Off-West End theatre

This review is from 2023. SplitLip’s delightful spoof WW2 musical has been heading inexorably for the West End for something like five years now. It’s a fringe theatre comet that’s gathered mass and momentum via seasons at the New Diorama, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios, and has now made impact in Theatreland – wiping out a West End dinosaur to boot, as it displaces ‘The Woman in Black’ after over 30 years at the Fortune Theatre. And it’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company, which consists of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Robert. All bar Hagan perform in the show, with Claire Marie Hall and Jak Malone rounding out the cast. This is very much their triumph. And though it’s been redirected for the West End by Robert Hastie, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is at heart the same show it always was. There are no added backing dancers or bombastic reorchestrations. It’s slicker and bigger in its way, but still feels endearingly shambolic where it counts. It’s a very larky account of the World War 2 Operation Mincemeat, a ploy from British intelligence to feed the German army disinformation via a briefcase of false war plans strapped to a corpse that they hoped to pass off as a downed British pilot (yes, there was a recent film with exactly the same name, about exactly the same thing, and yes they do make a joke about this). The story centres on Charles Cholmondeley (Cumming), the socially inept MI5 operative who dreams up the plan, and...

This review is from November 2018. Huddle returns to the Unicorn for 2026. Penguins, never exactly out of fashion, are particularly on-trend this season thanks to the emperor penguins who made global headlines after a BBC camera crew controversially rescued them from a gully.Huddle, from Filskit Theatre, doesn’t offer anything quite so nerve-wracking, but it’s certainly more good news for everyone’s favourite flightless birds. Against a deadpan animated backdrop of a larger colony, Joseph Barnes-Phillips’s Papa Penguin squawks and waddles and gets up to general penguin business. Of course, he looks like a dude in a penguin suit, and part of the charm of Huddle is how far the creative team have gone with this: Papa Penguin is a sort of semi-anthropomorphised creature, with a small clutch of physical possessions that he hoards on his rusty old sled, above which hangs a line he uses to hang fish on. It’s a slightly surreal but charming flourish.He also appears not to have a mate, but is nonetheless blessed with an egg that duly hatches into Victoria Dyson’s Penguin Chick. The rest of Katy Costigan and Sarah Shephard’s production is basically two adults making penguin noises at each other – and it’s just delightful, packed with nice little details like Dyson’s costume (by Maxwell Nicholson-Lailey), which sheds layers of grey fluff as she slowly advances towards adulthood. Some mild peril kicks in at the end, as Papa Penguin is forced to head out to sea to get more fish and...

Of all the blockbuster kids’ books produced by the industry-dominating Julia Donaldson/Axel Scheffler partnership, could Stick Man be the weirdest? It’s a curious tale of a sentient being who seems in fact to be neither stick nor man. Our hero, out for a morning run, finds himself essentially kidnapped by a curious dog. A further series of unfortunate events separates Stick Man from his Stick Lady Love, their three wooden kids and his forest home… until the day is saved by none other than (major spoiler alert) Santa Claus. Sensibly, seasoned Donaldson adaptors Freckle Productions don’t waste time on trying to make all of this make logical sense to a pre-school audience, or their parents. Instead, the Stick Man text becomes as a tentpole for some impressive stagecraft and plenty of enormously fun buffoonery. The high-energy cast of three bust out silvery fish, rubber rings and beach balls, umbrellas and other sensory tricks, as misadventure after misadventure carries our splintery hero through water, sand and snow. One or two flying props may have been fumbled during the performance I saw, but I think it’s fair to chalk that up to the joyful chaos on display. There’s some imaginative, engaging and admirably non-cringe audience interaction, and even a few jokes for the grown-ups, panto-style. On-stage percussion, melodica and sax from actor-musician James Gulliford give the prerecorded soundtrack (by Benji Bower) a live lift, and Stick Man himself (JG Daniels-White) shows...