London theatre reviews

We all love a plot twist but New York theatremaker Andy Sandberg’s play Affluenza feels like a cautionary story about what happens when you twist too hard…

There are some plays that you watch and immediately know what you feel about them, whether that’s a star rating or simple thumb directed north or south. Then there are shows like Nina, Caroline Williams’ metatheatrical, oftentimes absurdist play set in the audition room for an ‘experimental’ production of The Seagull (confusingly also called Nina), where so much thinking is required to understand the production that personal opinion can fall by the wayside…

The thrill of slogging up three flights of steps to the Royal Court’s tiny experimental Upstairs studio is that you never know what you’ll find at the top. Happily, debut playwright Joy Nesbitt’s excellent ancestry drama has a scenario that bites from the get-go, and never relaxes its grip…

A baker, a witch and a boy with a cow walk into the woods. It sounds like the set-up to a dodgy Christmas cracker joke, but plenty of Londoners already know how this one ends, given Jordan Fein’s lavish revival of Sondheim’s subversive fairytale musical Into the Woods spent last year packing out the Bridge and hoovering up Oliviers. Now it’s crossed the river to the Noël Coward with a mostly new cast, and it’s every bit as good…

This revival of Jay Presson Allen’s 1989 Truman Capote monologue was initially staged in the stunning House of the Redeemer in New York, the sort of opulent old Manhattan building of your wildest dreams…

Is getting a drink with an ex always a bad idea? If the aim to create the chaos and drama befitting a side-splitting one-act play, well: you might be onto something. Debuting in London after runs in New York and Los Angeles, Douglas Lyons’ Table 17 is dependent on people making bad, often unjustifiable, choices…

Sting’s musical The Last Ship has had a fairly rough sailing of it so far: in the 13 years since it launched in the States it’s been through three iterations with three different writers and three different directors. The one great constant is Gordon Sumner himself: as well as writing the songs, he’s expended a lot of time and money on the project, including a stint performing in the 2014 Broadway incarnationand this globally touring version in which he’s just gone ‘fuck it’ and fully embraced the role of grizzled shipyard foreman Jackie White…

The streets between Soho and the West End are excellent places to get drunk. But few of us will indulge ourselves in central London like playwright and novelist Partrick Hamilton, the well-known boozer best known for his 1929 play Rope about the real-life murder of a 14-year-old boy (later turned into the classic 1948 Hitchcock film). But not to worry, one can now experience such dangerous states of inebriation in a new stage version of Hamilton’s books this autumn at Southwark Playhouse Borough…

This musical version of Thelma & Louise has many things going for it, notably some thrilling songs from alt-country legend Neko Case, a great cast led by Amy Lennox and Rachel Turner, and some sparking dialogue from Callie Khouri, screenwriter of the classic 1991 Ridley Scott feminist road movie…