Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party is very, very funny, but it’s also totally doolally. The play had its London premiere at the Lyric Opera House (now the Lyric Hammersmith) in 1958. It was shut down after eight performances, thanks to a raft of disastrous reviews. It’s now considered a classic and has re-opened at the Harold Pinter…
Theatre
London Theatre reviews: Get the London lowdown on all the latest West End and regional theatre reviews.
Playing it up in 2018: the best London theatre
2018 promises to be a stellar year in London’s west end theatres and fringe playhouses. These are the London plays I’ve already booked – my recommendations for the best London theatre in 2018. Get booking now, as those golden tickets will be going, going gone! The Birthday Party Stanley Webber (Toby Jones) is the only…
I’m MAD AS HELL and I’m not going to take it anymore
In 1976, a film called Network cleaned up at the Oscars, winning four Academy Awards. Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by the great, late Sidney Lumet, the black comedy was written and released during the Watergate Scandal and the Vietnam War, poking fun at the lengths to which the networks would go to get…
Venus in Fur at the Theatre Royal Haymarket
Aphrodite is in the house at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in a hair-raising erotically-charged production of David Ives’s Broadway hit, Venus in Fur. Natalie Dormer treads the boards as the feline Vanda Jordan, and David Oakes of Victoria fame has parked his Prince Ernest to reveal a magnetic Thomas Novachek with a knotty personality. Thankfully,…
Theatre Review: Labour of Love
Love is all around us at the Noël Coward Theatre this autumn. It’s Labour intensive and dirty, and you can catch it in James Graham’s latest blockbuster, the political romcom Labour of Love. Starring Martin Freeman and Tamsin Greig, the play is not just a history lesson of the Labour party in the last 27…
REVIEW: Mother Africa at The Peacock
Wednesday evening was one of firsts for me: I heard an audience groan when the interval lights came on instead of scurrying to the bar or loo; I sat through a circus without a clown in sight (thank you); and I went to the Peacock Theatre in Holborn, baby sister to Sadler’s Wells to see…
Review: Dirty Great Love Story
Dirty Great Love Story was just the tonic I needed after an extraordinarily peculiar week on the world stage. It’s a one-man and one-woman romp directed by Pia Furtado and with some energetic performances by Felix Scott and Ayesha Antoine, executed mostly in rhyme. Originally a 10-minute award-winning Edinburgh Fringe piece, written in 2012 by…
THEATRE REVIEW: Sideshow & Amadeus
Sideshow at the Southwark Playhouse The Southwark Playhouse is the go-to venue when I am looking for quirky and slightly off-beat productions. Last year it played host to the wonderfully eclectic Grey Gardens, starring Sheila Hancock, and is now staging the colourful and moving musical, Sideshow, on until the 3rd December. Sideshow comes to London…