Andrzej Lukowski

Afternoon tea is what makes a trip to London truly iconic – even if you already live here. You’ll find some of the best at London’s chicest hotels, restaurants, and art galleries - and we’ve worked out what makes an afternoon tea a truly memorable experience. It'’s not just perfect pastries, the most elegant of teeny tiny cakes and finger sarnies with the crusts cut off, but swish service, the option to have something boozy and bubbly and a picture-perfect, characterful room in which to enjoy it all. From The Ritz to a Caribbean restaurant in Walthamstow, the National Gallery and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, there's truly something for every cake-munching tea-drinker in this round-up of London's best afternoon tea spreads.  Expect to pay in the region of £50 to £80 for the pleasure per person, but you'll be in for a treat if you go with one of our recommendations. Remember, many of the teas have set times for seatings, so booking in advance is always a good idea. RECOMMENDED: The best hotels in London. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor and knows all about tiny little cucumber sandwiches and drinking Champagne at 3pm. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines. The hottest new openings, the tastiest tips, the spiciest reviews: we’re serving it all on our London restaurants WhatsApp channel. Follow us now.

From a quintet of affordable benefit shows hosted by the enigmatic Daniel Kitson to the latest outing from telly fave Katherine Ryan, it’s another month of diverse comedy thrills on the London stage. There are far, far too many one-off, multi-performer comedy nights in London for us to compile a single coherent page with our favouites on, which is entirely to London’s credit. So do check individual bills of comedy clubs online for that sort of thing. But if you’re looking for an individual comedian with a full headline show then this page is here to compile the Time Out editorial team’s top choices, often with our reviews from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The best comedy clubs in London.The best new theatre shows to book for in London.

There’s a lot of talk about the state of London nightlife right now. Naysayers lament the fact that venues are closing at an alarming rate, blame Gen Zs for not going out and claim that it’s impossible to get a drink in central after 1am (it’s really not). With all that negativity and uncertainty, it’s tempting to just stick to what you know – or worse, stay in – rather than get out there and experience what this vast city has to offer after dark.  There are new nights popping up all the time. Heart of Soul, Jungyals and Gays, Club Stamina and Joyride are all relatively new (and totally brilliant) additions to London’s club scene. There’s also the nights that have remained classics for good reason – Rowans, the Palm Tree fridays, K-Hole – as well as more wholesome late-evening activities like life drawing, spoken word nights and supper clubs.  There’s nights out for everyone in this city. Nights for foodies, film buffs, audiophiles. Nights for marathon ravers, old-school movers and for when you need a proper good singalong. Even nights out for when you just want a nice sit down.  We curated this list by asking Time Out staff members for their favourite nights out in the city – and trust us, we know our stuff. Our list features nights in central London, east London, west London, north London and in south London. They all take place frequently, or semi-frequently, throughout the year and each offers something unique. So what are you waiting for? Start planning your next night o

London’s theatre scene is the most exciting in the world: perfectly balanced between the glossy musical theatre of Broadway and the experimentalism of Europe, it’s flavoured by the British preference for new writing and love of William Shakespeare, but there really is something for everyone. Between the showtunes of the West End and the constant pipeline of new writing from the subsidised sector, there’s a whole thrilling world, with well over 100 theatres and over venues playing host to everything from classic revivals to cutting-edge immersive work. This rolling list is constantly updated to share the best of what’s coming up and currently booking: these choices aren’t the be-all and end-all of great theatre in 2025, but they are, as a rule, the biggest and splashiest shows coming up, alongside intriguing looking smaller projects.   They’re shows worth booking for, pronto, both to avoid sellouts but to get the cheaper tickets that initially go on sale for most shows but tend to be snapped up months before they actually open. Please note that the prices quoted are the ‘official’ prices when the shows go on sale – with West End shows in particular it can unfortunately be the case that if they sell well, expensive dynamic prices can be triggered. Want to see if these shows live up to the hype? Check out our theatre reviews. Check out our complete guide to musicals in London.  And head over here for a guide to every show in the West End at the moment.

Hello, and welcome to the Time Out theatre reviews round up. From huge star vehicles and massive West End musical to hip fringe shows and more, this is a compliation of all the latest London reviews from the Time Out theatre team, which is me – Time Out theatre editor Andrzej Łukowski – plus our freelance critics. RECOMMENDED New theatre openings in London this month. A-Z of West End shows.

Sunday lunch. There’s nothing quite like it. An elemental meal, one that Londoners take incredibly seriously. Debates about what constitutes the ‘perfect’ Sunday roast have been known to last for hours. There is no shortage of top roasts in London. We’ve rounded up the city’s best Sunday meals from a host of homely pubs and restaurants all around town. What makes a good roast? For us, it’s simple; a cosy room is a good start, maybe in a pub with an open fire. Then it comes to the plate – we need perfect roast potatoes, well-cooked lamb, beef or pork and a decent plant-based option too. A Sunday roast is more than just lunch - it’s self-care. From snug neighbourhood staples to more bijou gastropubs, posh hotels, Michelin-star spots, and even a metal bar in Camden, we’ve got something for every taste (if that taste is for comforting mounds of roast meat, lashings of gravy and carbs for days).  A lot of these places get quite busy, by the way. So you’re always advised to book ahead to avoid disappointment.  RECOMMENDED: London's 50 best pubs. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor, and her Sunday roast order is usually pork belly with extra gravy, extra roasties and a big glass of Pinot Noir. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

Thanks to some frankly pretty wacky decisions made at the Council of Nicea in the year 325AD, the Easter weekend famously jumps around crazily from year to year, making the Easter holiday undoubedly the most erratic of all school breaks. For 2025, the school Easter hols stretch from Saturday April 5 to Monday April 21, with that Monday of course Easter Monday – Easter being so late this year that the holidays end with it. That’s a lot of child entertaining to do, but with the weather hopefully staying nice and spring now fully sprung, it’s a great opportunity to go out and have fun with the family and take advantage of the most fun family activities available this April.  Stuck for ideas on how to fill all this free time? That’s where we come in. Below is a list of ideas for things you can get up to in London with the kids this Easter holidays.  RECOMMENDED: Crack open our full guide to the Easter weekend.  

What is immersive theatre? A glib buzzword? A specific description of a specific type of theatre? A phrase that has become so diluted that it’s lost all meaning? Whether you call it immersive, interactive or site-specific, London is bursting with plays and experiences which welcome you into a real-life adventure that you can wander around and play the hero in. I’m Andrzej Łukowski, Time Out’s theatre editor, and let me tell you I have run the immersive gamut, from a show where I had to take my clothes off in a darkened shipping container, to successfully bagging tickets to the six-hour Punchdrunk odyssey there were only ever a couple of hundred tickets released, to quite a lot of theatre productions where the set goes into the audience a bit and apparently that counts as immersive. There is a lot of immersive work in London, some of which is definitely theatre, some of which definitely isn’t, some of which is borderline, some of which is but doesn’t want to say it is because some some people are just horrified of the word ‘theatre’.  This page has been around for a while now and gone through various schools of thought, but the one we’ve settled on for now is that the main list compiles every major show in London that could reasonably be described as ‘immersive theatre’, while the bottom list compiles a few of our favouite immersive shows thet you probably wouldn’t describe as theatre though it is, naturally a blurry line. Whatever the case you can mostly only really decide wh

Hello! I'm Andrzej, the theatre editor of Time Out London, and me and my freelancers review a heck of a lot of theatre. This page is an attempt to distil the shows that are on right now into something like a best of the best based upon our actual reviews, as opposed to my predictions, which determine our longer range what to book for list. It isn’t a scientific process, and you’ll definitely see shows that got four stars above ones that got five – this is generally because the five star show is probably going to be on for years to come (hello, Hamilton) and I'm trying to draw your attention to one that’s only running for a couple more weeks. Or sometimes, we just like to shake things up a bit. It’s also deliberately light on the longer-running West End hits simply because I don’t think you need to know what I think about Les Mis before you book it (it’s fine!). So please enjoy the best shows in London, as recommended by us, having actually seen them.

Hello – I'm Time Out’s theatre editor and also a parent, something that has considerable overlap in London, a city with three dedicated kids theatres and where pretty much every other theatre might play host to a child-friendly show. Listing everything would be a slightly psychotic undertaking and probably not that illuminating, as many kids’ shows are only on for a day or two. So instead this round up forcusses on the flagship shows at London’s kids theatres – that’s the Little Angel, the Unicorn and Polka – plus other major shows aimed at or suitable for youngsters. On the whole, pre-school and primary children are the age groups best served specifically, because secondary school aged teenagers can generally see adult theatre perfectly well (and will indeed often be made to do so!). So while the odd teen focussed show will make it in here, if you’re looking for something to do with teens why not consult our reviews page or what to book list. Our London kids’ theatre page normally contains information for all the main children’s shows running in London theatres this month and next month, and is broken down into three categories. Theatre for all the family is suitable for any age, including adults without children. Theatre for older children is specifically aimed at school-age children and teenagers. Theatre for babies, pre-schoolers and younger children does what the title suggests, and also includes shows suitable for younger school-age children. See also:50 things to do i

Sandwiched between the twin food heavens of Borough Market and Bermondsey Street, and with an abundance of restaurant gems, you’ll struggle to eat badly in SE1. An area of London with something for every taste and budget, eating around London Bridge is like a backpacking world tour these days, and our selection includes picks from a huge range of cuisines. Look here for a page dedicated to the best restaurants in and by Borough Market and enjoy our favourite restaurants near London Bridge. RECOMMENDED: The best restaurants in Bermondsey. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

There are a hell of a lot of musicals running in London at any given time, from decades-long classics like ‘Les Miserables and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ to short-run fringe obscurities, plus all manner of new shows launched every year hoping for long-running glory. Here we round up every West End musical currently running or coming soon, plus fringe and off-West End shows that we’ve reviewed – all presented in fabulous alphabetical order. SEE ALSO: How to get cheap and last-minute theatre tickets in London.

This April de Angelis period drama feels like a great idea that could have been done better. To be honest, it could probably be done better by De Angelis herself: she was a young woman when it premiered in Leicester way back in 1993. Her intimate drama about five of the most prominent actresses of the Restoration – that is to say, five of the first ever English actresses – feels like the sketch for a bigger and more detailed play that was never actually made. Why revive it? Well, it’s an intriguing subject. More to the point, director Michael Oakley has pulled together this cast. Current Orange Tree boss Tom Littler has definitely upped the name quotient at the small but respected Richmond theatre since taking over last year. Anna Chancellor is a very decent get as Mrs Betterton, doting actress wife to Thomas Betterton, the unseen actor-manager of the Duke’s Company for whom the actresses work. Triple Olivier nominee Katherine Kingsley – last seen on stage leading the National Theatre’s Witches musical – is wonderful as the very tough, very bosomy Mrs Marshall. But it’s the less well know youngsters who really impress. Nicole Sawyerr was excellent in last year’s art exploitation satire My Mother’s Funeral. Here she’s brilliant as the flighty, cunning Mrs Farley, who goes on what one can only call Quite A Journey over the course of the play. It’s not the biggest role, but it calls for pitch-perfect comic and tragic timing and she really does deliver.  The revelation, though,

Nobody loves to imply they didn’t have anything to do with slavery more than the British. Admittedly we were less enthusiastic about it than noted spin-off nation the USA. But you can’t boast about how early you were to abolish something without having been pretty into it in the first place. Azuka Oforka’s uneven but engrossing play ruthlessly pushes the surface incongruity of the fact that it’s set in an 18th-century Jamaican sugar plantation with the none-more-Welsh name of Llanrumney. Though Oforka’s characters are fictional, Llanrumney is a real place that was owned by the Welsh Morgan family. The play premiered last year at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, and clearly tying Wales to slavery is a potent gesture in front of a Welsh audience that can’t quite be replicated here. Nonetheless, the English are not wriggling out of this one. It’s a play with a lot of moving parts, which eases us in by starting with the fraught relationship between slaves Annie (Suzanne Packer) and Cerys (Shvorne Marks). Annie is Llanrumney’s housekeeper and the illegitimate daughter of its late owner. Cerys is her barely acknowledged daughter. It’s 1765, just four years after huge slave revolt Tacky’s rebellion, and the threat of violence hangs in the air. Annie is of the mindset that it‘s best to make herself indispensable to the whites in exchange for a better life and elevated hopes of manumission. Cerys dreams of rebellion and the end to the oppressive status quo. But though they have our sym

  One of the biggest winners of Euro 2024 was undoubtedly the playwright James Graham. Having promised to update his smash Gareth Southgate drama Dear England following the final tournament of his subject’s tenure as England men’s team manager, Graham must have been thrilled when our boys neither crashed out nor triumphed, but rather did precisely as well as they had done in Euro 2020. Major changes were not therefore necessary; Dear England has been tweaked a bit for its third run in three years, but not a lot. A new cast hasn’t radically changed the vibe either: as Southgate, Gwilym Lee is broadly going going for exactly the same sort of respectful impersonation as his predecessor Joseph Fiennes; likewise Ryan Whittle’s scene-stealingly funny Harry Kane is pretty much the same as Will Close’s scene-stealingly funny Harry Kane. Clearly it’s back because it gets bums on seats rather than because Graham has astonishing new insights to share. But who cares? Graham has written deeper and more important plays than Dear England. But the secret of its success is that – unlike the actual England men’s team – it is consistently, relentlessly entertaining.  Of course there’s the worry that Rupert Goold’s pacy, widescreen production might overhype Southgate, or lionise him in luvvie-ish terms. Yes, by some metrics he’s the most successful England manager in history. But that’s not necessarily how the average England fan sees him.  As ever with England, it comes down to penalties. After

This review is from October 2024. Arcade returns for 2025 as part of mini festival Darkfield @ The Ditch. Arcade will ‘headline’, alongside a selection of new Darkfield shows. Blackout theatre specials Darkfield – aka Glen Neath and David Rosenberg – have spent years crafting meticulously disorientating immersive words that audience members experience via sophisticated headphones-based binaural sound design, performed in entirely lightless shipping containers. On the whole, they feel like surreal, sinister dreams: evocative but you’re effectively a passenger – just along for the ride, with no real agency of your own, and as the (very short) shows wear on and you get acclimatised to the darkness I’ve generally found the whole thing starts to feel a bit sillier. Arcade is a clever and unsettling leap forwards, giving you a degree of agency as you’re stood at an old school arcade machine with a big button on it that you press to indicate ‘yes’ in the choose-your-own-adventure style story. You do not in fact play an arcade game, but the general understanding in the interactive story relayed through your headphones is that you’re an avatar named Milk in a game that you could either interpret as intended to be imagined as sophisticated VR or taken literally as a headphones game from Darkfield. Whatever the case, you’re thrust into a violent, absurdist dystopia and while one button might not sound like a lot of agency, when I got shot point blank in the head within about 30 seconds

Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in an abusive relationship with the Menier Chocolate Factory, a theatre that almost exclusively seems to trade in brilliant musicals I love and terrible farces I hate. I want to go into these things with an open mind, but inevitably it’s the same outcome every time. And following its excellent revival of Mel Brooks’s The Producers - now heading for the West End – guess what’s next? Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s off-Broadway hit Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors isn’t that bad: it’s a goofy, gag-filled but fundamentally quite tame parody of Bram Stoker’s immortal 1897 novel that basically adds up to an old-fashioned BBC radio comedy.  It does have one genuine USP (US performer): transferring with the show, James Daly is undeniably very good looking and very stacked as the extremely camp Count Dracula. Handsome in a way British people aren’t – like a child’s drawing of a hunk – Daly’s weapons-grade American charisma does at least make the idea of building a show around him feel plausible when he’s on stage. But otherwise it’s pretty dismal. A hard-working British cast of four – including musical theatre star Charlie Stemp as meek solicitor Jonathan Harker – flit energetically between roles, but their Englishness only serves to underscore the fact this has the air of a British radio comedy of decades past. Maybe if it felt more American it might seem less dated. It is, to break out the obvious metaphors, anaemic, defanged, lacking bite. Conventi

This review is from 2023. Tambo & Bones returns to Stratford East for 2025 as part of a UK tour. Clifford Samuel takes over the role of Tambo, and Daniel Ward reprises the role of Bones. US poet and playwright Dave Harris’s ‘Tambo & Bones’ is a funny, filthy, often gleefully ridiculous satire about the African American male experience as embodied by the two title characters: Tambo (Rhashan Stone), a thoughtful, troubled guy concerned with the betterment of Black America and the expansion of its consciousness; and Bones (Daniel Ward), an incorrigible hustler almost entirely fixated on how much money he can make out of any given situation.  When we first meet them, they’re dressed in battered, silly minstrel outfits, stuck in an overtly artificial, cartoonish-looking field. Tambo is trying to have a nap. Bones wants to get some money out of us, the audience. They bicker and debate and come up with various harebrained schemes before realising something is off and that they need a more contemporary way of telling their story/making a shitload of money. In the next scene, they’re reborn as an old-school rap duo, now espousing their worldviews in rhyme. Rude and ridiculous and anchored by two full-bodied performances from Stone and Ward – who absolutely go for it with the rapping –‘Tambo and Bones’ is a blast. Yes, it’s also a consideration of African American male archetypes and the Black American dream. But it’s a very irreverent one, something underscored by a totally out-there

Amy Heckerling’s cult 1995 comedy Clueless feels a bit overshadowed by the funnier (but less nuanced) Mean Girls, which came a few years later and more aggressively staked its claim to the same post-John Hughes, high-school-as-a-jokey-microcosm-of-life turf. So it’s not surprising that Mean Girls was first in there with a musical adaption, currently fetching away over at the Savoy Theatre.  But finally, here’s Clueless, which like Mean Girls is adapted by its original screenwriter, a sign of a labour of love if ever there was one. Despite other major successes, Heckerling is not the name Tina Fey is, and her stage update is nothing like as coruscatingly funny as Fey’s. But she makes a strong case for the enduring appeal of Clueless, her slyly clever valley-girl revamp of Jane Austen’s Emma. And unlike Fey she hasn’t roped her less talented husband in to write a load of unfunny songs that don’t really go with the rest of it.  The songs are in fact co-written by Broadway royalty lyricist Glenn Slater and ‘00s Scottish pop star KT Tunstall – an odd choice to translate the adventures of perky LA schoolgirl Cher Horowitz, but certainly not a bad choice as it turns out.  The slightly random deployment of Tunstall does, however, feel emblematic of a frustrating vagueness at the heart of the Rachel Kavanaugh-directed Anglo-American production. It never feels as Californian as the film, and doesn’t quite know whether to play up its ‘90s setting or shrug it off. Tunstall’s tunes broadl

The only way I can think to describe Jean-Phillipe Daguerre’s massive Parisian stage hit Farewell Mister Haffmann is as an unnatural collision of Schindler’s List and Indecent Proposal. Proof that the French really are a bewilderingly freaky people. Joseph Haffman (Alex Waldmann) is the Jewish proprietor of a jewellery shop in Paris, 1942. He asks his trusted employee Pierre (Michael J Fox) if he might agree to take ownership of the business to protect it from the Germans, on the condition Joseph – whose wife and kids have escaped to Switzerland – is allowed to hide on the premises. Pierre makes a bizarre counter proposal: he is sterile, so asks that if he goes along with Joseph’s plan, might Joseph please boff his wholesome wife Isabelle (Jennifer Kirby) once a month until she’s pregnant? Sorry to say that I found this so insane that I struggled to engage with the first hour of the play. The premise is maybe just about plausible, but the execution is totally loopy. Having suggested and brokered this convoluted sexual arrangement, Pierre falls apart the second Isabelle and Joseph do it, something bombastically accentuated in Oscar Toeman’s production by the moodily lit scenes of Pierre frenziedly tap dancing upstairs while the others are getting it on in the basement. For their part Waldmann’s Joseph and Kirby’s Isabelle approach their task with the elan of schoolchildren wearily cracking on with their homework – whether Joseph feels any guilt about cheating on his wife we ne

The first show I remember seeing at the Yard Theatre was called Manga Sister and was a 40-minute micro opera about a samurai going nuts at an old people’s home. I liked it a lot. But it’s fair to say that Hackney Wick’s only theatre has come a long way in the 14 years since then, as it closes the doors of its original building not with a fringe curio but a revival of Tennessee Williams’s greatest play The Glass Menagerie. Yard artistic director Jay Miller is not a man afraid to throw out a lot of ideas and see what sticks, and it took a while for me to settle into his revival, which eschews period detail in favour of a dreamy no place chased by contemporary music (notably John Maus’s gorgeously elegiac Hey Moon), where everyone is kitted out is strange, luxuriant, beautiful costumes courtesy of ‘Lambdog1066’ (probably not their real name but so what if it is). And yet Miller has a clear and lucid plan for it. The ’30s-set 1944 drama, based on Williams’s own family, tends to depict aging Southern belle Amanda Wingfield as a suffocating force of nature whose overbearing love has ruined the lives of her children, Tom (probably gay) and Laura (probably disabled). Miller upends this. Sharon Small’s Amanda is ultimately a decent sort: if the engine of the play is her relationship with her troubled son, then here Small and Tom Varey’s charmingly battered Tom (he kind of looks like ‘70s Dylan) laugh together as much as they argue. She is reined in, a carefully modulated performance t

This review is from the 2018 Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre run for Dinosaur World Live.  The last time the beasts of the Mesozoic era descended upon Regent’s Park it was for ‘Dinosaur Zoo’, a puppet-based dino romp that was a lot of fun, albeit somewhat defined by its obstinate refusal to feature dinosaurs that weren’t from Australia (the show was in fact Australian, but dinosaur nationalism is a pretty weird concept). Anyway, ‘Dinosaur World Live’ is a not dissimilar idea, except that the British show, written and directed by Derek Bond, isn’t afraid to give the audience what it wants – that is, a T-rex. In fact, there are two T-rexes, an adult and a baby, plus a brace of Triceratops and some semi-obscure additional dinos (Giraffatitan, Segnosaurus, Microraptor) that parents may or may not have heard of depending upon the extent of their children’s dino-love. There’s a framing plot, which goes on a bit and may sail over the heads of smaller audience members, wherein perky Miranda (Elizabeth Mary Williams, with the squeaky-clean pep of a Butlin’s Redcoat) recounts how her family discovered a mysterious island full of living dinosaurs, which they are now exhibiting across the breadth of the UK in a larksome roadshow. It’s a set-up to introduce us to a succession of lovably unruly puppet dinosaurs, beautifully designed by Max Humphries and manipulated by a versatile team of puppeteers overseen by Laura Cubitt. There’s a spot of audience interaction – feeding, grooming – and th

The stage versions of Terry’s Deary’s enormously successful ‘Horrible Histories’ franchise – that’s history for kids with a heavy emphasis on the naughty bits – are now so successful in and of themselves that they’re starting to wrack up a ‘Fast & Furious’-volume of sequels – summer 2021 will see the West End debut of the lengthily-titled ‘Horrible Histories – Barmy Britain: Part Five’. Not content with that, they’re now taking to the high seas (well, river) with ‘Terrible Thames’. It’s an enjoyable hour-long clipper tour that forgoes humdrum observations on London’s great waterway and instead focussed on the darker stuff. To do so, there’s a dramatic device. Billie, a schoolchild, has earned a special trip on the Thames with her teacher, and the two of them spend the trip engaged in a duelling dialogue of facts, putting the awkwardly blokey teacher’s more conventional wisdom against Billie’s knowledge of the darker stories or the Thames, as handed down to her by her family. It’s not exactly ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’, and if I were being particularly annoying I might point out that they become fairly interchangeable after a while, with each of them being well-informed or pig-ignorant on whatever we happen to be sailing past on a strictly alternating basis. Nonetheless: it’s fun! Written by Deary and the show’s director, Neal Foster, the facts are understandably quick-fire, given you can’t, for instance, explain the background to the 1014 Viking incursion into London tha

This review is from the original 2024 National Theatre run of Till the Stars Come Down. It will transfer to the West End in 2025 with casting TBA. Tickets go on sale March 20. Beth Steel has earned her debut at the National Theatre, slowly grafting her way up via a string of working-class dramas at Hampstead Theatre, on to the hipper Almeida for 2022’s ‘House of Shades’, and now finally arriving at the dizzying heights of the Dorfman. ‘Till the Stars Come Down’ is a beautifully observed and often bruisingly hilarious play that centres on Hazel, Maggie and Sylvia, a trio of sisters from Mansfield, who have reunited for the wedding of Sinead Matthews’s Sylvia. The first half hour of Bijan Sheibani’s production is luxuriant character building, nary a man in sight as the sisters chatter about Sylvie’s imminent wedding, catch up on lost time – Lisa McGrillis’s Maggie unexpectedly left town a little while ago – and banter. Banter a lot: all of Steel’s characters have a way with words, a quintessentially English, working-class wit. But Lorraine Ashbourne’s dissolute Aunty Carol is something else, a veritable one-liner machine: even if you hate everything else about the play you’d have to be made of stone not to laugh like a drain at something like half of her lines. As the drama warms up, it looks like it’s going to be about the white working class’s response to EU migration – Sylvie’s husband-to-be Marek (Marc Wooton) is Polish, and the family is divided about him, to say the least

This April is an enjoyably eclectic month on the London stage, with a bit of celebrity magic – Ewan MacGregor and Elizabeth Debicki in My Master Builder – a blockbuster musical – Broadway transfer The Great Gatsby – and some cool international work at the Barbican in the shape of a very unusual Hamlet and a prestige Irish Beckett production. But there’s one production that’s really piqued my curiosity, as the greatest director of his generation makes his debut as a playwright with a truly fascinating looking play…  The best new London theatre openings in April 2025 Photo: Royal Court 1. Manhunt Part of the reason Robert Icke has established himself as the greatest British director of his generation is that on the quiet he’s a remarkable playwright, with his brilliant contemporary adaptations Oresteia, Oedipus and The Doctor et al all vastly different to the source material. He’s never really sought any credit for his writing. But in another coup for the David Byrne-era Royal Court, Icke makes his debut there as both director and – for the first time officially – playwright. Manhunt is a drama about Raoul Moat, the fugitive who precipitated a deadly and eccentric chase across the North East after he shot his ex fiance and her new partner with a shotgun in 2010. It’s a strange and queasy story and if Icke can pull a great original play out of it then GOAT-dem surely beckons. Royal Court Theatre, until May 3. Buy tickets here.  Photo: Old Vic 2. The Brightening Air Technical

It feels like barely a few days since massive biannual theatre ticket sale London Theatre Week – which is actually one month long – wrapped up. But hooray! Here’s the next big West End theatre sale! What sort of sucker would pay full price for a theatre ticket anyway? (We jest, of course: but it’s always work seeing if there’s a sale on the horizon before booking tickets, especially to older shows that often reduce their prices during slower bits of the year). Anyway, this sale – partnered with Time Out – is called the Spring Spectacular 2025, it takes in 66 theatre shows, and it lasts until April 14, with savings of up to 59 percent. It covers a bunch of big name West End shows including The Book of Mormon, Tina, Back to the Future, Wicked, MJ the Musical, Matilda the Musical, Starlight Express, Moulin Rogue!, Magic Mike Live and Starlight Express.  If I were to make a couple of recommendations it would be for the transfer to the Barbican of the Open Air Theatre’s wildly acclaimed production of Fiddler on the Roof, and hugely acclaimed US transfer Stereophonic, which is liable to sell out when the reviews drop if the reception is anything like it was in America.  Whatever you’re looking for, have a rummage round on the official site and see if you can snag a bargain you like the look of. The Spring Spectacular 2025 runs until April 14. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025. The Royal Court has announced a spectacularly eclectic 2025 season.

Maybe you remember the 2010 film Burlesque, which starred Christina Aguilera as a dancer who gets her big break at Cher’s struggling LA burlesque lounge. Maybe you don’t (the film was a modest success at best, mostly in the US). But one person who clearly hasn’t forgotten it is Aguilera herself, who has teamed up with the film’s write Steve Antin and fellow big name songstress Sia for a full blown musical adaptation of Burlesque that had tryouts in Manchester and Glasgow last year and is now set on a limited West End run this summer, replacing Mean Girls at the Savoy Theatre.  They’ve reworked the songs they wrote for the movie specially for this musical, which Aguilera is also a producer of.  Quoth the Dirrty singer: ‘I’m proud that Burlesque the Musical is coming to London’s West End!  Our journey of making this film to bringing this show to the stage has been so special and exciting.  Following our successful previews, having the show land in the West End later this year is a dream come true!’. New songs have also been written, by US singer Toderick Hall and Brit Jess Folley, both of whom played roles when the show played in Manchester and Glasgow last year; although casting is yet to be announced it certainly wouldn’t be particularly wild if they re-emerged in the London cast seeing as how they’re making money off it anyway. The show is written and produced by Steven Antin (who wrote and directed the film), with additional material by Kate Wetherhead. Curiously none of th

‘It’s a full feast of what new writing can look like!’ enthuses Royal Court artistic director David Byrne in a short phone chat to promote his latest season at the iconic new writing theatre. If Byrne’s first year of work at the Court was determinedly eclectic then his second, announced today, is more of the same, albeit insofar as the six plays it comprises are giddily, gloriously different from each other. It will get underway with a big late spring transfer for Breach Theatre’s acclaimed verbatim musical about After the Act (May 21-Jun 14), which concerns the devastating effect of Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 on the UK LGBTQ community. Theatre nerds will probably be aware that it started life at Byrne’s former theatre the New Diorama (read our four star review here) – the whimsical but hard hitting show will transfer to the Court’s larger Downstairs theatre in expanded form. It will be followed a short return for last year’s hit play ECHO (Jun 27-Jul 5), which calls in as part of a global tour. The piece is involves a different performer every night reading it for the first time: guests confirmed include Mel Giedroyc, Nish Kumar and Juliet Stevenson. That will overlap with the previously announced, kill-for-a-seat revival of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (Jun 12-Jul 5) which plays in the dinky Upstairs.  After that there will be a major new work from brilliant Irish experimental company Dead Centre with Deaf Republic (Aug 29-Sep 13). A collaboration with sign language poet

Fetch did not quite happen. Tina Fey’s Mean Girls musical was one of the biggest new West End openings of 2024, and was generally praised for being a very funny adaptation of the beloved millennial high school movie. But word on the actual songs was less strong, and by the time it opened here it had already closed on Broadway. It’s questionable whether the fact a film version of the musical being released earlier last year really helped. And the arrival in town this month of the very similar Clueless can’t have been a huge boost either.  In short, Mean Girls is leaving town this summer after running at the Savoy Theatre for about a year – a perfectly decent stint, but inevitably every musical that comes to town with an open-ended run hopes to stick around for a few years, and Mean Girls definitely isn’t doing that, or even coming close to the two years it managed on Broadway. Still, there’s good news for non-London-based fans of Cady Heron, the Plastics, and all the other high school eccentrics in Fey’s show will be embarking upon a UK tour next year, with dates to be announced.  Often when a musical’s closure is announced a few months in advance it means the ink has been dried on the deal for the next show to go into the theatre, but decorum dictates the current resident is allowed to announce its departure first. There are various rumours sloshing around regarding what’s next for the Savoy, including a musical adaptation of 2010 Christina Aguilera vehicle Burlesque that’s a

Celebrity actors are famously reluctant to tour plays around the country: most of the time you’ll be lucky to get a cheeky week in Brighton ahead of a West End transfer. So immense credit then to nascent Brit superstar Jodie Comer, who scored a huge West End hit with Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie in 2022 and repeated the feat in 2023 on Broadway. And she’ll be doing it again at the start of next year, as she dusts off the acclaimed monologue about a hotshot lawyer whose life is turned upside down after she is sexually assaulted.  The Justin Martin-directed play will tour the UK and Ireland for two-and-a-half months next year, starting with two dates in Richmond – its only London performances – and then playing a week each in Dublin, Edinburgh, Cardiff, York, Bath, Canterbury and Birmingham before wrapping up a year from now in Comer’s hometown of Liverpool The show was a virtual instant sellout on the West End and Broadway, and clearly it’s going to be a nightmare to get tickets to any given individual date when they go on sale Tuesday March 25. Nonetheless, thousands of people will see the run, and how cool Comer is doing this rather than another West End stint? The complete Prima Facie UK tour is  Jan 23-24 – Richmond Theatre, London Jan 27-31 – Gaiety Theatre, Dublin Feb 3-7 – Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Feb 10-14 – New Theatre, Cardiff Feb 17-21 – Grand Opera House, York Feb 24-28 – Theatre Royal, Bath Mar 3-7 – Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury Mar 10-14 – The Rep, Birm

Superstar director Jamie Lloyd’s shows don’t always star massive celebrities, but it’s fair to say that you’d have to go back to the pre-pandemic era to find one that didn’t. So when it was announced that his superb 2019 Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita would be transferring to the huge London Palladium for the summer it did at least beg the question as to who would be starring as iconic Argentine politician Eva Perón. Last time out it was the talented but relatively obscure US performer Samantha Pauly. But the Palladium is a lot bigger, the run is a lot longer, and Lloyd is a much bigger deal these days. Anyway, long story short, screen star of the moment Rachel Zegler will follow in the footsteps of the likes of Madonna, Elaine Paige and Patti Lupone to star as Perón. It caps a busy spell in the Gen-Z star’s life: following the recent conclusion of her Broadway debut in a lively Romeo + Juliet, Zegler is currently on the promotional trail for her new Disney project, a live action update of Snow White in which she stars as the eponymous put upon princess (the film has generated various controversies, which you can read about here if that floats your boat). And now she’s making her West End and professional musical theatre debut at the Palladium, though absolutely no need to worry her lungs aren’t up to it – she first came to global attention via the songs on her YouTube channel, which led to her award-nominated breakthrough role in Ste

It doesn’t get more big time American musical than the long-awaited stage debut of The Greatest Showman. Which is why it’s quite charming that Disney’s latest megabucks musical will be debuting next year in our own humble Bristol.  It makes sense, of course. The family-friendly mega corporation’s most recent shows have had a British connection: Frozen was directed by Michael Grandage, and the imminent Hercules is co-written by former Young Vic boss Kwame Kwei-Armah; Frozen also lasted rather longer here than on Broadway. So that’s nice for the good people of Bristol: The Greatest Showman will debut at the city’s Hippodrome venue next spring. In terms of the show itself: well you know the deal. A gargantuan smash in 2017 – both theatrically and its massively successful soundtrack – The Greatest Showman started life on screen, though you’d be forgiven for assuming it pre-existed as a stage musical. It’s vanishingly rare these days for a live-action musical to debut on screen and not stage, and The Greatest Showman has a similar premise to the pre-existing Barnum, both being about the legendary circus impresario PT Barnum. The musical will be directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, whose other works include The Book of Mormon and Mean Girls (both on in London right now) and Hercules (which arrives this summer). Naturally it’ll include the songs from EGOT-winning duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul… and word has it they’ve written five new ones for the stage version, which will

Um renomado clube de comédia londrino atacou de forma bizarra as pessoas que tenham sido injectadas com Botox, alegando que há tanta gente assim no público que o ambiente ficou comprometido nos seus dois espaços na cidade britânica. Como resultado, o conceituado Top Secret Comedy Club – assim baptizado devido aos frequentes convidados secretos de primeira linha – está aparentemente a proibir a entrada de qualquer pessoa que tenha feito Botox. Num comunicado excêntrico – mas que parece ser a sério –, o clube afirmou que “a medida drástica para injectar mais emoção no clube surge depois de os artistas de stand-up terem partilhado as suas preocupações com o facto de as caras congeladas dos britânicos que usam Botox não reagirem às suas piadas”. Há muito para desvendar, e é claro que continua a ser totalmente possível que se trate de uma brincadeira. Afinal, estamos a falar de um clube de comédia e as alegações são bastante estranhas.  Mas seria muito improvável lançar um ataque a um grupo aleatório de pessoas se não houver um problema com elas. Partindo do princípio que é a sério... bem, presumivelmente as pessoas que fizeram Botox não são uma minoria protegida e podem ser banidas à vontade, mas não deixa de ser uma política de entrada bastante desagradável. As pessoas têm as suas próprias razões para fazer Botox! Se uma parte tão significativa do público tiver Botox e isso estiver a afectar visivelmente o ambiente do clube, talvez proibir todos eles não seja boa ideia. E há qu

The West End’s biggest sale London Theatre Week is simply too big to be contained by a single week. When it was first announced back in February it was already a fortnight long, then another week was added, and now a final week – it will run until Sunday March 16. What hasn’t changed are the offers: if you’re thinking of taking in a West End show and it’s not something that’s crazy sold out then the odds are it’s included in London Theatre Week (which Time Out partners with). That means if you book via the London Theatre Week website, you’ll be able to get tickets at a reduced price when you book. Sometimes there are some exceptions, eg the offer might only apply to quieter days of the week. But if you’re not too fussy you could make some genuinely decent savings, and even if you only get a tenner off then that’s better that nowt.  We’re told that thus far the biggest London Theatre Week seller is The Lion King, which isn’t really a shock – the Disney juggernaut rarely discounts and is pretty pricey, so this is a great chance to get decent tickets from £25. The rest of the top ten consists of more big musical names: Hamilton, MJ The Musical, Wicked, Tina, The Book of Mormon, Mamma Mia!, Back to the Future, The Great Gatsby and Matilda the Musical. London Theatre Week runs until Sun Mar 16. Book tickets here. The best new London Theatre shows to book for in 2025. The worst train station in London for cancellations has been revealed.

A beloved London comedy club has made a bizarre attack on people who’ve had Botox injections, claiming that there are so many of them in its audiences that the vibe has been compromised at its two London venues. As a result, the well-regarded Top Secret Comedy Club – so called because of its frequent secret big-name guests – is apparently formally banning anyone who has had Botox. In a bizarre press release that seems to be in earnest, the club has said that ‘the drastic move to inject more emotion back into the club comes after stand up acts shared their concerns that Botoxed-up Brits’ frozen faces aren’t reacting to their jokes’. There’s a lot to unpack there, and it of course remains entirely possible that this is a wind-up. It is a comedy club, after all, and the allegations made are pretty outlandish.   But it would seem pretty weird to launch an ad hominem attack on random group of people if you didn’t earnestly have a problem with them. Assuming it’s in earnest… well, presumably folk who’ve had Botox aren’t a protected minority and can be banned at will, but it does seem like a fairly obnoxious policy. People have their own reasons for getting Botox! If such a large proportion of your audience is Botoxed that it’s noticeably affecting the vibe of your club then maybe banning them all isn’t a great idea! And it has to be said that putting out a press release saying ‘people aren’t laughing enough at our venues’ does not exactly sell them.  Still, they’ve succeeded in mak

The Menier Chocolate Factory’s revival of Mel Brooks’s beloved comedy musical The Producers felt like the ultimate luxury programming when it opened just before Christmas. The original production of the show was the defining theatrical hit of the ’00s, when it packed ’em in at the gargantuan Theatre Royal Drury Lane – so when the Menier bagged the first London revival it effortlessly sold out out the bougie Southwark theatre.  On the plus side, though, the Menier has a long and noble tradition of West End transfers, and it seemed more or less inevitable that the new Patrick Marber-directed production would be bound for a bigger stage. And so it proves: The Producers is coming back to the West End. In case you slept through the ’00s or are too young to remember them, Brooks’s musical is an all-singing staging of his sublimely bad taste 1967 film about disreputable Broadway producer Max, who enlists his hapless accountant Leo to help him stage an appallingly bad taste, sure-to-flop musical called Springtime for Hitler in order to con money out of his investors. Unfortunately the appalling slab of Nazi apologia becomes a walloping great hit, causing the duo all manner of problems. Marber’s tough, grimy revival won plaudits in December – including a four star review from Time Out – for retaining all the laughs of the original production and having unfortunate relevance in our more fascist-friendly present day, while discretely tuning down some of Brooks’s more, uh, dated humour.