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Closer to Heaven musical at the Turbine Theatre

There’s no getting around it. The book for Closer to Heaven, Jonathan Harvey’s 2001 musical with original songs by Pet Shop Boys, is a bit of a dud. Stuffed with underdeveloped plots, tiresome exposition, clicheś and sentimentality, it contributed to the premiere’s tepid reception. And any revivals that have fared well since have done so in spite of it.
Simon Hardwick’s new production fights this bear trap of a book with heart. And while it sometimes seems that no amount of talent will wrench th...
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The Government Inspector at Marylebone Theatre

Who’d have thought it? 188 years after its premiere, a play about privileged buffoons hustling their way into power is still drawing audiences. What a difference a couple of centuries doesn’t make, hey?
Nikolai Gogol’s satire originally skewered Tsarism and contemporary Russian society. It follows a foppish civil servant who is mistaken for a government inspector by a corrupt small-town mayor and his councillors. He takes their misunderstanding and sprints with it, accepting bribes, moving in wi...
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The Ballad of Hattie and James at the Kiln Theatre – review

Samuel Adamson’s new play, were it a musical ballad, would challenge even the most competent conductor with its ambition.
There’s the epic scale, which spans a lifelong tumultuous friendship between its eponymous heroes (played by Sophie Thompson and Charles Edwards). Changes in tempo and focus as we yo-yo across decades between crucial moments in their relationship. Crescendos to time and multiple themes to explore – jealousy, addiction, misogyny, grief, the power of music and the cost of music...
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Dear Octopus at the National Theatre – review

Unless you’re in one of those rare Scrabble-playing, round-the-piano-singing, suspiciously harmonious families, you’ll be all too familiar with the truth that makes Dodie Smith’s 1938 play so joyously and painfully relatable. Families are simmering pots of emotion, constantly on the brink of boiling over. And family gatherings? Well, they’ll crank the heat right up.
The Randolph family pot is a hefty one – four generations gathering at their ancestral home on the cusp of the Second World War for...
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Othello at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe – review

An Othello for our times. It’s the promise of many a production, and understandably so. Enduringly, depressingly topical, Othello feels like a challenge to theatre makers to explore why. And there are myriad broken institutions and disillusioned sections of society to choose as their lens.
Director Ola Ince’s production takes place within the Met Police, swapping the battlefields of Cyprus for London’s docklands, where Chief Inspector Othello investigates a drug cartel. It’s an inspired premise,...
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Review: The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel (Wilton's Music Hall)

"We make no attempt to put reality on stage," declare Told by an Idiot, the company behind this anarchic gem.
It's a promise that has defined their back catalogue – pieces concocted collaboratively from a single, often unlikely, idea and performed seemingly spontaneously. Inventive, highly physical, carefully crafted chaos.
And things are no different here. Based on one truth – that in 1910, an unknown Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel sailed to New York together as part of Fred Karno's famous m...
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Review: The Night of the Iguana (Noël Coward Theatre)

In the summer of 1940, a tormented Tennessee Williams was holed up in a Tahiti hotel, doubting his abilities, despairing of his future, and drinking rum-cocos on credit. Salvation eventually came in the form of a fellow guest – a young writer feeling equally desolate. Williams wrote of that summer: "all which is most valuable in life is escaping from the narrow cubicle of one's self… to a hammock beside another beleaguered being."
His experiences inspired this intensely human play, and its heart...
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Review: Chicago (Phoenix Theatre)

There's no getting around it; Chicago is an institution. The world's longest running American musical (it just celebrated 21 years on Broadway) and the West End's longest running revival, it's been seen by an estimated 31 million people and won six Tonys, two Oliviers and a Grammy.
So how do you tackle its return to London after a five-and-a-half-year absence? You don't mess with the formula. You stick to the show's central tenets: sex, slick comedy, big vocals and high kicks; you recreate the...
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Review: Dear Brutus (Southwark Playhouse)

"It isn’t good for me not to get the thing I want," is the tearful wail a few scenes into Dear Brutus, the play often described as JM Barrie’s Peter Pan for adults.
The wail belongs to Lob, an aged Puck who has invited a disparate group of characters to his country house. His aim is to send them into the magical wood that appears every midsummer’s eve – an alternative Neverland whose promise isn’t eternal childhood but second chances. The opportunity to walk the paths we wish we’d taken. To get...
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Review: Dessert (Southwark Playhouse)

Some theatre shares its politics in stealth mode. In monologues bristling with metaphor. In loaded set designs. And some theatre slaps it right on the posters.
Walking into the auditorium, past images of a cake iced with a number five, out of which a tiny slice has been cut and iced with a 95, there's no mistaking what this play is about: how five per cent of the world’s population enjoys 95 per cent of its wealth. The tagline reads: "How big a slice do you deserve?"
The play itself is just as b...
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