tue 14/10/2025

Theatre Reviews

Gravity & Other Myths: Out of Chaos, Brighton Festival 2023 review - eye-boggling acrobatics

Thomas H Green

With acrobatics at this level, they make it all look so easy, it’s possible for an audience to become complacent.

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The Motive and the Cue, National Theatre review - theatrical titans face off

Matt Wolf

Plays about the theatre are many and varied, from Gypsy and Noises Off to the numerous Shakespeare works that absorb theatrical performance into their very fabric.

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August in England, Bush Theatre review - Lenny Henry monologue lands a painful one-two

Helen Hawkins

Reggae hits are already playing over the speaker system at the Bush when the audience enters, some jigging to the sounds as they find their seats. The set before us is a living room with a bright orange carpet, a squidgy tan faux leather armchair and a cocktail trolley.

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The Vortex, Chichester Festival Theatre review - naturalism clogs up Coward's pipes

Ismene Brown

Sometimes I go outside and look at our kitchen drain. Where there should be a vortex there’s a largely static pool. Tree roots have recently grown through the old pipes, their clumps colonised with fat, dog hair and coleslaw bits, and though a bit of handpumping will shift some of the stale water for a while, it really needs systemic attention from Dyno-rod. A good Dyno-rodding is what Chichester’s new production of Noel Coward’s The Vortex needs too.

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It’s a Motherf**king Pleasure, Soho Theatre review - disability-led comedy hits hard

Gary Naylor

Just when you’ve relaxed a little, privilege duly checked and confident that you won’t be guilt-tripped for nipping into that disabled loo a few years ago at the National (c’mon, the interval was nearly over and needs must), FlawBored drop a bomb into the narrative.

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A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, Barbican Theatre review - eco-touring play doesn’t travel well

Helen Hawkins

There was a jolting eco-themed work onstage in London recently, but sadly A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, a Headlong company collaboration with director Katie Mitchell and a number of international producing houses, wasn’t it. 

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Jules and Jim, Jermyn Street Theatre review - a bohemian love triangle ends badly

Gary Naylor

It’s apt that this new play, with characters moving in and out of Paris either side of World War I, is staged at this intimate theatre, one that always has the ambience of a below-ground oubliette.

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Dixon and Daughters, National Theatre review - cold discomfort harm

aleks Sierz

Men are bastards. Okay, not all of us, but enough to make the lives of millions of women a misery. This we know, but anyone who has any doubts might be educated by some of the horrific statistics of sexual assault and domestic violence in the programme of Deborah Bruce’s Dixon and Daughters, a new play at the Dorfman space of the National Theatre.

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The Secret Life of Bees, Almeida Theatre review - stirringly delivered musical about civil rights

Helen Hawkins

The cast of The Secret Life of Bees first parade onto the Almeida stage hefting big glass storage jars full of a golden substance: honey. The jars glow as if they are beacons, lights that guide. Which they turn out to be.

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Dancing at Lughnasa, National Theatre review - largely ravishing Brian Friel revival

Matt Wolf

It's saying a lot when a production lives up to its gasp-inducing set. That's the happy case with Josie Rourke's loving revival of Dancing at Lughnasa, which returns Brian Friel's modern-day classic to the building, the National, where this Olivier and Tony Award-winner first played London over 32 years ago.

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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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