Theatre
Three hours of tripe
Standing at the Sky’s Edge is an ode to a monstrous carbuncle. The atrocity in question is a concrete gulag,…
Megaphonic honks
Simon Stone claims that his new comedy, Phaedra, draws on the work of Euripides, Seneca and Racine. In fact, the…
Chatterbox crackdown
A romcom with an irritating title, Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, has opened at the HP Theatre starring Jenna Coleman…
What a drag
Sound of the Underground is a drag show involving a handful of cross-dressers who spend the opening 15 minutes telling…
Pure, heavenly escapism
The Unfriend is a smart new family comedy which opens on the sunlit deck of a cruise ship. Peter and…
Close to perfection
Watch on the Rhine is the curiously misleading title chosen by Lillian Hellman for a wartime family drama that became…
Polar exploration
The National’s new comedy by April De Angelis is a clever and amusing attempt to deliver that most elusive artefact,…
Pre-Raphaelite Tintin
Orlando opens with a pack of Virginia Woolfs on stage. All wear the same costume of horn-rimmed spectacles, long tweed…
Going like the clappers
A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing…
Pitched battle
The Wagatha Christie affair began in 2019 when Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of selling stories from her private Instagram…
Oh yes she is!
There is nothing more panto than a dame. The grandmother of today’s dames is Dan Leno (1860–1904), a champion clog…
Manhattan transfer
Crude eccentricities damage the potential brilliance of Othello at the National. Some of the visual gestures seem to have been…
Christmas cracker
Elf opens with an unbelievable premise. Buddy was abandoned as a baby and adopted by Santa’s elves and he spent…
Undramatic melodrama
A heroic Asian woman parachutes into occupied France to work for the resistance and help overthrow the Nazis. This sounds…
Mad about the girl
Viewers watching a good romcom need to fall in love with three things. The boy, the girl and the affair…
Insane profligacy
The UK Drill Project is a cabaret show that celebrates greed, criminality and drug-taking among black males in London. It…
Bad education
King Hamlin is a shock-horror drama about gang crime in London. Hamlin, aged 17, has left school without learning any…
Clown or vicar – who cares?
London has a brand-new theatre – yet again. Last summer, a cabaret venue opened in the Haymarket for the first…
Three roled into one
Good, starring David Tennant, needs more dosh spent on it. The former Doctor Who plays John, a literary academic living…
Farrago of jabber
The Doctor is an acclaimed drama from the pen of writer-director Robert Icke. We’re in a hospital run by a…
After the fall
Clunk, clunk, clunk. John Gabriel Borkman opens with the obsessive footfalls of a disgraced banker as he prowls the attic…
Worthy of Wilde
Eureka Day is a topical satire set in a woke school in America. An outbreak of mumps has led to…
The sound of silence
Look at this line. ‘I’m 80 years old. I find that unforgivable.’ Could an actor get a laugh on ‘unforgivable’?…
Redemption songs
Rehab: The Musical opens with a boyband star, Kid Pop, getting busted for possession of cocaine. The judge sentences him…
Rhapsodic banalities
‘Trans people are sacred. We are divine.’ The first line of I, Joan at the Globe establishes the tone of…
