London Theatre Reviews - West End & Off West End - Brighton

It seems innocent enough: four girls wait anxiously to appear on the latest reality TV game show. It's like Take Me Out or Blind Date - but with much higher stakes, because if contestants, who are always female, don’t get picked after three appearances, they get taken away and brutally mutilated in a procedure that they may or may not survive. And if they do win, they have to marry whoever picks them, regardless of their own feelings. It's all part of a compulsory government programme to slow … [Read more...]

I’ve seen up to 14 short plays as part of one show in the past, but I’ve never come across anything as seamless and intertwined as these six. Despite the different writers of the component short plays of Frenemies, the tempo is at full tilt throughout. I would not have known otherwise that these were actually six short plays presented as a single piece of theatre, and may have been inclined to interpret this production as one play by the same playwright. The scene changes are very quick, so much … [Read more...]

As you enter the intimate Studio space at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley, you see on stage what at first looks like a mannequin dressed in the striped pyjama uniform complete with yellow star, of an inmate of Auschwitz concentration camp. On taking your seat, you realise that this is no mannequin but an actor taking part in A Lesson From Auschwitz. Tiny swaying movements have given the game away and as you wait for the play to begin you realise that he has a bloody nose and looks in a terrible … [Read more...]

It’s a show where ‘hard-hitting’ is a fitting description in a literal sense as well as a figurative one. Family Values is one of those productions set in one room, over one act, and dazzles its audiences with the sheer quantity and quality of drama that can arise from the comings and goings of people in and out of this one room. Can people really escape from the mafia? I’m not convinced they can, particularly in an era of mass communication, and this play does nothing to dispel this … [Read more...]

I sometimes wonder if Shakespeare ever imagined, in his wildest dreams, that 400 years later theatre companies would not only still be performing his work, but seeking out new, original perspectives to make the stories feel like they were written yesterday. Macbeths, by David Fairs, is Shakespeare's Macbeth. Except it isn't, exactly. A fresh take on one of the Bard's bloodiest plays reimagines events through the eyes of just two characters - the murderous Macbeth and his scheming wife. In the … [Read more...]