When I sat down to watch Unicorn Theatre’s new production of The Canterville Ghost, I was not in the best of moods. Things up till that point had been rather chaotic (the show started 15 minutes late, and I overheard families complaining about being seated apart due to confusion over seating) and the disability access…

From the sublime to the ridiculous via Vauxhall and prize for the funniest and filthiest Christmas show of the year goes to Above the Stag’s annual LGBT panto which this year is a retelling of Pinocchio. Jon Bradfield and Martin Hooper’s mile-a-minute script is directed with spunky flair by new artistic director Andrew Beckett. Man-mad…

It’s a cliche to describe a newer playwright’s work as “like X meets Y”, but less annoying than the usual bromides that could be accurately used to describe this play: heartwarming; tear-jerking; hilarious. So let’s just say that the Last Noel does what Annie Baker attempted to do in the Antipodes, set within a framework…

Wunderkind actor-writer Arinzé Kene (how can one man be so talented?) knocked it out of the park again last night, with the revival of his 2011 play Little Baby Jesus. Directed by JMK Award 2019 winner Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu, this play reinforces the Orange Tree Theatre’s already solid reputation as a home for groundbreaking new writing.…

Rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit. It’s one of the things old people are known for, isn’t it, rabbiting on? So it makes sense, in a way, that a play created to be performed to audiences of older people and those living with dementia jumps and twitches between multiple characters and subplots. I saw Paradise Lodge, a…

Miles Jupp’s one-man show ‘The Life I Lead’ (essentially a biography of actor David Tomlinson, best known for his roles in Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks) opens this week at Park Theatre after a national tour. Over the course of an hour and a half Jupp brings Tomlinson’s genial buffoonery and gentle good humour…

Romance Romance, the all-male gay musical which opened at the Above the Stag Theatre in Vauxhall, is a beautiful and ornate chocolate box of a production. This new adaptation gender-flips the 1987 Broadway original, which featured three heterosexual couples and explored deceit and fidelity in relationships.  Comprising two separate one-act plays (unrelated bar the unifying theme of…

Although in my non-blogging life I inhabit the world of ‘new writing,’ one of my secret passions has always been restoration comedy. But amongst the pretty frocks and byzantine misdealings (and excellent jokes and good fun), there’s usually a heteronormative reduction of women to marriageable/unmarriageable objects which fits badly with my feminist anarchist Royal-Court-Upstairs credentials. I’ve long praised Paul…