London theatre reviews

Three teenage girls are dancing round their bedroom under flashing rainbow lights, squealing over boys, when everything goes dark and the screaming starts. It’s a jolting opening to a play, and it sets the rhythm for everything that follows in Theresa Ikoko’s Girls. You’re laughing one minute and holding your breath the next.

‘Tis the season: master mentalist Derren Brown is back on the West End, this time with a disorienting show that sets out to challenge the illusion of free will and our ownership of the future. Pretty classic Brown stuff, right? Well, indeed. You might think that, some 30-odd years into his career, you know exactly what Brown’s shtick is. But, of course, the thing you can always expect from Brown is the unexpected…

You know what they say: they fuck you up, your mum and dad. And in Danny Lee Wynter’s new play, based on his own experiences, so do your sisters…

Ask any millennial how they feel about High School Musical, the world-conquering made-for-Disney Channel teen movie, celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, and their reaction will likely be equal parts misty-eyed and horrified. Nonetheless, there’s clearly big business in nostalgia, as is made blatantly clear with the brand new High School Musical stage production running at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre this autumn…

Helen Edmundson’s new play Some Woman is described as a thriller, but the experience of watching it is more like a slow strangulation – one that leaves you feeling thoroughly shaken and queasy on the other side…

We all love a plot twist but New York theatremaker Andy Sandberg’s play Affluenza feels like a cautionary story about what happens when you twist too hard…

The thrill of slogging up three flights of steps to the Royal Court’s tiny experimental Upstairs studio is that you never know what you’ll find at the top. Happily, debut playwright Joy Nesbitt’s excellent ancestry drama has a scenario that bites from the get-go, and never relaxes its grip…

A baker, a witch and a boy with a cow walk into the woods. It sounds like the set-up to a dodgy Christmas cracker joke, but plenty of Londoners already know how this one ends, given Jordan Fein’s lavish revival of Sondheim’s subversive fairytale musical Into the Woods spent last year packing out the Bridge and hoovering up Oliviers. Now it’s crossed the river to the Noël Coward with a mostly new cast, and it’s every bit as good…

Sting’s musical The Last Ship has had a fairly rough sailing of it so far: in the 13 years since it launched in the States it’s been through three iterations with three different writers and three different directors. The one great constant is Gordon Sumner himself: as well as writing the songs, he’s expended a lot of time and money on the project, including a stint performing in the 2014 Broadway incarnationand this globally touring version in which he’s just gone ‘fuck it’ and fully embraced the role of grizzled shipyard foreman Jackie White…

Kimberly Akimbo has the sort of outlandish premise that makes you wonder if it’s going to be another entry in the annals of ‘mad things that only Americans are interested in’. But any  musical that wins five Tony awards and tempts the legendary Maria Friedman out of unofficial retirement is probably going to be alright, isn’t it? Well yes.