London theatre reviews

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…

The search for truth lies at the centre of Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s Pukitzer-nominated play, which follows archivists at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum as they study, dissect, and agonise over a mysterious photo album donated in 2007…

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. 

If you staged it as a radio play, Anna Jordan’s Lost Atoms would be a skilled but conventional story of a relationship, from meet cute through to heavily foreshadowed breakup.

As a schoolchild in the late ‘90s I swear to god I saw a production of The Tempest  – I think at Malvern Theatre – that mostly consisted of Prospero and his villainous brother Antonio playing chess together, while the rest of the play kind of happened around them. It was so weird that I now occasionally doubt it actually happened. But also I’m pretty sure it did as I remember it so clearly. And Tim Crouch’s new production of The Tempest brought it to mind: I think it might baffle a lot of people, but I doubt any of them will forget it in a hurry.