Theatre in Covent Garden

A Catholic upbringing has left me both terrible at lying and capable of looking guilty about more or less anything. As such I was morbidly convinced that I would get the tap on the shoulder designating me a traitor in this live recreation (you could call it immersive theatre if you wanted) of the smash BBC game show. This proved to be entirely correct and long story short I lasted four rounds until I was rumbled (though it was a close thing and involved me being inexplicably betrayed by my fellow traitor). And speaking as somebody who has barely watched the show: I had a blast. If you can swallow the cost (a little under £50 in the evening, but cheaper by day) and go in prepared to be eliminated early then The Traitors Live Experience is extremely good fun. As much as anything, this adaptation from Immersive Everywhere is extremely well organised. Clearly you can’t make a note-perfect recreation of a show that involves 25 contestants staying at a remote Scottish castle for three weeks. But what they’ve done captures a sense of it very nicely. In this much shorter format, a large number of participants book in for a given time slot and are then divided into groups of around 12. Each is spirited away to their own round table, which comes complete with its own Claudia Winkleman-substitute host. Ours was a chipper young man who did a great job of geeing things along with help from a pre-recorded Winkleman (wisely she’s only used sparingly). It’s such a rock-solid conceit that...

Show writer Kate Trefry explains all you need to know about ‘The First Shadow’. ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ is a sprawling maximalist monolith, a gargantuan entertainment that goes beyond being a mere ‘play’. It’s too unwieldy and too indulgent to be a theatrical classic. But nonetheless, this prequel to the Netflix retro horror smash is the very antithesis of a cynical screen-to-stage adaptation.  As overwhelming in scale as as the show’s monstrous Mindflayer, it’s a seethingly ambitious three-hour extravaganza of groundbreaking special effects, gratuitous easter eggs and a wild, irreverent theatricality that feels totally in love with the source material while being appreciably distinct from it.  It’s clearly made by a fan, that being big-name director Stephen Daldry, who used his Netflix connections (he’s the man responsible for ‘The Crown’) to leverage an official collab with the Duffer Brothers, creators of the retro horror smash.  It starts as it means to go on, with pretty much the most technically audacious opening ten minutes of a show I’ve ever seen, as we watch a US naval vessel deploy an experimental cloaking device in 1943, to catastrophic effect. Yes, the sets wobble a bit, and yes, writer Kate Trefry’s dialogue is basically just some sailors bellowing cliches. But we’re talking about watching a giant vessel getting pulled into a horrifying parallel dimension on stage. It is awesome; and when it cut into a thunderous playback of Kyle Dixon and Michael...

'My mummy says I'm a miracle,' lisps a pampered mini-me at a purgatorial kiddies' birthday party at the outset of this delicious, treacly-dark family show. The obnoxious ma and pa of its titular, gifted, pint-sized heroine are not, of course, quite so doting. But 'Matilda' must be making its creators, playwright Dennis Kelly and comedian-songsmith Tim Minchin, a very pair of proud parents. Opening to rave reviews in Stratford-upon Avon before transferring to the West End in 2011 and snatching up Olivier Awards with all the alacrity of a sticky-fingered child in a sweetshop, Matthew Warchus's RSC production remains a treat. With hindsight, Kelly and Minchin's musical, born of the 1988 novel by that master of the splendidly grotesque Roald Dahl, is a little too long and, dramatically, a tad wayward. But like the curly-haired little girl in the famous nursery rhyme, when it is good, it is very, very good. And it's even better when it's horrid. The past few months have seen some cast changes, including, alas, the departure of Bertie Carvel's tremendous Miss Trunchbull, headmistress of the dread Crunchem Hall School, former Olympic hammer-thrower and a gorgon of monumental nastiness, complete with scarily Thatcher-esque tics of purse-lipped gentility and faux concern. David Leonard doesn't quite match the squirm-inducing, hair-raising detail of Carvel in the role, but his more butch, granite-faced version is fantastically horrible nonetheless. And if Paul Kaye as Matilda's...

Avenue Q was never going to be the number one most zeitgeisty musical of 2026. It’s not that Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s subversive ’00s classic has aged badly, even if a couple of its more wilfully transgressive moments – notable the song ‘Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist’ – land a bit ickily in the MAGA era. And sure, some of its reference points have dated: a song about how everyone uses the internet to watch porn (‘The Internet is for Porn’) was clearly considerably sharper in 2003. On the whole, though, the main flaw with Avenue Q in 2026 is that Avenue Q did it first. By which I mean that the jaw-dropping audacity of a rude musical theatre parody of Sesame Street has now largely gone – it is a very famous show that ran for five years in the West End the first time around and almost 20 in New York.  It’s also been superseded in terms of bad-taste musicals, not least by Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s enduring The Book of Mormon, which they co-wrote with Lopez.  Accept all that, and Jason Moore’s revived production is a fun piece of naughty noughties nostalgia that raises a smile from the sight of its fluffy yellow stage curtain onwards. Princeton (Noah Harrison) is a wet-behind-the-ears young puppet who has just graduated from university (‘What Do You Do with a BA in English?’)  and is now looking for a place to live on Avenue Q, a shabby but affordable neighbourhood in outer NYC that boasts former child actor Gary Colman (Dionne Ward-Anderson) as its superintendent...

Read our review of Dracula HERE.  Kip Williams is not a massive name in British theatre (yet), but the Aussie writer-director is starting to make some serious waves over her. His dizzyingly high tech, Sarah Snook-starring one woman Dorian Gray was a big West End hit last year, this autumn he directs a version of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the Donmar. It seems questionable as to whether we’ll get part two of his one woman Victorian horror trilogy over here – a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde received mixed notices Down Under – but part three is coming our way in the new year as his take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula lands on our shores. In her first full London stage role since her career making turn turn in The Color Purple over a decade ago, Cynthia Erivo will return home to (hopefully) triumphantly take on 23 different roles in a tech enhanced solo romp through Dracula that plays clever visual homage to the early years of horror cinema.

One of theatre’s greatest mysteries is how Disney literally made the most successful musical of all time and then proceeded to learn absolutely nothing from it. Virtuoso director Julie Taymor included all the dumb stuff required by the Mouse in her version of The Lion King – farting warthogs, basically – but nonetheless crafted an audacious and iconic production that departed radically from the aesthetic of the film and is still in theatres today. Subsequent Disney musicals like Aladdin and Frozen aren’t bad, but they take zero risks – effectively just plonking the film onstage – and are not in theatres today. And here comes Hercules, the next in the megacorp’s long line of perfectly adequate, not very imaginative adaptations of its bountiful ’90s animated roster. Book of Mormon director Casey Nicholaw’s production is good looking and high energy. Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s book is appropriately big hearted with a handful of very funny gags. The show’s not-so-secret weapon is the retention of the film’s sassy quintet of singing Muses. Here turbocharged into a full-on gospel group, they’re a whole lot of finger snapping, head shaking, quick-changing fun, and also add a note of character to Alan Menken’s likeable but unremarkable Alan Menken-style score. Hercules is a unit of generic Disney stage entertainment However, the Muses are also symptomatic of the fact that the show’s Ancient Greece comes across as a reskinned small-town America, without having any comment...

Inter Alia opens with Rosamund Pike wigged and gowned and rocking out, rasping ‘fuck the patriarchy’ into a mic. This is not a power ballad: the Saltburn and Gone Girl star plays Jess Parks, a pioneering feminist judge, and she is performing the emotional cut-and-thrust of a recent rape trial with relish, deploying her icy froideur to slay macho barristers who are attempting to slut shame vulnerable complainants. The dimly lit blokes in the backing band are, it transpires, Parks' husband and son: a fitting setup for Suzie Miller's three-hand play that feels more like a 100-minute monologue. Like its companion legal drama Prima Facie, which was a massive hit starring Jodie Comer, Inter Alia is a spectacularly demanding showcase for a female star, and Pike delivers the goods with stadium-level charisma, intelligence and flair. Miller’s play is based on interviews with female judges who juggle demanding careers with caring responsibilities and social lives: ‘inter alia’ means ‘among other things’. It's fun to see Pike in an earthier, more physical theatrical role, very different from the icy Hitchcock blondes she's known for on film. Initially, we see her dashing from court to robing room, fielding a dozen missed calls from her sweet bumbling lout of a teenage son, Harry (Cormac McAlinden) who can't find a Hawaian shirt for a party he's going to later, then dashing home to prepare a supper for guests while getting dolled up, taking phone calls and questions, and ironing...

Into the Woods finishes its Bridge Theatre run on May 30. It will transfer to the Noël Coward Theatre in September, with Kate Fleetwood the only confirmed cast member so far. The Bridge Theatre has an incredibly consistent track record with musicals. Admittedly that’s because it’s only previously staged one musical. But it was a really good one, the visionary immersive production of Guys & Dolls that wrapped up a two-year-run in January. And great news: rising star Jordan Fein’s sumptuous revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods makes it two for two. After the slightly stodgy tribute revue Old Friends and the weird semi-finished ‘final musical’ Here We Are, this is the first actual proper major Sondheim revival to be staged in this country since the great man’s passing. And the main thing worth saying about 1986’s Into the Woods is that it’s the work of a genius at the peak of his powers: a clever send up of fairytales that pushes familiar stories into absurd, existential, eventually very moving territory. It’s both playful and profound, mischievous and sincere, cleverly meta but also a ripping yarn. While Sondheim is the marquee name, the book is by James Lapine (who also did the honours for Sunday in the Park with George and Passion), who does a tremendous job twisting the convoluted narrative into droll, accessible shape. But every second is filled with Sondheim’s presence: his lush, motif-saturated score of baroque nursery rhymes feels as vividly alive as the...

This review is from March 2026. John Proctor is the Villian transfers to Wyndham’s Theatre in Febrary 2027, with casting TBC. John Proctor is the Villain is a period drama about 2018. By that I don’t specifically mean that the Broadway smash nails the exact experience of going to a US high school in the late ’10s: frankly, the American education system is so alien that there are points where Kimberly Belflower’s play might as well have been set on a Mars colony space academy for all the resemblance it bears to the average Brit comp. But what Belflower does do brilliantly is nail the intersection between the relatively brief apex of the #MeToo movement and a generation of smart, naive school girls who would have been the right age to absorb its rhetoric at the precise moment they’re discovering what it was a reaction to. Plus, it has a banging soundtrack, with Lorde’s 2017 hit ‘Green Light’ embedded deep in its bones, and discussed in reverent tones by its young characters in a way that feels poignant and illuminating: school girls don’t geek out over ‘Green Light’ anymore, and they probably don’t discuss #MeToo either. If this sounds like it has the potential to come across as a bit like a po-faced lecture then that couldn’t be further from the case. Danya Taymor’s production – which transfers recast from a smash Broadway run – is an absolute blast, the many serious issues raised all of a piece with its breathless ebullience and Belflower’s endlessly witty text. As much as...

  This Tony and Olivier Award-winning musical – adapted by Harvey Fierstein with songs by Cyndi Lauper from the 2005 Britflick – was first seen in the West End a decade ago. And now it struts back into town with energy to spare. It arrives at the London Coliseum in a production directed by Nikolai Foster, artistic director of Leicester’s Curve Theatre, where it debuted last year.  Charlie Price (Matt Cardle) has reluctantly inherited his recently deceased dad’s Northampton shoe factory, which will be forced to close in a matter of weeks due to dwindling sales. But a chance encounter with cabaret and drag performer Lola (Johannes Radebe) and the broken heel of a boot she used to whack a couple of bigots sparks an idea. Together, can they meet a market need for durable, fabulous footwear while saving the factory by making boots not brogues? Fierstein’s book steers hard into the connection between two seemingly completely different people linked by a shared struggle to find their place in the world and a sense of not living up to their fathers’ ambitions (in Lola’s case, not following her dad into the boxing ring). Lauper’s music similarly aims directly at the heart in duets like ‘I’m Not My Father’s Son’. However, while the show follows a well-trodden path to self-acceptance, it does so with an intoxicating exuberance. Foster’s staging is gorgeous, cutting through the industrial tones of Robert Jones’s multi-dimensioned set – production lines of shoes and sewing machines –...