Theatre Reviews
Birdsong, The Original Theatre Company online review – a gutsy experimentThursday, 02 July 2020![]()
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks’ best-selling First World War novel, has been adapted quite a few times in its twenty-seven years. Read more... |
Hamilton, Disney+ review - puts us all in the room where it happenedWednesday, 01 July 2020![]()
The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, National Theatre At Home review – a mad delightFriday, 26 June 2020![]()
Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed for NT Live at the Bridge Theatre last summer, is – as it gleefully acknowledges – completely bonkers. But it doesn’t start out that way. Read more... |
The Last Five Years, The Other Palace Digital review - socially distanced heartbreakFriday, 26 June 2020![]()
A musical featuring two people who are physically separated? Jason Robert Brown’s work is a shutdown natural – as this new digital theatre version demonstrates. Read more... |
Small Island, National Theatre At Home review – big-hearted story hits every beatFriday, 19 June 2020![]()
A British-Jamaican man is confused. It's the Second World War, and he signed up for the RAF on the understanding that he would serve as a pilot overseas. But instead he's ended up as ground crew in a grey Lincolnshire village. "You are overseas, aren't you?" sneers his sergeant. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe online review - a seasonal treatTuesday, 16 June 2020![]()
What could be better for a lockdown summer night "out" than a virtual visit to Shakespeare's Globe? Simultaneously in a theatre and the open air, we can share the visible enjoyment of hundreds of others, the very opposite of self-isolation and social distancing. Read more... |
The Madness of George III, National Theatre at Home review – a powerful, elegant depictionFriday, 12 June 2020![]()
It has been the fate of George III – who on many levels was a visionary and accomplished monarch – to go down in history as a comic figure, most famed for losing first America and then his mind. Read more... |
Reasons To Be Cheerful, Graeae review - raunchy working-class nostalgiaWednesday, 10 June 2020![]()
If any musical can live up to this title in these troubled times, it must be this show from Graeae, a theatre company whose mission is to champion the work of Deaf and disabled artists. Read more... |
Coriolanus, National Theatre at Home review – gritty 21st century updateFriday, 05 June 2020![]()
An arrogant leader contemptuous of his people. Could there be a more perfect timing for Josie Rourke’s taut, visceral production of Coriolanus? Read more... |
This House, National Theatre at Home review – timely revival of brilliant House of Commons dramaFriday, 29 May 2020![]()
There is a line of argument that – unfairly – blames playwright James Graham for Dominic Cummings. Would Cummings, some might ask, have achieved the influence he has now if it hadn’t been for his depiction in Graham’s brilliant TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War in which he was played as an obsessive genius by Benedict Cumberbatch? 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

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

There’s a grail, but it doesn't glow in a mundane if perverted Christian ritual. Three of the main characters have young and old actor versions...

The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s ...

Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in ...

“Tell me what you see” invites Robert Forster during “Tell it Back to me.” The album’s eight songs do not, however, necessarily say what Forster...

Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to have our records on...

Songlines Encounters is your round-the-world ticket to great...

The water proves newly inviting in The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Rattigan's mournful 1952 play that some while ago established its status as...

It's one thing to be indebted to a playwright, as Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter have been at different times to Beckett, or Sondheim's latest...

There’s nothing more healthy than dissing your own dad, and filmmaker Amalia Ulman says that her old man was “a Gen X deadbeat edgelord skater”...