London theatre reviews

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…

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…