London theatre reviews

To be totally clear: Now You See Me Live is a stage-magic spectacular that has little to do with the Jesse Eisenberg-fronted film trilogy of the same name. That is to say, there’s no plot here and if the various participating magicians are using it as a front for fighting capitalism via the medium of high-concept heists, then they’re keeping quiet about it…

A love letter to theatre. A love letter to Philip Glass. A meditation on creativity and Taoism. There isn’t really a way to describe this show without making it sound naff or dull.
But that’s to underestimate the great Phelim McDermott who, with his company Improbable, has made some of the most extraordinary work of the last couple of decades, as well as West End hits like My Neighbour Totoro and big operas like Philip Glass's epic Akhnaten. 

Indiana Lown-Collins’ production of Shakespeare’s early comedy about three Spanish noblemen who decide it will be a great idea to swear off women and lock themselves away for three years of study – mere moments before a very eligible princess and her ladies arrive – is awash with sun-soaked flamenco energy…

The list of content warnings is long and heady: prolonged nudity, torture, mutilation, murder, sex, incest, violence, forced eating, drug abuse, homophobic and misogynistic language, blood and needles…

This is not so much a homage to Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and the gang as a soiling of their memory…

The lighting may be dim in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s auditorium – reconfigured to resemble an atmospheric 1960s NYC cabaret club – but the star wattage is bright…

This lightweight musical about the very ‘complicated’ FBI director J Edgar Hoover – who dominated America’s 20th century,  serving for 48 years – began life as a 1994 radio play starring Kelsey Grammar. Exactly how it ended up making its stage debut 32 years later at an off-West End theatre in Islington I am fairly unclear. But on some level it’s obviously something to do with the big name creative team…

Director Simon Stone – an Australian – seems obsessed with the English upper-middle classes. He works internationally but in this country, at least, his free adaptations of the classics all concern sweary, witty, slightly awful posh people who live in nice Grand Designs-style houses in which they say funny, cutting things until tragedy inevitably raises its head…

Sam Ryder is not the Messiah. But he did come second for the UK in Eurovision, which places him close in some people’s eyes. And you can see the logic of casting him as the lead in a splashy summer revival of Jesus Christ Superstar…

This nailbitingly tense thriller is director Felix Barrett’s second ‘normal’ piece of theatre to open in London in the last year, following West End smash Paranormal Activity.