London theatre reviews

‘Twelve Angry Men’ meets ‘A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire’ meets a really out-there Agatha Christie novel in this often brilliant and somewhat frustrating new drama from Lucy Kirkwood…

Two men sit, eyeing each other warily, in a rundown New York apartment owned by Black (Gary Beadle), who has just prevented White (Jasper Britton) from ending his life in front of a subway train. Now, he wants to convince him not to try again…

A woman now living in Mexico City tries to tell us about her youth, working as a translator in America, but struggles to pull the story together as the duties of motherhood distract her…

Back in 2015, Miriam Battye’s ‘Trip the Light Fantastic’ played at the Bristol Old Vic for just over a week. It was about a young man teaching an old man to ballroom dance and they performed it in the basement with a couple of plastic chairs. Despite seeing literally hundreds of plays since, I still, every so often, find myself thinking about this little treasure of a show, cuddling the memory of its understated brilliance…

Sam Steiner’s first two plays were fearless acts of imagination, brilliantly realised…

Daniel Ward’s ‘The Canary and the Crow’ is funny and burningly fierce…

Ever rediscovered an autobiographical creation, like a teenage diary or confessional recording, years later and experienced the torture of reading, or listening to, the younger version of you? 

I would seriously question whether any other show on the planet bar ‘Les Misérables’ could get away with junking its original production and carrying on as if nothing had changed…

‘Always different, always the same’ is how the late John Peel famously described his favourite band The Fall, and it’s a description that could quite tidily be applied to Cirque du Soleil’s annual start-of-the-year stand at the Royal Albert Hall…

Unless you’re an extreme fan of musical theatre, it’s unlikely you’ve heard of ‘Rags The Musical’…