is as she has experienced it.

Read more...

Before the Party, Almeida Theatre

David Benedict

Faced with an unfamiliar play, it’s usually hard to spot exactly where the writer stopped and the director started. Not here. This is one of those occasions where a director’s voice is considerably and almost constantly louder than the playwright’s. You might think you’re seeing Rodney Ackland’s Before The Party but what you’re getting is Matthew Dunster’s assault upon it.

Read more...

Ryoji Ikeda: superposition, Barbican Theatre

Louise Gray

It’s not often that a performance’s technological properties leaves you simply slack-jawed. Robert Wilson’s very long Swedish-language version of Strindberg’s A Dream Play did – at the same venue, though this time in 2001 – when the surtitle machines broke down (the audience gave an audible gasp of horror and then settled to its collective fate), but that was for altogether different reasons.

Read more...

The Low Road, Royal Court Theatre

aleks Sierz

“My honest instinct,” says Jim, the hero of Bruce Norris’s The Low Road, “is one of resentment.” And while this contemporary fable of industrious bees, aka capitalist speculators, is set in the past, and is full of good jokes, it is also laced with emotions that are a tougher sell. Here a humorous tale of a life of entrepreneurship comes hand-in-hand with some satire that is bitter as well as being funny.

Read more...

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.


latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Samuel Arbesman: The Magic of Code review - the spark ages

The slightly overwrought subtitle, "How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World and Shapes Our Future", gives a...

Album: Mary Halvorson - About Ghosts

Although Mary Halvorson leads the sextet Amaryllis on About Ghosts, instrumentally, she does not place her guitar to the fore. The first...

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bridge Theatre review - Nick...

It’s a sign of the inroads that the term “immersive” has made in theatreland that it now gets jokily namedropped at the...

Saul, Glyndebourne review - playful, visually ravishing desc...

This thrilling production of Saul takes Handel’s dramatisation of the Bible’s first Book of Samuel and paints it in...

theartsdesk at the Dublin International Chamber Music Festiv...

If, like me, chamber music isn’t your most frequent home, there are bound to be revelations of what for many are known masterpieces. Mine in...

Album: Marina - Princess of Power

Marina Diamandis is a proper pop star, brilliantly full-on...

The Gold, Series 2, BBC One review - back on the trail of th...

The first series of The Gold in 2023 was received rapturously, though apparently it only told one half of the story of the 1983 Brink’s-...

Eva Quartet, St Cyprian's review - polyphonic bliss

Eva Quartet are four outstanding Bulgarian voices of polyphonic purity and depth, drawn from the legendary choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, who...

Album: Mary Chapin Carpenter - Personal History

In those seemingly long-ago times of loneliness and lockdown, artists around the world invited us into their kitchens and living rooms as they...