London theatre reviews

If we go with the kind of heavy-handed punning ‘The Double Dealer’ favours, this revival of William Congreve’s rarely performed Restoration comedy could also be called ‘Laughs Laboured Lost’…

First seen in 1983, Patrick Barlow’s spoof on the nativity story, as performed by two hapless, over-earnest am-dram types and an opera singer, is always newly updated and devised when re-staged…

We all know the story of Sleeping Beauty – the cursed princess who pricks her finger and sleeps for one hundred years…

JM Barrie’s original 1904 play ‘Peter Pan’ feels like a pretty twee period piece these days; you can understand director Jonathan O’Boyle’s urge to update it…

The fact that actor Natasha Gordon's debut play as a writer is the first by a black British woman to hit the West End is both wonderful and shaming…

Making a deal with the devil is arguably a pretty weighty business. Contracts signed in blood, eternal damnation, all that…

The most distinctive thing about this revival of Anton Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’ is that it is very funny…

Liam’s joined the synchronised swimming team. But Liam can’t swim. That’s the basic idea behind Tom Wells and Matthew Robbins’s one-man musical, ‘Drip’…

After their absence from last year’s decidedly tepid ‘Cinderella’, Hackney Empire has got two of its best panto performers back for its twentieth festive extravaganza…

Remember Take That? Well, hold onto those memories because songs aside, there’s precious little of the ’90s boyband in Gary Barlow’s jukebox musical ‘The Band’, which trundles into the West End after a lengthy UK tour…