London theatre reviews

Bryony Kimmings has one heck of a fanbase: some big comedy names have played the 1,000-seater Soho Theatre Walthamstow since it opened in May, but none of them have mounted a two-and-a-half week run, as Kimmings has with new show Bog Witch.

Like many of Shakespeare’s deeper cuts, Troilus and Cressida is a bizarre (bordering on broken) play that is clearly only performed (sporadically) in the twenty-first century because of who its author is. I don’t think that makes it bad, just weird.

Tracy Letts’s 2018 play starring Susan Sarandon and Andrea Riseborough embraces and subverts bio-drama cliches. 

The National Theatre’s first production of the play since 2010 – Rufus Norris was the first artistic director to simply not stage it – falls reasonably squarely into the ‘indie Hamlet’ box. 

At the National Theatre last Christmas, Max Webster’s vividly queer take on Oscar Wilde’s magnum opus felt quite a lot like The Ncuti Gatwa Show…

American writer Samuel D. Hunter’s 2015 play, making its UK debut at Trafalgar Theatre, isn’t big on laughs…

This all-singing adaptation of the blockbuster 2004 Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore romcom is written by cult US musical comedy duo Steve Rosen and David Rossmer, who have been admirably pragmatic in looking at the source movie and concluding that no, you absolutely cannot do a lot of that stuff in a modestly sized London theatre in 2025.

Famous franchises aren’t just big business in Hollywood: they’re also the driving force behind much of London kids’ theatre. And source material doesn’t come much better known than We’re Going on a Bear Hunt…

Arguably the entire point of the first play to be programmed at the National Theatre by its new boss Indhu Rubasingham comes around five minutes from the end – after the actual plt has wrapped up – when Ukweli Roach’s Dionysus adds the mantle of ‘god of theatre’ to his celestial portfolio and dedicates the NT’s Olivier theatre to us. And if the hour and 40 minutes that precede this moment are messy, I’d say they are entertainingly messy. 

Joe Orton’s breakthrough play Entertaining Mr Sloane hasn’t been revived in London in almost 20 years, and on this showing you can kind of see why. His dark comedy about a middle aged brother and sister who both fall for a sexy lodger with a shady past caused outrage in its day. But in 2025 it’s unforgivably tame and unfunny.