London theatre reviews

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?

If you know Christopher Brett Bailey you will surely know him for 2014’s This Is How We Die, a hallucinatory, hilarious beat poetry-style road trip monologue that ended in an awesome roar of sound as the show – hitherto just Bailey at a desk – morphed into a cacophonous post rock gig…

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. 

Usually when reviewing children’s theatre I completely disregard the opinions of my own kids, who are pathetically easily pleased and woefully lacking in in-depth knowledge of the theatrical arts. This is different though.

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. 

Director Clint Dyer has put a very bold spin on Dale Wasserman’s 1963 stage adaptation of Ken Kelsey’s countercultural classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Former National Theatre deputy Dyer has reimagined it as an intersectional work about racial hierarchies, in which the outnumbered white staff of a psychiatric hospital keep a largely Black patient population in check via icy self-belief and exploitation of their patients’ vulnerabilities…

How often does a night at the theatre begin with an actual full-on karaoke session? Maybe yours does all the time, but certainly not mine (and more’s the pity). Yet that’s the set-up at Heart Wall – enter the auditorium at the Bush Theatre, scan the QR codes covering the walls, and sign up to sing.

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…