Andrzej Lukowski

Greetings of the season. Well, I'm actually writing this in early September. But then, how long is Christmas theatre season in London exactly? Certainly it’s in full swing by late Novemebr, with virtually every pantomime and kids’ show in the city up and running way before Advent, with most of them running until the new year. I’m Time Out’s theatre editor, and I have seen more pantos and Julia Donaldson adaptations than any human being should. But also it’s always an exciting time of year: Christmas is the best time to take children to the theatre because there are such a dizzying array of options, for all ages. This list is an attempt to try and put some order on the gargantuan breadth of children’s and family friendly theatre across the city during the season. It doesn’t include long running West End shows – you know about The Lion King, right – but is an attempt to compile as many festive shows for young audiences as possible, at theatres big and small. We’ve divided our list into family-friendly Christmas shows – that is to say, shows suitable for children, but that you could easily visit without – and shows that are directly aimed at a younger audience. Please note that there are so many pantomimes in London that they have their own seperate list – see link below.  RECOMMENDED: The best Christmas pantomimes in London. Find more Christmas shows in London. 

THERE IS A REDIRECT ON THIS TO KIDS 50!!! Six. Weeks. Or thereabouts. The school summer holidays are the greatest test of any parent’s logistical mettle, seeing as they’re longer than mozt people’s entire quota of annual leave. And this isn’t America where you can just send your children off to a camp all summer and forget about them. We have to keep our kids entertained. So good luck with that! And I mean it: my name’s Andrzej, and I’m Time Out’s theatre and kids editor, and as a parent of two I have to deal with this nonsense every year myself. So to help you organise and plan, here are my picks of the best new and temporary London family events this summer, from theatre shows to dinosaurs, exhibitions to more dinosaurs (there are a lot of dinosaurs around this year). When are the school summer holidays 2025 Officially the 2025 London school summer holidays run Wednesday July 23 to Friday August 29. But many schools will break on Monday 21 July, and virtually all of them will add a teacher training day or two on at the start of September. What to do in London in the school summer holidays 2025 See below for a list of new and temporary kids’ summer holiday activities.  For evergreen ideas for things to do with children in the capital, see our 50 Things To Do With Kids In London. For summer things to do with younger kids, see our 30 Things To Do With Babies and Toddlers in London. For summer things to do with teenagers, see our Best Things To Do With Teenagers In London 202

The summer holidays feel like they’re barely over, but suddenly it’s cold and dark and you have to amuse the little ones for at least another week. In other words, welcome to October half term. Despair not, however: there’s always loads to for kids to do in London at this time of year, not least because they blessedly coincide with the run-up to Halloween.  My name is Andrzej and I’m Time Out’s lead kids’ writer and also parent to two children who go to school in Bromley, where for some reason the local authorities think we want a two-week half-term. As ever, the idea with this list is to highlight the best new, returning or last chance to see shows; London also has plenty of evergreen fun for children of all ages, quite a lot of which you can find in out list of the 50 best things to do with kids in London. When is October half-term this year?  This year, London’s October half-term officially falls between Monday October 27 and Friday October 31 (ie children will be off continuously between Saturday October 25 and Sunday November 2). Some children will be off for two weeks, that is to say Monday October 20 to Friday October 31 (or Saturday October 18 to Sunday November 2 counting weekends). Here’s our roundup of all the best things to do with your children this October half-term. 

Hello parents and guardians! I’m Time Out’s children’s editor, and as a parent of two childen I can confirm that London is an amazing city raise kids in. Yes, you probably have to put a bit of commuter time in, but there’s a virtually endless stream of stuff for children to do, from playgrounds and parks to incredible kids’ theatres, free museums to slightly more expensive zoos and aquariums, and all sorts of stuff inbetween. This is a sort of ever-evolving checklist of what we think the 50 best things to do in the city with kids are. Some of it is incredibly obvious: you’re probably aware that London has a Natural History Museum. But it’s worth stressing is a really, really great Natural History Museum, and whether you’re just visiting or have lived here all your life, a visit is a terrific day out. Alongside that, we’ve got 49 other ideas for things to do with childen in London – the focus is inevitably on younger children of nursery and primary school age, but we aim to cater for all here, from tots to teens. That’s all ages, all budgets and all times of the year – as well as adding new London attractions as they open or return, this list will be switched around seasonally: ice rinks, grottos and pantiomimes are great to take your children to in winter, less so in summer. Of course, there are more than 50 things for children to in London, and we’ve got plenty of other recommendations for you: it‘s full of outdoor options, from high-concept adventure playgrounds to gorgeous

Oh yes it is! London panto season is back for 2025, and here’s Time Out’s complete rundown of every major pantomime in the city. For some Londoners the only time of year they'll visit a theatre, panto season is a bizarre, joyful, quintessentially British time to come together and watch some light-hearted spoof fairytales that revolve around men dressing up as women and/or farm animals. Within that, though, there’s huge variation, from the megascale London Palladium show with its filthy figurehead Julian Clary, to Clive Rowe’s brilliant panto purism at the Hackney Empire and JW3’s amusing Jewish spin that runs on Christmas Day itself. I’m Andrzej Łukowski, Time Out’s theatre editor, and while this page is simply intended as a round-up of London pantomimes, then it’s an *informed* round up – I have seen approximately four billion pantos over the last 15 years or so, and know what they’re all like, plus we’ll update this page with star ratings when our reviews of this year’s crop start rolling in in late November. London is a city that takes pantomime seriously, and even if the idea of seasonal frivolity fills you with dread, there’s a panto out there for you. RECOMMENDED: The best London theatre shows to see in 2025. The best Christmas theatre shows in London.

Hello – I'm Time Out’s theatre editor and also a parent, something that has a lot of overlap in London, a city with three dedicated kids theatres and where pretty much every other theatre might stage a child-friendly show. This round up focusses on the flagship shows at London’s kids theatres – that’s the Little Angel, the Unicorn and Polka – plus other major shows aimed at or suitable for youngsters. On the whole, pre-school and primary children are the age groups best served specifically, because secondary school aged teenagers can generally see adult theatre perfectly well (and will indeed often be made to do so!). So while the odd teen focussed show will make it in here, if you’re looking for something to do with teens why not consult our reviews page or what to book list. Our London kids’ theatre page normally contains information for all the main children’s shows running in London theatres this month and next month, and is broken down into three categories. Theatre for all the family is suitable for any age, including adults without children. Theatre for older children is specifically aimed at school-age children and teenagers. Theatre for babies, pre-schoolers and younger children does what the title suggests, and also includes shows suitable for younger primary school children. See also:50 things to do in London with kids.The best child-friendly restaurants in London.The top 9 museums in London for kids.

Hello, and welcome to the Time Out theatre reviews round up. From huge star vehicles and massive West End musical to hip fringe shows and more, this is a compliation of all the latest London reviews from the Time Out theatre team, which is me plus our team of freelance critics. August is a fairly quiet month for London theatre openings so we’ll be posting relatively little here until things get busy again in September. But if you’d like to see reviews of work that’s likely to be coming to London in the near future, then do check out our coverage of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025. A-Z of West End shows.

Hi! I’m Time Out’s theatre editor, and arguably I got into this game purely to avoid having to pay for theatre tickets. But over the years I've picked up a few tricks on how to enjoy theatre for less. London theatre has a reputation for being expensive. And there’s no getting away from the fact that it can be: top West End prices have soared in recent years, with many popular shows costing over £200 or even £300 if you want a nice stalls seat (possibly with some food and drink thrown in, possibly not). That’s as much as a music festival for a couple of hours of theatre. However, exorbitant top prices really aren’t the whole story. West End theatre is genuinely much cheaper than New York’s Broadway, and the cheapest tickets for any given show are almost always less than £30, and often less than £20. And there will always be inexpensive ways into a show, be it snagging a discounted online ticket or buying a bargain basement standing ticket. Want to go to the theatre in London but don’t think you can afford it? Here’s a hopefully exhaustive guide to why you’re wrong. Buy early Often when people complain about the prices of West End tickets, they mean the most expensive ones, which are often the only ones available after a show has officially opened. The fact is that every show has cheap seats, but they often sell out. Pay attention to what’s coming up and try to get in as early as possible. If there’s a long-running West End show you want to see, follow its socials so you when n

There are over a hundred theatres of all shapes and sizes throughout London, from tiny fringe venues above pubs to iconic internationally famous institutions like the National Theatre. And at the heart of it is the West End, aka Theatreland. What is a West End theatre? Unlike Broadway, where there are strict definitions based upon capacity, there is no hard and fast definition of a West End theatre. However, West End theatres are all commercial theatres – that is to say, they receive no government funding – and on the whole they are receiving houses, that is to say they don’t have in house artistic teams creating the work that they show (although often theatre owners like Andrew Lloyd Webber or Nica Burns may commission or even create the work). They are mostly based in the West End of London, although it’s not a hard and fast rule, with two major ‘West End’ theatres at Victoria. Most West End theatres are Victorian or Edwardian, although Theatre Royal Drury Land and Theatre Royal Haymarket have roots a couple of centuries before that, while @sohoplace is the newest (it opened in 2022). Capacity is similarly all over the shop: the 2,359-set London Coliseum is the biggest; the smallest is generally held to be the 350-set Arts Theatre. Many mid-size theatres like the Harold Pinter, Duke of York’s or Wyndham’s are greatly in demand for drama and serve as home to several different productions every year. Others, like the Lyceum or His Majesty’s have played host to a single musica

There are a hell of a lot of musicals running in London at any given time, from decades-long classics like Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera to short-run fringe obscurities, plus all manner of new shows launched every year hoping for long-running glory. Here Time Out rounds up every West End musical currently running or coming soon, plus fringe and off-West End shows that we’ve reviewed – all presented in fabulous alphabetical order. SEE ALSO: How to get cheap and last-minute theatre tickets in London.

Hello! I'm Andrzej, the theatre editor of Time Out London, and me and my freelancers review a heck of a lot of theatre. This page is an attempt to distil the shows that are on right now into something like a best of the best based upon our actual reviews, as opposed to my predictions, which determine our longer range what to book for list. It isn’t a scientific process, and you’ll definitely see shows that got four stars above ones that got five – this is generally because the five star show is probably going to be on for years to come (hello, Hamilton) and I'm trying to draw your attention to one that’s only running for a couple more weeks. Or sometimes, we just like to shake things up a bit. It’s also deliberately light on the longer-running West End hits simply because I don’t think you need to know what I think about Les Mis before you book it (it’s fine!). So please enjoy the best shows in London, as recommended by us, having actually seen them.

London’s theatre scene is the most exciting in the world: perfectly balanced between the glossy musical theatre of Broadway and the experimentalism of Europe, it’s flavoured by the British preference for new writing and love of William Shakespeare, but there really is something for everyone. Between the showtunes of the West End and the constant pipeline of new writing from the subsidised sector, there’s a whole thrilling world, with well over 100 theatres and over venues playing host to everything from classic revivals to cutting-edge immersive work. This rolling list is constantly updated to share the best of what’s coming up and currently booking: these choices aren’t the be-all and end-all of great theatre in 2025, but they are, as a rule, the biggest and splashiest shows coming up, alongside intriguing looking smaller projects.   They’re shows worth booking for, pronto, both to avoid sellouts but to get the cheaper tickets that initially go on sale for most shows but tend to be snapped up months before they actually open. Please note that the prices quoted are the ‘official’ prices when the shows go on sale – with West End shows in particular it can unfortunately be the case that if they sell well, expensive dynamic prices can be triggered. Want to see if these shows live up to the hype? Check out our theatre reviews. Check out our complete guide to musicals in London.  And head over here for a guide to every show in the West End at the moment.

Let’s first acknowledge that there is not a person alive who is currently torn between spending their birthday theatre vouchers on a choice between either Mamma Mia! or Cow | Deer. Even if you have never heard of the great avant-garde director Katie Mitchell, it seems inconceivable that you would book into her Cow | Deer – a play whose publicity information clearly states that it is about a cow and a deer and features no dialogue – and go expecting a night of high-octane commercial theatre lulz.  The caveat, then, is that if you do think Cow | Deer sounds like a horrible idea then I am not here to convince you otherwise. Don’t take a risk on it! You would probably hate it. See Mamma Mia! Admin over, let’s get down to business. For Mitchell devotees and open-minded souls who think the premise sounds wild enough to be interesting, Cow | Deer is a virtuosic foley performance in which a quartet of actors (Pandora Colin, Tom Espiner, Tatenda Matavai and Ruth Sullivan) deploy a colossal array of objects – from hay bales to hot water bottles – to create the sounds of a cow and also a deer.  They’re augmented by sound design from co-creator Melanie Wilson that is heavy on animal noises (lots of birdsong, lots of cows, ie the actors don’t have to moo) and a script from Nina Segal that imposes a degree of discipline and direction and ultimately a rather haunting ‘story’ about humanity’s disruption of ordered nature. An audacious technical exercise the likes of which you’re unlikely to

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 it

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Ohio transfers to the Young Vic.  The omens were always good for Ohio, which is produced by Fleabag and Baby Reindeer hitmaker Francesca Moody and had a transfer to the Young Vic nailed on months before the Fringe started.  It’s the work of Abigail and Shaun Bengson, aka indie folk duo the Bengsons, aka a band you probably haven’t heard of if you live over here because their oeuvre seems to largely consist of theatrical performance pieces that haven’t toured outside of the US… until now. I’m not going to pretend I know much more about them than the above paragraph but if I had to guess I’d venture that Ohio was intentionally devised with the object of introducing the duo to an overseas audience. It’s a potted history of the pair’s lives, albeit a dreamy, impressionistic one, starting with Shaun explaining how he lied to his son about the existence of an afterlife in order to cheer him up. It then moves through such subjects as the worm Abigail had as a childhood pet, Shaun’s loss of the Christian faith of his childhood, and the degeneration of his hearing that led to him developing severe and incrementally increasing tinnitus. It’s hard to describe the show formally. The pair would make good kids’ TV presenters - she’s bouncy and ebullient, he’s dry and courteous. There is definitely a presentational aspect to the whole thing: I learned an awful lot about the mechanics of tinnitus! There’s also an intoxicating wildness t

Dublin’s Dead Centre is a true marvel, a theatre company that makes intensely visceral works that feel like they’ve been wrenched from a beautiful dream and a screaming nightmare simultaneously.  Written and directed by the company’s Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel in collaboration with BSL poet Zoë McWhinney, Deaf Republic is an adaptation of Ukrainian writer Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 poetry collection of the same name, which concerns a town occupied by a hostile power in which the locals all go deaf after a soldier shoots a young deaf boy. What is Deaf Republic about?  It’s clearly quite a lot about Russia’s 2014 occupation of eastern Ukraine. It’s a fictional story set in a fictional town in an unnamed country, and the R word is never spoken once. But even if it weren’t for a couple of direct allusions to Ukraine, it would be glaringly apparent which contemporary occupation Deaf Republic was predominantly a response to. That said, it wilfully evades specificity, and its vision of the bleak absurdity of life under a hostile power clearly has resonance with Gaza as well as the Donbas. It is about deafness. Allegorically speaking, townspeople’s sudden loss of hearing feels synonymous with resistance. The question of whether they’re really deaf is a slippery one - the short answer is some of them are, a couple of them appear not to be. But their apparent inability to hear the enemy baffles and frustrates the occupying soldiers (all played by Dylan Tonge) who growls that they should be

This review is from 2024. In 2025 A Christmas Carol returns to the Old Vic for the ninth years in a row (and possibly its last as it’s Matthew Warchus’s final Christmas at the Old Vic). Paul Hilton will play Scrooge. Although it’s the second most influential Christmas story of all time, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a tale that’s disseminated by adaptations rather than because everyone still religiously reads the 1843 novella. And for eight Christmases in a row – including 2020! – the main form of dissemination for Londoners has been the Old Vic’s stage version, which packs ‘em into the huge theatre for two months every year. I haven’t been since it debuted in 2017, when Rhys Ifans played supernaturally reformed miser Ebeneezer Scrooge. Back then, Matthew Warchus’s production of Jack Thorne’s adaptation was simply a stage version, of a story endlessly retold each year. Now it is essentially the version, not because nobody else does it (in 2022 I counted 11 adaptations), but because of the unparalleled scale of its success: it’s certainly the most successful stage adaptation of this century, and quite possibly ever. Eight Christmases on and it’s charming, but groans under the weight of its own success. What really struck me on second viewing was the conflict between Thorne’s smartly empathetic text and Warchus’s ecstatically OTT Christmasgasm of a production. Making a few judicious departures from Dickens, Thorne seeks to humanise Scrooge, get to the heart of his was

The omens were not good for this stage musical adaptation of the 2010 Christina Aguilera screen vehicle Burlesque. Foremost among them: it debuted in Manchester and Glasgow last year, but most of its creative team was summarily axed and replaced by one Todrick Hall, an erstwhile American Idol contestant who the bumpf describes as ‘one of the most high-profile and prolific storytellers in the world’. I am slightly exaggerating here. The hugely talented British set designer Soutra Gilmour, for instance, was replaced by Nate Bertone, another American. And Hall was already involved. But he now directs, choreographs and has written most of the songs, plus he stars in not one but two roles. Oh, and while the book is officially written by Steven Antin – who wrote and directed the film – it’s hard not to see the hand of Tod in the larky, metatheatrical script, which is not only very different in tone to the film, but also gives all the larkiest, most metatheatrical lines to Hall’s brace of characters. Anyway, Burlesque isn’t totally inept, but it’s ultimately just bludgeoning, a clangorous three-hour pantomime on steroids that makes the original film look like a model of tastefully plotted restraint. It feels like being trapped in a warzone Jess Folley is Ali, a young lass from Iowa with an impressive pair of lungs, her virtuosic singing encouraged by her sassy choirmaster Miss Loretta (Hall). One day she discovers that her birth mother Tess (US cabaret star Orfeh) is still alive a

The last Michael Jackson musical to grace the West End was ‘Thriller – Live’, a revue show that was almost endearingly dumb, consisting as it did of the King of Pop’s greatest hits interspersed with a bunch of ripped men bellowing about his sales figures.  ‘MJ the Musical’ is the real deal, however, an estate-endorsed jukebox show that’s gone down a storm on Broadway. Significantly, it has a book by Lynn Nottage, one of the great American playwrights. Her text addresses aspects of Jackson’s life with a frankness that’s refreshing, if selective. It’s set in 1992, during rehearsals for the ‘Dangerous’ world tour and handily a year before child sex abuse allegations were first levelled against Jackson. ‘MJ’ thus avoids any allusion to said controversy. At the same time, it doesn’t do that thing where it pretends there was nothing unusual about him: there are allusions to everything from Bubbles the chimp to Jackson’s changing skin colour.  For the West End debut of Christopher Wheeldon’s production, ‘present day’ Michael is played by the jaw-droppingly talented original Broadway star Myles Frost. To say he’s a triple threat would be an understatement: in the acting department he’s maybe more of a vague menace, but as a dancer and singer he is extraordinary. Yes sir, he can moonwalk, and slip into all of Jackson’s propulsive dance routines effortlessly. His voice isn’t quite as piercing as Jackson’s, but it’s a fair approximation, and frankly remarkable given what he’s doing with

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I promise I won’t go on about this too much, but I think I may have been responsible for The Sun’s bizarre 2023 attack on Lorna Rose Treen, in which the tabloid accused the rising sketch star of killing comedy with ‘wokery’. I was on the panel for the Dave Joke of the Fringe award that year, and I nominated Treen’s harmless – and by no stretch of the imagination woke – gag that won that year’s award (it revolved around ‘cheetah’ and ‘cheater’ being homophones). So unless another panellist also nominated it then that was me - sorry Lorna! This isn’t simply a flex because Treen has a new show, but because within a few minutes of it starting she very amusingly breaks with its Americana theme to address the Sun ‘incident’ – she has the article printed out to show us – and to declare that her intent this time is to kill theatre as well. 24 Hour Diner People isn’t really a theatre show, but it’s certainly notably higher concept than its predecessor Skin Pigeon. It follows a series of oddball characters at a quintessentially American diner – possibly at some point in the ‘80s – with Treen playing most roles and audience members being dragooned in to tackle the rest.  It is a huge amount of fun, in large part for the same reason Skin Pigeon was: Treen tackles the bizarre series of characters – from our daydreaming waitress host to a trucker with really long arms to a bizarrely kinky schoolgirl – with total conviction, and a palp

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Ultra-nerdy standup Kieran Hodgson – a man who once did an entire hour about the 1975 European referendum – recently had a cameo role in notorious superhero flop The Flash. In fact he spoke the first line in the movie. This is so prodigiously improbable that it’s no wonder it’s the jumping off point for his new show, Voice of America.  In fact the very English Hodgson makes relatively little hay out of his turn as the character dubbed Sandwich Guy, the drawling American barista who opens the doomed Ezra Miller flicks. Of course he talks about it a lot, and is as bemused as anyone that it happened. But there’s no behind-the-scenes goss or analysis of the film itself. Rather, some initial feedback over the quality of his accent is used as a jumping off point to explore his relationship with America as a whole. To a certain extent the point of Hodgson’s unswervingly high concept stand-up shows is that they’re not especially relatable: he’s an intensely warm and likeable performer, but he pursues odd obsessions, in an eccentric manner. His last, Made in Scotland, followed his relocation to Glasgow and his attempt to immerse himself in Scottish culture and language to such a ludicrous degree that it seemed calculated to wind up anyone Scottish in the audience (which is quite a lot of people at the Edinburgh Fringe). Voice of America, though, is very relatable: it’s about the complicated relationship we all have with the US, a

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In this sweet debut Fringe hour,  Lewisham-born-and-bred stand up Toussaint Douglass threatens us with 55 minutes of jokes about pigeons.  As a stickler for high-concept shows, I was a little disappointed to discover this was a colossal overstatement: there’s maybe 15 minutes on the ubiquitous winged rats. But they’re 15 good minutes, not least the show’s brilliantly chaotic cold open where Douglass makes one audience member drive a stuffed pigeon strapped to a remote control car around the room while others are made to try and feed it bread. For the most part Accessible Pigeon Material is a show about Douglass and his family, though he has a pleasingly idiosyncratic way of approaching what might otherwise be fairly humdrum material. There’s some great gags about Lewisham and some charming stuff about living with his ‘87-year-old flatmate’ (ie his nan, for whom pigeons were emblematic of the UK when she arrived with the Windrush generation). Best of all is a sequence where he roleplays his geezerish father while an audience member is forced to play the part of a younger Douglass trying to get his pathologically undemonstrative old man to say ‘I love you’. That this last gag isn’t pursued with quite the self lacerating viciousness it could be is indicative of the fact that Douglass basically seems like a really nice guy, making a show about the things that interest him (which includes pigeons). Perhaps he’d benefit from m

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I very much enjoyed this berserk late-night hour from Alice Cockayne, a selection of inscrutable but hilarious character sketches that might offer a sort of anxiety dream interrogation of contemporary femininity, or might just be a load of random shit that exists purely for the lolz. If that sounds hifalutin it’s definitely not: Cockayne has a colossal pair of fake boobs strapped to her for the entire show, starting with the lengthy opening scene in which she plays the deadpan owner of what one assumes to be a brothel, although all her working ‘girls’ – represented by wigs that are sometimes thrust at audience members – seem to be very old and have a lot of problems (‘riddled with neurodiversity’). Other characters include the posh, wildly overbearing Penelope Jane Pendlewitch, whose entire worth is tied up in motherhood and who claims to have had ‘556 children’; a cleaner, also apparently incredibly old, who fills the air with cleaning spray and dirty thoughts; and an Eastern European woman with incredibly long nails.  To be honest, describing the characters doesn’t make them make sense and Licensed. Professional. Trained. Qualified. is one of those balls-trippingly weird shows that would conceivably not work if it were staged for an afternoon crowd (it is currently running in the 10.40pm slot). But while the WTF absurdity is a lot of the point, it’s Cockayne’s eye for layering her oddball creations with details that de

Like Hamlet, Twelfth Night is one of those god-tier Shakespeare plays that pops up so much at 'regular’ theatres that it feels relatively underproduced at the Globe. It’s a stretch to say it’s actually not suited to the Bankside playhouse (which is probably something you could say about Hamlet). But this new production feels like an object lesson in what can go wrong with a Globe Twelfth Night. Robin Belfield’s production falls into a very Globe-ish trap of having a lot of fun individual turns but failing to really cohere into a whole that makes much sense. And the lack of set changes leaves it without any sense of place, just groups of characters mucking about in front of Jean Chan’s unhelpfully abstract sun-ray set design. It starts off very well, mind. As Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́’s Viola shipwrecks on Illyria she witnesses a vibrantly weird carnival, equal parts Notting Hill and The Wicker Man. This is Duke Orsino’s court, which is contrasted beautifully with the subsequent appearance of the moribund Olivia and her extravagant mourning garb. These costumes – by Chan again – are wonderful, and give the main parties on the island a sense of identity. But then it loses steam. The carnival-versus-funeral thing never comes to anything and certainly doesn’t result in the sort of joyous, movement-soaked production that is briefly threatened.  Instead it lets itself get bogged down in the various drunks, oddballs and assorted other comic characters in Olivia’s household - which is not a

Rebecca Lucy ‘Self Esteem’ Taylor is no stranger to the West End. She launched her new album A Complicated Woman with a highly theatrical run of shows at the Duke of York’s Theatre earlier this year. And before that she properly trod the boards with a starring part in the musical Cabaret, playing the iconic role of Sally Bowles from autumn 2024 to spring 2024. While Cabaret was a big deal, she was also somewhat shielded from the spotlight: she was only taking over the part of Sally and there were no reviews, while the focus wasn’t solely on her as she was co-lead with Jake Shears, who played the Emcee. Next year, however, sees the former Slow Club singer take on what might be the biggest challenge of her career. She’s to return to the Duke of York’s play the lead in a major West End play, the fiftieth anniversary revival of the great British dramatist David Hare's early work Teeth ‘N’ Smiles, which debuted at the Royal Court way back in 1975.  Will she be up to it? It has to be said that the play is a pretty damn good fit: she’ll play Maggie, the embittered frontwoman of a failing rock band, bitter, broken and obstinate as the 60s that she once flourished in now grind to a bitter end. There are even songs by Nick and Tony Bicât, which have been updated and added to by Taylor herself.  Inevitably this is going to appeal to her fanbase: but the real question is whether she can wow the curious West End theatregoer who may be intrigued by the first revival of his play in decades.

UPDATE: Full run dates have now been confirmed for Dracula, which will play at the Noël Coward Theatre Feb 4 to May 30 2026, a chunky 16-week stint. Technically a public on sale date has not been confirmed, but a presale open to all has: you can buy tickets to Dracula on Monday September 22 if you sign up here.  Cynthia Erivo got her big break on the London stage, though probably not when she expected to. In 2014 the then-unknown Brit was cast in the lead role of the massive West End folly I Can’t Sing!, a parody of The X-Factor that turned up years too late for the zeitgeist and duly died a death at the gargantuan London Palladium. But unbenownst to her, she’d already made it: the previous year she’d got great reviews in the tiny Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of the musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s classic novel The Color Purple. It never went to the West End. But it did go to Broadway, and after that Erivo’s reputation was duly made, Hollywood came calling, and she’s not acted on a British stage since. That will change next year, though, when she makes the mother of all returns in not one role but 26 in a high tech one-woman stage adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If that rings a bell, then it’ll be because last year Sarah Snook took the West End by storm in the conceptually similar The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Dracula isn’t a rip-off: it’s by the same Australian creative team from Sydney Theatre, headed by director-adaptor Kip Williams (who has in fact made

Over 30 years since he last trod the boards in Stratford-upon-Avon, stage and screen legend Kenneth Branagh will finally reunite with the RSC in 2026 as he tackles one of the few great Shakespeare roles he’s never played. In what is astonishingly his 35th Shakespearean role, he’ll star as Prospero in a huge new production of The Tempest (May 13-Jun 20) that will run in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre next year. Prodigiously gifted as Branagh is, it’s perhaps a relief to see that he’ll be directed by the venerable former National Theatre boss Richard Eyre (who will be making his RSC debut) – Branagh’s last Shakespearean outing was a somewhat eccentric neolithic style take on King Lear that he starred in and directed himself, to bemused reviews. Here, he’ll be free to focus on the acting. Plus he’ll have time to stick around and team up with the great American actor Helen Hunt, who will make her RSC debut co-starring with Branagh in a new version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard that’s been adapted by the brilliant satirical playwright Laura Wade – directed by Harvey it’ll run in the Swan Theatre July 10-August 29. And they’re not the only big names in RSC bosses Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey’s 2026 season. National treasure Mark Gatiss will make his debut for the company to take on the title role of a new version of Brecht’s classic Chicago-set satire on Hitler’s rise to power, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Seán Linnen. The season will be rounded out by a new pl

London Zoo – aka ZSL – is always evolving and you can expect a slick new attraction there every couple of years: the post-pandemic era has given us the huge walkthrough Valley of the Monkeys and a nifty new reptile house. ZooTown, though, is something different. It’s not an animal exhibit – or if it is, the animals in question are kids ages three to eight who will be able to book in for a 45 minute sesh at this brand new role play centre built in the zoo’s old reptile house (the one from Harry Potter). They’ll take on the role of a ZSL conservationist – horticulturalist, scientist or zookeeper – at the zoo within a zoo as they spend their session working their ‘jobs’ and playing with over 1,000 toys (a lot of which are admittedly zebra poo balls) including 63 cuddly animals – from parrots to komodo dragons – that have had microchips specially fitted by the zoo vets.  Photo: ZSL It’s both an opportunity for little ones to learn about conservation and what goes on behind the scenes at a zoo, and also a jolly good play session that perhaps acknowledges youngsters can sometimes have their attention spans tested by a full day at the zoo. To stop the sessions becoming oversubscribed but also ensure people turn up, you’ll need to book for them, and it’ll cost £1 to reserve a space in addition to your entry to the zoo. Sessions will become available to book three days in advance. Happy roleplaying, and here’s hoping your sprog has what it takes to cure the Komodo lurgie. ZooTown wi

David Bowie was quite possibly the most interesting man who ever lived, and boy did he know it. Although conceivably we’d have called this behaviour ‘hoarding’ if he hadn’t become enormously famous and successful, the man kept basically everything associated with his career – from before it was clear he’d have one, right through to his very last weeks.  Bowie had something like 90,000 individual items stashed away in a private archive in the US. And then he donated the whole thing to the V&A, which took possession of it following its use in the blockbuster touring exhibition David Bowie Is… To be clear, the V&A’s brand new David Bowie Centre is not a permanent home for the David Bowie Is… It's an archive.  Most of us, I would venture, do not spend a massive amount of time hanging out in archives. To be honest I went along to the V&A Storehouse – the museum’s new permanent public archive in Stratford – a bit hazy on what it actually was and how this would all play out. Opened to much fanfare back in May, the Storehouse is an enormously impressive building, like stepping into a fantastically reimagined version of the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, floor upon floor of artfully arranged furniture, clothing and other paraphernalia from the V&A’s colossal collection on full public display.  Photo: David Parry The David Bowie Centre occupies a corner of the second floor and it does, in fact, include a small exhibition that gathers together some fascinating items. Of cou

Greenwich isn’t currently what you call a theatre mecca: London’s maritime borough has a pleasant small scale venue in the shape of the Greenwich Theatre, but that’s pretty much it unless you count the Mamma Mia! dinner show at The O2. Astonishingly, then, it’s just been announced that what would appear to be the biggest theatre in London will open there next autumn in the form of the Troubadour Greenwich Peninsula Theatre. To be clear, it won’t have the biggest capacity house in London. But it will have two 1,500-seat theatres inside it, which is pretty damn big individually (bigger than all but a handful of musical theatre and opera houses) and combined it’ll rival the 3,069-set Edinburgh Playhouse for the title of biggest theatre in the entire country. What the hell is going to be staged there, you might reasonably ask. The Troubadour chain is an intriguing one that has been bringing large, flexible, somewhat architecturally prosaic spaces to London for a few years now. In a statement, the company’s co-CEOs Oliver Royds and Tristan Baker suggest the new theatre will be used to transfer in large scale shows struggling to find a berth in a West End with a very limited stock of available big theatres. Fair, but 1,500 seats is really big, and remember there are two of them.  Image: Troubadour If we look to the other Troubadours we might see some clues to the future of the new one. The Troubadour White City was a damp squib that staged a single ill-advised National Theatre tr

First things first: acting legends Ian McKellen and Judi Dench are sadly not doing a play together at the National Theatre. Dench (90) is almost certainly retired from the stage, and while whippersnaper McKellen (86) has had an astonishingly busy eighties –Londoners can’t say they didn’t get a chance to see him live – it looks unlikely he’ll tread the boards again this year, at the very least.  However, they are teaming up for the mother of all theatrical chats. Under incoming artistic director Inhu Rubasingham, the NT is launching a new strand of one-off shows called Next Chapter, and she’s bagged the legendary duo to talk about their lives and careers in conversation with their friend the actor Jim Carter. The one-off show will be held in the NT’s giant Olivier Theatre on Friday December 19. Image: Wrench 32 If a convo between two extremely famous actors who’ve performed on the NT stage multiple times is impressive but maybe not surprising, the other Next Chapter show announced today is from more out of leftfield. Directed by Clint Dyer, the show on Friday October 23 – also in the Olivier – will be a theatrically reimagined live version of veteran Brit rapper Wretch 32’s new album HOME? What does that mean exactly? We’re promised dancers and drama exploring Black British identity. Interestingly Rubasingham has already announced there is an untitled collaboration with Stormzy in the pipeline – could the National Theatre become the new home of British hip hop?  Wretch 32’s

Two years ago, Shakespeare’s Globe tried a bold experiment: recruit a gang of actors – many of them quite famous – to perform a one-off performance of Twelfth Night in an old school Elizabethan ‘cue script’ style.  What the hell is that, you reasonably ask. Well, back in Shakespeare’s day, actors didn’t all rehearse productions together for weeks on end, but rather learned their own lines and the lines before their lines and then got together and did the play on that basis alone.  Is that a recipe for terrible productions? It’s certainly a recipe for quick productions, and Twelfth Night went well enough that the Globe is doing it all again this year, with a take on the if anything even more beloved comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Its one and only performance will take place on Sunday September 14, and we can exclusively reveal the cast. The biggest name is Stephen Mangan, who played Malvolio in Twelfth Night and clearly had so much fun that he’s up for it again, this time playing classic comedy character Bottom, the overenthusiastic amateur actor. He’ll be joined by an excellent cast headed by Globe boss Michelle Terry as Hippolyta/Titania and her actor husband Paul ‘Kev from Motherland’ Ready as Theseus/Oberon.  Alongside them we have Paul Chahidi (Puck), Jolyon Coy (Snout/Moth), Alfred Enoch (Lysander), Sarah Finnegan (Prompt/Philostrate), Leah Harvey (Hermia/First Fairy), Ényi Okoronkwo (Flute/Peaseblossom), Tanya Reynolds (Helena), Jamie Wilkes (Snug/Cobweb), Jacoba Wil

★★★ If you think a two-hander drama about Elizabethan legends Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare having a sexy, dangerous time while trying to write a play together sounds a bit slash fiction-y then you would have the number of Born with Teeth, a new drama by US playwright Liz Duffy Evans. There is more to it than that, though. For much of its running time Daniel Evans’s RSC production comes across like an outlandish workplace comedy. It stars a Ncuti Gatwa so hysterically off the leash that it makes his Doctor look like William Hartnell’s: he makes a case for Marlowe as quite possibly history’s most annoying person. Hyper horny, hyper bawdy, and with the attention span of a gnat, the icing on the cake is that he sincerely believes himself to be the greatest playwright of the age (not an unreasonable assumption in 1591). Born with Teeth is pretty trashy. His unfortunate colleague is Edward Bluemel’s mild mannered William Shakespeare, who has been summoned by his (then) more famous peer to co-write the play Henry VI. He is keen to do this, but unfortunately Marlowe is too busy buzzing around like a cross between David Brent and Frank-N-Furter for anyone to get any work done. If Marlowe isn’t boasting about his own brilliance, he’s either trying to shag Shakespeare, fight Shakespeare, slag off Shakespeare’s work, or launch into a complicated spiel about the need for patronage to survive in the paranoid world of Elizabethan London.  Photo: Johan PerssonNcuti Gatwa Th

September is always a great month for London theatre: after the slowdown of the summer, autumn sees pretty much every subsidised theatre in London stage new productions simultaneously. And this September feels particularly momentous as Indhu Rubasingham takes over as the seventh artistic director of the National Theatre and directs Bacchae, the first show she’s programmed. Over at the Young Vic and Nadia Fall also starts her reign. It’s the end of an era at the Bush also, where Lynette Linton directs her last play for the venue – and the Almeida, where Rupert Goold’s final season begins. Plus lashings of celebrity fun including Ncuti Gatwa, Letitia Wright, Alicia Vikander, Andrew Lincoln and Brendan Gleeson. RECOMMENDED: The best London theatre shows to book right now. The best new theatre openings in London in September  Photo: Nadav Kander 1. Romans: A Novel What is it? Now this is a way to kick off a final season. Admittedly a very long final season: Rupert Goold’s final tranche of programming at the Almeida will last until the end of next year. But it couldn’t get off to a more promising start than a veritable theatre hipster holy grail: a new play from Alice Birch. Her 2017 drama Anatomy of a Suicide is one of the great British works of the last decade. She’s not done a lot of stage stuff since because her screen career went into overdrive, notably with her adaptation of Normal People. Now she’s finally back with a new play. To be honest the description seems cool but

While most West End musicals aspire to run for as long as physically possible, this summer has seen London graced by an unusually large number of limited run musicals. And PSA: they all end this weekend. Foremost among them is undoubtedly Jamie Lloyd’s production of Evita, which is effortlessly the most talked about theatre production of 2025. If star Rachel Zegler stayed on board it could easily have run at the huge London Palladium for a year. But she’s a busy woman, and Lloyd rarely if ever recasts musicals: Evita will complete its scheduled run on Saturday. As you might expect, it’s sold out: you could snag a return or one of the £29.50 standing that go on sale from its website at 10am each day. Or you could of course get down to the Palladium around 9pm (or 4pm Saturday afternoon) and catch one of Zegler’s final ever performances of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina to the assembled Argyll Street masses. The spectacular musical adaptation of The Great Gatsby transferred to the West End from Broadway in unusually quick time, but it was always going to be a limited run as the London Coliseum is home to English National Opera for most of the year. It could come back, though it seems possible it got in fast to avoid clashing with Florence Welch’s imminent rival Gatsby musical. It ends its run on Sunday, and there’s decent availability. Finally, a last chance to see the oddity that is Burlesque. An adaptation of the Christina Aguilera chickflick of the same name, it had a troubled

When it launched as a pop up at the tail end of 2016, Ballie Ballerson was pretty much the flagship venue for the then relatively novel kidult trend, that is to say grown adults doing children’s activities, generally while drunk. Ballie Ballerson is a ball pit with a bar, and in the mid ’10s it stood as the apex of the London millennial project – the wildly popular original Dalston pop-up location lasted for six months before begetting a permanent Shoreditch location shortly thereafter. ‘What’s going on with Ballie Ballerson in 2025?’ is not a question you hear asked much. And I don’t mean that to be damning – nobody asks about Dans Le Noir or The Mousetrap, and yet they’re still chugging on. It’s certainly not a question I had asked, because aside from an obligatory rolling of my eyes when Ballie B launched, it had never occurred to me that I would actually one day go. While technically a millennial, I had a one-year-old when the bar first opened its door, and I think whatever ironic gymnastics you’re doing in your head to justify a night out there is rendered null and void if you’re also somebody who takes small people to actual ball pits as a matter of course. Then, a couple of months ago, I received an email: Ballie Ballerson, the ball pool for adults, was now letting in children. Not, it should be said, at the same time as any adults other than supervisory parents. But for the duration of the 2025 school summer holidays there are Friday sessions at Ballie: 3.30pm-5pm for