London theatre reviews

Harriet Walter is the face on the poster. But the triumph in this new version of the Frederick Garcia Lorca classic belongs to the women behind the scenes…

For 13 years the Lyric Hammersmith pantomime has cultivated a reputation as the punky outsider of the London panto scene: more political, more jokes for adults, and often just plain weirder than its peers.

That’s not the case with the 2023 edition. Written by long-term associate of the panto Vikki Stone it’s a far gentler affair than any of its predecessors. Has the Lyric panto gone soft? It’s hard to say: Stone also wrote the much spikier 2021 ‘Aladdin’, so you can’t put it purely down to her. Perhaps the change in tone reflects the preferences of director Tonderai Munyeva, a newcomer to pantomime who directs competently but without a huge amount of flair.

Any which way, Stone’s ‘Cinderella’ is a lot of fun, and if there are fewer gags for grown-ups there are definitely a lot of reworked ‘90s bangers to compensate. From ‘Disco 2000’ to ‘Mambo No 5’, Stone is wise to the idea that using songs beloved by millennial parents is at least as quick a way to a happy audience as doing versions of whatever it is that ten-year-olds listen to these days (though to be fair a run through ‘Antihero’ goes down well).

The show, then. Well, it’s your standard west London spin on the fairytale, with Tilly La Belle Yengo’s Cinders working at Shepherd’s Bush Market flogging her own range of boutique rodentwear. In a somewhat gentler version of the story than we sometimes get, she has an oppressive but maybe not quite abusive home life. Sisters Muffy (Charlie Cameron) and Gusset (Meghan Treadway) are obnoxious but not monstrous (or, indeed, ugly). The returning Emmanuel Akwafo does a fine job of adding some U-rated sauce and negotiating the slightly complicated role of Cinderella’s stepmother Lady Jelly-Bottom, who sort of morphs from pantomime villain to pantomime dame over the course of the show; Akwafo feels palpably more comfortable in the latter role, but he gives both some serious welly.

Cinderella’s fortunes are changed when Damien James’s posh, socially awkward Prince Henry of Hammersmith runs across her stall and falls head over heels but fails to get her name, so decides to throw a massive party in the hope she’ll turn up – which she does, flying there after Jodie Jacobs’s Fairy apparently turns her pet gerbil into a sort of grotesque gerbil-plane.

You could run a fleet of trucks through the obvious plot hole that the Prince knows where Cinderella works and so could obviously find her very easily - but that’s panto, baby! 

And a fine, fun, big-hearted panto it is too. But I can’t help but miss that old sprinkle of Lyric Hammersmith acid.

What if Secret Cinema did a Christmas grotto? That’s kind of the vibe to this kids’ immersive festive experience, which takes place in ‘The Old Bauble Factory’ - not in fact an actual disused bauble factory, but a rebranding of a section of the old Vaults complex under Waterloo…

Sure, it’s nearly December, but it’s not really Christmas in London until there’s a few things happening, including the return of ‘A Christmas Carol’ to the Old Vic, this year starring Christoper Eccleston off the telly…

This gaspingly intimate revival of Ibsen’s scandalous 1881 play marks the first UK production since 2018 for Brit auteur director Joe Hill-Gibbins…

The Orange Tree Theatre scores a hit with new artistic director Tom Littler’s raucously enjoyable revival of Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy classic, ‘She Stoops To Conquer’. With judicious modern tweaks to the script, it’s buoyed along by a top-tier cast who go full ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ on this production’s updated 1930s setting.

Sure, it’s notionally aimed at families. But the National Theatre’s Roald Dahl adaptation ‘The Witches’ really is for everyone, (everyone over eight anyway). Because it’s quite easily the funniest new musical London has seen since at least ‘The Book of Mormon’. 

Jude Christian is an achingly cool leftfield playwright and director… and apparently a massive Christmas fan…

This short, sharp play from Polish writer Magdalena Miecznicka concerns the aftermath of an affair between wealthy English guy John (David Sturzaker), and Aga (Olivia Le Anderson), a younger Eastern European woman in a poorly paid hotel job.