The top London theatre shows according to our critics

Nicolas Hytner’s Bridge production is a staggering achievement, a more or less flawless take on traditional terms that’s turned into something transcendent by the staging, from Hytner and designer Bunny Christie…

Okay, let’s just get this out of the way. ‘Hamilton’ is stupendously good…

Yes, the presence of soon-to-turn-85 stage and screen legend Ian McKellen tackling Shakespeare’s great character Sir John Falstaff is the big draw in ‘Player Kings’. But Robert Icke’s three hour-40-minute modern-dress take on the two ‘Henry IV’ plays does not pander to its star…

This one-woman stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s short horror is a dizzying technical masterpiece, boasting a tour-de-force performance from Sarah ‘Shiv Roy’ Snook in a multitude of roles.

I was blown away by the emotional power of this show, about three generations of incomers in Sheffield’s iconic – and infamous – brutalist housing estate, Park Hill.

Tyrell Williams’s debut ‘Red Pitch’ – transferring to the West End from the Bush with a million ‘best play’ awards in its wake – is so good that it might make you like football…

For the first time in its 92-year history, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has opened its doors in March. And it’s absolutely worth it: the deliciously bonkers, endlessly inventive, and extremely funny ‘Bear Snores On’ is one of the best kids’ shows I’ve seen in an age.

What a long, strange trip it’s been. Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle…

It is, to be clear, fairly nuts that leftfield European director Ivo van Hove has been allowed to plonk what I can only describe as a leftfield European musical in a big theatre in the middle of London’s glittering West End. 

SplitLip’s delightful spoof WW2 musical has been heading inexorably for the West End for something like five years now…