The source material for The Secret Life of Bees may have a perhaps overly simplistic plot and limited character development but Lynn Nottage, Duncan Sheikh and Susan Birkenhead have done muc…
The sun is setting on Michael Longhurst's time at the Donmar Warehouse and his penultimate production is a timeless classic, Noel Coward's sparky and charismatic relationship comedy about mi…
The Union Theatre reopened some time ago but Betty Blue Eyes is its first in house production since then, a revival of the Stiles and Drewe musical from 2011 about social mobility, the weddi…
Anyone who has read the book will know what to expect or if you haven't then there are enough content warnings to prepare you at least for some of what is to come in Ivo van Hove and Koen Ta…
Usually, European productions find a home at the Barbican but The National Theatre of Norway has gone west to Notting Hill for the UK transfer of Dance of Death performed in the original Nor…
Malevolent forces shaping small communities is a strong premise for all kinds of drama, from the arrival of outsiders that tend to be the focus of horror to the power shifts of Pinter plays …
Playing for a few nights at Wilton's Music Hall as part of a nationwide tour, Anders Lustgarten's new play The City and the Town is about the confrontation between past and present, about th…
What are the limits of a woman's ambition at a time when she had no power? Lula Raczka's new play Women Beware the Devil explores accusations of witchcraft and the meaning of evil at the out…
It is still a relatively rare experience to see a working class drama that invests its characters with a profound and complex, even a poetic interior, life, but from the first moments of Ric…
Simon Stone turns his attention to another important literary woman, Phaedra as imagined by Euripides, Seneca and Racine and given a modern retelling in a production at the National Theatre …
"Words, words, words," Eliza Doolittle was sick of them particularly as empty descriptions of the love she wanted a practical demonstration of. Sam Steiner's play Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lem…
Noises Off at the Phoenix Theatre is a fast-paced show that still demands an enormously skilled and precise technical performance from every member of its cast and Lindsay Posner's team make…
Director Rebecca Frecknall tackles one of the greatest plays of all time, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire back in the intimacy of the Almeida Theatre and brings a devastating ne…
The sports biography is a great focus for drama and at the Park Theatre the focus is on boxing legend Vernon Vanriel who is telling his own story in the world premiere of On the Ropes, a pla…
From a red handkerchief disappearing within the hands of a magician to fake footage in the early 20th century, Hampstead Theatre's latest international import is the UK premiere of The Art o…
Liz Kingsman's One Woman Show at the Ambassadors is then more than a pot shot at Fleabag and the like, and is instead an assessment of the performative nature of female roles in popular cult…
Stephen Karam's Sons of the Prophet at the Hampstead Theatre, first staged in 2011, makes its European debut here by starting a lot of conversations that it doesn't manage to finish.
The National Theatre has quite mixed fortunes when it comes to new play commissions, some become and instant hit " like After Life and the storming success this year of Jack Absolute Flies A…
Othello at the National Theatre is a production that has thought very carefully about the things it wants to say and, particularly, what Othello has meant at different points in its performa…
Office-based plays are relatively few and far between particularly those from the 1930s, so the revival of John Van Druten's London Wall at the Tower Theatre is particularly interesting, not…
Rona Munro's latest piece, Mary, treads similar ground to historical trilogy The James Plays in its examination of Mary Queen of Scots and the series of fateful activities that led to her be…
Gloria Williams takes a more decided position on good and evil in the world premiere of her play King Hamlin at the Park Theatre in which an almost inevitable decline into crime is born out …
C. P. Taylor's play Good, written in 1981 is about the easy slide into extremism, how a decidedly ordinary, peaceable even tolerant man with no obvious belief in the outcomes of Nazism can a…
Looking across cultural representations of women in the past 100 years it is possible to draw connections between characters such as Hester Collier in Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea, P…
In recent years the 'rediscovery' of Summer and Smoke and an impressive production of The Night of the Iguana have awakened an interest in what are considered Williams' lesser-known major wo…