London theatre reviews

Virginia Woolf’s towering 1931 novel The Waves doesn’t offer Joycean levels of formal complexity. Nonetheless, its haunting modernist blend of poetry and novel that sketches out the lives of six – or perhaps seven – friends is not a simple read. But it goes down surprisingly smoothly in this stage adaptation by Flora Wilson Brown.

Dave Harris’ Tender is, I suppose, a drama about how hard it is to be a man. But don’t worry, you can put the pepper spray away: we are so far away from incel territory here that we might as well be talking about a different species.

After 430 or so years it’s fairly apparent that we as a species are not going to get tired of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. And even though Emily Lim’s new take comes less than three months after the Globe’s last production of the same play ended, it still feels like a breath of fresh air.

If you’ve recently found yourself on the Piccadilly Line during evening rush hour, you may have noticed fellow passengers sporting feather boas, bowler hats and other attempts at Belle Époque attire. They’re on the way to the latest immersive dining experience from The Lost Estate, creators of popular festive show The Great Christmas Feast…

I was both moved by and a little annoyed at Mass. This story of two sets of bereaved parents attempting rapprochement in the aftermath of a high school shooting is the debut play by US actor and filmmaker Fran Kranz…

This 1968 play by the great dramatist of the fractured American Dream isn’t one of Arthur Miller’s best. But The Price is compelling in its uncompromising cynicism, originally written as a rebuke to how Miller perceived the abstract, consequence-free tone of 1960s theatre.

Who would the Fab Four be without their fifth member? Would Beatlemania have existed at all? Would their US success have even been possible? And those albums – would they have given it all up before they’d had the chance to create the likes of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Revolver?

As actor Yousef Sweid freely admits near the start of his solo show, the name Between the River and the Sea promises controversy – controversy that never really comes, because you see, he’s a bit of a centrist dad. 

The main flaw with Avenue Q in 2026 is that Avenue Q did it first. By which I mean that the jaw-dropping audacity of a rude musical theatre parody of Sesame Street has now largely gone – it is a very famous show that ran for five years in the West End the first time around and almost 20 in New York.