AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮ End of Moving Walkway's Laughing Matter King's Head Theatre | London directed by Paul Lichtenstern One of the hardest things for any actor to do is surely to act like they're not acting, to pretend that they are a 'real person' rather than a performer or artist creating make-believe in the very show people have paid to see. If successful, the question then becomes how long they can convince a sceptical and perhaps fidgety audience before giving the game away. The self-p

✮✮✮ Mike Bartlett's Wild Hampstead Theatre | London directed by James Macdonald Andrew, the central character in Mike Bartlett’s new play, may as well have just been called Edward Snowden. He is a whistle-blower from the United States who leaked information about government surveillance and has found himself a fugitive, trapped in Russia, with nowhere to turn. Even the actor playing Andrew, Jack Farthing, looks remarkably like Snowden. Over the course of the play, he is visit

✮✮✮✮ Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea National Theatre | London directed by Carrie Cracknell Hester Collyer, the central character in Terence Rattigan’s 1952 classic, has more than just a hint of Mrs. Dalloway about her. Hester is slowly revealed to us through the events that unfold over one single day, as Clarissa Dalloway is in Virginia Woolf’s novel. Both women keep themselves tightly composed; both concerned with how they appear to others and weighed down with expecta

✮✮✮✮ Phaedra(s) after Sarah Kane, Wajdi Mouawad and J. M. Coetzee Barbican Theatre | London directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski In the run-up to the EU referendum, the presence of such a quintessentially French cultural institution as the Odéon-Théatre de l'Europe brought a special resonance to the Barbican, offering a timely reminder of the languages, cultures and collective history that the UK is currently considering divorcing. Indeed, three and a half hours later, the even

✮✮✮ 1/2 Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Southwark Playhouse | London directed by Simon Evans A little too self-congratulatory at first, director Simon Evans’ two-hour panto-esque entertainment about a comically inept production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream gets better the longer it goes on, and by the end few in the audience will have laughed as loudly at any Shakespeare comedy they've seen before. A few lucky individuals (or poor souls) will also have never been pluc

✮✮✮✮ Neil Bartlett's Stella LIFT Festival | London directed by Neil Barlett Groundbreaking LGBT playwright, novelist and director Neil Bartlett calls Stella his "love letter sent to a very real person." But his brilliant new 70 minute play, poignantly staged in Hoxton's original and expensively renovated Victorian music hall, constantly throws into question who exactly this "real person" is, or rather was. Is it the beautiful wife of Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, Stella Clinton

✮✮ Steven Dietz's Last of the Boys Southwark Playhouse | London directed by John Haidar Steven Dietz’s play Last of the Boys explores the effects of the Vietnam War thirty years later on two American veterans, friends Ben and Jeeter – and Jeeter’s brand new girlfriend – and her mother. If that sounds like a bit of a random selection of people, well… it is. The initial dialogue between brooding Ben and upbeat Jeeter is very promising. It is warm, funny and authentic, with an i

✮✮✮✮ Nick Payne's Elegy Donmar Warehouse | London directed by Josie Rourke What is a life? Is it enough just to be alive and well, or do we need something else to make our lives more than just existence? These are some of the questions raised in Nick Payne’s latest play, Elegy. Lorna (Zoë Wanamaker) has a neurodegenerative disease which will kill her, unless she has the affected part of her brain removed – and with it every memory of her wife, Carrie (Barbara Flynn). ​ The pl

✮✮✮✮ Annie Baker's The Flick National Theatre | London directed by Sam Gold There is something unsettling about entering a theatre and finding yourself confronted with rows of empty seats, pretty similar to the ones you are sitting on, instead of the set stage you were expecting. The dingy cinema auditorium of Annie Baker’s Pulitzer-prize winning play feels less like a theatre set; rather more like a mirror, reflecting our own mundane lives back at us. This is unlike a tradit

✮✮✮✮ Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs National Theatre | London directed by Yaël Farber Standing ovations at the interval as well as at the end on press night tell you all you need to know about the ongoing power of Lorraine Hansberry's dizzying interrogation of white colonialism versus black freedom-fighting, and the deeply moving quality of this excellent production, entrallingly directed by Yaël Farber. The clapping and cheering were a welcome release of tension. Funny line