London theatre reviews

Anna Ziegler is one of those American playwrights who has had a million hits back home and remains virtually unproduced over here, (the sole exception being Photograph 51, which was a stonking West End hit about 10 years ago – less because it was an all time classic and more because it had Nicole Kidman in it.)

There’s a nagging irony at the centre of Bird Grove. This play about the young Mary Ann Evans – aka future literary titan George Eliot – features copious scenes of her expressing frustration that only men have a voice in society. But the play itself is very much written by a man, Alexi Kaye Campbell. It more or less styles this out, but there are lines where you wonder how Campell wrote them with a straight face…

Everyone knew there was more to the late Chadwick Boseman than Black Panther, but even so it was somewhat startling when Deep Azure – a play he wrote in 2005 – popped up on the winter programming schedule of Shakespeare’s Globe…

I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever heard proper walk-on applause in this country before. But the Shadowlands audience erupted as soon as star Hugh Bonneville walked out on stage. Either our stiff upper lipped standards are slipping, there were a load of Americans in, or Bonneville fans are simply very, very thirsty people…

The name gives ‘generic Britcom’ and the show doesn’t entirely fail to deliver on that. But this musical adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry – a 2012 novel that was made into a film a couple of years back – has a fair few unlikely moments of its own, in a good way…

‘Romance’ instinctively calls to mind red roses and glossy, youthful love stories. Easier to overlook is the romance of those rarely centred at all: the older generation. Sweetmeats, from writer Karim Khan and director Natasha Kathi-Chandra, offers just such a love story – slow-burning and cocooned in domestic simplicity…

Man and Boy is never going to displace The Deep Blue Sea or The Browning Version or even French without Tears as the quintessential Terence Rattigan work. But this is a truly extraordinary revival, that in its way has a significance that transcends the actual choice of play…

Lucky Richmond. Not only is it regularly voted the happiest place in London, it’s also home to the Orange Tree Theatre, where locals can get close to weighty actors performing thoughtful revivals of classic dramas in an intimate in-the-round space. Veteran director Richard Eyre’s new adaptation of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death ticks all those boxes. But despite its excellence, I don’t think it’s going to boost the borough's happiness ratings: Strindberg’s savage study in marital misery leaves no hope un-quashed.

I wouldn’t really say Miriam Battye’s comedy The Virgins reminded me of my own teenage years, although to be fair this is probably because I was never a teenage girl. However, it did make me laugh a lot.

Arcadia is just another play you can stage in the same way that the sun is just another thing floating in the sky. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece is a work of burning, ravenous intelligence, and while almost universally acknowledged as his best work, I get why it’s not staged very often.