London theatre reviews

‘Fawlty Towers’ regularly tops polls of the best British TV comedies of all time. So, how does his stage version of hapless hotel owner Basil Fawlty – arriving ahead of his TV remake of the series with his daughter – fare in the ‘funny’ stakes?

‘People, Places and Things’ in 2024 is never going to be quite the same thing as ‘People, Places and Things’ in 2015…

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer-winning play is a meaty watch, a pungent, spikey mix of laughs, tears and doomed defiance that centres on a multiracial group of misfits headed by Danny Sapani’s retired NYPD officer Walter…

Given a beautiful warm May night and the twinkling surroundings of the Open Air Theatre, I’d probably look fairly kindly on a wilfully abrasive take on ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’, let alone a crowd-pleasing ‘Twelfth Night’…

This slick but shallow adaptation of Gogol’s classic 1836 satire takes a comedy grounded in the very real corruption of Tsarist Russia and gives it a very English lobotomy…

‘Spirited Away’ is famously not the first of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated masterpieces to hit the London stage in the last two years…

Shakespeare’s Globe launches its summer season with this sparkling staging of one of the bard’s best comedies. It’s a sun-drenched spectacle that makes full use of the theatre’s crowd-pleasing openness and opportunity for audience interaction.

Aussie director Benedict Andrews’s UK reputation is heavily based on his extraordinary 2012 production of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’, which turned the melancholy masterpiece into a wild fin de siècle romp set on a huge black slag heap, in which the titular siblings memorably danced to Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ while howling their boredom…

British playwright Sami Ibrahim’s 2022 play ‘two Palestinians go dogging’, was a divisive one. Some praised the experimental dark comedy, set in Palestine in the year 2043. Others didn’t really know what was going on. But critics echoed that, no matter what, this unrelenting show stayed with you…

Everyone knows the story of ‘Swan Lake’. A princess turned into a swan, a wicked sorcerer, a chiselled prince coming to save her. It’s a wonder that the ancient story, and ancient 1877 choreography by Marius Petipa, is still beguiling audiences. But just like the most classic of fairy tales, the tale of the cursed princess remains a gesamtkunstwerk that will definitely pull on your heartstrings…