Andrzej Lukowski

It’s not quite summer, but it’s the school holidays and it’s actually warm outside: it must be May half-term, aka the only half-term holiday to take place when the weather actually is nice. So of course ‘the park’ and maybe even ‘the seaside’ are on the agenda. But here’s thge best of the rest London has to offer this hols, from a lavish new Natural History Museum prehistoric exhibition to the return of family theatre classic War Horse.  My name is Andrzej and I’m Time Out’s lead kids’ writer and also parent to two London-based children. 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 May half-term this year?  This year, London’s February half-term officially falls between Monday May 25 and Friday May 29 (ie children will be off continuously between Saturday May 23 and Sunday June 1, and possibly a little longer as June 2 is a popular inset day).  Here’s our roundup of all the best things to do with your children this May half-term.

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. London's critics’ choice shows to book for at a glance: Best musical: Hamilton, Victoria Palace Theatre Best star casting: Romeo & Juliet, Harold Pinter Theatre Best for kids: Paddington the Musical, Savoy Theatre Best old classic: Les Miserables, Sondheim Theatre  Best for a scare: Paranormal Activity, Ambassadors Theatre 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.

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? Unfortunately for complicated-ish reasons there is a severe lack of short-term accommodation in Edinburgh during the Fringe, certainly compared with what there was ten years ago, and the odds of you getting an incredible bargain on a gorgeous apartment on the Royal Mile are somewhere close to nil. On the plus side, Oasis aren’t playing a sold out run of stadium shows during this year’s festival, so that will take a little pressume off the city’s accomodation stock in 2026.However, don’t despair – here are five tips for sorting yourself out. 1. Throw (some) money at the problem To state the obvious, there are always properties available, and yes, if you spend enough you’ll be okay. An unscientific survey of Airbnb in May 2026 suggests if you can stretch to about £200 a night you should be able to get a fairly basic single or double bedroom at peak Fringe – far, far higher than a decade ago but maybe it’s just easier to accept it’s expensive and concentrate on enjoying yourself. If you can divide a bedroom between two or a whol apartment between several you might even get a decent deal. Plus if you’re feeling brave, some of the more absurdly priced Aibnbs might drop their prices late, though don’t count on it. 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

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. December is the busiest time of year for London theatre – expect plenty of pantomime reviews and other seasonal fun but also a slew of major openings from across London’s many venues as the industry works itself to a frenzy before shutting down for Christmas. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2026. 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. Although the start of the year open air theatre is largely absent for obvious reasons, the season does get underway relatively early, especially at the Globe, where a truncated Shakespeare play – this year Romeo & Juliet – plays for schools and brave civilians from early March. 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.

May 2026: There's a brand new Number 1, with Holy Carrot in Spitalfields taking the top spot thanks to some seriously creative vegetarian cookery. Other fresh additions include Guirong Wei’s The Wei in Fulham, Auguste and Cafe Kowloon in London Fields, the third Forza Wine, super fun Osteria Vibrato and latest branch of YeYe's Noodle & Dumpling (all three in Soho), as well as numbing Chongqing spice at Jiāonest in Hoxton, perfect pasta at Burro in Covent Garden and Mexican seafood at Cometa in Fitzrovia. Hungry yet? Every week, a frankly silly amount of brilliant new restaurants, cafés and street food joints arrive in London. Which makes whittling down a shortlist of the best newbies a serious challenge. But here it is. The 20 very best new restaurants in the capital, ranked in order of greatness and deliciousness. All of them have opened over the past 12 months and been visited by our hungry critics. So go forth and take inspo from this list, which is updated regularly. Check in often to find out what we really rate on the London restaurant scene. And look here for all the info about the best new openings in May 2026. London's best new restaurants at a glance: 🍝 Central: Osteria Vibrato, Soho 🍠 North: Ling Ling’s, Islington 🇹🇭 South: Kruk, Peckham 🍝 East: Holy Carrot, Spitalfields 🥗 West: The Wei, Fulham Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines. RECOMMENDED: The 50 best restaurants in London

What is immersive theatre? A glib buzzword? A specific description of a specific type of theatre? A phrase that has become so diluted that it’s lost all meaning? Whether you call it immersive, interactive or site-specific, London is bursting with plays and experiences which welcome you into a real-life adventure that you can wander around and play the hero in. London's best immersive shows at a glance: Best for dinner theatre: Faulty Towers the Dining Experience, President Hotel Best for Trekkies: Bridge Command, Vauxhall Arches Best for music lovers: Mamma Mia! The Party, The O2 Coolest: Lander 23, Carriageworks I’m Andrzej Łukowski, Time Out’s theatre editor, and I have run the immersive gamut, from a show where I had to take my clothes off in a darkened shipping container, to successfully bagging tickets to the six-hour Punchdrunk odyssey almost nobody saw, to a lot of theatre productions where the set goes into the audience a bit and apparently that’s immersive. This page has been around for a while now and gone through various schools of thought, but the one we’ve settled on for now is that the main list compiles every major show in London that could reasonably be described as ‘immersive theatre’, while the bottom list compiles a few of our favouite immersive shows thet you probably wouldn’t describe as theatre though it is, naturally a blurry line. Whatever the case you can mostly only really decide what most of these shows are if you go and do them… prepare to immer

The 79th annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe is approaching, with over 3,000 shows taking over more than 250 venues in the Scottish capital. From theatre and comedy to art, music and dance, the Fringe is Nirvana for culture lovers. Plus, there’s the Edinburgh International Festival happening at the same time, which brings pioneering theatre, music and dance shows from across the globe. But what to see? Although the Time Out team can only really scratch the surface in terms of reviewing Fringe shows, we aim to review the buzziest, hippest and most acclaimed shows every year: to let you know what to see at the Fringe, but also in advance of many of these shows inevitably transferring to London and beyond. Get stuck in, have a read, and add a few more shows to your ‘must-see’ list. We’ll be updating this page from August 7; at the moment it’s blank because the Fringe hasn’t started yet. RECOMMENDED:  Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival FringeThe 10 best comedy shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026The 10 best theatre shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026.

The largest arts festival in the world is also the largest comedy festival in the world– there’s nothing quite like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (August 7-August 31 2026). And indeed, for many punters the Fringe is a comedy – pretty much any British stand-up (and many foreign ones) who has a show, will take it to the Fringe. 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 2026 Edinburgh Fringe The best kids’ shows at the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is back for summer 2026. For three weeks (August 7 – August 31, the latest possible dates), a dizzying array of artists will be launching themselves at the Scottish capital in volumes literally unseen anywhere else on the planet. It’s the biggest arts festival in the world, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.   It’s also so big that it’s difficult to know where on earth to start, with over 3,500 shows across genres. That’s a daunting number to pick from even for seasoned Fringe-goers, and whereas with comedy you can guarantee there will be some household names on the bill, theatre is tricky because it tends to be a lot… well, fringier than the biggest of the stand-ups. But that’s kind of the point. Part of the magic of the Fringe is that you’re supposed to be open-minded: by the end of the month, people who were not famous before, will be famous. Still, you’re got to start somewhere and here’s our pick of the best theatre shows accounced so far. 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 recommendations are for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026, the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) is running alongside it as usual and we’ll throw in a few tips and hints from its repertoire, which consists of a much smaller number of much larger shows. (NB the initial version of this list has more EIF than Fringe shows as the shows are announced earlier

A pleasingly eclectic month of London chuckles this May, that runs the gamut from the first serious Edinburgh previews of 2026 to a rare chance to catch a legendary comedy podcast in its live incarnation, to a comedy play co-written with Stewart Lee. 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.

April 2026: We've updated our roasts list to reflect the return of sunnier days. Try the Macbeth in Hoxton, which offers a great Portuguese-style Sunday sesh, and the ravishing Jamaican-inspired roast at Buster Mantis in Deptford. There are a couple of posh restaurants in the mix too, with a Nordic roast at the plush Ekstedt at the Yard near Westminster, and a serious meat feast at Quality Chop House in Clerkenwell. We also have a new Number 1 to welcome spring in; the bright and breezy offering at the super fancy-feeling Sessions Arts Club in Clerkenwell.  London’s best Sunday roasts at a glance: 🥩 Central: Sessions Arts Club, Clerkenwell 😇 North: The Angel, Highgate ⛪ South: Old Nun’s Head, Nunhead 🌈 East: The Nelson’s, Hackney 🍻 West: The Mall Tavern, Notting Hill Sunday lunch. There’s nothing quite like it. An elemental meal, one that Londoners take incredibly seriously. Debates about what constitutes the ‘perfect’ Sunday roast have been known to last for hours. There is no shortage of top roasts and Sunday lunch options in London. We’ve rounded up the city’s best Sunday meals from a host of pubs, restaurants and breweries all around town. What makes a good roast? For us, it’s simple; a welcoming room is a good start, maybe in a pub with an open fire during the winter months. Then it comes to the plate – we need perfect roast potatoes, well-cooked lamb, beef or pork and a decent plant-based option too. A Sunday roast is more than just lunch - it’s self-care. From s

Virginia Woolf’s towering 1931 novel The Waves doesn’t offer Joycean levels of formal complexity. Nonetheless, its haunting modernist blend of poetry and novel that sketches out the lives of six – or perhaps seven – friends is not a simple read. But it goes down surprisingly smoothly in this stage adaptation by Flora Wilson Brown. And that’s all to the good: The Waves is so purely literary that I don’t think an entirely equivalent stage version is possible. But Brown’s text and Julia Levai’s deft, efficient production conventionalise it with love and brisk purpose. Part of that is simply down to having a superb cast, who inject warmth and feeling into Woolf’s lengthy poetic soliloquies, whose mannered language holds the characters at an intentional remove on the page. We do get plenty of Woolf’s original poetry. But Brown is fearless about chopping and changing: she has added lashings of dialogue (the novel is essentially one character talking after another), and has rearranged things to make the autobiographical character of Rhoda the effective main narrator. This is a clever move for a number of reasons, the most pragmatic of which is that it means the production gets the most value out of its Rhoda, the excellent Ria Zmitrowicz, in her first stage performance in years. She’s wonderful as an introspective, panic-attack prone outsider, happy to hover quietly around the margins of her group of friends, some of whom – gorgeous good-time socialite Jinny (Syakira Moeladi) and su

Dave Harris’ Tender is, I suppose, a drama about how hard it is to be a man. But don’t worry, you can put the pepper spray away: we are so far away from incel territory here that we might as well be talking about a different species. The US playwright’s latest is directed by Matthew Xia, the Brit director who did such a spectacularly good job directing Harris’ batshit time-travelling drama Tambo & Bones that the posters for Tender actively bill this as a reunion between the two. It is not as mad as Tambo & Bones, because Tambo & Bones ended in a dystopian race-war future filled with silly robots and Tender doesn’t. But it does, again, speak to the sheer scope of Harris’ imagination, and Xia’s ability to articulate his out-there ideas on a modest budget. The setting is a New Jersey strip club in which the female clientele and the male strippers are allowed to engage in actual sex acts due to a convoluted legal loophole identified some years ago by the club’s unseen owner, Margie. A team of three guys – Trae (Kwame Odoom), Geoff (Dex Lee), and Donny (Darren Bennett) – have been performing the same routine (which involves teddy bear costumes) for years now.  But far from being growling studs, revelling in their respective masculinities, the men are a mess: the play begins with a long monologue from Trae – half dressed as a bear – who reflects mournfully, at length and with reference to the cult Manga Sailor Moon on his lack of pleasure from sex these days. More pressingly, a new

After 430 or so years it’s fairly apparent that we as a species are not going to get tired of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. And even though Emily Lim’s new take comes less than three months after the Globe’s last production of the same play ended, it still feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s not the most nuanced or revelatory Dream I’ve ever seen. But Lim’s USP is creating massive scale participatory public theatre works (mostly for the National Theatre). This isn’t quite that, but it uses the Globe’s large, lairy crowd to maximum impact for a production that cheerily deviates repeatedly from Shakespeare’s exact text in a joyous, almost non-stop welter of audience interaction. The embellishments run from start to finish, with a lengthy and enjoyable pre-show that involves roping audience members into ‘auditions’ for the Mechanicals: when I took my seat I assumed the people dancing on stage were in the cast, but no – just punters, though many of them get callbacks throughout the show and one lucky attendee even gets to the play Moon at the end. Lim has, also, hired a ringer in the shape of Michael Grady-Hall, who played an anarchic, improv-tastic Feste in the RSC’s recent Twelfth Night, and more or less reprises the character here except the role is fairy henchman Puck.  His role is actually better modulated here than in Twelfth Night, where it felt like the action kept having to stop so that he could do lengthy magic routines. But it’s easy to imagine t

‘Can Rebecca Lucy Taylor act?’ is I guess the big question here.  Well, I don’t think there’s any evidence from the pop star’s straight-up play debut (she previously co-starred in Cabaret) that the artist also known as Self Esteem is a hugely versatile character actor. But: the answer is ‘yes’. The theatrical, theatre-literate singer potently channels what feels like a lot of personal stuff into the role of Maggie Frisby – a minor rock singer, angry, amused and very drunk as her band disintegrates at a 1969 Oxford student ball. And I think if you’re a proper hardcore Self Esteem fan you’ll probably see David Hare’s 1975 play Teeth ’n’ Smiles as a means to an end, a vehicle to fire Taylor up as she pours her heart and soul and cynicism at the music industry into the role of Maggie, combusting spectacularly – and at one point, almost literally – at the tail-end of the ’60s.  The trouble is the play has not aged brilliantly, a fact that, to his credit, Hare has acknowledged in the past (though he’s been supportive of this revival).  He was right! Teeth ‘n’ Smiles was inspired by Hare’s observations of a washed up Manfred Mann at the playwright’s own university ball. Which is interesting. But in 2026 it’s astonishing how unclear it is what point Hare is really trying to make.  I think it’s a passage of time thing. In 1975, this slightly absurdist drama about an addled rock band limping on through a catastrophic final show was in and of itself powerful commentary on the end of a ‘

This review is from 2022 and the original, Ralph Spall-starring London run for Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation. The production returns in 2026 with a new cast headed by Richard Coyle as Atticus Finch. Meet Atticus Finch: centrist dad. Aaron Sorkin’s smash Broadway stage version of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ makes a fair few tweaks to Harper Lee’s 1960 literary masterpiece.  Most predictably, there’s the ‘West Wing’ mastermind’s trademark sparkling dialogue. Yes, he remains faithful to the idea that we’re in ’30s Alabama, but his polished wit is very much present and correct, most especially in the goofily pinging three-way narration provided by his child characters: plucky Scout (Gwyneth Keyworth), chippy Jem (Harry Redding) and dorky Dill (David Moorst). The narrative structure has been tinkered with: the climactic trial scene is now parcelled up into chunks throughout the play rather than included as a single sweeping sequence.  The plot, however, is essentially unchanged. By far Sorkin’s most significant intervention via Bartlett Sher’s production is to pointedly reimagine the play’s white lawyer hero Atticus Finch. Rafe Spall’s interpretation of the role steers well clear of Gregory Peck’s immortal screen version and, to a large extent, the book. Peck’s Finch was famously sonorous-voiced and saintly. In both book and film, Finch was explicitly seen through the adoring eyes of his daughter Scout. Here, with his chipmunk Alabama twang, Spall simply *sounds* less like a wise statesm

I was both moved by and a little annoyed at Mass. This story of two sets of bereaved parents attempting rapprochement in the aftermath of a high school shooting is the debut play by US actor and filmmaker Fran Kranz. He scored a low-key indie cinema success with the screen version of Mass, a 2021 film you’d be excused for not having heard of as it’s one of those flicks that got released to literally four cinemas. Transposed to the stage, it retains an awkward filmic structure, bookended by extraneous scenes in which two staff members at the church hall in which it’s set fret over getting the space ready for the meeting. Rochelle Rose’s Kendra – the facilitator of the meet – swoops in with a very icy American efficiency that teeters on the pass agg. But it’s all irrelevant to the plot, and it feels like either more should have been made of these characters or much less.  The meat is the meeting. Four great Brit actors play the parents, and I suppose it’s a very small spoiler to say that at first we’re not entirely sure who is mum and dad to the victim, and who the shooter. Is it Adeel Akhtar’s forcedly cheerful Jay and brittler wife Gail (Lyndsey Marshal)? Or is it the more visibly broken down and subdued Linda (Monica Dolan) and Richard (Paul Hilton), whose marriage is implied to have broken down?  It’s not a mystery that Carre Cracknell’s naturalistic production attempts to drag out for a great length of time, but the five or 10 minutes of ambiguity underscore the essential

What is Bubble Planet? Having opened at the tail end of 2023, Bubble Planet is another manifestation of the popular phenomenon that I’m calling Instagrammable immersive family experiences. This one is a particularly close kin to the now defunct Balloon Museum. Where is Bubble Planet? Located in the increasingly culturally vibrant Wembley Park, I’m about 75 percent certain it’s in the same building the last Secret Cinema show was in, just a few minutes walk from the station. What happens at Bubble Planet? The theme is nominally bubbles, though this is interpreted extremely freely, from a balloon room and a ball pool, to a computer generated ocean and a VR experience, both of which do technically feature bubbles. There is a lot of descriptive text on the wall, but it’s mostly waffle rather than anything you need to pay attention to. Is it any good? God help me, I have been to a lot of these things with my children and maybe I’m developing Stockholm Syndrome but I’d say Bubble Planet is the best example in London of This Sort Of Thing: I have literally seen some of these rooms (or something very close to them) before, but not in a combination that so conspicuously maximises the fun. Unburdened by the weird artistic pretensions of the Balloon Museum or the penchant for padding out the attraction with rubbishy little rooms where not much happens a la most of the other experiences, Bubble Planet all killer no filler, if by ‘killer’ you mean ‘room full of giant balloons that keep bu

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the offer o

This review is from 2016, and of the original, two-part version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. This will close in September 2026, and in October 9 2026, it will slim down to a single show approximately two hours and 55 minutes in length. In the unlikely event you were worried a leap to the stage for JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series would result in it becoming aggressively highbrow, self-consciously arty or grindingly bereft of magical high jinks, just chill the hell out, muggle.  ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ is an absolute hoot, a joyous, big-hearted, ludicrously incident-packed and magic-heavy romp that has to stand as one of the most unrelentingly entertaining things to hit the West End. Writer Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany and a world-class team have played a blinder; if the two-part, five-hour-plus show is clearly a bit on the long side, it’s forgivable. ‘The Cursed Child’ emphatically exists for fans of Harry Potter, and much of its power derives from the visceral, often highly emotional impact of feeling that you’re in the same room as Rowling’s iconic characters.  There’s also a sense that this story of wizards and witches is being treated with the respect its now substantially grown-up fanbase craves. No disrespect to D-Rad and chums, but the leads here are in a different acting league to their film counterparts’: Jamie Parker and Alex Price are superb as battered, damaged, middle-aged versions of old enemies Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Sam Clemm

If you know Christopher Brett Bailey you will surely know him for 2014’s This Is How We Die, a hallucinatory, hilarious beat poetry-style road trip monologue that ended in an awesome roar of sound as the show – hitherto just Bailey at a desk – morphed into a cacophonous post rock gig.  There have been other lower-key projects since, plus at least one major dead end in the form of Carnival: At the End of Days, a film the Canada-born, US-raised, London-resident Bailey co-wrote with Terry Gilliam (it has suffered the fate of many Terry Gilliam films and seems unlikely to ever in fact be made).   But it’s probably reasonable to call I Saw Satan at the 7-Eleven Bailey’s first major live show since This Is How We Die (which toured for years).  Viewed through a strict theatre lens, there hasn’t been a huge amount of progression since TIHWD: it’s Bailey sitting at a desk again, delivering a hallucinatory road trip monologue again, only without the rock gig bit this time (select performances including the press night do include a batshit coda: it would be unfair to spoil the surprise and weird to discuss it as part of the show when it usually isn’t). But that’s not a particularly fair way of looking at it, I don’t think. With his mad-scientist hair and mad-scientist stare and general mad-scientist vibes all round, Bailey is a compelling live presence. He is, however, a guy sitting at a desk reading from typed pages (we know they’re not just a prop because he points out some typos). Th

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

This review is from February 2026. Arcadia transfers to the West End in June 2026 with casting TBC. Arcadia is just another play you can stage in the same way that the sun is just another thing floating in the sky. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece is a work of burning, ravenous intelligence, and while almost universally acknowledged as his best work, I get why it’s not staged very often.  I think part of the reason is that the late, great Stoppard probably gatekeepered it from half-baked revivals. But it does definitely involve a lot of people talking about maths, and as much as anything else you really need to be able to pull together a cast who can make discussions about the statistical implications of a country estate’s 200 year-old gamekeeping logs really sing. It’s obviously not a play about gamekeeping logs. It’s a play about the unpredictability of humanity, how we’re defined by our transience, our sex drives, and our desire to understand. Carrie Cracknell’s revival is not an attempt to radically reconfigure Arcadia and I doubt anyone would be so foolish as to try – it’s an incredibly specific play. She and her team - notably designer Alex Eales - have however leaned nicely into the Old Vic’s current in-the-round configuration. A bit of furniture aside, they've forgone any attempt to make it look like the country estate on which the play is set, which we visit in the early 19th century and again in the present. Instead we’ve got a revolving circular stage and lights tha

The jewel in the crown of the National Theatre’s 2026 schedule is Electra/Persona – a mash up of the Ancient Greek tragedy of Electra with Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1966 thriller Persona, adapted and directed by Aussie hotshot Benedict Andrews. That’s not the reason it’s such a big deal, though: it has a sensational cast headed by Tár co-stars Nina Hoss and Cate Blanchett. The presence of the latter means it’s all but guaranteed to sell out its two-month run immediately, so don’t miss out on your chance to buy tickets. The show was announced some time ago, but we do finally have the full information about it: it’ll run August 19 to October 10, with public booking opening at noon on Thursday May 21. Electra/Persona will also be going on sale to members the week before – although it won’t sell out on the pre-sale, membership will more or less guarantee you can get a ticket in an unhurried fashion (if you have an Amex card you should also get a couple of days’ advance sale access). Failing that, £10 Rush Tickets will be released every Friday throughout the run. Image: National Theatre‘Electra/Persona’ poster Electra/Persona is the biggest NT show to go on sale May 21, but not the only one. It’ll be joined by an eagerly anticipated revival of Caryl Churchill’s landmark Cloud No 9 (Nov 2 2026-Jan 13 2027), the first time the legendary avant-garde playwright’s breakthrough play has been staged in London in decades. There’s a one-week run for radical Portuguese play Catarina and th

Chessington World of Adventure is definitely the most old fashioned of the big London-adjacent theme parks. There’s something endearingly last century about the random bits of zoo you still find scattered around. It has, nonetheless, been investing in some very modern IP of late. Okay, 2023’s World of Jumanji area was relatively low stakes, given there probably isn’t such a thing as a rabid Jumanji fan. But it set the template for a rapid period of expansion that takes in two staggering thematic coups. Next summer Chessington will open the world’s first Minecraft-based theme park zone. And before that it’s done the same with a possibly even more successful franchise. If you are somehow unfamiliar with the phenomenon that is PAW Patrol, it’s a cartoon about a group of talking puppies who fight petty crime in Adventure Bay, a San Francisco-alike town populated by harmless oddballs who get into minor scrapes that inevitably require a ‘ruff ruff rescue’ from the pups and their absurdly OTT vehicles (bankrolled by Ryder, an incredibly wealthy 10-year-old child). Anyway, it is absolutely enormous with the under-fives, and now it has its own Chessington zone in the shape of World of PAW Patrol, which takes in four rides, a gift shop, a play area and themed snacks. Me and my kids went down to the press preview just before it opened and here are some thoughts. To get the slight negative out of the way first, the thing to bear in mind is that it’s a Chessington zone on a Chessington bu

High School Musical was a millennial Disney phenomenon. A low budget made-for-TV movie about high schoolers singing songs and getting overwrought about the school play, it was considerably more successful than a slot of the Disney cinema releases of the era, giving us two sequels, Zac Efron and innumerable spin offs. One of those spin offs is a stage version that hasn’t been seen in London since 2008, when the film was at the zenith of its popularity.  And also enjoying the first flush of success back then were the pop-rock band McFly, who never had anything directly to do with High School Musical, but whose dewy eyed reverence for the iconography of the American secondary school system very much permeated their whole thing. Anyway, those things very much come together in 2026 with the first ever fully homegrown British production of High School Musical, which will star McFly’s Harry Judd as Coach Jack Bolton, father of male lead Troy Bolton (aka the Zac Efron role). He’s the big name attraction in this new Brit production of the film’s stage musical adaptation, which will debut in Salford over the summer (with Jason Donovan as Coach Bolton) before settling in for a lengthy stint at the Troubadour Wembley Park, which has just been vacated by Starlight Express after a couple of years. Will it be pure millennial nostalgia? Or will a new young generation be wowed? We’ll find out this autumn.  High School Musical is at Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, Oct 12-Jan 3 2027. The best

A sunny hello to you all! London’s outdoor theatre season started in late April whether the weather likes it or not. Usually it does not, but in case you haven’t looked outside for the last week, the weather is pretty damn good right now. How long will it last? Open air theatre season simply doesn’t care: it effectively runs from April 23 (Shakespeare’s birthday, when the Globe opens for the year) to the last weekend of October (when the Globe closes). You can go to see an open-air theatre show today if you want (maybe bring a jumper); by summer you’ll have multiple options. I’m Andrzej, the theatre editor of Time Out, and here are my picks of the best open-air theatre shows to see this summer. The 8 best open air theatre shows to see in London The big one: Cats returns Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of TS Eliot’s whimsical book of cat poems was famously one of the most successful musicals of all time, the original production running for decades in the West End and beyond. While it famously spawned a film adaptation that we absolutely do not talk about, there has only even been one stage version in the UK. Until this summer, that is: in quite the coup, the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has bagged the first ever British revival of Cats. Expect something new and exciting with neither the overt ’80s vibe of the OG or the CGI bumholes of the film we don’t talk about. Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Jul 25-Sep 19. Buy tickets here. So many opportunities to see A Midsummer Nigh

It’s May on the London stage and we’re now entering that period of the year where things start seriously hotting up in the West End, as the biggest shows of 2026 – the ones that are hoping to still be here in a year – finally get their runs underway pre-summer. Things are warming up literally too: the Globe opened its doors in April, and the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre joins it this month. The biggest show coming to London in May is Beetlejuice, a massive Broadway Tim Burton musical adaptation that’s finally found a West End theatre big enough to stage it. The biggest name on the stage this month, however, is an all-time Brit legend who was a theatre regular until the ’80s when he left to become a film star. All tickets to Krapp’s Last Tape starring Gary Oldman are of course sold out, but read on to find out how you can still get in.  All this and plenty more besides, from a fresh chance to see Ava Pickett’s much-hyped 1536 to Jinkx Monsoon ‘doing’ Judy Garland. The best new London theatre shows opening in May 2026 Image: Royal Court Theatre   1. Krapp’s Last Tape Gary Oldman was a Royal Court stalwart until the mid-’80s, when he essentially quit theatre for film: you’ll probably be familiar with his work. Last year, however, he returned to the stage with a production of Samuel Beckett’s peerless experimental masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape, in which an old man listens back with mounting horror to the megalomaniacal recorded utterances of his youth. Debuting his production

Keira Knightley caused a major splash with her last – and to date, only – West End roles, starring in Molière’s The Misanthrope and Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour at the height of her late ’00/early ’10s fame.  Knightley has famously adopted a lower profile since becoming a mother a decade ago, but this autumn she’ll return to the stage in an extremely cool theatre project that’s very much in line with her hipper middle aged screen output. She’s the biggest name in superstar director Robert Icke’s new adaptation of The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s the Academy Award-winning 2006 thriller about Stasi surveillance of an East German neighbourhood during the last years of the Berlin Wall.  Icke is best known for his Shakespeare plays – his Romeo & Juliet is currently in the West End – and self-penned adaptation of classic plays (like recent hit Oedipus), though this will be his first foray into film adaptation – something that his idol Ivo van Hove is a big fan of. While Knightley is the biggest name as actress Christa-Maria Sieland, her male co-stars aren’t far behind: she’ll be joined by Game of Thrones and The Hours man Stephen Dillane as Stasi agent Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, and Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson as Georg Dreyman, the playwright – and lover to Christa-Maria – that Gerd is spying upon. Icke is superb writing about the complications of human emotion, and is profoundly unlikely to get bogged down in dodgy accents – expect something special. Th

If you’re not a theatre nerd, it’s not always easy to snap up tickets to the next big stage smash in good time. Coming to London on a wave of Broadway hype that may nonetheless have passed the casual London theatregoer by, US playwright Kimberly Belflower’s subversive high school drama John Proctor is the Villain has sold out its entire run at the Royal Court Theatre before it had even played a single show there. If you’d missed the fact the Old Vic was staging Tom Stoppard’s greatest play Arcadia until after the rapturous reviews came out then again – good luck getting tickets.  Good news, though: they’re both getting new leases of life, and you’ll have ample chance to see both again. Admittedly one chance will come sooner than the other: the dizzyingly clever Arcadia will move to the Duke of York’s Theatre in less than two months, plotting a summer run from June 20 to September 12. Meanwhile, there’s a rather longer wait to see John Proctor, which is set at a rural US high school and follows a group of sparky high schoolers studying Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the height of the #MeToo era: it will move to Wyndham’s Theatre next February, which is a chunky wait but can probably be attributed to a relative shortage of mid-sized West End theatres, plus there its American director Danya Taymor is probably unavailable for a while.  At the moment neither play has any cast announced. Arcadia probably has in fact been substantially cast, just not finalised: you can imagine any

The Sistine Chapel is coming to London. Sort of. In what is undeniably not quite the same thing as the Bayeux Tapestry coming to the British Museum, but still exciting nonetheless, a lavish new experience is aiming to channel the majesty of Michelangelo’s stupendous frescoes for a London audience this summer. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition is essentially an immersive type show in rough line with those Van Gogh and Klimt projection-based exhibitions, that will offer highly detailed, massive scale looks at the 34 frescoes that make up the chapel’s ceiling and collectively tell the story of Genesis. Rather than projections, however, these will be actual full-on highly details canvas reproductions. Photograph: Courtesy of Sistine Chapel Exhibit Some of these immersive art exhibitions are a bit down-at-heel, but this would appear to be something classier, an earnest attempt to bring over a work of art – or collection of works of art – that will unquestionably never, ever tour in pretty much the only way that it is physically possible to do that. Tickets are priced £19.50 peak and £17.50 off-peak – so around the same price as the €20 admission for the actual Chapel.  Whether you’re wanting to get a closer look at Michelangelo’s transcendent art for the first time or have seen the real thing and fancy a refresher, this is as close as you’re going to get without hopping on a flight to Rome. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition is at 1 America Square (near To

The prospect of an all-female cast version of David Mamet’s seminal drama of doomed masculinity and rampant capitalism Glengarry Glen Ross has been kicking around for a while now. Indeed, it was was even reported last year that the recent Broadway revival would flip the genders when the Kieran Culkin-led first cast departed. For whatever reason that did not happen, but clearly director Patrick Marber is very sold on the idea, as he’s now staging an all female Glengarry Glen Ross at the Old Vic this summer.  The big question is, can you just flip the play and do it the same, and the answer is probably ‘no’, which may account for why it didn’t happen on Broadway and why this is technically a new production with a new creative team. And, of course, a new cast: biggest name Indira Varma (pictured) will play Levene, the oldest person in a Chicago real estate office, a once formidable saleswoman fallen on hard times; US actor Rosa Salazar will play Roma, the sharklike, amoral saleswoman who leads the ensemble. They’ll be joined by Mercedes Bahleda, Nancy Crane, Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Florence Odumosu and Niky Wardley. How exactly it lands is TBC, but famously the nature of female workplace bullying can be very different to testosterone crazed ways of men and it’ll be fascinating to see if this revival can articulate that effectively. Glengarry Glen Ross is at the Old Vic, Jun 4-Jul 18. Buy tickets here. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2026. Michael Sheen is returni

Richard E Grant gives such immaculate ‘West End stage actor’ vibes that it’s easy to overlook the fact that he’s a relative stranger to Theatreland, having not done a play in London since Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged 20 years ago. This autumn, however, he cashes in all his suave older actor chips to take on one of the greatest British comedies of the 20th century, as he stars opposite beloved US TV star Christine Baranski – making her West End debut – in a massive new revival of Noël Coward’s all-time classic Hay Fever.  One of Coward’s greatest plays, the outrageous 1925 comedy tells the story of David and Judith Bliss, the heads of a bonkers, bickering upper class family who each invite guest to stay on the same weekend with disastrous consequences. It gets staged a fair amount, mostly because it’s very funny: the last big London production in 2012 featured a scene-stealing turn from a young Phoebe Waller-Bridge. So there are plenty of opportunities for younger cast members (who are TBA), but like a lot of Coward’s work, much of the enduring appeal lies in the fact that it provides great roles for older actors. It’s being directed by Emily Burns, a rising star with a knack for comedy, with her presence suggesting that while unlikely to be a by numbers take, this will likely be going for the funny bone rather than aggressively deconstructing the 101-year-old classic. Which is all to the good and probably what people want from Withnail & I legend Grant – but frankly it’ll j

Way back in 1998, a young Michael Sheen took to the Old Vic stage to play the title role of Peter Shaffer’s brilliant 1979 drama Amadeus, a masterpiece that followed the catastrophic, one-sided rivalry between the young, brilliant composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, his contemporary and rival who’d been largely forgotten by history until the play came along and made him infamous (possibly unfairly). It scored great reviews – running for 18 months – and clearly stayed with Sheen because a few years back he took on the older role of Salieri in a limited run Australian production. And now he’s aiming for a hat-trick! In case you missed it, Sheen has turned his back on Hollywood in order to focus on his new Welsh National Theatre company, which launched earlier this year with an acclaimed production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Other productions have been announced – a new play called Owain & Henry will run in Cardiff in November. But the next one we’re getting will be the third production of Amadeus he’ll have starred in, as he reprises the role of Salieri opposite rising Welsh star Callum Scott Howells’ Mozart in a new production from director Jeremy Herrin for the Welsh National Theatre. Photo: Felicity McCabe After debuting in Cardiff, this new Amadeus will transfer to the Noël Coward Theatre, where it will be Sheen’s first performance in a West End theatre since the acclaimed Frost/Nixon 20 years ago (he’s mostly appeared at the National Theatre since).

Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit turns 15 this year: but it just keeps getting bigger and bigger as it plots a fresh West End run with some truly massive names.  The playwright has made a career out of ‘cold read’ plays, that is to say mischievous works designed to be performed by a different actor each night who has never seen the show before and doesn’t know what’s coming, and is therefore responding to the prompts and text given to them live and for the first (and only) time. Although this has become Soleimanpour’s hallmark, in White Rabbit, Red Rabbit there was a particularly pointed reason: the actor was literally acting as a stand-in for the playwright, who at that time had been forbidden from leaving his home country of Iran.  The play has never really dated, and indeed with Iran so grimly back in world news it remains a playful, grimly fascinating look at everyday life under its controlling, paranoid regime.  More to the point, bigger and bigger names keep wanting to do it, and it returns for 2026 with a fresh host of slebs on board as it settles in for a West End residency under the auspices of new production company There & Then, formed by Soleimanpour and his regular director Omar Elerian. Running at the Duchess Theatre on Mondays (when its regular show The Play That Goes Wrong isn’t on), it will go on for several months, and we don’t have every celebrity name yet. But we do have a lot of them, including such heavy hitters as David