Andrzej Lukowski

July is upon us and the spectre of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has hovered into view. Even if you have no intention of crossing the border this August, the gargantuan Scottish festival has a clear effect on the London comedy scene: this month our city is is groaning with work in progress previews of the Fringe’s likely highlights, and you can easily sample the best of the Fringe without going any further north than Soho Theatre. There’s also plenty more fun besides: Tim Minchin returns to live service, Stewart Lee moves to the Southbank Centre, and cult movie critic parody On Cinema has a string of live performances in Walthamstow. There are far, far too many one-off, multi-performer comedy nights in London for us to compile a single coherent page with our favouites on, which is entirely to London’s credit. So do check individual bills of comedy clubs online for that sort of thing. But if you’re looking for an individual comedian with a full headline show then this page is here to compile the Time Out editorial team’s top choices, often with our reviews from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The best comedy clubs in London.The best new theatre shows to book for in London.

Six. Weeks. Or thereabouts. 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. So let’s call it what it is: six big ones – more than most parents’s annual leave. 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 dinoaurs, exhibitions to magicians. These are events likely to either only be on this summer or new to London. For evergreen ideas for things to do with children in the capital, see our 50 Things To Do With Kids In London. For general London summer ideas see our summer in London guide.

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 – Time Out theatre editor Andrzej Łukowski – plus our freelance critics. RECOMMENDED New theatre openings in London this month. A-Z of West End shows.

There’s perhaps nothing more magical than seeing a play or musical in the open air, and London is absolutely the city for it. In defiance of the weather gods, our outdoor theatre season now stretches from March to late October: we’re are just that tough. Or at least, optimistic about the weather. Substantially it revolves around a few key theatres, notably Shakespeare’s Globe – open March to October and generally boasting a cheeky outdoor Christmas production – and the delightful Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, which is open late spring to the very end of summer. The former specialises in Shakespeare plays, while the latter has a musical theatre focus. But there’s plenty of other stuff, especially as the summer reaches its height, from the ambitious street theatre of the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival to the musical theatre blowout of West End Live. Not sure what you'll need for an open-air theatre trip? Then don’t miss our guide to practical open-air theatre info.  If you’re interested in taking in some outdoor cinema this summer, head to our dedicated page.

Edinburgh in 2025: Well, we don’t need to say it, do we? Soon, Edinburgh will be in the midst of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025. Its official dates this year are August 1 to 25, but you’ll find brilliant cultural things to see and do here throughout the summer, and some Fringe shows will even start early in July. But as ever, there are plenty of reasons to visit this wonderful city, all year round. Read on for our ultimate guide.  Hayley Scott: ‘I grew up in Edinburgh and I still can’t get enough. Years spent living elsewhere have made me increasingly appreciative of the city, but it’s hard to pin point exactly where its charm lies. There’s its small size, making it extremely walkable (provided you aren’t afraid of some rain and the occasional hill), and there’s its rich and well-preserved history, meaning parts of the city feel otherworldly, even to someone who calls it home. Growing up I would wander the botanic gardens feeding bread to the squirrels, and now I stroll the cobbled streets via wine bars, restaurants and – depending on the time of night – chippies. Ready to walk, drink, dance and all the rest of it? Get your waterproof on and explore.’ 📍 RECOMMENDED: Ultimate guide to what to do in Edinburgh ✈️ The best weekend breaks from London What free things are there to do in Edinburgh? Plenty. A number of our top museums have free entry year-round, including the National Museum of Scotland, the National Gallery, the Portrait Gallery and the Modern. But it’s not ju

Hello – I'm Time Out’s theatre editor and also a parent, something that has considerable overlap in London, a city with three dedicated kids theatres and where pretty much every other theatre might play host to a child-friendly show. Listing everything would be a slightly psychotic undertaking and probably not that illuminating, as many kids’ shows are only on for a day or two. So instead this round up forcusses 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 school-age children. See also:50 things to do i

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.

L.A. covers a mind-bogglingly massive volume of land (and for that matter, ocean too). So it’s no surprise that Los Angeles packs in an enormous number of world-class attractions. If you’re a tourist looking for things to do, you’ll have no problem finding vacation inspiration, from Hollywood tours to a day at one of the city’s best beaches. Even locals might very well find ways to fall in love with the city all over again in our extensive list of the best Los Angeles attractions. RECOMMENDED:📽️ The best studio tours in Los Angeles This article includes affiliate links. These links have no influence on our editorial content. For more information, click here.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is back for summer 2025. For three weeks (August 1 – August 24), the Scottish capital is home to comedy giants, serious thespians and hilarious first-timers, all putting on shows left, right and centre. It’s a huge, colourful celebration of all sorts of performing arts, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.   But with so much choice on offer, it’s difficult to know where on earth to start. Here’s our pick of the best theatre shows accounced so far. The programme is famously enormous (over 3,500 shows), so we’ll keep adding to the list in the run up to the festival and will update it based upon reviews when the festival actually starts.  While most of our recommednations are from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025, the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) is running alongside it as usual – the EIF is slimmed down this year and has few fewer theatre shows than usual, but it does have one big one in particular… RECOMMENDED: Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe10 of the best comedy shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 202411 of the best jokes and one-liners ever told at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

It’s the largest arts festival in the world – there’s nothing quite like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (August 1-August 24 2025). With literally hundreds of comedy shows to choose from, flicking through the phonebook-like Fringe programme can be more than a little daunting. So we’re here to help. From stand-up legends to award-winning newcomers, these are the comedy shows we’ve either seen and reviewed or are most excited about at this year’s festival. Got some downtime between gigs? Then check out our pick of the best pubs, restaurants and afternoon tea in Edinburgh.  RECOMMENDED: Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe The best theatre shows at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe The best kids’ shows at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe

So you’d like to go to the Edinburgh Fringe but you haven’t booked anywhere to stay yet – is it a practical option on a budget? The first thing to say is that for complicated-ish reasons there is currently a severe lack of short-term accommodation in Edinburgh during the Fringe, certainly compared with what there used to be, and the odds of you getting an incredible bargain on a gorgeous apartment on the Royal Mile are somewhere close to nil. And we hate to say it, but things are exacerbated in 2025 – at least in the second week of the Fringe – by Oasis’s string of dates at Murrayfield Stadium.However, don’t despair – here are five tips for sorting yourself out. 1. Throw (some) money at the problem Airbnb can still be your friend, insofar as it does still have properties available, you just need to accept that come July or August you’re probably looking at over £100 a night for a private room unless you’re very lucky, and vastly more for a whole place. It’s a lot! And it’s been exacerbated by recent tightening of licensing rules by the city. But it does the trick, it’s cheaper if you can divide the price with friends, and if you can afford it then internalising the message ‘Edinburgh is pretty expensive’ is better than looking morosely for a bargain that probably won’t come. 2. Do it like a student Part of the problem with short-term Fringe accommodation is that – long story short – a change in Scottish tenancy law a few years back meant that landlords were no longer able to

TV channel U&Dave has taken it upon itself to crown the ‘best joke’ of the Edinburgh Fringe each year for the last decade plus. That’s quite a challenge, given that the arts festival welcomes in hundreds of shows and hopeful comics to the city. Its annual competition, the Funniest Joke of the Fringe, names a winner from a competition shortlist drawn up by a panel of comedy critics, before members of the public are asked to pick their three favourite jokes. Last year, Mark Simmons, who first got into comedy more than a decde ago, took home the award with his snappy one-liner about a ship, taken from his PHB’s Free Fringe show at the Liquid Room Annexe. In 2023, Lorna Rose Treen took home the prize with her gag about an unfaithful zookeeper, which was ranked one of the best by 44 percent of those surveyed. It turns out U&Dave audiences basically like zingers, one-liners and snappy puns: there’s rarely overlap between the Joke of the Fringe and the winners of the main comedy awards. Which makes sense: Joke of the Fringe is voted for by people at home, not people seeing entire shows. And it’s all to the good, an opportunity for acts who might not get the attention otherwise to step into the spotlight.  We’ll share the 2025 winner when it arrives, usually in the final week of the Fringe. Keen to hear the previous winning jokes? Check them out below. RECOMMENDED:Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024The best comedy shows at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024The best

The seemingly unstoppable David Attenborough has achieved more since hitting retirement age than most of us - let’s be honest, all of us - will achieve in our entire lifetimes. This new immersive film is his second major project since turning 99 in May, following his more traditional documentary Ocean. Produced by Open Planet Studios, Our Story sees the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum transformed into a smaller version of the Lightroom in King’s Cross (a sort of projection-based theatre). While ‘immersive’ is a word exhausted by overuse, ‘immersive documentary’ is emerging as a fairly distinct genre with clear hallmarks. As with the Lightroom’s shows, Our Story is based around powerful digital projectors beaming the film onto the four walls of the space, wrapping around the surfaces so there are different images whichever direction you look. You are indeed immersed. It’s still a narrative documentary film, in which Sir David tells us the story of the planet from fiery, lifeless rock to the advent of mankind to a possible future. Attenborough narrates, and appears at the start and end. There’s a fair smattering of expectedly dazzling wildlife footage. But Our Story isn’t really a nature doc in the style of Attenborough’s most famous works, and rather than painstakingly captured original footage of animals, it uses pre-existing stuff plus heavy use of CGI to supplement its storytelling. Occasionally this feels like a minor letdown: though they’re not trying to pr

There has been some opaque messaging around this 25th anniversary revival of Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis. Gathering together the original creative team and cast – which includes current RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans – I’d half got the impression this would be a case of ‘same people, different take’. But it’s clear from a cursory look at any photo from 2000 that this is that show, brought back. And James Macdonald’s production returns to us as somewhat luxury theatre. 4.48 Psychosis was originally staged in the Royal Court’s tiny Upstairs studio. Which made sense: mounting a formally challenging work that heavily foreshadowed its writer’s suicide was obviously a delicate business in the immediate aftermath of her death. Now, however, her passing is less raw, the play is an acknowledged modern classic, and this revival sold out aeons ago (although you can still get tickets on Mondays).  Why restage this production when 4.48 Psychosis never really enjoyed a major UK revival? (the Young Vic did it with a Romanian actor and a French director… 16 years ago). Why not at least transfer it to the bigger Downstairs theatre? Is it meaningfully different from how it was 25 years ago? I can’t answer those questions, but I can tell you that I was rapt for the entire 70 minutes. Is 4.48 Psychosis bleak? I mean duh, yes, The critic Michael Billlington famously described the orginal production as ‘a suicide note’. I’m not sure that’s true, though it’s obvious why he said th

It’s up to every primary school parent to wrestle with their own conscience as to whether it’s appropriate to take their dinosaur-loving child to Jurassic World: Rebirth (rating 12A) this summer. But regardless of how much a wuss your kid is, a new installment in the franchise inevitably means a glut of family-friendly mesozoic-related shows. London is full of them this summer holidays, and foremost is the ‘official’ show Jurassic World: The Experience, which was last seen here three years ago at ExCel London (then called Jurassic World: The Exhibition), the last time a Jurassic World film came out.  God help me, I also saw it the last time around, and can report that the only significant change is the location: it’s now staged at NEON, a new venue just outside Battersea Power Station that will apparently be dedicated to similar immersive events. I don’t have a lot to say about NEON – it’s basically a big box – but the Power Station redevelopment is quite a fun place to take little ones to after the show, which is pretty brief.  It’s all good clean cretaceous fun The premise is the same as before. The experience is roughly 45 minutes long and begins with us boarding a ‘ferry’ to get out to Isla Nublar, home to Jurassic World. A handful of impressively gigantic animatronic herbivores greet us, along with some fun interactive bits, and then it’s on to the incubation lab where we can pet a ‘baby dinosaur’ (a puppet) and muck around with more displays. Next up we witness feeding

This review is from 2019. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe returns for 2025 in a production based upon Sally Cookson’s original that’s redirected by Michael Fentiman, with set and costume design by Tom Paris. Katy Stephens stars as the White Witch. Kind of caught halfway between ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘The Wind in the Willows’, it’s fair to say that CS Lewis’s ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ – with its well-spoken child heroes, twee talking animals and heavy Christian vibes – can be left looking a bit old-fashioned. Endlessly adapted long before the current era of sophisticated CGI-driven fantasy, has its time passed now that everything from ‘His Dark Materials’ to ‘The Wheel of Time’ is being adapted for the telly? Truthfully, the answer to that question probably lies with the fate of Netflix's imminent lavish adaptation. But for now, we have a very smart stage version from Sally Cookson, that balances the stiff-upper-lipped charms of the book with a real sense of the encroaching wildness – even madness – of the fantastical kingdom of Narnia.  The opening section is jolly hockey sticks à gogo, with the audience cast as wartime child evacuees, spirited away from the Blitz on the same train as Lewis’s young heroes the Pevensies. By the end, it’s become something that feel rapturously wild, as Narnia awakes in a frenzy of colour and feeling from the century-long magical winter placed on it by Laura Elphinstone’s sleekly malevolent White Witch. Yes, Lewis shoved loade

In an era where even Andrew Lloyd Webber has concluded he needs to move with the times, West End super producer Cameron Mackintosh remains obstinately grounded in the twentieth century. That’s not to say the man’s a dinosaur: he’s the UK producer of Hamilton, for starters. But he has a core of shows that have been in his stable for decades, that he returns to semi-frequently and sometimes claims to be reinventing. Really, though, the new takes on Miss Saigon, or Mary Poppins, or Les Mis are the equivalent of giving an old trophy a good buff and polish – you might make it sparkle a bit more, but it’s the same trophy.  Mackintosh was not the first producer of Lionel Bart’s all-singing Charles Dickens smash Oliver! – he was 13 when it opened – but he did produce a 1977 revival that was totally faithful to the original 1960 incarnation, down to using the same sets. He revived it once again in the ’80s, then did a new version in 1994, which was brought back in 2008. Now we have a ‘fully reconceived’ take from two old Oliver! hands: Mackintosh and director Matthew Bourne, the choreographer on the last incarnation.  Bourne is best known for sexy gothic dance pieces, and he certainly brings his full gothic sexiness to bear here: a cumulonimbus-worth of dry ice seeps through the inky recesses of Lez Brotherston’s brooding multilevel Victorian London sets. Sweeney Todd’s barbers could plausibly be just ariound the corner. Bourne’s choreography is not very ostentatious, but there are a

This review is from 2023.  Kids’ theatre company Tall Stories has been touring its stage version of ‘The Gruffalo’ for over 20 years now – it’s almost the same age as Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s iconic picture book. Though the company has dipped its toes in other waters, there’s no denying that it has found a niche: the other shows in its current repertoire are a version of ‘Gruffalo’ sequel ‘The Gruffalo’s Child’ (returning to the West End this Christmas!), plus Donaldson and Scheffler’s much-loved ‘The Snail and the Whale’ and ‘The Smeds and the Smoos’. Directed by Toby Mitchell, latest show ‘The Smeds…’ has been knocking around in touring form for a year or so but finally makes its West End debut this summer. And it’s very charming, in a predictable way. Tall Stories is ruthlessly efficient at the whole ‘take a bedtime story that you can read in five minutes and stretch it to an hour’ thing. An opening reference to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is a hoot, there are some nice songs from John Fiber and Andy Shaw, and Barney George’s sets and Yvonne Stone’s puppets do a decent job of channelling Scheffler’s eccentric, cuddly vision of space, as feuding tribes of aliens – the red Smeds and the blue Smoos – set out on a galactic odyssey to find their youngsters Bill and Janet, who have eloped together.  Though it can’t really compete in visual pizazz with the BBC’s recent animated version, it is pretty much a faultless exercise in modestly budgeted kids’ stage adaptation. Pe

This review is from 2022. Nemesis; hubris; redemption; headgear. Those are pretty much the main themes of Jon Klassen’s wonderous trilogy of picture books that kicked off in 2011 with the seminal I Want My Hat Back, in which a dopey bear wanders the forest looking for his missing red party hat, eventually clocking that it has been nicked by a rabbit, which it’s then very strongly implied that the bear goes on to kill and eat. Followed by This Is Not My Hat – in which a small fish soliloquises to the reader about how he’s definitely going to get away with stealing a big fish’s bowler hat – and We Found a Hat – in which two tortoise pals must decide what to do with a sombrero – the three books contain no shared characters or plot, but are linked by Klassen’s gloriously deadpan, almost woodcut-like drawings, sparse dialogue and bracingly morally ambiguous humour. The same qualities have also made the books tricky to adapt: the National did a sort of maximalist fantasia on I Want My Hat Back a few years ago that was a lot of fun but didn’t especially resemble the source material beyond the key plot beats. The basic problem is that a literal stage adaptation of I Want My Hat Back would only be about ten minutes long, and it’s difficult to see how you can convey Klassen’s distinctive visual style with human actors. But that was before there was a trilogy, and – crucially – before the pandemic. This stage version of the three books started life as a lockdown project for designer Sam

Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac.  Specifically, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band’s mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members ‘Holly’ (aka Christine McVie) and ‘Diana’ (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band’s menfolk in favour of their own condominiums.  Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir).  Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile blues n

Obviously Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is a ludicrous film to adapt for the stage, especially for a modestly budgeted touring show with no set changes and a cast of seven. As much as anything else, Alfred Hitchcock’s absurdist conspiracy thriller is best remembered for two of the most audacious setpieces in cinema history: an attack by a machine gun-toting crop duster plane on an Illinois cornfield, and a final showdown on top of Mount Rushmore. But whimsical auteur Emma Rice has long abandoned any fear of adapting impossible source material. She doesn’t attempt to faithfully recreate a given film or book so much as drag it into her own private dimension, where it’s forced to play by her rules. North by Northwest is an interesting choice nonetheless, because it’s so hard to classify. Despite its huge impact on the genre, it’s not really an action film. And it’s not really a comedy. But there’s a definite twinkle in its eyes as it follows Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant in the film, Ewan Wardrop here), a mediocre middle-aged adman who gets dragged into an elaborate conspiracy after being mistaken for George Caplan, a spy who does not in fact exist. Arguably Rice disrupts a delicate equilibrium by making it overtly comic, with dance sequences, miming to ’50s pop hits, and a spectacularly knowing, fourth wall-breaking performance from Katy Owen as shadowy spymaster The Professor, who serves as the show’s narrator and tour guide. It’s jarring at first, but Rice pulls it off because

This review is from the original 2017 Old Vic run for Girl from the North Country, in July 2017. It returns to the theatre with a new cast in July 2025. Whatever you do, don’t call it the ‘Bob Dylan musical’. Yes, the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman may have once described himself as ‘a song and dance man’. But playwright-director Conor McPherson’s bleak, Dylan-soundtracked ‘Girl from the North Country’ is a play with songs that avoids the trappings of musical theatre like the plague – there are no dance routines, no happy endings, and the Old Vic stage remains dimly lit and half-shrouded in darkness. Dylan himself had no creative input, but one assumes it was always implicit in his licensing of the songs that it wasn’t ever going to be a big tits-and-teeth West End show with Bob’s name in lights. Taking place in the Dustbowl at the height of the Great Depression, ‘Girl from the North Country’ extracts the Steinbeckian strand from Dylan’s oeuvre, and might be imagined as an extra story that didn’t make Todd Haynes’s haunting, Dylan-inspired film ‘I’m Not There’. It’s set at an inn in Duluth, Minnesota (Dylan’s hometown) in 1934. Nick Laine (Ciaran Hinds), the gruff owner of the establishment, has many problems, not least the apparent dementia of his wife Elizabeth, played by Shirley Henderson in a truly bewitching turn, intense, otherworldly, almost rockstar-like. The show is set entirely in the inn, and follows the Laines and their patrons, who range from Joe (Arinze Kene), an ex

This review is from the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe. Adam Riches’s comedy shows have long been high concept, high effort affairs; now he crosses over to the dark side of the Fringe programme (aka the theatre bit) to make his Summerhall debut with Jimmy. It’s a one-man-show about US sportsman Jimmy Connors, the bad boy of ‘70s tennis, who was eventually eclipsed by the likes of Boris Becker and John McEnroe. They, however, retired as relatively young men. Jimmy is set at the 1991 US Open: with the 39-year-old Connors now way down in the rankings, we meet him just as he’s losing a match to Patrick McEnroe, John's little brother. Connors is not happy,  a wounded old tiger with nothing but contempt for an opponent he knows he’d have swept past a decade ago. There are no actual balls in Tom Parry’s production. But there is a lot of sweat: racket in hand, Riches hurls himself energetically around the ‘court’ in recreation of Connors’s actual moves. I’m sure it’s not a perfect replica, but Riches is bloody good, both lucidly conveying the flow the match and conveying a level of dogged persistance that feels important for Connors’s story.  Although it has a lot in common with Richard’s comedy shows - character work, accent work, just a lot of work - it’s definitely not trying to be funny in the way that they are, with just a ghost of his usual infamous audience interactions. The gangly Riches does undeniably remain an intrinsically amusing performer, but the category change makes sense. Ev

In 1983, the year the internet was created, a doomsday cult of nerds decided to create a repository for every web page ever created. These would be printed out in binary, put into bound editions, and then fed to a weird network of fluffy fungi, with the understanding that on January 1 2025 some sort of rapture would be achieved out of all this data. Unfortunately it didn’t happen – a non event described as ‘the epic fail’ – possibly because the system was being poisoned by the toxic levels of fake news now contaminating the web. But maybe YOU can help..? As far as I can make out from actually having seen it, that's the basic premise behind new immersive theatre company Sage & Jester’s inaugural show Storehouse, which I think is worth sharing because beyond ‘it’s an immersive theatre show’ it was pretty unclear what was actually involved on the basis of the advance publicity. Unfortunately Storehouse is also absolute nonsense, a pretty but torpid vanity project that’s the brainchild of businesswoman Liana Patarkatsishvili, who I assume also bankrolled this expensive show, staged in a gargantuan Deptford warehouse.  Patarkatsishvili – daughter of the late Georgian billionaire and media mogul Badri Patarkatsishvili – is clearly concerned with ‘misinformation’: last year she funded an art installation in Edinburgh called Illuminated Lies on the same subject. Which is fine but simply lobbing money at an idea you care about doesn’t inherently make for great art, even with talented

By the standards of any other city, July in London is a pretty damn busy month for theatre. Here, it’s the start of the summer slowdown, with few of the big subsidised venues running a show over the hols, most big new West End shows keeping their powder dry until the autumn, and much of the industry decamping to the Edinburgh Fringe, which this year begins at the very end of the month. Nonetheless, there’s still plenty to keep us going, including loads from the National Theatre which is opening a show in each of its three theatres plus one in the West End. Really, though, there’s only one show on people’s lips at the moment – and it handily takes our number one spot. The best new London theatre openings in July 2025 Photo: Marc BrennerRachel Zegler in rehearsals   1. Evita What is it? If last year was Brat Summer, this one is Balcony Summer. Hollywood star Rachel Zegler’s nightly 9pm-ish performances of ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s finest hour has made headlines around the world thanks to the fact she’s not singing it in the auditorium but on the outside front balcony, to an increasingly large nightly crowd. Even if the rest of it were to prove to be rubbish it deserves the number one slot for such an audacious gesture. But as it’s essentially a reworking of Lloyd’s excellent 2019 Open Air Theatre production, we’re expecting it to be pretty damn good. London Palladium, now until Sep 6. Buy tickets here.   Photo: National T

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. Photo: Johan PerssonThe Muses 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,

Ncuti Gatwa’s time on Doctor Who proved to be pretty brief. But he didn’t put his feet up in the gap between his two seasons – theatre was his first love and he got straight back on that stage last Christmas to star in the National Theatre’s hallucinogenically camp take on Oscar Wilde’s classic ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, the first the NT had staged since the ’80s. The Max Webster-directed production was a roaring great hit and now it’s set to transfer to the West End, replacing Mischief Theatre’s ‘The Comedy About Spies’ at the Noël Coward Theatre. Gatwa’s not coming along though: whether he’d have been up for it is a moot point, as he’s already busy starring in the RSC’s new West End play Born with Teeth.  However, a fine replacement has been found for the role of young ‘bachelor’ about town Algernon Montcrieff: it’s Olly Alexander, who hasn’t been in Doctor Who but did make his name as actor in ‘It’s A Sin’, another show by Russell T Davies. Wilde’s play is very much an ensemble affair and there is no news on further casting at this stage, though we dare to dream that the mighty Sharon D Clarke will return as the formidable Lady Bracknell. If you want to know a little more about what the production was like last time, then read our four-star review here. The Importance of Being Earnest is at the Noël Coward Theatre, Sep 18-Jan 10 2026. Book tickets here. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025. London’s most spectacular free festival has just announced

It feels very abstract to be talking about a winter anything right now. Nonetheless: time marches on and in a few months’ time we’ll be moaning about the lack of sun and how cold we are and ready for the indoor winter season at Shakespeare’s Globe, which has been announced today. Well, kind of indoor. There will be two productions in the candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. First off, a bilingual English and Welsh take on Romeo and Juliet entitled Romeo a Juliet (Nov 5-8). A co-production with Wales’s Theatr Cymru and directed by its artistic director Steffan Donnelly, it will apparently function as a study of the struggle for Welsh identity. There’s not much information on exactly how it’ll work yet and you'll have to be quick to catch it – it’s only on for a week. The big event Bard-wise is A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Nov 13-Jan 31 2025), which has been performed millions of times at the Globe but never indoors, for obvious season related reasons. It’s a co-production with the ever exiting touring company Headlong, directed by Holly Race Roughan and Naeem Hayat. We don’t really know what to expect, but it’ll apparently explore the darker corners of the play. An outdoor Christmas show has been a Globe tradition in recent years, and these have typically been fairly short, fairly low budget, and staged fairly early in the day compared to summer shows in the main theatre. But for Christmas 2025 the Globe is going big with Pinocchio (Nov 29-Jan 4 2026), a new musical adaptation: no

Do you remember The Walk? Staged in 2021, the show-slash-festival-slash touring artwork was based around Little Amal, a-not-so-little (in fact gigantic) puppet refugee girl who 'walked’ from war-torn Syria to dear old Blighty. Now the producers behind it – including former Young Vic boss David Lan – have a new show with a similar, but different, and even more visually striking idea. The Herds is effectively a migration of puppet beasts from the heart of Africa: elephants, giraffes, antelopes, lions, wolves, wildebeest and more.  They set out from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year, travelling overland from Africa and on into Europe with their final destination of the Arctic Circle. By all accounts they’re travelling in large numbers and their appearances are pretty damn spectacular. Photo: BerclaireKinshasa Why is this happening? Well just as The Walk was designed to raise awareness of refugees’ stories, so The Herds is themed around climate change and habit loss, with the animals – all made from recycled materials – 'fleeing’ habitat loss in their native countries.  If that sounds heavy: well yes, it is, but the events scheduled for London actually look pretty fun. After making their arrival at Tower Bridge on the morning of Friday June 27, the beasts will be ‘fed’ at the Scoop amphitheatre near the bridge by local primary school children at 10am in a performance entitled Cornflakes and Hay created by the nearby Unicorn Theatre. That afternoon t

Well, it’s the right weather for it. The West End’s annual free outdoor musical theatre festival West End Live returns right on time for the sunniest weekend of the year. Whether you’ve been planning your whole weekend around it for months now or you’ve only just heard of it and think it sounds like a fun idea, here we’ve everything you need to know. What happens at West End Live? It’s basically an outdoor musical theatre concert. Performers from most musicals currently running in the West End – and a few coming to town soon – perform a song or two live, generally in costume, sometimes with full choreography bells and whistles. Where is West End Live? It’s in good old Trafalgar Square, in its usual events area. When is West End Live 2025? This weekend: it runs Saturday June 21 11am to 5pm and Sunday June 22 noon to 5pm. Do I need a ticket? Nope, West End Live is free. HOWEVER it is enormously popular, particularly the first couple of hours on the Saturday when most of the really big hitters squeeze in their performance before their 2.30pm matinee. There is no truly great way of guaranteeing a slot here other than getting in early, though obviously Trafalgar Square is an open space and you should be able to hear the songs if you’re in the general vicinity. If you want a more chilled out experience come down Sunday or later Saturday afternoon. Will anyone famous be performing? We tend not to know as the shows don’t say in advance what songs they’ll be doing and therefore who wi

London is hot right now. Literally. And it’s only going to get hotter. Next week, it’ll probably cool down a bit at the start and then get hot again. It’s basically unbearable, but at the same time it’s outdoor frickin’ theatre season, baby. Where better to cool down than at an open air theatre with a gentle night breeze and glass of something cold, preferably watching something classy but not aggressively difficult. Here are five outdoor shows on right now or about to start that will take you outside the scorching concrete hellscape that is our beloved city. 1. The free outdoor musicals festival Is it possible to simply show tune your way through 30-plus degree heat? They’ll be giving it their best try at West End Live this weekend, the two day festival at which the cast of pretty much every musical in town will be singing a song or two, for free, in Trafalgar Square. The catch? The best shows are early on the Saturday, and it’ll hit capacity rapidly. Plus it’ll be ‘el scorchio’. For a complete guide including full line up, head here. Trafalgar Square, Sat Jul 21 and Sun Jul 22. 2. Shakespeare’s daftest play The Globe has fine productions of Romeo and Juliet and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible currently in its rep. But if tragic deaths and people named Goody are a bit much for your heat fogged brain, get down to its new production of Shakespeare’s dumbest play. The Merry Wives of Windsor is a joyously silly romp in which his beloved character Falstaff – who dies offstage in He

Striding biblically into the green room at a London Bridge rehearsal studio, Michael Shannon is a daunting figure. Six foot three, craggier than Mount Rushmore and pathologically unsmiling, the double Academy Award nominated, Kentucky-born actor has the most ‘just walked out of a Cormac McCarthy novel’ energy to him of anyone I’ve ever met.  ‘Are you familiar with the play?’ he asks immediately, in what is possibly an innocuous opening gambit, but also possibly an attempt to determine if I’m some sort of lightweight flim-flam entertainment journalist. Because we’re not here to talk showbiz. We’re here to talk about his role in the Almeida Theatre’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. And also we’re here to talk about my favourite band of all time, REM. You will recognise Michael Shannon. It would be truly remarkable if you hadn’t seen one of his films, because according to his official bio there are over 90 of them. Whether you know him from offbeat indie flicks (of which he has made dozens), huge blockbusters (he famously played General Zod in Man of Steel and The Flash) or somewhere in between (those Oscar nominations came for Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road and Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals), it is a statistical inevitability that you have seen a Michael Shannon film. You’ll recognise that rough-hewn face. You’ll be aware he has range, but always presence and weight – he’s not much of a romcom guy. What British audiences haven’t seen for a long time is M

As you may or may not know, nascent screen superstar Rachel Zegler is in town, currently starring as loveable dictator’s wife Eva Perón in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. A lot of people clearly do know this, as it’s rapidly caught on that at around 9pm every night Zegler is heading up to the outside balcony of the London Palladium to sing the showstopping ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ – not to the audience in the theatre, but to the passing masses of central London (ticketholders see it on a big screen in the theatre, a similiar idea to the infamous ‘street walk’ section of Lloyd’s phenomenal take on Webber’s Sunset Boulevard). Aside from casual passers by, it’s been reported that up to 600 people have been gathering per night, specifically to see her sing. Although the show is a couple of week from officially opening, there has already been raging online debate as to the merits of the scene: there are those who think everything Jamie Lloyd does is infuriatingly faddish and he should just back off from live video entirely; there are those who think having the populist Evita singing directly to the masses – and not the ‘elite’ ticketholders is actually pretty resonant with the themes of the show. I’m not going to pass judgement until I’ve seen it. But I do think it’s fundanetally a cool idea that at 9pm each night you can see a very famous person sing a very famous song for free – London can be exasperating at times, but it’s this sort of high-powered

The school summer holidays are famously a nightmarish month-and-a-half of trying to amuse children unaware of the fact that you’re desperately trying to keep them entertained during a break that is longer than all your annual leave put together. Still, there are some bright spots, especially living in London, and a big one is London Kids Week. Run by the Society of London Theatre, it’s nothing so vulgar as ‘a sale’, but is rather an initiative to get children into a theatre during the school hols by offering under-18s free tickets when accompanied by a paying adult. In addition, up to two further children’s tickets can be booked at half price by the same adult.  It’s a damn good deal with no real catch (there isn’t even a booking fee), beyond the fact that inventory is limited, although rarely massively so. Get in early, though, and you might be able to snag (free) tickets to one of the special workshops or other activities laid on as part of the ‘week’, which you can book for now and runs the length of the summer hols, from July 21 to August 31 (a strange definition of ‘week’ but whatever). It’s always a good showing and runs the gamut from full on kids’ theatre like The Smeds and the Smoos and The Tiger Who Came to Tea – clearly aimed at younger audiences – to much more adult fare like Stranger Things: The First Shadow and the Rachel Zegler-starring Evita that will theoretically allow you to impress teens at an affordable price.  To book, and for the full list of shows – wh

Did you ever wished you could have participated in the infamous events of January 6, 2021, when a mob attacked the US Capitol building in Washington DC only to be narrowly thwarted by law enforcement? Of course you don’t: it would have been horrible. But an unusual and eye-catching immersive theatre show called Fight for America! seeks to recreate the most infamous day in recent American history as a gigantic tabletop board game with over 10,000 hand-painted miniatures. Staged in the Stone Nest arts centre on Shaftesbury Avenue, the show is the brainchild of multimedia performance company the American Vicarious with design by Games Workshop legend Alessio Cavatore. Photo: J Elon Goodman There are two teams: red – representing the attackers – and blue – representing the defenders. Up to 20 audience members can pay the higher ticket price to actually participate in the game, guided by a games master into making decisions that will shape the outcome of the assault as thousands of miniatures are moved around a gigantic 14-foot model of the building itself. The remaining audience members pay a much lower ticket price to spectate. Photo: J Elon Goodman Clearly this is a somewhat provocative idea for a show, although it sounds entirely fascinating. It appears the point is not to let you LARP January 6, and the show materials don’t get into the ideology of Team Red – which we’re all pretty familiar with at this stage – in any significant way. But January 6 happened and by most in

Whether you consider yourself a theatre fan or not, Greenwich + Docklands International Festival is always a highlight of the annual London calendar, bringing together spectacular, essentially unclassifiable outdoor entertainment to the open spaces of Thames-side London. In recent years shows have included a recreation of the Northern Lights, a bevy of glowing swans, and a performance on a melting artificial iceberg. Now it’s back for 2025, and the first tranche of announcements for this year’s festival are upon on. First things first: we have dates! The festival will run in its traditional late summer slot, this year August 22 to September 6. There’s basically too much stuff to list in full, but I’ll pick out a few highlights and you can catch up with the full bill here. You can always rely on GDIF for a spectacular opener, and this year it comes from hench French parkour troupe Lézards Bleus, who will get things underway with Above and Beyond (Aug 22, pictured top), a dazzling opener in which eight performers will astound gathered crowds as they leap over the roofs of central Woolwich. Great news for families: the beloved Greenwich Fair (Aug 23 and 24) will return to central Greenwich after skipping last year. It brings family friendly games and street performance to the heart of the borough; there’s stuff on all day with highlights within the programme including all-female Belgian circus company Cie Des Chaussons Rouges’s high wire show Epiphytes in Greenwich Park. Down on