London theatre reviews

Picture Vincent van Gogh and you’ll probably imagine a tormented artist – one ear missing and a mind full of swirling thoughts. But Nicholas Wright’s 2002 play takes us somewhere far less familiar: back before painting consumed his life, when the Dutch painter spent time in Brixton…

For the first 15 minutes or so, I thought I had Welcome to Pemfort’s number. Sarah Power’s play presents as a cosily familiar comedy about a clutch of small-town eccentrics pulling together in an effort to stage a fundraising fun day for the titular medieval fort (not a castle!) that forms the chief point of interest in their sleepy town.

This hugely enjoyable tech satire-slash-thriller from US playwright Aaron Loeb is so good at bamboozling you as to what it’s going to be about that I almost hesitate to get into the plot. It’s good! Go see it! Isn’t that enough of a review for you?

Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk is the sort of esoteric classic that only gets staged very occasionally: I think this NT revival is the third UK production ever, and the first this century…

The universe, Emma Howlett reminds us at the outset of her dense, intellectually fizzing play — fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe and now running at Jermyn Street Theatre — doesn't care about us…

In a parallel universe in which a harmonious two-state solution was achieved in Israel/Palestine, you might question why a theatre would revive Ryan Craig’s solid (but not classic) Jewish family drama barely a decade after it debuted at the National Theatre. We do not live in that parallel universe…

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the godmother of rock and roll. Her story and her music are extraordinary. So it’s a privilege and a treat to see British soul goddess Beverly Knight play Rosetta in this intimate two-hander, a play with songs that’s all about the music. 

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is as American as apple pie and the electric chair. So on paper it seems like a strange first choice of play for Michael Sheen’s new Welsh National Theatre. But never fear: the whole thing manages to be so exuberantly Welsh that you’ll soon forget the town of Grover’s Corners is supposed to be somewhere in New Hampshire.

Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass is a really weird play. A lot weirder than official summaries tend to divulge. Which is impressive given that official summaries will tell you that it concerns a Jewish Brooklyn housewife who is inexplicably paralysed in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, Germany’s 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom…

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.)