London theatre reviews

Coincidentally topical, with Artemis II in the news this past week, Theo Jamieson and Adam Lenson’s new musical Flyby concerns an astronaut who drifts very far from home – and asks us to piece together why.

Anya Reiss’s new adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a panic attack in textual form, that smartly amplifies the debt-related anxieties that underpin the 1879 original into something extremely modern and extremely nerve-wracking…

Two thoughts buzzed around my head while watching the first UK revival of Michael Frayn’s 1998 megahit Copenhagen. Number one, it’s astonishing that the first time around this hyper-dense show, substantially concerned with theoretical physics, ran in the West End for two years, following a year at the National. And number two, it would probably land differently if the Americans nuked Tehran on press night which (at the time of writing) was a genuine possibility. 

Inter Alia opens with Rosamund Pike wigged and gowned and rocking out, rasping ‘fuck the patriarchy’ into a mic. This is not a power ballad: the Saltburn and Gone Girl star plays Jess Parks, a pioneering feminist judge, and she is performing the emotional cut-and-thrust of a recent rape trial with relish, deploying her icy froideur to slay macho barristers who are attempting to slut shame vulnerable complainants…

Winsome Pinnock’s eccentric and occasionally confounding new play follows Abi (Rakie Ayola) and Marva (Cherrelle Skeete), two Black female historians who have secured access to the recently unearthed daily records of an eighteenth century Jamaican plantation…

Les Liaisons Dangereuses – I think it’s French for ‘the sexy meetings’ – is a classic play, though I’m not convinced that’s the same as being a good one. Starting life in 1782 as an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Christopher Hampton’s 1985 stage adaptation was a sensation, adapted into a hit 1988 film and clearly responsible for the ‘90s teen remake Cruel Intentions.

You probably want to know about Sadie Sink. But first we must talk about the sure-to-be-divisive device in auteur director Robert Icke’s take on Romeo & Juliet…

This Tony and Olivier Award-winning musical – adapted by Harvey Fierstein with songs by Cyndi Lauper from the 2005 Britflick – was first seen in the West End a decade ago. And now it struts back into town with energy to spare.

The ingredients to this 2012 play by Moonlight screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney feel familiar. Elite American high school, scholarship choir boys, one gay and bullied. A floppy-haired ‘think-outside-the-box’ teacher in the vein of The History Boys’ Hector or Dead Poets’ Society’s Keating.

Ghanaian-American playwright Jocelyn Bioh has already impressed at the Lyric Hammersmith with her cracking comedy School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play. Now she returns, with director Monique Touko once again at the helm, bringing the play that earned her five Tony Award nominations in 2024 – and it’s easy to see why it was such a hit on Broadway…