\ This first-rate production of Tom Stoppard’s palimpsestic masterpiece is simply a must-see. When the English poet Flora Crewe travels to India, she sits for a portrait by the Indian painter Nirad Das. Both that portrait and this play reflect the complex melding of cultures that emerged from the British presence in India. Exploring different approaches to art and the presentation of the artist, the drama also exposes the intricate and often fraught political relationship between the two countries whose histories became so deeply intertwined. Flora’s meeting with the Indian painter hints at the complicated dynamic between a dying imperial vision and its colonial subject, while also questioning the epistemological frameworks through which we seek to understand the past. Many years later, Crewe's American biographer meets with her sister Mrs Swan as he attempts to reconstruct that Indian encounter. Both that actual experience and the artistic impression of Crewe created by Das stand ...

“They’re Dancing Cheek to Cheek Again!” The posters and advertising for the original 1935 film starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers promised romance, dancing, and songs you would never forget. This current production is every bit as delightful as the original and largely lives up to the film’s hype. The farcical confusions of the love story continue to charm and amuse, and it is refreshing that director Kathleen Marshall has chosen not to update the references. The show is unapologetically presented as a period piece, relying on the quality of its singing and dancing to bridge the gap between eras. With its unforgettable Irving Berlin score and top notch tapping from Phillip Attmore as Jerry Travers, it succeeds admirably. Attmore clearly relishes his role, and his exuberance is infectious. As Jerry’s love interest, Dale Tremont, Amara Okereke displays a fine voice, and the couple’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” is a definite highlight. As the comic foils the young lovers, Horace...

Recounting true crime has long been a popular form of entertainment. The act of regaling audiences with tales of criminal horror that both terrify and titillate them arguably reached a peak with the Penny Dreadfuls of the nineteenth century, yet it remains a mainstay of contemporary television. KENREX , a dramatisation of the story of Kenneth Rex McElroy, who terrorised the small Missouri town of Skidmore for nearly two decades, stands as a masterful example of this enduring tradition. With the collusion of his lawyer, McElroy was able to intimidate and brutalise the town’s residents until July 10, 1981, when a long-deferred reckoning finally arrived. Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian have crafted the material for the stage with remarkable skill, and Holden’s performance is nothing short of astonishing. He fully inhabits the many figures ensnared by these grim events, sustaining a breathtaking level of energy as he moves across the stage and transforms into characters as varied as the t...

Taking inspiration from the 1948 Powell and Pressburger film, Matthew Bourne has created a sumptuous interpretation of The Red Shoes that bears his unmistakable signature while honouring Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of artistic obsession. The production possesses a strikingly cinematic quality and moves with remarkable fluidity from scene to scene. Lez Brotherston’s set design masterfully shifts between the world onstage and the more intimate realm behind the curtain, allowing the audience to experience both the external praise afforded to the young dancer Victoria Page and the private turmoil that drives her. Paule Constable’s expressive lighting enriches these transitions with subtle and atmospheric precision. Indeed, the staging of this production is extraordinarily rich, creating layers of visual interest that can border on overwhelming. As Page, Cordelia Braithwaite conveys her character’s emotional struggle with exceptional clarity, capturing the tension between her devotion t...

John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World is a work rich in significance and open to varied interpretation. In his programme notes, Christopher Collins views the play through the contemporary lens of the global migrant crisis and society’s fascination with celebrity. Yet Christy Mahon’s (Christ as Man) symbolic killing of his father, who returns with amusing regularity, also invites a reading of the play as a religious satire in which Synge advances a vision of bold and irreverent humanism. In many respects, this is a radically innovative piece of writing that challenges both social expectations and the established conventions of comedy. This current National Theatre production preserves much of the original’s force and the stark and lyrical set vividly conjures the atmosphere of the west of Ireland. As the eponymous hero, Éanna Hardwicke convincingly portrays the timid youth who, through the fantasies of the townspeople, discovers his identity and is reborn as a figure...

Michael McKeever’s play opens with a long-established gay couple hosting a friend and the latest young man he is dating. The alcohol and the banter are flowing, and we seem to be in familiar comedic territory until an argument breaks out over gay marriage. Mitchell, a writer and Daniel’s partner, considers marriage an unnecessary, heteronormative expression of commitment. The remainder of the play is about Mitchell, and the audience, learning the importance of the institution of marriage for gay couples. Despite some clever dialogue and some good character development, this work is mainly didactic, and when Daniel falls ill, there is an uneasy sense of emotional manipulation which accompanies the lesson that we are being taught. The play also glosses over the truly formidable realities faced by caregivers when a partner develops a chronic condition. In this world both Mitchell and Daniel’s mother are affluent enough to argue over who will assume responsibility for his care without havi...

This year’s big and gloriously gay panto from the “He’s Behind You!” gang has burst into the Charing Cross Theatre, and it has arrived like it owns the place. Beauty and the Beast: A Horny Love Story brings back several familiar faces, including the incomparable Matthew Baldwin, who now plays the mother of two gay children living at a petrol station in the Scottish Highlands. Baldwin is every bit as majestic as you imagine a woman in a fluorescent tabard can be. Laura Anna-Mead playing Bonnie, the frequently ignored lesbian daughter, bounces through the show with a delightful energy, while Matt Kennedy completely charms as Bertie, the titular beauty. As his beastly counterpart Keanu Adolphus Johnson is ferociously fabulous. Chris Lane earns his boos and hisses as Cornelius, the villainous brother whose moral compass has a limp arrow, while Dani Mirels deserves her cheers as the blue-haired enchantress who finds love. However, again this year, it is Baldwin who storms the stage. With a...

In 1925, when Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels was first staged, it was a succès de scandale. The Lord Chancellor, London’s theatre censor, barely approved it; a woman protested against it in the theatre; and the Burgomaster of The Hague shut the production down entirely. A century later, the shock value has largely faded. Women having premarital sex, perhaps sharing a lover, and then getting drunk together and comparing experiences are no longer considered to be quite as scandalous. Yet if the shock of Fallen Angels has largely vanished, its humour endures, along with Coward’s satirical targets: the double standard of expectations for men’s and women’s behaviour, the challenge of sustaining passion in long-term relationships, and the persistent hypocrisy surrounding sexual conduct. The work was one of Coward’s early successes, and the play bears the marks of the playwright’s developing craft. The drunkenness scene is pushed to its limits, while the use of comic devices, such as the overl...

It is easy to misremember Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady as simply another musical romcom, but this superb production reminds us that it is rooted in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion . Along with the beguiling love story, there is a sharp and insightful commentary on class, gender, and the social forces that shape us. This is a transformation tale with something to say, and this first-rate staging gets the balance exactly right between fairy tale romance and pointed social critique. The beloved story of the Cockney flower girl who blossoms into a lady and the brilliant but blinkered academic, who finds he has a heart after all, is presented with uncommon clarity and warmth. It is not only the tale of Eliza’s metamorphosis, a working class woman discovering her independence, her identity, and her voice. It is also about the detached and self assured middle class academic Henry Higgins learning, sometimes painfully, what it means to truly listen. Simbi Akande is a radiant Eliza Doolittl...

John le Carré’s landmark espionage tale remains a defining work of the genre. At the height of the Cold War, spymaster Alec Leamas has just seen one of his most trusted agents killed. Ready at last to abandon the service, he is instead drawn into a final, intricate scheme meant to topple his old adversary, Mundt, head of East Germany’s foreign intelligence apparatus. Leamas is only required to present himself as a whiskey-soaked cynic who is willing to betray his country - a role that comes all too naturally to a man who has grown tired of every trick in the trade. Yet two forces could unravel this cunning plan: the romantic resurrection of Leamas' long-extinguished idealism, or the dawning suspicion that he is a pawn, rather than a player, in someone else’s unforgiving game. David Eldridge’s adaptation and Jeremy Herrin’s meticulous staging capture the novel’s bleak, noir-tinged world with striking fidelity. Even the heavy burden of exposition, required to guide the audience throu...