Andrzej Lukowski

Hi! I’m Time Out’s theatre editor, and arguably I got into this game purely to avoid having to pay for theatre tickets. But over the years I've picked up a few tricks on how to enjoy London theatre for less. People tend to think of London theatre as expensive. And they can be right: top West End prices have soared in recent years, with the best tickets for many popular shows costing over £200 or even £300. That’s as much as an entire music festival for a couple of hours of theatre. However, exorbitant top prices actually aren’t the whole story. For starters, the cheapest tickets for any given show are almost always less than £30 a pop, and often less than £20. This isn’t Broadway where everything is crazily priced. And the £200-plus tickets will only be a small minority (the issue is that they’re often the last ones to sell, for obvious reasons). There will always be inexpensive ways into a show, be it snagging a discounted online ticket or buying a bargain basement standing ticket. Want to go to the theatre in London but don’t think you can afford it? Here’s a hopefully exhaustive guide to why you’re wrong. Buy early The number one reason why people think West End tickets are expensive is because they don’t try and buy them until the show has already opened in a blaze of publicity, at which point they discover only the top price tickets are left. The fact is that every show has cheap seats, but they often sell out. Pay attention to what’s coming up and try to get in as early

Thanks to some frankly pretty wacky decisions made at the Council of Nicea in the year 325AD, the Easter weekend famously jumps around crazily from year to year, making the Easter holiday undoubedly the most erratic of all school breaks. For 2026, the school Easter hols stretch from Monday March 30 to Friday April 10, with the Easter weekend tucked away snugly in the middle of that (Good Friday is April 3; Easter Monday is April 6). Theoretically, then, the holiday should be precisely two weeks long with the bank holidays neatly contained therein, although doubtless some schools will tack on a cheeky Monday teacher training day at the end. Easter is a funny old holiday that be perfect outdoor weather and can be bloody awful. But hopefully spring will have fully sprung, and if not don’t worry – there’s absolutely loads to do in London this Easter holiday, and we’ve rounded up teh best option below.  Stuck for ideas on how to fill all this free time? That’s where we come in. Below is a list of ideas for things you can get up to in London with the kids this Easter holidays.  RECOMMENDED: Crack open our full guide to the Easter weekend.  

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 March 2026. London's best new restaurants at a glance: 🍛 Central: DakaDaka, Mayfair 🍠 North: Ling Ling’s, Islington 🇹🇭 South: Kruk, Peckham 🍝 East: Tiella, Bethnal Green 🥗 West: Martino’s, Chelsea March 2026: We have a new Number 1! The newly-opened Tiella in Bethnal Green has scooped the top spot thanks to knockout regional Italian dishes from chef Dara Klein. Other fresh additions include the slinky Martino's in Chelsea, Cambodian residency Barang at The Globe in Borough Market, foodie wine bar in a one-time Clerkenwell tattoo parlour Passione Vino, perfect produce at Dockley Road Kitchen in Bermondsey, Korean fusion spot Calong in Stoke Newington, Hunanese heat at Fiery Flavors in Surrey Quays, Ukrainian elegance at Sino in Notting Hill, cool diner energy at Dover Street Counter in Mayfair, Georgian classics at DakaDaka in Mayfair, and veggie-friendly Thai at Kruk in Peck

A relatively quiet month for comedy in London, with a lot of acclaimed shows from the last year back for final victory laps before their creators move on to the next thing. There’s still plenty on, mind, and if you’re a fan of James Acaster you’re pretty much in hog heaven as he seems to be playing a different London venue each night – most of them are sold out but he’s headlining a charity that you can still get into. 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.

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.

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 London theatre in 2026, but they are, as a rule, the biggest and splashiest shows coming up, alongside intriguing looking smaller projects.   London's best shows to book for at a glance: Best musical: Beetlejuice, Prince Edward Theatre Best Shakespeare play: Romeo & Juliet, Harold Pinter Theatre Best celebrity show: Krapp’s Last Tape, Royal Court Theare Best for teens: John Proctor is the Villain, Royal Court Theatre Best blast from the past: Cats, Open Air Theatre 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. It’s also beweilderingly big: between the showtune-centric West End and the constant pipeline of new writing from the subsidised sector – plus the Wild West of the fringe – there’s well over 100 theatres and over venues playing host to everything from classic revivals to cutting-edge immersive work. This is my attempt to make sense of all that for you. These are 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

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.

To say that William Shakespeare bestrides our culture like a colossus is to undersell him. Over 400 years since his death, the playwright is uncontested as the greatest writer of English who has ever lived. Even if you’re not a fan of sixteenth century blank verse – and if not, why not? – his influence over our culture goes far beyond that of any other writer. He invented words, phrases, plots, characters, stories that are still vividly alive today; his history plays utterly shaped our understanding of our own past as a nation. London Shakespeare plays at a glance: Best celebrity cast: Romeo & Juliet, Harold Pinter Theatre Best weird: The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Globe Best for kids: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Unicorn Theatre Best rarity: Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare’s Globe. And unsurpisingly he is inescapable in London. The iconic Elizabethan recreation Shakespeare’s Globe theatre is his temple, with a year-round programme that’s about three-quarters his works. Although based in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Company regularly visit the capital, most frequently the Barbican Centre. And Shakespeare plays can be found… almost anywhere else, from the National Theatre – where they invariably run in the huge Olivier venue – to tiny fringe productions and outdoor version that pop up everywhere come the warmer months.  This page is simple: we tell you what Shakespeare plays are on in town this month (the answer is pretty much always ‘at least one’). We we tell yo

The Christmas holidays barely feel like they’re over but oh look: here’s our old pal February half-term, back again. Dealing with the little ones for a week in the middle of what is arguably the bleakest month of the year is always a bit of a shock to the system. But fear not! By way of acknowledgement of all this London really steps up with the indoor activities challenge, with the annual Imagine festival at the Southbank Centre as ever leading the way for a week in which there’s in fact plenty to do. Read on for our top tips.  My name is Andrzej and I’m Time Out’s lead kids’ writer and also parent to two children who go to school in Bromley, where for some reason the local authorities think we want a two-week half-term. As ever, the idea with this list is to highlight the best new, returning or last chance to see shows; London also has plenty of evergreen fun for children of all ages, quite a lot of which you can find in out list of the 50 best things to do with kids in London. When is February half-term this year?  This year, London’s February half-term officially falls between Monday February 16 and Friday February 20 (ie children will be off continuously between Saturday February 14 and Sunday February 22).  Here’s our roundup of all the best things to do with your children this February half-term.

Borough is known for having one of the best food markets in the world, but it’s also home to some seriously good restaurants as well as the brilliant market. The Borough Yards development – just next to this historic, edible wonderland – is where you’ll find some of the latest and greatest spots to have a sit-down feast, including west African restaurant Akara and southern Thai sensation, Plaza Khao Gaeng. If you’re off to SE1 and your stomach is rumbling, then consult this list so you can hunt down all our favourite spots for a fabulous feed, from contemporary Greek classics at Oma and Pyro, to pasta at Padella, classy French cuisine at Camille and seafood at Applebee’s.  RECOMMENDED: The best restaurants in London Bridge. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

Hello – I'm Time Out’s theatre editor and also a parent, something that has a lot of overlap in London, a city with three dedicated kids theatres and where pretty much every other theatre might stage a child-friendly show. London's kids theatre shows at a glance: Best musical: Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre Best for teens: The Hunger Games: On Stage, Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre Biggest new show of last year: Paddington the Musical, Savoy Theatre  Quirkiest show for tweens: Who Let the Gods Out, Polka Theatre  This round up focusses on the flagship shows at London’s kids theatres – that’s the Little Angel, the Unicorn and Polka – plus other major shows aimed at or suitable for youngsters. On the whole, pre-school and primary children are the age groups best served specifically, because secondary school aged teenagers can generally see adult theatre perfectly well (and will indeed often be made to do so!). So while the odd teen focussed show will make it in here, if you’re looking for something to do with teens why not consult our reviews page or what to book list. Our London kids’ theatre page normally contains information for all the main children’s shows running in London theatres this month and next month, and is broken down into three categories. Theatre for all the family is suitable for any age, including adults without children. Theatre for older children is specifically aimed at school-age children and teenagers. Theatre for babies, pre-schoolers and yo

There are over a hundred theatres of all shapes and sizes throughout London, from tiny fringe venues above pubs to iconic internationally famous institutions like the National Theatre. And at the heart of it is the West End, aka Theatreland. What is a West End theatre? Unlike Broadway, where there are strict definitions based upon capacity, there is no hard and fast definition of a West End theatre. However, West End theatres are all commercial theatres – that is to say, they receive no government funding – and on the whole they are receiving houses, that is to say they don’t have in house artistic teams creating the work that they show (although often theatre owners like Andrew Lloyd Webber or Nica Burns may commission or even create the work). London's best West End shows at a glance: Best musical: Hamilton, Victoria Palace Theatre Best for families: My Neighbour Totoro, Gillian Lynne Theatre Best ’80s classic: Les Miserables, His Majesty’s Theatre Funniest show: Operation Mincemeat, Fortune Theatre  Hippest hit: Hadestown, Lyric Theatre They are mostly based in the West End of London, although it’s not a hard and fast rule, with two major ‘West End’ theatres at Victoria. Most West End theatres are Victorian or Edwardian, although Theatre Royal Drury Land and Theatre Royal Haymarket have roots a couple of centuries before that, while @sohoplace is the newest (it opened in 2022). Capacity is similarly all over the shop: the 2,359-set London Coliseum is the biggest; the sm

Andrew Doherty’s idiosyncratic folk horror comedy Gay Witch Sex Cult was one of the most arresting stand up debuts at last year’s Fringe. And its follow up Sad Gay AIDS Play is a lot of fun. But it also sails into tropier waters than its predecessor, and though hardly a run of the mill stand up show, it does feel like it’s treading on some pretty well worn ground. Doherty again plays a preeningly precious and self-regarding version of himself, now attempting to write a follow up to last year’s hit. Unfortunately his wealthy parents are refusing to bankroll him this time, so he’s turned to the Arts Council England, who have no interest in the creepy Six-esque musical he wants to write. But upon hearing he’s gay, ACE suggests in the strongest possible terms that he write a play about AIDS. Doherty goes about all this very amusingly, and his secret weapon is his own stage persona. Weasley, brittle and self justifying, making art for all the wrong reasons, secure in the knowledge that mummy and daddy’s money will bail him out if things go south - it’s depressingly but hilariously acute satire. But a bad taste play about AIDS? In 2025? Really? Team America’s ‘Everyone Has AIDS’ was 21 years ago and it’s decades on from the flowering of the great AIDS related dramas. It’s an absurdly anachronistic provocation – a handful of off-colour jokes about The Troubles feel edgier. Likewise the bit where he throws in a scene about a simple working class lad from Newcastle because ACE require

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

Anna Ziegler is one of those American playwrights who has had a million hits back home and remains virtually unproduced over here, (the sole exception being Photograph 51, which was a stonking West End hit about 10 years ago – less because it was an all time classic and more because it had Nicole Kidman in it.) Evening all Afternoon isn’t necessarily one for the ages either. However, it’s pretty good, and more to the point the 90-minute two-hander is a tremendous vehicle for two actors. It enables an absolutely storming stage debut for Erin Kellyman, the 27-year-old Brit who has been making a name for herself as a screen actor since her teenage years and now ticks ‘being great on stage’ off with an effortlessness that recalls Jodie Comer’s belated theatre debut a couple of years back. She plays Delilah, the surly university-age American daughter to an unseen British father. He’s taken her back home to England where she studies, sulks and slowly disintegrates, marinating in a dangerous psychological stew of grief at her mother’s death and the isolation of the Covid lockdown. And also resentment, of her dad’s new wife Jennifer (Anastasia Hille). An absolutely storming stage debut for Erin Kellyman The play is built on a fascinating variation on the old Brit/Yank culture clash. With her fabulous frizz of hair and perpetual scowl, Kellyman’s Delilah is a brassy, DGAF, New York-raised hipster who absolutely does not care about speaking her mind or causing offence. This puts her in

There’s a nagging irony at the centre of Bird Grove. This play about the young Mary Ann Evans – aka future literary titan George Eliot – features copious scenes of her expressing frustration that only men have a voice in society. But the play itself is very much written by a man, Alexi Kaye Campbell. It more or less styles this out, but there are lines where you wonder how Campell wrote them with a straight face.  Maybe I’m being unfair as really Bird Grove is about two people: Mary Ann and her father, Owen Teale’s Robert Evans. A slightly cringe epilogue aside, Campbell’s play barely alludes to Eliot, but is firmly concerned with Mary Ann, a brilliant and unconventional young woman who nonetheless desperately needs her dad. Teale’s Robert is a gruff middle class widower who is paying a small fortune for the titular abode in fashionable 1840s Coventry, essentially in an effort to engage with society and bag his beloved daughter a suitable husband. He’s doing this out of care: independent women weren’t really a thing at the time and in the opening scene he’s shown to be both indulgent of Mary Ann and her unconventional friends – including a flamboyant French hypnotist! - and intolerant of douchebag suitors, giving Jonnie Broadbent’s amusingly pathetic suitor Horace short shrift. He wants to make sure she’s looked after. Matters between them become tested when Mary Ann works up the courage to tell her dad that she no longer wants to go to church as she no longer believes. Final

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe I think we can all agree at that this stage in human history, no genre – or subgenre, whatever – has been more comprehensively done to death than the dinner party reunion play. I say this not to criticise Northern Irish playwright Karis Kelly for having the temerity to write a drama in which four female generations of the Gillespie familiy gather for the occasion of Eileen’s ninetieth birthday and drinks are taken, secrets are revealed etcetera etcetera. But I do wonder if some of the wackier decisions at the end come from a well-meaning but ill-advised desire to break the mould. In fact for much of its length Katie Posner’s production for Paines Plough makes for a perfectly decent play, even if it does have a familiar rhythm. Julia Dearden is great fun as the sweary, outspokenly Unionist Eileen; Andrea Irvine, Caoimhe Farren and Muireann Ni Fhaogáin are all solid as, respectively, Eileen’s mumsy but on edge daughter Gilly, strident granddaughter Jenny and sensitive English great granddaughter Muireann. Everything putters on nicely, with Dearden’s caustic comic performance keeping things lively as we edge towards revelations about the whereabouts of Gilly and Jenny’s absent husbands. And then Consumed goes totally nuts, with a trio of mountingly bombastic twists fired off in bewilderingly rapid succession. The whereabouts of Jenny’s husband turns out to be fairly pedestrian. Gilly’s is wild. And a further revelation from

Everyone knew there was more to the late Chadwick Boseman than Black Panther, but even so it was somewhat startling when Deep Azure – a play he wrote in 2005 – popped up on the winter programming schedule of Shakespeare’s Globe.  Boseman’s playwriting career fell by the wayside as his acting one took off, and from recent interviews with his widow Taylor Simone Ledward – who had tragically little time with him before his death from cancer – it’s apparent that she wasn’t especially familiar with this work until the Globe asked to stage it. And why would she be? Deep Azure was, relatively speaking, his most successful play, but it only received one staging in Chicago. There is undeniably something random about how by far its biggest production to date is at a candlelit Jacobean playhouse in London, 21 years on. Actually, though, the fit with the Globe makes sense beyond being a show that director Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu was keen to stage. Boseman’s play is not only written in street poetry-esque rhyming verse, but it features a ghost (kind of), a revenge plot and even actually quoted passages from Hamlet. Like Hamlet, it’s set in the aftermath of a death, that of Deep (Jayden Elijah), the free-spirited lover to Selina Jones’ intense Azure. He was killed by a cop, and she’s now stuck in a spiral of despair, compounded by her own underlying body image issues. She lives with Deep’s friends Tone (Elijah Cook) and Roshad (Justice Ritchie) because she doesn’t trust herself to go home in

I skipped the weekday press preview of this swish exhibition dedicated to all things Aardman Animations so that I could take my kids a few days later. The funny thing is, they were almost the only children there: on its opening Saturday, the Young V&A’s Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends was sold out to what appeared to be around 95 percent child-free east London creative types. It makes sense. Though the exhibition is nominally aimed at kids aged eight to 14, it’s important to remember that Aardman was founded in 1972, while its totemic animator Nick Park has been on board since 1985 and his first Wallace and Gromit film A Grand Day Out was released in 1989. In other words, Aardman has been part of most British adults’ lives for a lot longer than eight to 14 years. The original models are fascinating, charming and surprisingly impressive. I suspect that Aardman-stanning adults snapping up tickets far in advance will have skewed the opening weekend demographics, and that a higher proportion of little ones will end up attending as the run progresses, but there’s plenty in this exhibition for both kinds of visitor. Inside Aardman is a nice mix of nostalgic paraphernalia that will appeal to adults, and hands-on, how-to-make-your-own stop-motion film stuff that youngsters will get a kick out of. As befits this most self-effacingly British of animation studios, Inside Aardman largely eschews both hagiography and biography. There’s no massive bigging up of Park or crowin

Some of the touring kids’ exhibitions that come to the Horniman can be a little on the generic side. And while this is of limited concern to the target audience, who undeniably skew towards preschool age, it can be a tad wearying for adults (i.e. me) who end up making repeat visits over the years. Voyage to the Deep, however, is a lot of fun, combining a Jules Verne theme and elements from the animated kids’ show Octonauts, alongside some generic stuff that tots will inevitably enjoy. On tour from Australia’s National Maritime Museum, the exhibition is nominally based around Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, although the classic Victorian adventure novel is more of a jumping-off point than slavishly interrogated. What it does do is give the whole thing a distinct identity: the room is dominated by a sort of exploded recreation of the Nautilus, the fictional – and indeed, in 1870, science fictional – submarine on which Captain Nemo and crew traversed the world’s oceans on a quest for vengeance (the vengeance bit is very much not included here). Kids will learn a little something about how a submarine works via the exhibition’s Nautilus and its various interactive stations. But it’s not exactly hard science, more a fun selection of themed activities running from two CGI screens at the front that allow you to ‘steer’ the sub through the oceans by operating its steampunky controls, via bunks, grabber claws and curio-packed storage cupboards, right to the back where t

The name gives ‘generic Britcom’ and the show doesn’t entirely fail to deliver on that. But this musical adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry – a 2012 novel that was made into a film a couple of years back – has a fair few unlikely moments of its own, in a good way.  Joyce’s own stage adaptation certainly isn’t a glossy teeth, tits and showtunes affair. Katy Rudd’s production of this yarn about a taciturn man in his sixties having what I think is fair to describe as an elaborate mental breakdown reminded me quite a lot of the charmingly eccentric recent West End hit The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Both deal with oddball older protagonists from southwest England; both have supernatural elements; both eschew trad orchestration in favour of rustic folk songs, with the tunes here written by indie folkster Passenger. The story, then, concerns Harold (Mark Addy), a dully affable gent living a life of quiet routine with his pass agg wife Maureen (Jenna Russell). But then he receives a letter from Queenie (Maggie Service), a former colleague of his who he hasn’t seen in 20 years. She is writing to let him know that she is dying of cancer in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed, and she wants to thank him for the kindness he showed her in the past. He composes a hilariously terse letter of condolence and decides to walk down to the post box to send it, but finds that this doesn’t seem adequate and long story short he decides to walk from rural Devon to Be

I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever heard proper walk-on applause in this country before. But the Shadowlands audience erupted as soon as star Hugh Bonneville walked out on stage. Either our stiff upper lipped standards are slipping, there were a load of Americans in, or Bonneville fans are simply very, very thirsty people. Of course I choose to believe the latter, and it’s emblematic of Bonneville’s peculiarly English middle aged charm that the role that’s getting his base so hot under the collar is that of the extremely low thirst CS Lewis. A revival of Wiliam Nicholson’s 1989 play, Shadowlands stars Bonneville as the devoutly Christian Chronicles of Narnia author, and traces his real life romance with the younger American poet Joy Davidman. And it’s largely delightful, not an odd couple meet cute, but a story about a genuine, real connection between two somewhat lost souls. He is a man in his late fifties who lives a life of scholarly bachelorhood, in rooms he shares with his doddery older brother Major WH Lewis (Jeff Rawle). But Lewis – or ‘Jack’ to most people, though his real name was Clive – is also kind and amusing. He’s hardly a monk, and indeed we learn that his inability – or lack of desire – to form attachments with women can in part be traced to trauma at the early death of his mother. Maggie Siff’s Davodman is self-possessed and fiercely intelligent. She is brave but vulnerable, travelling the world with her sweet young son Douglas, her promising start as a poet h

Man and Boy is never going to displace The Deep Blue Sea or The Browning Version or even French without Tears as the quintessential Terence Rattigan work. But this is a truly extraordinary revival, that in its way has a significance that transcends the actual choice of play. Anthony Lau’s production is the first Rattigan I’ve seen that throws off the shackles of naturalism. Even amazing productions of his plays have basically been set in some variant of a period drawing room. But with Lau’s Man and Boy, Rattigan finally joins Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen et al in being deemed a playwright whose work can be given a batshit staging and still stand tall.  Staged in the round, designer Georgia Lowe‘s distinctly Brechtian, wilfully anachronistic set is a billiard table-like spread of green with a smattering of period decor (a wireless, a dial phone). The centre is dominated by a series of metal legged, Formica-looking tables of the sort that I don’t think existed in 1934, the year in which the play is set. And the very long dot-matrix printed financial report deployed at one point is definitely not right. Oh, and on the back wall in an alluring retro font is an actual cast list that illuminates the names and roles of whoever is on stage at the time (aesthetics aside, this is just a bloody good idea.). I don’t think every part of the design is loaded with meaning. But collectively it sets Rattigan free from chintzy tradition, and when combined with Angus MacRae’s wild, jazzy score g

This review is from the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe. Every Fringe needs a Big Tear Jerker, and this year the title unquestionably goes to Haley McGee’s ‘Age Is A Feeling’, a prodigiously wise, sad and beautiful contemplation of a life. A barefooted McGee sits in a high wooden chair in front of us. Her age is somewhat indeterminate – she could be anywhere from late twenties to early forties – a fact that suits the show, which she performs in a circle of flowery poles, each with a word that corresponds to a story. At intervals throughout, audience members are invited to choose from a selection of the words. The stories that aren’t chosen are discarded, and we never get to hear them (though in some cases we get a brief outline). It’s kiiind of a gimmick: McGee’s point is that nobody ever truly knows a person, not even themself, and so we’re deliberately presented with an incomplete life. But what we’re presented with doesn’t feel particularly incomplete, and I kind of wonder if McGee just wrote too much material for the show. But it adds a certain artsy structure to proceedings, gives it a form beyond McGee just telling us a yarn - it’s a bit of a gimmick, but it’s not gimmicky. Anyway: McGee’s narrative starts at her protagonist’s twenty-fifth birthday: she recounts her dad telling her his belief that you can only hire a rental car from that age because it’s only then that your brain has finished developing. Somebody tells her age is a feeling, and McGee’s monologue goes on to try

My one rule of theatre is that while it’s nice to travel to see shows out of town, there’s never any point in having FOMO because everything that’s actually any good will probably end up coming to London anyway. And March 2026 certainly proves the hell out of that rule, as we’re treated to transfers of the most acclaimed Broadway show of last year (John Proctor is the Villain), the first production from Michael Sheen’s Welsh National Theatre (Our Town), and transfers from such exotic locales as Bristol (Choir Boy) and Leicester (Kinky Boots). Plus plenty of homegrown magic including a massive luxury National Theatre production of Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk, and the great director Robert Icke helming a new production of Romeo & Juliet starring Sadie Sink. The 10 best new London theatre openings in March 2026 Photo: Empire Street ProductionsNoah Jupe and Sadie Sink 1. Romeo & Juliet What a joy it is to live in an era in which Robert Icke and Jamie Lloyd – arguably the two most exciting mainstream theatre directors alive – are basically now in charge of West End celebrity Shakespeare. Following Lloyd’s superlative Much Ado last year, Icke picks up the baton again with his own take on Romeo & Juliet, this one with Stranger Things starlet Sadie Sink as one half of of the doomed teenage power couple and Noah Jupe – best known for his role in the Quiet Place films – as her Romeo. Expect (as ever with Icke) an emotional but unsentimental production that’s liable to find new meaning

Post-pandemic the ‘big summer musical’ has become tradition at the Barbican: the iconic arts centre has staged one every year since 2021. This year, it’s one-upping itself and putting on two. It was announced some time ago that the first half of the summer would see it stage Cole Porter’s High Society, in a production that’s the spiritual sequel to the smash production of Porter’s Anything Goes that ran in 2021 and 2022.  That’s definitely one for the ‘classic musicals’/‘bring your nan’ crowd.  The second half of the summer is given over to something rather different in the form of Death Note. It will be a new musical adaptation of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s hugely successful ’00s manga series about a gifted student named Light Yagami who – for Reasons – is given an enchanted notebook that will kill anyone whose name is written in it within 40 seconds. Now convinced he is basically a god, Yagami reshapes the world as he sets about eliminating its criminals. Baffled at events, the authorities turn to enigmatic master detective L to try and get to the bottom of the killings. It’s a fairly unusual set up for a musical, but to be fair no more so than Cats, and this adaptation by Frank Wildhorn, Jack Murphy and Ivan Menchell has in fact been kicking around in various Asian productions for the last 10 years, with a concert version of it staged over here a few years back. Now, though, it gets by far its biggest Western production to date as it moves into the Barbican for six w

We already knew the new RSC season was good un’, thanks to the early announcement last week of Game of Thrones: The Mad King, the largely self-explanatory (though you can read more about it here if you want) stage prequel to George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. That’s not all the Royal Shakespeare Company has in store for us over the next year or so – not by a long shot. Following The Mad King – the dates of which are TBC, but it'll be this summer – Hollywood and Broadway star Jonathan Groff will return to the British stage for the first time in over a decade. He’ll star as Rosalind in an all-male production of Shakespeare’s forest-set romp As You Like It (Sep 26-Nov 7) that will also star the redoubtable Brit actor Fisayo Akinade as Rosalind’s BFF Celia. RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans directs. Balancing out the all-lads As You Like It is a revival for Phyllida Lloyd’s seminal all-female Julius Caesar (Nov 5-28), which was first seen at the Donmar Warehouse a decade ago and returns alongside star Harriet Walter, who’ll be reprising her superb turn as Brutus. The Swan Theatre will be dominated by the sort of thing the RSC does best: from October to the new year it’ll play host to an epic, two-part adaptation of George Eliot’s great novel Middlemarch (Oct 1-Jan 16 2026), written by Nina Raine, who is currently doing the honours for the National Theatre’s much-anticipated Summerfolk. Finally, the busy year will be rounded off with the RSC’s traditional Big Chr

When Broadway comedy smash Oh, Mary! opened in the West End at Christmas, it did so with no celebrity names, just its own formidable reputation and a couple of very credible stage actors in the form of Mason Alexander Park as narcissistic First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, and Giles Terera as her sexually repressed husband Abraham Lincoln.  So far so good, but it’s hard to imagine Cole Escola’s smash having quite the longevity it’s had on Broadway without a little more celebrity sauce, where the likes of Tituss Burgess, Jinkx Monsoon and Jane Krakowski have played Mary since the departure of Escola themself.  Anyway, long story short, Brit comedy icon Catherine Tate will be the new Mary, taking over from Park April 27, and staying in the role until July 18, as the play extends in tandem. Terera already had an engagement at the Old Vic to co-star in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, so he’ll be leaving earlier (March 14), with his replacement stage actor Scott Karim starting a couple of days later and staying throughout Tate’s run.  Tate feels like perfect casting for a show that is clearly heavily influenced by old school ’70s British comedy; she’ll also clearly bring a completely different tone and energy to things than the younger, non-binary, American Park. Clearly she’s going to open Oh, Mary! up to a new audience; it also begs the question as to whether the show will – like Cabaret and 2:22 A Ghost Story – enjoy a long run on the basis of a series of ever juicier celeb stunt c

A Game of Thrones play has been in the works for ages now – it was first announced in 2021, and was then due to debut on the West End in 2023 under the name The Iron Throne. While the core creatives of playwright Duncan Macmillan and director Dominic Cooke haven’t changed, a lot else has, and long story short the fully George RR Martin-endorsed and compliant play is now called Game of Thrones: The Mad King, it’s coming this summer with dates TBC, and will be produced by the RSC, who will stage it not in London but in Stratford-upon-Avon. The exact reasons it took so long are unclear: the show will have taken considerably longer to get from announcement to completion than either Game of Thrones spin-off TV series. That said, it’s not a patch on the delay for Martin’s infamous sixth A Song of Ice and Fire novel The Winds of Winter, and you have to imagine that a fair amount of development might have been required to make medieval-style combat that looks good on stage. And it certainly sounds like that will be required as the show is set at a jousting tournament. Or rather, to hardcore ASOIAF fans, it chronicles the fateful Tourney at Harrenhal that led to Robert's Rebellion, a pivotal event that set up the main story of the books and TV series. It’s also flashed back to in A Game of Thrones (the novel) and we know quite a lot of details about it, and that it featured various younger versions of beloved series characters such as Ned Stark and Jaime Lannister. GoT has always had

★★★ In theory, Kip Williams’ Dracula is the perfect homecoming vehicle for Cynthia Erivo. Having spent her twenties making a name for herself on the London stage, she hasn’t trodden our boards since a Menier Chocolate Factory production of The Color Purple kicked her career into overdrive a decade ago. But the Stockwell-born Wicked star was always going to come home at some point, and Dracula offers the chance to show her range: taking on 23 roles in a stage retelling of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel. And let’s be honest, it has the air of awards bait. Auteur Aussie director Williams’ aggressively techy, film-heavy style is pretty out there. But Dracula follows his wildly acclaimed one-woman Dorian Gray, which won its star Sarah Snook a Tony and an Olivier. However, in Dorian Gray, Snook’s live performance always felt like the main event. In Dracula, Williams’ virtuoso use of film gets in the way. There’s a lot of debate over whether ‘live video’ – that is to say, a performance relayed via video feed to a big screen on the stage – counts as theatre, and the answer I will give anybody to this is ‘yes’. The problem with Dracula is that as it wears on, Erivo has to portray multiple characters of roughly the same importance at the same time. Williams’ solution to this is to make heavy use of pre-recorded Erivos, who we can see on the screen, impressively blended with a live feed of the set and the ‘real’ Erivo.  Photo: Daniel Boud The thing is, there is far more pre-rec

London has a lot of West End theatre sales, the biggest of which is indisputably London Theatre Week. While the actual discounts and participants vary from year to year, LTW is quite literally the biggest sale: despite the name promising a mere seven days of stagey bargains, there are actually two London Theatre Weeks a year, and they’re both a month long. It makes no sense, but we’ll take it… Without further ado then: the first LTW of the year is upon us now, and lasts until March 8 and there’s plenty of great bargains to be scored, with the headlining attraction being the multitude of big name West End long-runners taking part including The Lion King, Hamilton, Mamma Mia!, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, The Book of Mormon, My Neighbour Totoro, Matilda, Six, Oliver!, The Devil Wears Prada and Wicked, with tickets for these starting from £19 when you book here (yes, Time Out is a partner). Those are the big splashy names, but it’s also a great opportunity to book in for a new show that might be some months away from opening and may sell out when the reviews drop, but for now is happy to drop prices a little. Smart tickets to get might include the National Theatre’s lavish new production of Gorky’s Summerfolk, Kiln’s Beatles drama Please Please Me, and the Royal Court’s African space race drama The Afronauts. Whatever the case, it’s well worth a rummage though if you’re thinking of making a London theatre booking anytime soon. London Theatre Week runs until Mar 8. Book tic

It’s easy to roll your eyes at screen to musical adaptations, but when they work, they really work, as evidenced by 2005’s Billy Elliot the Musical. Arriving just five years after the Stephen Daldry directed, Lee Hall-written film about a young lad from County Durham who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer at the height of the miners’ strike, Daldry and Hall returned with the addition of songs from one Elton John. They made for somewhat unlikely bedfellows on paper, but in reality the move to musical was an unalloyed success, with the medium allowing Billy Elliot to seesaw ever more wildly between kitchen sink northeastern life and full on fantasy.  It was a stonking success, running at the Victoria Palace Theatre for over a decade, finally closing in 2016 when the theatre had a refurb in order to accommodate Hamilton. It didn’t do too shabbily over on Broadway either, running for four years and winning a pretty incredible 10 Tony Awards. Billy Elliot also, by the by, launched the career of a young man named Tom Holland, who worked his way up through the cast to the title role over the course of a couple of years spent in the show. It’s pretty good, basically, and now it’s heading back to London. Hamilton is still firmly ensconced at the Victoria Palace, so Billy Elliot will be heading to the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand, which is soon to be vacated by the departing Back to the Future the Musical. There’s a little while to wait, though: the show will tour to Sunderland, Manch

It’s been a decade since his death but David Bowie remains as great a presence in London as ever: the V&A’s David Bowie Centre opened to the public last year, it’s recently been announced that his childhood home in Bromley will be turned into a museum, and a lavish posthumous archive release campaign came to its head just a few months ago with final set I Can’t Give Everything Away. Lightroom in King’s Cross specialises in spectacular, specially made immersive films that are screened all over its floors and walls by its ultra high-powered projectors. Subjects so far include the work of David Hockney, Vogue magazine, and the two movies that currently remain in the repertoire: The Moonwalkers, a film about the Apollo landings by Tom Hanks, and Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs, which is pretty much as you’d imagine.  Frankly, Bowie is a no-brainer for similar treatment: his epochal sense of style and theatre, heavily documented life, and peerlessly banging catalogue lend themselves perfectly to an all(ish)-senses film.  And so it is: new immersive film David Bowie: You’re Not Alone will debut at the Lightroom from April. Photo: Justin Sutcliffe Featuring no narration other than Bowie’s own voice, we’re promised You’re Not Alone ‘is both a multimedia spectacle and an intimate and revealing self-portrait’, that will dip deep into the vaults of the Bowie Archive in New York to both bring us closer to the man and to showcase some of his greatest live performances. Like al

Internationally touring immersive exhibitions – offering teched-up, often fairly lurid accounts of key episodes in history – are becoming a bigger and bigger thing in London. In large part the astonishing recent volume of them is because there are two new-ish spaces in London – Dock X and ImmerseLDN – that are big enough to house shows that have been touring Europe and the US for a while but have lacked an obvious London home.  It was announced a couple of weeks ago that Dock X’s Titanic exhibition would be replaced by a new one one about the Vikings. And now it’s been announced that The Last Days of Pompeii at ImmerseLDN will be replaced by Cleopatra: The Experience. It does, of course, pertain to the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, whose name still rings through history thanks to extremely enthusiastic reports of her beauty, her interactions with the Roman Empire, and of course Shakespeare’s immortal play Antony and Cleopatra. Photo: ImmerseLDN In fact, while Cleo is the star, it’s perhaps best to view the show as a sort of sequel to last year’s Tutankhamun exhibition (which is by the same people) that generally focusses on the late days of Ancient Egypt (rather than the zenith shown in Tutankhamun). Spanning nine galleries and 3,000 square metres, the show is was developed in collaboration with historical curators and Egyptologists, and endorsed by British Cleopatra expert, Dr Chris Naunton.  Photo: ImmerseLDN It will trace the Alexander the Great-begat Ptolemic Dynasty – of

Disney’s latest megabudget musical spectacular has announced it’s leaving town a little more than a year after it opened: Hercules will close its doors on September 5, just after the school summer holidays are wrapped up. It’s got to be viewed as a small disappointment for Disney, whose stage version of The Lion King is the most successful musical in history and still going strong on the West End and Broadway. Hercules has lasted notably less time than Frozen, which preceded it in the gargantuan Theatre Royal Drury Lane.  That said, a year-and-a-bit at Drury Lane is nothing to sniff at and it’s so big that there’s rarely the expectation that a show will run and run there. Hercules didn’t do as well as Frozen, but it would be kind of nuts if it did given how much more popular the movie version of Frozen was than the relatively culty Hercules. And it’s hardly leaving in disarray, with its closing date over seven months away. Photo: Matt CrockettLuke Brady (Hercules) Speculation will inevitably turn to what replaces it in the West End’s biggest theatre. Disney has hogged Drury Lane in recent years and is having a tryout of its much anticipated Greatest Showman musical in Bristol this spring – rumours abound that it’ll be next up in Drury Lane if all goes well. But there are other possibilities, with several larger Broadway musicals hovering in the wings waiting for a suitably large London theatre to move into. There’s also the possibility that there may be another gap between

It’s been a while since Adrian Lester graced the London stage: the only thing he’s done this decade is the low key post-pandemic show Hymn, at the Almeida, back in 2021.  But after scoring great notices in the RSC’s Stratford-upon-Avon production of Edmond Rostand’s panache-tastic romance Cyrano de Bergerac, the screen star – still possibly best known for his starring role in Spooks – will return to the West End for the first time in a decade later this year when Simon Evans’ production heads to the Noël Coward Theatre. Co-starring the wonderful Susannah Fielding as Roxane, the true love of the gorgeously poetic but outwardly ugly Cyrano, the production is, by all accounts, a lot more traditional than Jamie Lloyd’s raptastic James McAvoy-starring production of a few years back. It’s a proper period production, and Lester’s Cyrano has a big old prosthetic nose. Nonetheless, it’s an updated version by Evans and the poet Debris Stevenson, and Stratford reviews praised its tough heart, lack of chintz, and terrific performance from Lester as a Cyrano gripped with self-loathing. For those unfamiliar with the play and story, it follows the romantic misadventures of the gifted but ugly French soldier Cyrano, who feels unable to woo the beautiful Roxane himself so instead opts for writing love letters to her on behalf of the pretty but dim Christian. Needless to say, this does not end particularly well. Cyrano de Bergerac is at the Noël Coward Theatre, Jun 13-Sep 5. Tickets are now on