Andrzej Lukowski

Time Out recently declared the ancient Bulgarian city of Plovdiv to be the most underrated in Europe. But despite having its ups and downs over the 8,000 years it’s been inhabited, it’s definitely having a moment right now. That’s partly because the erstwhile Macedonian and Roman town of Philippopolis is an absolute treasure trove of ancient architecture, much of which is still being unearthed to this day.  But it’s not all pagan temples and Roman theatres. A wag might say there were also some impressive ancient relics on display at the newly launched PhillGood Festival (Phillgood because Philippopolis), which held its inaugural edition in 2026. Staged next to an atmospheric disused stadium on the outskirts of town, its debut notably brought a large number of mostly British music legends to Bulgaria for the first time in their lengthy careers, with The Cure and Gorillaz headlining the first two nights and US star Moby winding things up on the Sunday.  ➡️ READ MORE: Ultimate guide to the best festivals in Europe   Photograph: OrleffThe Cure were among the festival’s first headliners   The order of the day is quality over quantity: there are just three stages and each has only four acts per evening. Things kick off around 6.30pm, with the PhillCool stage having a more local line-up, PhillRave playing host to the dance artists, and the main PhillGood stage hosting splashier larger European acts – notably Wolf Alice, Kneecap and Suede in the first edition, as well as the headli

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 see 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. RECOMMENDED:  Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival FringeThe 10 best comedy shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026The 16 best theatre shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026.

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: Chat Noir!, The Lost Estate Best for Trekkies: Bridge Command Best for music lovers: Mamma Mia! The Party, The O2 Best for a fancy dress adventure: Pirates of the Caribbean, Secret Cinema 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 immerse

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.

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. Think Phoebe Waller-Bridge, think Richard Gadd, whose careers were made by the Fringe. 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. (Please note th

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. (Please note the list is in alphabetical order). 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

August 2026: There's a brand new Number 1 on the list, with the exceptional Impala in Soho taking the top spot as our favourite new restaurant in London. Other fresh additions include Hon's BBQ in Hackney Wick, Cue Point in Notting Hill, Jackson Boxer's Vesper in Clerkenwell and All Roads in Brixton, as well as a sensational supper club at Haggerston cafe, Logma. 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 August 2026. London's best new restaurants at a glance: 🥩 Central: Impala, Soho 🍷 North: The Golden Tooth, Newington Green 🦐 South: The Victory, East Dulwich 🍝 East: Hon's BBQ, Hackney Wick 🥗 West: Maai by Nikita, 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. The hottest new openings, the tastiest tips, the spiciest reviews: we’re serving it all on our London restaurants WhatsApp

London’s South Asian food scene is a mosaic of flavours showcasing the culinary traditions of everywhere from India and Pakistan to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Rather than one unified cuisine, it reflects the complex cultural tapestry that has evolved through centuries of migration, trade, and gastronomic exchange across the subcontinent. For the diaspora, food goes beyond sustenance; it’s an expression of identity, memory, and community.  London’s best Indian and South Asian restaurants at a glance: 🇱🇰 Best for Sri Lankan food: Rambutan, Borough Market 🍛 Best for a quick curry: Tamila, Kings Cross ⭐ Best for a Michelin star meal: Trishna, Marylebone 🍚 Best for a street-food snack: Shree Krishna Vada Pav, Fitzrovia 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Best for a family feast: Kokum, East Dulwich Rooted in philosophical teachings, including the mindful and balancing principles of Ayurveda, South Asian food in London emphasises reverence for natural ingredients and the simple joy of eating. From masala-rich Pakistani karahis and delicate vegetarian Gujarati thalis, to the spicy thrum of Bangladeshi bhortha, this list spans the diversity of the cuisine in the city. Whether it’s fine dining, street food at a community centre, trailblazing female chefs, or a family-run canteen, these establishments are love letters to their heritage, connecting Londoners through the warmth of South Asian hospitality, shared flavours and stories.  RECOMMENDED: The 50 best restaurants in London. Shekha Vyas is

For many people, musical theatre basically is theatre, and certainly there are a hell of a lot of musicals running in London at any given time, from decades-long classics like Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera to short-run fringe obscurities, plus all manner of new shows launched every year hoping for long-running glory. London's best musicals at a glance: The summer’s big hit: Jesus Christ Superstar, London Palladium/Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Best of the oldies: Les Miserables, Sondheim Theatre Best for families: Paddington the Musical, Savoy Theatre The next big thing: One Day, Garrick Theatre. Funniest musical: Operation Mincemeat, Fortune Theatre Here Time Out rounds up every West End musical currently running or coming soon, plus fringe and off-West End shows that we’ve reviewed – all presented in fabulous alphabetical order. SEE ALSO: How to get cheap and last-minute theatre tickets in London.

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: Hamlet, venue TBC. Best summer fun: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s Globe Best rarity: King John, Shakespeare’s Globe. Best for Radiohead fans: Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Barbican Centre. Best grab a ticket as soon as they go onsale: Lear, Yard Theatre 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

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: Sunday in the Park with George, Barbican Centre Best Shakespeare play: Lear, Yard Theatre. Best celebrity show: The Lives of Others, Adelphi Theatre Best blast from the past: Cats, Open Air Theatre Best batshit crazy idea: The World is Full of Married Men, Yard 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 pric

Dayna McAlpine: ‘I first moved to Edinburgh from the depths of the Scottish countryside when I was 18, and I still feel as in awe of it now as I did all those years ago. Where else in the UK can you feel such a rich mix of gothic history and Scottish heritage while experiencing an electric present that never stands still? You don’t have to simply take my word for it either; just look at Edinburgh’s calendar of world-famous arts and music festivals, ever-evolving food and drink scene and globally-renowned venues. And all of it would be nothing without our hospitality – we want you to experience Edinburgh like a local. The feeling of belonging was enough to draw me to come home after a seven year stint in London. So join us for a dram, dance into the wee hours, marvel at the sights and experience why we love our city so much. It’s enough to make you never want to leave.’ 🏨 Ready to book? Here are Edinburgh’s best Airbnbs and very best hotels The best things to do in Edinburgh, at a glance 💎 Our can’t-miss activity: Get stuck into Edinburgh Fringe 2026  💸 Best free activity: Clamber up Arthur’s Seat 🪕 Best local experience: Dance at a traditional ceilidh 🥘 Best for foodies: Sample cheese at I.J. Mellis 🐋 Best for kids: Visit the National Museum of Scotland Dayna McAlpine is a writer from Edinburgh. At Time Out, all of our travel guides are written by local writers across the UK who know their cities inside out. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Club NVRLND transfers to London in winter 2026. One of the buzziest and frankly most bewildering hits of this year’s fringe is Club NVRLND, a work of (I guess) immersive club theatre that attracted a very large, very enthusiastic crowd on the Tuesday night I saw it. Setting aside the fact it’s a hit, and donning my ‘critic bastard’ hat, the nicest thing I can say about Club NVRLAND is that the creative team have done a wonderful job of coming up with an idea for a show that people – including a lot of young people – are clearly hugely into. But Club NVRLND could have been done better. It feels like a distant cousin to the recent West End musical smash & Juliet, but made by people with no experience or aptitude for musical theatre. As you might guess, the show – conceived of and directed by Steven Kunis – is a riff on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, set a nebulous number of years after the events of the original story. Peter is on the cusp of 30, and Wendy is now on the verge of getting married. We first meet her as she stumbles tearily in her dress to the door of Club NVRLND, which is – of course – good old Neverland reimagined as a nightclub. There are a few oddities with this: Smee is now a hot jacked guy, the crocodile is a big Romanian gangster. But I think we can basically get on board with the premise.  But the book, by rising star Jack Holden, is at best negligible, a flimsy account of the various characters working throug

Death Note: The Musical is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's classic mid-’00s Death Note manga, which concerns Light Yagami, a Tokyo high school student who (via a capricious death spirit) comes into possession of a book that kills anyone whose name is written in it. Frank Wildhorn, Jack Murphy and Ivan Menchell's adaptation is largely drawn from the first half of the series and simplifies the story in various ways. But it’s doesn't take any major liberties, other than the fact they’re all singing now. This is potentially good news for fans of the series, of which there are clearly a lot: I caught the show the Monday after press night and it was rammed, with a noticeably large number of boy tweens in attendance (the age advice is 12-plus and I’m not sure I’d let my boy tweens watch it but let he who casts the first stone etc). If you’re not a pre-existing fan of the series you may well – like me! – spend the whole time with your jaw on the ground wondering why the hell this is all happening and why the characters are all like this.  It was always going to be an unconventional musical, but the retention of the bizarre, generally sociopathic, undoubtedly manga-accurate behaviour of almost every major character feels like a missed opportunity to do something more interesting and tragic with this story. I would have liked more liberties, please. A gleefully bombastic, tightly drilled, visually impressive rock musical The i

Emma Howlett is a gifted, extremely clever writer-director who scored a deserved Summerhall hit last year with the audacious feminist science odyssey Aether. Howett’s follow-up is The Plot and really (if you’re British, anyway) there is only one plot: the failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, aka the Gunpowder Plot. A two-hander performed by Sophie Kean and Abby McCann, we initially meet brother plotters Thomas and Robert Wintour (aka Guy Fawkes’ less famous mates) as they’re playing a word association game in which they pass a lit match back and forth, with the loser the one holding it when it burns down. It becomes apparent from their conversation that they’re dead, and awaiting entry to ‘upstairs’ or ‘downstairs’ although I think Howlett means this as much reputationally as theologically. The fact they’re playing with matches, which didn’t really exist until at least two centuries after their deaths, suggests they’ve been here a long time and that perhaps they’re only going to go up or down when public opinion on the Plot settles.  The plot of The Plot is very heavy going indeed To that end they don a series of costumes and take on a succession of characters ranging from themselves and their fellow plotters to James I and even William Shakespeare to offer a guide to the tangled threads of the Plot, from its nuts and bolts origins, class and religious dimensions, to the full gruesomeness of Fawkes’ execution, to the way Macbeth was inspired by the eve

In another good year for Edinburgh Fringe shows billed as comedy that could easily have been put down as theatre, here’s a theatre show that could easily have been comedy. The start of her second solo hour – following last year’s Main Character Energy – is in fact indistinguishable from stand-up, as the sunny, charismatic Wilkey talks us through a classic solo-show conundrum. She’s single! And she doesn’t know why! Which is particularly galling because she’s bisexual and – by her own account – pretty unfussy.  And she’s very amusing about it all, batting out a selection of a cappella R&B classics as she talks through a romantic history that can kind of be summed up as ‘Jesus then men then women’. She’s particularly funny on why feckless lesbians are just as annoying to date as feckless straight guys.  The theatre, then, comes from the conceit that Wilkey herself is incapable of being honest with herself and about her wants, needs and history and so to get the real goss we need to visit her ‘infinite pussy’, a sort of more liberated version of herself dressed in gauzy red robe who we transition to via loud sucking sound. This all builds to a climax that brings in her morose, wounded heart as a charactrer too (also played by the artist). This stuff does all get a bit woo-woo: on the one hand there’s a slightly terrifying outpouring of self-love etc, on the other the whole thing with Wilkey playing herself, her vag and her heart does feel a bit ‘classic 1970s performance art’. 

Larry Dean is the workhorse of Saturday Night Live UK: the Glaswegian comic didn’t necessarily get the kudos of the show’s breakout stars like George Fouracres or Jack Shep, or his younger fellow stand-ups Ania Magliano and Paddy Young. But in season one he performed in more sketches than anybody else, and if you didn’t notice then that’s because he’s a chameleonic presence, his astonishing command of accents making him an invaluable supporting player.  It’s also somewhat unfair to invoke SNL when he’s been a big deal in Scotland in particular for over a decade: certainly he’s playing the biggest room at the Fringe this year of anyone from the show.  A set of old school observational raconteurism And it’s a very pleasant hour of comedy, albeit one that feels summed up by Dean’s late confession that he gave the show the title Hellbent because he was expecting there to be more fractiousness around his recent wedding to his now husband than was in fact the case. The large contingent of Catholics and small delegation of Iranians at the wedding had a lovely time, apparently. Instead the show is framed around his relationship with his autistic, Black County-accented husband - from meeting to marriage - and is essentially a set of old school observational raconteurism.  It’s all very agreeable, elevated by Dean’s gift for accents. He never quite makes it his main thing, but he’s incredibly deft with it: his bit on the two types of Americans had me snorting. Ultimately, though, he’s

A minimalist Dutch version of Tony Kushner’s maximalist New York epic Angels in America? I’d have my doubts except for the fact that Ivo van Hove’s production for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam has been kicking around in the company’s repertoire since 2008, and its reputation precedes it. That said I might have enjoyed the first half of its UK debut more if expectations weren’t quite so high. Because Van Hove’s adaptation is quite something to get your head around.  Angels in America – or to give it its full name, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes – famously consists of two full-length plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. They’re almost always revived together (they’re two halves of the same story after all) making any production a fairly monumental undertaking. So yes, Jan Versweyveld’s  ‘set’ is ultra stripped back: the stage is bare apart from a packing case with two record players, a projector and some David Bowie LPs on top of it. But it still runs at five hours - it can only feel so sparse. It remains epic. What I found disorientating is that Van Hove’s staging strips out the more vivid tones of Kushner’s hallucinatory epic. Certainly the bare stage and restrained Dutch language performances hardly conjure New York City and yet it is a story of NYC – you can’t really denature it into a universal ‘no place’. So it takes a while to warm up; and the cast’s performances need some time to adjust to.  But by the second half, it’s flying. At this

Paddy Young is annoyingly handsome and has one of the best gigs in British comedy, being the co-anchor of SNL UK’s Weekend Update.  So you’d think a stand-up show bemoaning that he’s a permanently single loser might not entirely convince. But no, he’s all good: Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? kicks off with a joke so kamikaze inappropriate that you have to think there’s a vague chance of it escaping isolation and screwing up his career. So probably best not share it here. Young’s surreal, somewhat poetic set paints him as an arch oddball whose singledom can be attributed to weirdness, moroseness and an inability to comprehend the rules of life in general. He obsesses over the first girl he kissed, reasoning she is the answer to his funk, tracking her down to Copenhagen and planning to fly out to see her; he dates a group of 30 men (called ‘the lads’) all at once, a logistical nightmare; he stews over his housemate’s greater romantic success and takes petty solace in the fact he has the better hair of the two. I would say most of this is very definitely made up, but Young’s stand-up has its own weird artificial gravity that kind of means that even if you don’t believe what he’s saying to, you know what he means: the man we see before us is a massive loser, or at least he is for the purposes of the show. And reality and tall tales are amusingly blurred – I don’t believe Young dated 30 men at once but I do believe he injured his hand in a freak accident with a samurai sword because

If the advent of Saturday Night Live UK has offered an Edinburgh Fringe boost for the stars of the show performing here then it’s also offered a calling care to SNL UK’s legion of writers – many of them terrific stand-ups who presumably came close to being included in the performing line-up but there was simply no room for them. One suspects Bella Hull would have been a shoo in if the ‘acerbic female Gen Z stand-up’ slot wasn’t comprehensively filled already by the more famous Ania Magliano, but the volume of press and profiles that have greeted Hull’s latest set suggest she’s waiting in the wings if a vacancy comes up. Who cares if she’s a mean girl when the jokes are this funny? Her schtick on Mad Cow Disease is relentlessly ironic, relentlessly acidic and extremely funny. She wields withering disdain like a samurai with a sword and clearly lies as easily as she breathes, with an opening routine that ends with as spectacularly stone-cold piece of rug-pulling as I’ve ever seen in a comedy show. I’ve no doubt she mines her real life for inspiration: it is not unbelievable that she spent 2025 single; her whole extremely amusing reminiscence about having a chaotic upbringing being raised by her mum and grandma would surely be too random to have made up. But she applies a zingy, lightly poisonous filter to everything – a sequence where she is gratuitously horrible about her flatmate is funny precisely because it’s so wildly over the top. I guess the underpinning assumption is t

Underground Monk Show is an American clowning supergroup. Like many supergroups it’s a bit self indulgent, probably not as good as its individual members’ main projects, and one member seems to have left already (Bill O'Neill, whose presence is advertised in the Fringe programme but apparently he’s only doing next year’s London dates). It’s still pretty funny though, a slice of late-night silliness in which the four remaining performers – that’s Max Baumgarten, Dee Marcucci, John Norris and Claire Woolner – are indeed wearing black monks’ cowls (I think for no reason other than that it’s funny to do so) as they shuffle and twitch their way through a loose plot structure based on a mystical bowl of water which each monk gets a turn diving into. The first monk up, who I believe is Baumgarten, gets a jolly underwater fantasia with bubbles, swimming and the others backing up as various groovy fish that leads you towards the obvious gag that the small bowl contains a large ocean. Not a bit of it: the other three monks find themselves in a series of totally different, considerably more twisted worlds – I particularly like the fantasy kingdom that Woolner enters and despotically takes control of. It’s knockabout, inventive, funny late night fun. It’s also a relatively improv-coded affair that gives the impression of a group of talented friends amusing each other first and foremost, something they’ve in part put together so they can spend a summer at the Fringe. The need for everyone

Elf Lyons is a clown comic who makes weird concept shows like her last one, Horses, which involved her playing the role of multiple horses, several of whom die. A singular talent, she’s certainly on the popular end of the esoteric but she also always seemed destined to be the definition of a cult artist.  Might something as humdrum as a breakup change that? Well maybe, although it’s all done in a very Elf Lyons-ish way. For at least the first 10 minutes there is no way you’d even begin to suspect that’s what was up, as Lyons – in an elaborate cocktail dress with enormous sleeves that keep slipping off distractingly – wanders in on barefoot tippy toes (as if she were wearing high heels) and launches into a breathy, faux femme-fatale film-noir accent as she takes a series of phone calls from ‘her husband’ (on bananas). ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asks. Dry ice pours out of her dress. Eventually she gets an audience member up to read a script, which she lip syncs to as he reads it. The script divulges that last year, she broke up with her fiancé just a couple of months before her wedding, and as the show wears on it becomes clear that she was utterly devastated by this.   Woman on the Edge is a mass of dissociations: the ’40s screen-siren character is an abstract avatar of Lyons’ grief and the marriage that never was, which is for the most part only addressed via the script read by the audience member and by recordings (also lip synced to) of friends detailing what a mess she

One of the most talked about shows at the 2026 Fringe isn’t a show at all, it’s a new venue, the Sauna Theatre. There is absolutely no euphemism at work in that name: it’s a big sauna that is also a theatre, designed by the people behind Paines Plough’s iconic Roundabout venue and occupying its space at Summerhall while it’s getting a refurb. Like the Roundabout, it can be packed up – it’s hoped there will be future stops in Manchester and London. With a capacity of 80, it’s built around three wooden tiers of seating, three massive sauna stoves, and the art of aufguss, a sauna ritual involving scented ice and elaborate towel flapping performed by ‘sauna masters’. This is Britain, so obviously you don’t go in naked: you need swimwear and a towel, both of which can be rented if you don’t have your own.  I won’t lie: I do not like saunas: I find the whole process of deliberately getting overly hot and sweaty faintly insane, and for that reason – and because I only saw two shows of its lively daily programme – I’m not going to do a traditional starred review here because one, I spent the whole time mildly bugging out, and two, I think judging some of this stuff out of five is a bit weird as to some extent I’d be rating the concept of saunas. The main thing you need to know is that while the shows have a 90-minute-plus running time, you get turfed out every 12 minutes or so to cool down in very cold showers and a plunge pool. This stops you dying of sauna, although it made for a s

Hole!, by American Sing-Song – aka ASS, aka New York-based performers Jake Brasch and Nadja Leonhard-Hooper – is one of those Fringe shows that you feel faintly grubby even describing the premise of but is, in fact, quite, quite magical. Basically it’s a two-hander musical about Conor and Luke, two young closeted gay men from Nebraska living through The Great Sucking, a phenomenon predicted by Conor’s stern preacher father (God tipped him off) wherein anyone who doesn’t have something shoved up their bum will be sucked up into the sky and never seen again. The boys’ community has survived via a creative approach to going to the toilet and the job lot of wooden buttplugs Conor’s dad ordered for them just before it all kicked off. And now, in a post-apocalyptic America, the duo have been sent off to prove that they’re men by taking out the ‘Cincinnati Daddies’, a tribe of gay men living liberated lives that offend Conor’s religious father. It obviously sounds insane, not to mention somewhat dirty. And yes, you probably shouldn’t take a young child (the age advice is 14-plus). But if it’s not what you’d call straight, it’s enchantingly straitlaced, as the deadpan creator-performers – dressed in caps, hoops in hair, poised at banks of instruments, for what amounts to a staged concert performance  – really set about telling the story with maximum conviction. I mean this thing really has worldbuilding and you’d better believe that Brasch and Leonard-Hooper have thought through thei

The four-week-long London Theatre Week is one of several events – notably the West End’s six-week-long Kids Week – that make us question whether anyone in British theatre knows what a week is. But who really cares: launching today (August 17) and running to September 13, London Theatre Week is a great big theatre tickets sale and that’s really all you need to know about it. Indeed, it’s up there as one of the biggest sales of the year, perfectly timed to set you up for the West End’s busier autumn, or to let you snap up a bargain for the final furlong of the still endless-feeling summer holiday. In terms of big hitting, famous West End shows it’s got plenty to offer: you can get a decent discount on the likes of Cabaret, The Lion King, Les Mis, Matilda, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, My Neighbour Totoro, The Phantom of the Opera and Wicked, with tickets starting from £15 for some shows, £25 for most of the West End long-runners, and the odd £35 bottom price to fancier fare like Cabaret. Basically almost every London musical that’s not Hamilton or Paddington is in.  There’s also a great chance to catch some of the year’s most acclaimed plays before they end limited runs – don’t miss out on the likes of Arcadia and Cyrano de Bergerac. Finally, now is a particularly good time to snap up a cheaper ticket to shows coming to London in the autumn that may well sell out when they open and get reviewed, but are currently happy to get bums on seats at a slightly nicer price than us

You don’t need to have immersed your life in arcane West End gossip channels to have seen this one coming. Earlier this year, a lavish stage adaptation of Disney’s 2017 smash The Greatest Showman had out of town tryouts at the Bristol Hippodrome. And right now, Disney’s current new musical Hercules is reaching the end of its yearlong run at Theatre Royal Drury Lane – the gargantuan historic theatre which has basically become the Mouse’s home in London in the post-pandemic era since Frozen opened there in 2021. In fact the biggest surprise to some may be that The Greatest Showman is new to the stage. It’s a rare example of a massively successful musical that started life on screen, where the role of the legendary American circus impresario PT Barnum was famously played by Hugh Jackman. Its Gen Z-friendly, modern-pop inflected score is certainly something of a departure from the average contemporary musical, but nothing insurmountable, and a decade after it hit screens The Greatest Showman: The Musical will open on Drury Lane’s gigantic stage. In terms of the talent involved it’s effectively a Broadway production, led by director Casey Nicholaw who helmed the musical version of Disney’s Aladdin and whose work you can see all over the London stage, most notably in long-running classic The Book of Mormon. He’s joined by the film’s songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who have written a series of new tunes to expand the musical, which has a book (ie the talky bits) by Tim Feder

★★★ Looking back at the reviews, a now-underappreciated element of the dire reception afforded to the 2019 film version of Cats is not the CGI bumholes but the fact that the movie critics were genuinely bewildered as to the classic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical’s lack of discernible plot. Watching a new stage production of Cats in 2026 is a similar experience: I know that the original West End production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s puss-tastic opus is one of the most popular shows in human history. But there are points during this first ever UK revival’s revue-like journey through a series of skits about (duh) cats – based on TS Eliot’s 1939 kids’ poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – where I wondered whether its previous success wasn’t some form of elaborate hoax perpetuated on later generations. It’s not that its mix of Edwardian-style whimsy, ‘80s-style synths and oompah-oompah vaudeville isn’t endearing. It’s just difficult to watch it and fathom how this was so popular that it ran for 20 years. Photo: Mark SeniorJaydon Vijn (Rum Tum Tugger) and cast Of course, this isn’t the original production, and nobody’s expecting it to run for another 20 years. Drew McOnie’s revival is less radical than the OAT’s lauded recent takes on Webber’s Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar, or indeed Tom Hooper’s fever dream film. But it does, nonetheless, feel like a smaller and edgier thing than Trevor Nunn’s blockbuster original. The titular Jellicle Cats are both familiar but

Evocatively-named immersive horror experience The Nightmare Realm has been terrifying the good people of Dublin since 2009, and by all accounts it’s very good at it, having won numerous awards on the international horror experience circuit over the years. And now it’s our turn to be frightened as it lurches across the sea to London. The large-scale independent production – with a cast of over 70 – will occupy the atmospheric grounds of the Victorian Avery Hill Mansion in Greenwich. It will offer two fully immersive tales of terror with original plot lines tailored to The Nightmare Realm’s London debut. Photo: The Nightmare RealmThe Nightmare Realm ‘Avery Hill Asylum’ will invite guests into a Victorian mental institution in which Dr Thorne has been conducting disturbing experiments; ‘Sundown Manor’ concerns an ancient Irish family that has arrived in London looking for victims. In the middle is Halloween Town, a ‘living village’ to explore with intriguing characters, hidden rooms, a slightly more chilled out vibe plus snacks. With staggered entry from early to late evening, the experience is about two hours long, with 75 minutes of that taken up by the actual stories. Photo: The Nightmare RealmThe White Witch, a character from The Nightmare Realm Obviously we’re all a bit wary of immersive spectaculars in the post Willy’s Chocolate Experience era, but The Nightmare Realm has amassed a great reputation over its 16 years, backed up by awards and the simple fact that the peo

UPDATE: Ariana Grande has withdrawn from the production and all other public appearances following the conclusion of her current world tour, which probably partly explains why the May onsale date for Sunday in the Park with George never materialised. Jonathan Bailey will remain in what is, after all, the lead role, with further casting TBA: expect it to stay a hot ticket but probably not as crazily as it would have been, which is probably no bad thing from from POV of a Londoner trying to get tickets. It’s now due to go on sale in the autumn. Hardcore musical theatre nerds may remember that in 2020 we were due to get a transfer of the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s 1984 classic Sunday in the Park with George. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a typically virtuosic work by the late genius that was inspired by the pointillist painter Georges Seurat's work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and follows a fictionalised version of the artist plus – years later – his cynical great grandson.  Long story short, if the Gyllenhaal version hadn’t got gazumped by the pandemic it’s unlikely that Sunday in the Park with George would come back around so soon. But it did, and so the coast is clear for Wicked lovers Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande to reunite as leads of a fresh production directed by Marianne Elliott, with design by Tom Scutt, that’ll run at the Barbican… next summer. That’s pretty much all we know for now, though it’s worth flagg

August is, as ever, a quiet month for London theatre, with theatremakers distracted by the summer holidays or the action north of the border at the Edinburgh Fringe (see our preview recommendations here). However: this is London! There’s still bloody loads of great stuff opening in theatreland! And here’s our guide to the best of it. Family and outdoor shows dominate: it is, after all, the month of the school holidays and the peak of the outdoor theatre season. There’s no doubt that the first ever UK revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is the biggest deal, but there’s plenty more besides, from the stage debut of the extremely silly kids’ graphic novels Dog Man, to the spectacular outdoor wonderments of the returning Greenwich + Docklands International Festival. The best new London theatre in August 2026 Image: Regent’s Park Open Air TheatreCats 1. Cats The last time we saw Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats it was via the fever dream of butt-holed furry homunculi that was the cat-astrophic 2019 film version. It’s had a happier last few years, with immersive US adaptation Cats: The Jellicle Ball a critical hit on Broadway. And now here comes the second-ever UK production, the first after the original 1981 version that ran in the West End for over two decades. Open Air Theatre boss Drew McOnie directs a fresh take on the lovable adaptation of TS Eliot’s feline-centric kids’ poetry. While it’s hard to imagine it’ll be a total reinvention of the

The school summer holidays are upon us. And while some of you will be going about your lives normally, for parents it’s six weeks of ‘how the hell am I getting through this with my bank balance and annual holiday allowance intact?’ While we can’t actually help you with the second point, we can with the first: here’s our recommendation of five genuinely great new free London activities and days out this summer holidays. Some are actually new, some are classic London venues or activities with something new to offer for the 2026 hols – all of them should offer a proper day out. Check out our longer list of the 25 best activities for the 2026 school summer holidays. The best free things to do in London with kids during the 2026 school summer holidays Photo: Chris RedgraveCrystal Palace Dinosaurs 1. Step back in time to the new look Crystal Palace Park London’s idiosyncratic Crystal Palace Park has just concluded the mother of all glow-ups via a regeneration project that has notably restored its 30 iconic Victorian dinosaur sculptures back to their original condition and paint jobs. It’s the perfect free morning or afternoon out this hols, with the extremely nice new playground – also part of the project – something else fun to do after you’ve gawped at the anatomically incorrect beasts. Go in the afternoon and you can also sneak in a visit to the free Crystal Palace Park Farm. 2. See spectacular outdoor theatre for free at the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival If you

Small but hard-hitting Covent Garden theatre the Donmar Warehouse has just officially announced its winter season, which will start when its current sold-out show The Guilty and its immediate follow-up A Month in the Country end. First up is Danny Lee Wynter’s Ilford Boy (Oct 10-Nov 28), which had been announced previously but goes on sale at last alongside the two new announcements. The semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about coming of age as a mixed-race teenager in ’90s London also has a cast now, which includes heavyweights Sinead Matthews and Ria Zmitrowicz, plus newcomer Leo Whitfield-Harris making his professional stage debut as Ted.  Next up big-name director Matthew Dunster will bring his heft to a new play by Stuart Slade called The King’s Ransom (Dec 5-Feb 6 2027), a dramatisation of the shocking 1977 attempt by four men to steal the body of the newly deceased Elvis Presley and bag a $10m ransom for its return. There’s no casting announced yet but Dunster does have a habit of swinging celebrity actors in his shows (he’s notably the man responsible for Lily Allen’s theatre career, and by extension the album West End Girl). Finally the splashiest show of the season is a revival of the great Harold Pinter’s cryptic masterpiece No Man’s Land (Feb 13-Apr 10 2027), its first London production since Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart did it a decade ago. This time starring big names Rupert Everett and Simon Russell Beale (pictured above), the play follows the bizarre, unse

Rebecca Frecknall is one of the great Brit directors of the last decade, having risen to fame via her empathy-heavy takes on the classics for the Almeida Theatre, directing stars like Paul Mescal and Michael Shannon in mostly American work. She scored West End transfers with her productions of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke and A Streetcar Named Desire, and her smash version of Cabaret has been in the West End for almost five years. She’s off to the Old Vic now, to work with her Almeida boss Rupert Goold. First, though, one last show at the Islington powerhouse: a revival for uncompromising Brit playwright Sarah Kane’s horrifying 1998 classic Cleansed, an extraordinary and unsettling play about a group of people whose love is tested by torture in the mysterious institute in which they’re interred. One does not simply stage Sarah Kane’s Cleansed – it’s about as extreme as theatre gets. How do you describe what it is to people? ‘I think for me it's an exploration of human love and connection, and can that survive in hell? A lot of people have been like: that feels so different for you doing Sarah Kane. But for me it feels like this play is like the purest distillation of the themes I’ve looked at in all the pieces I’ve done because really it's about love and brutality and how those two things exist together.’ When did you first come across it? ‘I came across Sarah Kane‘s work when I was at university, and I didn’t get it at all. We studied Blasted as part of a module in m

Probably the greatest of the ‘dinner party plays’ of the ’00s, Tracy Letts’ August: Osage Country is a seriously heavyweight piece of American drama that follows the addled Weston family as they rip each other to shreds over the course of several eventful weeks. And as plays from 2007 go, it’s pretty well known thanks to the hit 2013 film adaptation. A stonkingly stacked cast was led by Meryl Streep as toxic matriarch Violet Weston, with the likes of Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor and Benedict Cumberbatch in support. August: Osage Country has only actually had a single London production: at the National Theatre, in 2008, and that was itself a transfer of the previous year’s US premiere, running for just a couple of months. Part of the reason is that this thing is BIG – it requires a pretty enormous cast, and the OG production ran at three-and-a-half hours. Image: August: Osage CountyAugust: Osage County at Nöel Coward Theatre, London But next year it’ll receive its first UK revival – and indeed, first production to originate in the UK – as the great Lesley Manville steps into the role of Violet, with Anna Maxwell Martin as Barbara Fordham, Violet’s controlling eldest daughter. There are loads of great roles in this play, so while we should probably assume they’re the extent of the slebs, we can assume we’ll be in for a treat in terms of further casting. August: Osage County is at the Noël Coward Theatre, Jan 18-Apr 10 2027. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 202

It’s been a rocky couple of centuries for the iconic Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. They debuted to a storm of hype in 1854, with Victorian audiences astounded by the life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures. But the paleontological community’s rapid conclusion that they were hilariously anatomically inaccurate saw them fall from favour until their first restoration in 1953, when it was generally concluded that actually it was cool that they were wrong. They were in no way built to last as long as they did, and had begun to look a little sorry of late, with cracks appearing in many of the 30 sculptures and vandals damaging several during lockdown.  Photo: Andy BateHylaeosaurus But as regular visitors to the southeast London park will know, a full scale restoration has been underway for some time now, and this morning (July 16) mission accomplished has been declared, with the dinosaurs and their various giant aquatic, pterosaur and mammal friends fully restored. Not only that, but where previous restorations have take a variable approach to colour schemes, this one has aimed to have the beasts look as close as they did to when the debuted 172 years ago.  It certainly won’t be the last time the beasts require a lick of paint and some TLC, but it means the sculptures have been removed from Historic England’s Heritage’s at Risk Register. What a joy it is to finally have one of London’s most idiosyncratic attractions back how the Victorians intended. Photo: Chr

★★★★ Director Simon Stone – an Australian – seems obsessed with the English upper-middle classes. He works internationally but in this country, at least, his free adaptations of the classics all concern sweary, witty, slightly awful posh people who live in nice Grand Designs-style houses in which they say funny, cutting things until tragedy inevitably raises its head.  It’s easy to be cynical about this: the starts of all his plays are functionally identical, and could easily be swapped with each other without really affecting the main plots.  However, it has to be said that The Oresteia is in many ways the apotheosis of Stone’s style, an expansive adaption of the Greek legend about the fall of the house of Agamemnon that is trashy as hell and yet relentlessly gripping, its three-and-a-half hours whizzing by.  Photo: Johan PerssonDavid Morrissey, Rakhee Thakrar, Mary-Louise Parker and John Macmillan The original story starts with one of the most infamous murders in myth, as Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia to the gods in order to allow the vengeful Greeks to sail to Troy. Here, the exact circumstances of the death of Iphigenia-equivalent Isobel are shrouded in mystery until the very end. A non-linear structure maximises shock value in a way that clearly takes a leaf or two from the world of true crime podcasts. After a classic Stone opening scene that introduces us to dad Christopher (David Morriseey), mum Montie (Mary-Louise Park) and kids Augie (Tom Glynn-C