In recent years, we have seen a resurgence of “plays with music”. Burn Bright Theatre’s ambitious revival of Vernon God Little is an excellent example of the genre.
Philip Ridley’s darkly hilarious Radiant Vermin is his latest withering dissection of the concept of parenthood.
Down the Rabbit Hole is a Lewis Carroll-inspired show by the troupe Airealism. The more you think about it, argues Michael Reffold, the more Alice in Wonderland and the circus ...
Love to Love to Love You sees actress and writer Florence Keith-Roach bring Schnitzler’s La Ronde into the disco era.
Spoken Mirror’s There’s a Monster in the Lake, a stirring trip through an enchanted woodland which opens this year’s VAULT Festival, is a rarity in theatre: a piece that could ...
Switching between 1945, 1990 and 2011, Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters is a sprawling yet intimate portrait of family conflict amid the warp and weft of Croatian history.
Michael Reffold enjoys two pieces of physical theatre: one inspired by E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, the other by Soviet-era absurdist Daniil Kharms.
When performing a monologue, managing the audience is a tricky balancing act; you don’t want them to switch off. So how does The Me Plays, a rhyming monologue by actor-writer ...
Who’d have thought so much humanity could be contained in a car? Michael Reffold reviews the UK premiere of Neil LaBute’s Autobahn, a cycle of short plays taking place entirely ...
Inspired by one of the many strands of The Iliad, Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Idomeneus is a playful spectacle that touches on the slippery nature of storytelling.
Adini Söyle (Say Your Name), at the Arcola Theatre, gives a comprehensive digest of Istanbul’s 2013 Gezi Park protests. It’s a shame that it told more than it showed, argues ...
Michael Reffold was appalled and horrified by the Old Red Lion Theatre’s revival of Philip Ridley’s The Fastest Clock in the Universe. That’s a good thing.
Brad Birch is one of Britain’s most exciting up-and-coming young playwrights. Michael Reffold reviews his play Where The Shot Rabbits Lay, staged at the White Bear Theatre after a reading ...
How do you get an audience shivering in their seats when it’s this light outside? It’s a challenge that Josie Rourke and a superb cast of five have taken on ...
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time hurtles towards you at a rate of knots, rather like the tube train that marks protagonist Christopher’s first adventure on his ...
You’d be forgiven for thinking we’ve perhaps seen all there is to see of the acclaimed Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. After all, there have been a myriad Vladimirs and Estragons ...
If there’s one thing that the creative team at Wilton’s Music Hall get right with their adaptation of this most slippery of novels, it’s in the way that they capture ...
Sometimes an actor inhabits a role so completely, so convincingly, that for the duration of a performance you really do believe you’re watching a different person. One such performance belongs ...
Old Times, first performed in 1971, is a prime example of Pinter’s ability to create characters who are riveting, engaging an audience’s full attention despite not a great deal happening ...
The current production of Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse is a curious creature. In what could be seen as a move specifically designed to court controversy, director Phyllida Lloyd ...
