Nina Culley

The beloved Melbourne International Comedy Festival is well and truly in full swing, with more than 680 shows lighting up venues across the city. Phew, our abs are hurting already! With so many comedians to see and not enough time, we have sent out a batch of reviewers to dig deep and suss out the best of the fest this year. Whether it's a weird and wonderful show, a national treasure or a rising star, check out our reviews and see what tickles your fancy.  Want to review the show over a drink? Check out the best late-night bars in Melbourne.  

Fifty years on, For Colored Girls still hits. Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem arrives at the Yard Theatre with all the love, rage, grief, humour and sisterhood that made it a landmark — and thematically, not nearly as dated as you’d expect. Upon arrival, the first thing you’ll notice is that there’s nothing on stage. No elaborate set or props to hide behind. Instead, director Diane Page has the women watch one another from the edges, gather, separate and occasionally become silhouettes against the light. When one woman speaks, the others are there to witness her, responding with hums and snaps of assent and giving the individual poems a sense of continuity and collective experience. It’s a smart choice, particularly given that some previous productions have allowed the individual poems to feel disconnected: a series of turns, not a cohesive work. The 2022 Broadway revival, for example, was praised for its exuberance but also criticised for throwing in so much spectacle and movement that the text occasionally got lost. Shange coined the term ‘choreopoem’ for this thrilling collision of poetry, music and movement. Her longtime collaborator Dianne McIntyre described the process as responding to the energy and meaning of Shange’s words: everybody thinking in motion, with the boundaries between dancer, actor and singer deliberately blurred. There are moments at the Yard’s first UK revival in when the movement feels a little too conscious of itself as choreography rather than an i

There're worse ways to spend a summer afternoon than drinking something cold beneath the trees at Thomas' College, Richmond, while watching a succession of Shakespeare’s characters flirt, bicker and generally make a mess of love. But Tom Littler's brace of shows – a co-production between the Orange Tree Theatre and Guildford Shakespeare Company – have more ambitious designs than pairing two crowd-pleasing romantic comedies. Although it’s fine to just watch one of them, Littler stitches Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing into one continuous romantic saga spanning the years around the Second World War. Characters cross from one play into the next, identities merge, and events in the first become emotional backstory for the second – a neat solution to Much Ado's insinuated backstory and Love's Labour's Lost's abrupt ending. Littler smooths the join between the two so seamlessly it's nearly impossible to spot. Into this he threads contemporary asides and crowd work, which land as some of the evening's biggest laughs. Love's Labour's Lost begins in summer 1939. The Prince of Navarre (Owen Oakeshott) and his scholarly mates have sworn off women for study and self-improvement, a resolve that lasts about five minutes past the arrival of the Princess of France, Leonata (Sarah Gobran), and her attendants. Their rhetoric grows increasingly ridiculous while the women watch on, considerably less impressed than the men would like. Sarah Gobran's Leonata and Phoebe Pryce's Beat

The title of Hideki Noda's latest play is ‘minus three twenty Fahrenheit’, roughly the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, the temperature at which a body sits suspended in cryogenic storage. It's also, roughly, the temperature at which this review nearly froze trying to explain the plot to a friend afterwards.  The Japanese theatrmaker’s company NODA MAP returns to Sadler's Wells for a third round, following A Night at the Kabuki (2022) and Love in Action (2024), with its latest being billed as ‘a Faustian descent through myth, memory and other bad ideas’. Unsurprisingly, then, given that Noda is notorious for jam-packing his plays, this one runs across three timelines, all featuring characters chasing angel bones.  In the modern strand, sniping pharma siblings President Oolong Deathmask (Satoshi Hashimoto) and Chairman Oolong Cha (Shoko Takada) – the production's best running joke – hunt the mythical bone using the vibrating one in the body of Help’s (Sadawo Abe) as their compass. With the help of their research team, they want it ground into supplements for an engineered Ultimate Human, or harvested to cure a genetic condition called AngelDN – either way there’s money in it. In the medieval strand, Mephisto (Suzu Hirose), the half-angel half-devil heroine, stakes a wager against God which sets up a fateful pact with Dr. Faust (Isao Hashizume). In antiquity, an empire answers to Queen Himiko, based on the legenadry shaman-ruler of early Japan. For all its denser themes, Fau

The stage or screen kiss has always made audiences speculate (often correctly; my mother is still not over Brad and Angie) as actors negotiate something that’s both intimate and sterility professional. It's the tension Sarah Ruhl toys with in Stage Kiss, finally receiving its UK premiere at Hampstead Theatre 12 years after it debuted in New York. We open in a classic audition room: mismatched chairs, institutional lighting, a flamboyant director (Rolf Saxon) who wants his actors to ‘follow their instinct’. The trouble is that nobody's instincts are particularly good. He reaches for the word ‘slippery’ to describe his first play - apt for everything that follows. MyAnna Buring's She arrives in a ball of anxiety, fumbles her lines, drops her bag, and gets the part anyway. The play she's cast in, a forgotten 1930s melodrama called The Last Kiss, is packed with longing and terminal illness, and also coincidently features He (Patrick Kennedy), her old flame. His expression upon recognising her suggests that the flame was never quite extinguished. Because of this, the first act is comedically theatrical – Stoppardian, even – a loving homage to the absurdity of the rehearsal room, the set blooming gradually into the full gilt aspirations of the play. After the interval, Robert Innes Hopkins’s design makes a decisive lurch from red velvet to the grubby reality of He’s flat, and then to a director’s nostalgia project set in ’70s New York, featuring a Bronx sex worker and an Irish sold

This review is from November 2025; Ride the Cyclone returns in June 2026. Rollercoasters and death may sound like a strange subject for a musical but Ride the Cyclone at Southwark Playhouse spins them into its own brand of jaunty strangeness. Premiering in Canada in 2009 and running off-Broadway in 2015, it has taken almost 15 years for the Jacob Richmond and Brooke Maxwell-penned show to make it to the UK. It begins with a freak rollercoaster accident dispatching six teens to a limbo presided over by the Amazing Karnak (Edward Wu), a mechanical oracle perched inside a fortune-telling booth. Suspended above a compact, adaptable set — a rotating platform and projections flickering at its centre — Wu strikes the perfect balance of ominous overseer and animatronic RuPaul, warming the audience up with cheeky meta-jokes about theatre etiquette. When the teens arrive, they’re joined by Jane Doe (Grace Galloway), a mysterious girl with no memory and no head, and informed — albeit in riddles — of the rules of a contest in which only one of them will earn a second chance at life. Each must plead their case: Ocean (Baylie Carson), the pro-democracy overachiever with a moral compass; Noel (Damon Gould), the romantic with hopes of living it out in Paris; Mischa (Bartek Kraszewski), the rage-filled rapper with a surprisingly tender underbelly; Ricky (Jack Maverick), the formerly mute comic-book-loving fantasist; and Constance (Robyn Gilbertson), the ‘nicest’ girl in town, who carries mor

Coincidentally topical, with Artemis II in the news this past week, Theo Jamieson and Adam Lenson’s new musical Flyby concerns an astronaut who drifts very far from home – and asks us to piece together why. After a slightly misplaced opening jump scare (this is not, despite brief suggestion, a horror), three narrators set the scene for Lenson’s production. Daniel DeFoe (Stuart Thompson), a name that nods to another fictional castaway, has stolen a spacecraft, The Ostrich, and gone off-grid on what appears to be a one-way mission to nowhere. The question of why is teased out through flashbacks, data logs and intermittent narration from Gina Beck, Rupert Young and Simbi Akande that feels, for the most part, unnecessary. In the past Daniel falls for documentary film-maker Emily Baker (Poppy Gilbert, of The Other Bennett Sister), a woman of fierce, sometimes supercilious intellect. Their relationship unfurls through familiar markers: the first trip away, the hike, the move-in, all staged across Libby Todd's minimal living room set and aided by swift costume changes (Eleanor Bull). It's the bright-eyed period when intellectual sparring feels like foreplay and each other's flaws are still endearing, until, of course, they're not. Emily can be morally superior, a bit of a bully – she carries the weight of being daughter to a celebrated, philandering filmmaker, and is both product and critic of a certain artistic ego. Gilbert is magnetic in the role, as believable in a teenage flashb

The universe, Emma Howlett reminds us at the outset of her dense, intellectually fizzing play — fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe and now running at Jermyn Street Theatre — doesn't care about us. Four particles take to the stage and announce as much: we’re specks, briefly conscious, adrift in something incomprehensibly vast and strange. A wheel is spun. Who will each particle become? Aether is framed as a lecture: the audience are the pupils handed whiteboards and asked mid-show to sketch Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe. Within that conceit we follow a patchwork of vignettes that juxtapose and intercut across time, gender, discipline and cosmos. The cast morph via accents, physicality and drawn-on moustaches into a procession of real women who wrestled with the universe's secrets: Hypatia, the philosopher murdered in 415 AD for her pagan scholarship; Vera Rubin, whose evidence for dark matter was denied recognition; Adelaide Herrmann, the illusionist who took over her husband's act after his death and became one of the most celebrated performers of her age. Each figure, beyond the play's broader comment on sexism in STEM, has been chosen to chart the continued cost of curiosity. Whether the play always makes that case clearly enough amid the chaos is a different matter (pun intended). Aether finds its footing in its character-driven moments rather than its themes. Gemma Barnett is dazzling across multiple roles — most searingly as Hypatia before her death— and it's h

History has not been kind to Mary Todd Lincoln. Wife to one of America’s most mythologised presidents, she outlived Abraham Lincoln by nearly two decades, having already endured the deaths of three of her four children, public vilification, financial ruin and eventual institutionalisation, signed off by her own son, no less. She became, conveniently, the ‘mad widow’: a cautionary footnote to a Great Man’s story, recently introduced to a new generation after her absurdist depiction in Broadway smash Oh, Mary!. So, really, it’s no wonder that she’s keen to rewrite her story. And rewrite it she tries. John Ramson Phillips’s Mrs President, first staged in 2025 and revived after further dramaturgical development, returns to Charing Cross Theatre with a different cast, the same writer, and director (Bronagh Lagan) and, unfortunately, the same issues. In this version, Keala Settle (The Greatest Showman) takes on the role of Mary, entering swathed in a floral pink frock, a nod to the real Mary’s iconic outfits, standing out against a swampy green set (Anna Kelsey). She’s working with famed Civil War photographer, or ‘the father of photojournalism’ as he was known, Mathew Brady (Hal Fowler), who is determined to capture the ‘real’ her - or at least the version of her he imagines to be real. At first, she embraces the process, declaring that she needs ‘a new image that will change people’s perception of me’. But Brady’s pursuit of artistic immortality soon curdles, as he hovers behind

‘Romance’ instinctively calls to mind red roses and glossy, youthful love stories. Easier to overlook is the romance of those rarely centred at all: the older generation. Sweetmeats, from writer Karim Khan and director Natasha Kathi-Chandra, offers just such a love story – slow-burning and cocooned in domestic simplicity. Two widowers, Hema (Shobu Kapoor) and Liaquat (Rehan Sheikh), meet at a Type 2 diabetes management course. It’s hardly a classic meet-cute, but it’s a plausible one, particularly given how disproportionately the condition affects South Asian communities. As with most romances, they begin by bickering. Hema, who calls herself a ‘scary Indian woman’, is admonishing, organised and a stickler for the rules, packing healthy snacks and dishing out barbs and sharp sideways glances. Liaquat, whom she initially labels the more neutral ‘Bhai’, is playful and nonchalant: padding about in slippers, sneaking mithai (sweets) and tuning out with his headphones. In time, they bond over shared language and, of course, food: cardamom barfi, ladoos and sweet mangoes eaten while waiting for lifts home. It’s here that the details of Aldo Vázquez's set comes into focus: two floral lounge rooms, a row of plastic chairs, a bus stop scattered with dried leaves and crumpled bottles. With Hugh Sheehan's immersive sound design, you could almost forget you're in a theatre and not eavesdropping on a London street. Khan's writing is comedic and charming, peppered with culturally specific

The one-night stand is comedy’s gift that keeps on giving: a pressure cooker of intimacy, regret, hope and awkward logistics. David Ireland’s Most Favoured takes that familiar morning-after scenario and, then twists it into something weirder. The short show premiered in Scotland in 2013 and was memorably billed a ‘theatrical snack’. Now Most Favoured get its London premiere at Soho Theatre, in a new production, but still clocking in at a brisk 45 minutes. Director Max Elton confines the production to set designer Ceci Calf’s nondescript, three-star-looking hotel room: a timber bed frame and rumpled sheets wrapped in a striped polyester bed-runner. In this anonymous space, Mike (Alexander Arnold) drifts nonchalantly around the hotel room, while Mary (Lauren Lyle) is exhilarated. She reveals that she has, for the first time in her life, felt loved, and she is determined to make Mike understand the significance of that fact. He, however, has also experienced a first: he’s tried KFC, and is understandably fixated on the finger lickin’ goodness. That bucket of chicken becomes the play’s central running joke and, eventually, its structural crutch. The awkwardness escalates when Mary reveals why she has been picking up men for at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (I mean, where else do people find ‘glamourous’ specimens — I mean, men — with good genes?) The pair function as effective foils. Lyle gives Mary unfiltered, Glaswegian charm, shot through with moments of genuine, eye-waterin

After what feels like an infinity of iterations of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, finding something genuinely new or interesting in it is a difficult feat. But it’s something that writer-director Tanika Gupta’s pulls off in her new take for the Orange Tree. She reimagines Ibsen’s restless anti-heroine as a mixed-heritage actress in postwar London, still suffocating under societal expectations, but now also constrained by race, class, gender, and reputation in a new Britain. It is 1948. The Blitz scars are still visible, but a veneer of gentility has returned. Inside a pristine Chelsea mews house — Simon Kenny’s blinding white-on-white set is simple but effective — Hedda (Pearl Chanda) lives with her dependable new husband, George (Joe Bannister). Outwardly, she’s living the dream: a glamorous ‘retired’ film star, she’s still admired (and feared) for her beauty and clout. But beneath that polish, she’s suffocating — aching for the freedoms enjoyed by those around her. Gupta’s inspiration comes from real-life film legend Merle Oberon, who famously concealed her South Asian heritage to survive Hollywood’s racist studio system under the Hays Code (the strict moral censorship guidelines that ruled American cinema until the late 1960s). That parallel gives Gupta’s Hedda a modern edge while retaining Ibsen’s familiar structure — the domestic cage, the manipulations, the doomed flirtations. Around Hedda orbit familiar figures: Leonard (Jake Mann), the brooding playwright; John Brack (

If you’ve ever felt Lucy Westenra got a terrible deal (#justiceforlucy and all that), the Lyric Hammersmith’s new spin on Dracula is here to set the record straight. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s adaptation takes Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic classic and shifts the focus to the women sidelined in the original. It also joins a lineage of feminist retellings: in Liz Lochhead’s 1985 Dracula, Lucy and Mina embraced their vampiric transformation, while Morna Pearson’s 2023 Mina’s Reckoning was staged with an all-women and non-binary cast — productions that, for all their boldness, received a mixed reception. Here, Mina (Umi Myers) delivers a moving performance, puppeteering a play within a play, in which the survivors of Dracula’s incursion to London serve up a cautionary tale — and lament Lucy’s fate in long stretches of exposition, a real tension killer. For those familiar with the novel or its many adaptations, the constant need to catch us up on plot points can feel especially tedious. With Mina and Lucy (Mei Mac) at the centre, the ensemble — Jack Myers as Jonathan Harker included — circles in and out as stand-ins for multiple roles, but their presence, and their purpose, feels thin. But definitely not as thin as the role of the men in this production. In Stoker’s original, Harker, Van Helsing, and Lucy’s various suitors are men of action — rational champions of science and medicine rallying to protect ‘their’ women — while Mina and Lucy, though scandalous for their time, were still bou