tue 14/10/2025

Theatre Reviews

Happy Days, Landmark Productions, Cork Opera House - to the end of the earth

David Nice

Siobhán McSweeney is to be loved as a person for her speech when she received a BAFTA for Best Female Performance in a Comedy Programme earlier this year, bringing up the way Derry people had weathered the “indignities, ignorance and stupidity of your so-called leaders in Dublin, Stormont and Westminster” (typically, the BBC cut that bit).

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The Crucible, Gielgud Theatre review - outstanding National Theatre transfer

Jane Edwardes

Whining Donald Trump and snivelling Boris Johnson claim that they are victims of witch-hunts, although all the evidence suggests otherwise. In 1953, haunted by the iniquitous McCarthy trials that were designed to purge the US of communism, Arthur Miller turned to a real travesty, that of the Salem witch-hunt of 1692.

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Idiots Assemble: Spitting Image The Musical, Phoenix Theatre review - more crude than cruel

Helen Hawkins

There are flashes during Idiots Assemble: Spitting Image The Musical of the old mordant humour from the show's heyday, when you could see Maggie the dominatrix, grey John Major eating his peas with his pants over his trousers and wee David Steel sitting in the pocket of David Owen. But today’s Spitting Image is more crude than cruel. 

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42nd Street, Sadler's Wells review - musical extravaganza will knock your socks off

Gary Naylor

There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless.

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We Will Rock You, London Coliseum review - the Queen musical returns, as ludicrous, dense and dreadful as before

Anya Ryan

Twenty-one years ago, critics were alarmed by Ben Elton’s deranged musical We Will Rock You. But, despite the "staggeringly awful" reviews, the show somehow went on to have 12 long (and painful) years of West End success. So, here we are again. The car crash of a show is back for a summer run at the London Coliseum. But has it made any progress in its nine-year hiatus? Sadly not.

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Southwark Playhouse Elephant review - superbly performed folksy musical

Helen Hawkins

The short story F Scott Fitzgerald wrote as a challenge, of a man born 70 years old whose body gets younger as the years pass, has already been blown up into a lengthy film of the same name starring Brad Pitt (and lots of CGI). Jethro Compton decided a bare-bones musical for six multi-instrumentalists and no special effects was what it needed to be, and how well it works.

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All of It/Hope Has a Happy Meal, Royal Court review - surreal pleasures

aleks Sierz

The summer season at the Royal Court, London’s premiere new writing venue, features two plays which imaginatively explore the human condition using elements of the surreal and the dystopic as well as the real. Or, to put it more accurately, both Alistair McDowall (in All of It ****) and Tom Fowler (in Hope Has a Happy Meal ***) show us recognisable human emotions through the lens of highly original storytelling...

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Groundhog Day, Old Vic review - Tim Minchin’s musical returns in full-on style

Helen Hawkins

Groundhog Day, appropriately, is back where it started. The hit film about a TV weatherman’s endlessly reiterated day in small-town USA moved to the Old Vic stage in 2016; but then its progress became bumpy, despite the awards showered on it and its lead, Andy Karl, on both sides of the Atlantic. Karl was injured during a Broadway preview and the show's US tour didn't happen.

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Patriots, Noël Coward Theatre review - crash-bang brilliant Putin comedy does it again

Ismene Brown

With apocalyptic floods pouring through the Kakhovka dam, and millions of Ukrainians displaced or bereaved, it doesn’t feel decent to be laughing at a witty black comedy about his rise from nonentity to full-blown tyrant. On the other hand, how can you not laugh when an oligarch injured in an assassination attempt sees it as a great way to get noticed in a crazed post-Soviet Kremlin?

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Yours Unfaithfully, Jermyn Street Theatre review - resonant debate about open marriage from 1933

Helen Hawkins

Miles Malleson, known as an inter-war character actor who popped up in numerous small roles on stage and screen, was also a surprisingly prolific writer and adaptor. Mint Theatre Company of New York love truffling out work like his Yours Unfaithfully, a 1933 play on a topic that still resonates today, even if the social milieu of the piece doesn’t.

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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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