London theatre reviews

A century ago, Noël Coward was the shit. Aged just 25, he was in a phase of his career when he couldn’t stop scoring hits. And he wasn’t simply some young fogey with a nice line in upmarket witticisms: his 1924 breakthrough play The Vortex had scandalised polite society with its depiction of drug abuse (which was furthermore an allegory for the even more verboten subject of homosexuality).

This is the (new) King’s Head Theatre’s second go at panto after a luke-warm Cinderella in 2024. By all accounts their first one (written and directed, as is the case this year, by Andrew Pollard) was fine, if a little lacking in the ‘fun’ department. I’m glad to say the team working away four floors below Upper Street got the memo, as this year’s Jack and the Beanstalk is absolutely bursting with berserk energy (and fart jokes) from the word go. 

Proof that the Lyric Hammersmith is basically London’s flagship panto these days comes from the opposite end of London, as Stratford East chalks up its best seasonal show in years, essentially by importing the previous Lyric creative team.

It’s difficult to pinpoint why the moment Paddington walks on stage at the start of his new musical is quite so moving…

It was presumably John le Carré’s death in 2020 that allowed a stage version of his breakthrough The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to finally go ahead. But I’d say his estate was right to give the nod: the story is in safe hands with playwright David Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin, whose adaptation settles in at the West End after scoring good notices in Chichester.

‘Merry and tragical. Tedious and brief’ is how the play with a play staged at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is described. While nobody could accuse this co-production between the Globe and Headlong as being tedious, it otherwise feels like it could have otherwise been patterned off that contradictory description.

Are you looking for something fuzzy to warm your heart this Christmastime? Then boy does the National Theatre have the show for you. 

High priests of the theatrically random Told By An Idiot are a perfect match for Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen’s droll festive picturebook How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? Adapted and directed by company leader Paul Hunter, it’s a glorious 50-minute non sequitur that should appeal to anyone with a sense of nonsense.

Cementing the Lyric Hammersmith’s place at the top of the London panto pantheon, here’s a wonderfully inventive new take on Jack and the Beanstalk for 2025. 

Scrooge has been ditched for an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘favourite child’, David Copperfield. And, in Abigail Pickard Price’s production, the reasons for this great honour shine loud and clear.