London theatre reviews

Three teenage girls are dancing round their bedroom under flashing rainbow lights, squealing over boys, when everything goes dark and the screaming starts. It’s a jolting opening to a play, and it sets the rhythm for everything that follows in Theresa Ikoko’s Girls. You’re laughing one minute and holding your breath the next.

Having missed the press night I decided the logistically sensible thing to do was to see this cult Irish immersive horror show on my own, late at night (I slotted it in after seeing another immersive horror, Room 13). This was either a terrible idea or a brilliant one: even some of the relatively sympathetic costumed beings that inhabit this pair of scary mazes – plus shorter one-room vignettes – looked at me in slight concern when they realised I was flying solo…

This short immersive horror show from Immersive Octopus and BAC provides briskly efficient scares four times a weeknight and up to eight a day at weekends. And to be clear it is scary. Or it is by the time you get to the main event, a sort of seance-like sequence where the audience - divided into small tables - are plunged into darkness, and bad things happen for 10 minutes or so…

‘Tis the season: master mentalist Derren Brown is back on the West End, this time with a disorienting show that sets out to challenge the illusion of free will and our ownership of the future. Pretty classic Brown stuff, right? Well, indeed. You might think that, some 30-odd years into his career, you know exactly what Brown’s shtick is. But, of course, the thing you can always expect from Brown is the unexpected…

You know what they say: they fuck you up, your mum and dad. And in Danny Lee Wynter’s new play, based on his own experiences, so do your sisters…

Ask any millennial how they feel about High School Musical, the world-conquering made-for-Disney Channel teen movie, celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, and their reaction will likely be equal parts misty-eyed and horrified. Nonetheless, there’s clearly big business in nostalgia, as is made blatantly clear with the brand new High School Musical stage production running at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre this autumn…

Helen Edmundson’s new play Some Woman is described as a thriller, but the experience of watching it is more like a slow strangulation – one that leaves you feeling thoroughly shaken and queasy on the other side…

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…

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…