London Theatre Reviews

'Clybourne Park' review — Bruce Norris's Pulitzer-winning play combines smarts and savagery

Not many plays have won a Tony, Olivier, and Pulitzer, but the enduring power of Bruce Norris’s 2012 Broadway entry Clybourne Park lands once more in its current revival at (aptly enough) north London’s Park Theatre, where the director Oliver Kaderbhai lands the singular savagery of the writing afresh. Its opening delayed by the pandemic, as continues to be a commonplace these days, the play packs a singular wallop that may even be greater now than when this satire was first seen. Like it or...

'The Human Voice' review — Ruth Wilson shines in searing isolation monologue, directed by Ivo van Hove

Sit in silence in a busy room, and you’ll hear a lot. The low hum of people talking around you. The flickering lights as they twitch overhead. The unexplainable, disconcerting noises that keep you on edge. Eventually, a voice drowns out all the sounds around you. You listen. You pay attention. You might learn something. But when everyone tunes into one person speaking, what happens next? At first, it’s a slightly awkward realisation for people in the room, but a few minutes in, you’ll realise...

'COCK' review — Jonathan Bailey and Taron Egerton star in Mike Bartlett’s topical yet dated play

The title of Mike Bartlett’s play is clearly meant to provoke. News articles add asterisks or use euphemisms. Email marketing campaigns censor the name for fear of ending up in spam folders. It’s a little naughty. What does COCK really mean? When the play premiered at the Royal Court in 2009 starring Andrew Scott and Ben Whishaw as the central couple torn apart by a new (female) lover, the title was seemingly a nod to cockfighting. When the play later premiered off Broadway in New York in 2012...

'Maria Friedman and Friends — Legacy' review — a soul-stirring concert commemorates musical theatre titans

Stephen Sondheim’s death last November shook many of us to the core and provides a soul-stirring foundation to Maria Friedman’s exultant new show, which opened the same day as news broke that her superb Menier Chocolate Factory revival of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along will soon be seen in New York, starring Daniel Radcliffe. In the meantime, Friedman honours not just Sondheim’s legacy but that of her friends Michel Legrand and Marvin Hamlisch, whose widow, Terre, took movingly to the stage at...

'Bloody Difficult Women' review — Brexit politics take centre stage

Add Tim Walker to those London critics (Nicholas de Jongh, Lloyd Evans, and Sheridan Morley are just a few of the others over the years) to swell the ranks of poacher-turned-gamekeeper. By that, I am referencing Walker’s about-face here as a playwright when he is better known as a longtime journalist and critic, at the moment for The New European. His play, Bloody Difficult Women, takes the approach taken some years ago by Schiller’s masterpiece Mary Stuart in opposing two real-life female...

'The Collaboration' Young Vic review: Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope transform into Warhol and Basquiat

What is art? And what is art’s role in society? Is creative expression derivative? Or is it putting the world in a larger context, commenting on the very thing from which it takes inspiration? These are questions that have always plagued artists, collectors, curators, and enthusiasts, and Anthony McCarten’s new play The Collaboration, about the 1980s partnership between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, dramatises the age-old conundrum. McCarten doesn’t offer anything particularly new in his...

'The Merchant of Venice' review — Shakespeare's comedy possesses a new and recharged ruthlessness

Shakespeare’s most vexed “comedy”, so-called because of the commingling of couples at the final curtain, has a new ruthlessness worthy of its venal landscape. Heavily cut and reordered so as to foreground the grievous fate that is meted out to the moneylender Shylock and its effect on his traitorous daughter Jessica, Abigail Graham’s staging of The Merchant of Venice jettisons the often-ludicrous closing act, in the process laying bare a play that on this evidence occupies much the same fearsome...

'The Woods' review — David Mamet's play returns as a sluggish battle of the sexes

David Mamet’s latest plays, Bitter Wheat in the West End and China Doll on Broadway had their problems. And now comes the first London revival in 21 years of Mamet’s 1977 two-hander, The Woods, to suggest that even early Mamet can make for tough sledding, too. A vehicle back in the day for starry duos — Chris Sarandon and Christine Lahti, Peter Weller and Mamet quasi-regular Patti LuPone — this murky study in what Gwyneth Paltrow might call (and has) “conscious uncoupling” here set on and around...

'But I'm A Cheerleader' review — a campy musical caught in a tricky pubescent period

“Is this even legal?” say the True Directions kids as they prepare for a simulated sex exam, the final step in their questionable conversion therapy. The teens are days away from graduating from True Directions, a summer camp which aims to help teenagers find their “true” heterosexual gender roles. While conversion therapy may seem like a wild concept, the act of “turning people straight” is still legal in many countries. So it’s important to bring sociopolitical conversations surrounding...

‘Henry V’ at Donmar review: Kit Harington stars in this timely production

“Once more into the breach, dear friends,” Prince Hal exclaims during the iconic monologue in Shakespeare’s history-come-tragedy about the petulant England royal’s quest for domination. But as the strapping and commanding Kit Harington hovers above the stage at the Donmar Warehouse in modern army fatigues preparing his troops for battle, that aforementioned “breach” feels all too close to home in Max Webster’s eerily relevant production. The play opens with a single chorus member, played ably by...