London theatre reviews

These days, Brixton Academy is an essential part of London’s cultural landscape. But there was a time when it was just a derelict old cinema building. In Alex Urwin’s play, inspired by the memoir Live at Brixton Academy by Simon Parkes, we watch as the space transforms into something sacred.

The puppies are back in town. Following its 2022 premiere at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, 101 Dalmatians returns for a limited summer run — this time wagging its tail across the proscenium stage of the Eventim Apollo.

Rosamund Pike gives a gale force performance in this even better companion piece to Jodie Comer-starring hit Prima Facie.

Bizarre, excessive musical adaptation of the Christina Aguilera film, based around the talents of US reality show contestant Todrick Hall. 

First announced aeons ago and presumably costing a bob or two to create, this Elvis Presley-based immersive show is a slick affair, heartfelt in its admiration for The King. It’s by Layered Reality, who have had notable immersive successes with the ongoing adaptation of The War of the Worlds and the Tower of London-based The Gunpowder Plot.

It’s also somewhat structurally eccentric, comes with a difficult-to-defend ticket price, and – when I visited anyway – clearly suffered from its audience not being crystal clear about what it involved from the off.

This sparky indie musical about a lonely Irish schoolboy who forms a band to escape a drab ’80s Dublin adolescence is a charming affair that reunites the architects of offbeat musical smash Once, as playwright Enda Walsh again adapts a movie by Irish filmmaker John Carney.

‘How would the life of Saint Clare of Assisi have played out if she was a Valley girl?’ is probably not a question you’ve ever asked yourself. But US playwright Chiara Atik answers it very entertainingly in her Stateside fringe hit Poor Clare.

This nihilistic comedy about a British Asian politician who seizes his chance to become leader of the opposition is funny and frustrating in equal measures…

The time is once again Nye, as Michael Sheen returns to the National Theatre to reprise firebrand politician and NHS founder, Aneurin Bevan, in Tim Price’s play, after Rufus Norris’s production originally debuted last year…

Even the most hardcore Bardolator would have to acknowledge that in a hierarchy of Shakespeare’s works, The Merry Wives of Windsor comes fairly low, being a hokey ass, canonically illogical spin off from the Henry IV plays. Essentially it offered the beloved character of Sir John Falstaff a brand new adventure, but one that lacked the pathos and grit of his original appearances, and also sidesteps the fact that he'd died some 200 years before the manifestly ‘present day’-set Merry Wives.