London theatre reviews

In a wedge shaped set, bright yellow as bile, a machine does its work. 

Writer-director Bijan Sheibani’s new short play is very well-observed: it feels like a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the blurry first few months of being a parent.

There’s been a frenzy of hype around Sam Grabiner’s debut play ‘Boys on the Verge of Tears’…

A ballad tells a story and writer Samuel Adamson starts his with a narrative misdirection: a woman is filmed playing a piano at St Pancras International and the footage goes viral, reuniting her with a man who professes still to love her…

‘Little fish, big fish/swimming in the water/come back here man/gimme my daughter’ hissed a demonic 25-year-old Polly Jean Harvey in her 1995 hit ‘Down By the Water’…

It feels like just yesterday that ‘millennial’ was synonymous with ‘young’. But in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins rancorous dark comedy, a group of late thirtysomething American friends marvel at how much they’ve all lived through…

Yes, the presence of soon-to-turn-85 stage and screen legend Ian McKellen tackling Shakespeare’s great character Sir John Falstaff is the big draw in ‘Player Kings’. But Robert Icke’s three hour-40-minute modern-dress take on the two ‘Henry IV’ plays does not pander to its star…

This enjoyably feral offering from all-female, historian-led theatre company Dirty Hare is a very unconventional dramatisation of a very specific historical incident: the strange, lurid tale of Anne Gunter.

‘What’s your favourite Brontë novel?’ demands Gemma Whelan’s bolshy Charlotte Brontë, as she accosts a succession of random audience members at the start of Sarah Gordon’s new play about the literary sisters. 

Having signed his life over to a little show called ‘Succession’ for six years, Brian Cox is both making up for lost time and gleefully cashing in his move from ‘well-respected actor’ to ‘bona fide superstar’.