Sarah Snook’s one-woman The Picture of Dorian Gray is gimmicky and shallow
Technical bravura, camera trickery and a high-wire, high-energy performance are not enough to make this show enjoyable or meaningful.
ByTheatre review
Live Aid musical Just For One Day: sanctimony and second-rate songs
Here are pop stars as cherubim and seraphim. Here is Ultravox belted out as if it was the Hallelulah chorus.
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50 years of Manon
In this Royal Opera House revival, Kenneth MacMillan’s masterful ballet still has the power to bring audiences to their feet.
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David Tennant is refreshingly vile in the Donmar’s Macbeth
The actor has a manic, eye-rolling energy and a real bitchiness in this production. But do we need the headphones?
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A nonconforming take on The Nutcracker
The Southbank Centre puts a refreshing new twist on the most established of theatrical traditions.
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Kenneth Branagh’s King Lear is camp, callow and utterly unmoving
Rarely have I been less touched by a production than this one – when Gloucester was blinded, the audience laughed.
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Don Quixote brought to life
Carlos Acosta’s playful and fiery take on the 1869 ballet is a joyful marriage of movement and music.
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Can Danny Boyle pull off a hip-hop dance version of The Matrix?
Free Your Mind is a spectacle – but for a show about man and machine, it lacks the human touch.
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Andrew Scott is superhuman in Vanya
Playing eight roles in this one-man Chekhov adaptation, the actor is utterly convincing.
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Dear England and the English Question
In his new play about Gareth Southgate, James Graham uses football to explore a contested national identity.
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Ruth Wilson’s The Second Woman is a mesmerising feat of endurance
Over 24 hours, as Wilson played the same scene with 100 different actors, the repetition became addictive – and profound.
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A Little Life is absurdly, tediously, pointlessly bleak
This four-hour self-harm horror-show is schadenfreude dressed up as empathy.
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The magical realism of My Neighbour Totoro
The RSC production of the Hayao Miyazaki film – which has deservedly won six Olivier Awards – combines enchanting stagecraft with…
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Medea at Soho Place: a stunning production that rains down on the patriarchy
Sophie Okonedo’s formidable Medea will go down as a legend in theatre history.
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Dom: The Play is nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is
This twee, smug, lowest-common-denominator political satire is not just bad: it’s mindless.
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A new musical proves it – Sylvia Pankhurst is the feminist icon we need
While her mother Emmeline has traditionally been the most famous Pankhurst, the Old Vic’s new show is just the latest…
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After a visit to the theatre I feel more of a Brightonian than I did the day before
I’d never been to the Theatre Royal before, but its a delightful, old-school place.
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Jews. In their Own Words is a sharp illustration of how the oldest hatred is still with us
Jonathan Freedland’s play considers the prejudicial myths fuelling anti-Semitism today, and how the Royal Court became complicit.
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Tom Stoppard’s new play Leopoldstadt is inseparable from its author’s biography
There is no separating the artist and the art in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, which draws directly on his life as a…
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The light and shade of Shostakovich
Igor Levit brings dramatic contrasts to his performance of the preludes and fugues in their entirety, which marked the beginning…
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