Review: Di and Viv and Rose
The three stars beautifully convey their characters’ quirks, individuality and hurts with an open-hearted generosity and rapport that makes it entirely captivating.
Review: The Ruling Class
There’s no doubting the boldness of this bonkers play about a special kind of madness, and its alternately outrageous and courageous view of a titled – and heavily entitled – family’s feud, and the extremes that they are driven to.
Review: The Hard Problem
Stoppard, now 77, is still spinning the plates of philosophical enquiry and discourse in the world premiere of his latest play, but it presents hard dramatic, as well as intellectual, problems that director Nicholas Hytner’s sparse and elegantly inhabited production can’t fully solve.
Review: Taken at Midnight
Jonathan Church’s production, which originated at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre late last year, is a handsome, thoughtful addition to the West End roster. It may sometimes be gruelling to watch, but it is never less than absorbing.
Review: The Railway Children
This is no circus, but a massive barn-like structure big enough to accommodate a real-life train engine and a carriage.
Review: Wicked
An autumn rich in musicals in the West End may yet bring better ones, but it’ll be difficult to find a more eye-poppingly lavish show anywhere than Wicked. And a musical about the castings of spells seems to have duly cast its own and hypnotises audience who have embraced it as not so much a musical as an event.
Review: War Horse
Straight after coming home from seeing War Horse, the now annual National Theatre production based on a children’s book and designed for family audiences, I went online to book tickets to see it again, this time with my partner, parents and older brother (who is a vet and has specialised in working with horses). So should you, before it sells out completely – and it will.
Review: Treasure Island
The first half, alas, passes by in a lot of sluggish exposition and character development as we are introduced to the pirate band, before the second half takes more imaginative flight when the Hispaniola reaches the island.