Irrelevant ★★★ Seven Dials Playhouse | January 9 - 28, 2023


Who doesn't love Hollywood gossip? Well, Millie Grable knows lots of juicy tidbits about Tinseltown in its golden age. Millie started out to be an actress, she attended RADA with Vivien Leigh and she aspired to be a theatrical artist. However, destiny intervenes and she ends up being an agent and managing other people's careers. In this alcohol fuelled monologue, we learn about her struggles, her disappointments and her moment of transformation into the talent-brokering uber-bitch she is today. It's all a lot of fun, and with this name-dropping diva, Keith Merrill has created a wonderfully over-the-top personality. It's a part that invites an actor to pull out all the stops, and Debbie Chazen takes it on with relish. Her Millie has a bit of Margo Channing, a dollop of Norma Desmond and maybe a soupçon of Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Unfortunately, because Millie's persona is so recognisable and because we only have her perspective on events, the audience's sympathy isn't sufficiently engaged to make a melodramatic ending resonate. It all seemed to fall a little flat. Nevertheless, for an encounter with a delightfully catty character and a peak into that world of celebrity gossip that we all pretend not to care about, Irrelevant is worth a visit.

Rated ★★★

Reviewed by J.C.
Photo by Tristram Kenton.

Want to save on tickets? See our Tips page.

When, Where, Getting there:
Map & Location: 1A Tower St, London WC2H 9NP, UK

Most Popular

ABBA Voyage ★★★★★ ABBA Arena, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park | Extended Run

Image
When great music from the past meets mind boggling technology from the future, the result is ABBA Voyage . This is a concert like no other. In a purpose built arena designed specifically for the show, massive high resolution LED screens, advanced lighting, and surround sound are used to create a fully immersive ABBA concert experience. Although the group’s last appearance in London was at Wembley Arena in 1979, they return technologically in this extraordinary production. These are not holograms or AI generated performances. This is a meticulously animated concert based on real performances by the band themselves. To achieve this effect, the group came together and re-performed their music using motion capture technology. They partnered with top visual effects experts to digitally recreate their younger selves. While the show includes a live band and backup singers, the Agnetha, Björn, Benny, and Anni-Frid seen on stage appear every bit as real as their original counterparts. One quick...
Full Details »

St. Martin in-the-fields: Lunchtime Concerts ★★★★ FREE

Image
Maybe the best musical value in London. The lunchtime concerts at St. Martin's are always a wonderful way to escape the hustle and bustle that is London and the sensory overload that is Trafalgar Square. This is a beautiful setting with great acoustics, and a church pew hard enough to make sure you don't nod off. Reviewed by J.C.  Our score:    ☆☆☆☆  WHEN, WHERE, GETTING THERE: Mon & Fri: 1 pm - 1:45 pm ( occasionally Tues & Thurs)  St. Martin in-the-fields, Trafalgar Square Nearest tube: Charing Cross https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/whats-on
Full Details »

Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans ★★★★ The British Museum | Jan 15 - May 25, 2026

Image
This small yet thoughtful exhibition explores the long-standing connections between two island nations. The relationship between Britain and Hawaiʻi dates back to Captain James Cook’s third voyage in 1778. He became the first European to document contact with the Pacific archipelago and that connection still resonates today, most visibly in the Hawaiian state flag (Ka Hae Hawaiʻi), which continues to display the Union Jack in its top-left corner. This display at the British Museum draws primarily on the museum’s own extensive collections, complemented by judicious loans from other institutions, including the Bishop Museum in Hawaiʻi. It is organised into three main sections: Laying a foundation, Allying kingdoms , and Reshaping relationships . The first section introduces visitors to Hawaiʻi's distinctive art, history, and cultural traditions. The second focuses on the 1824 visit of King Kamehameha II (also known as Liholiho) and Queen Kamāmalu to London, and on their tragic deaths...
Full Details »

Gerry & Sewell ★★ Aldwych Theatre | January 13 - 24, 2026

Image
Gerry & Sewell presents itself as a theatrical pot o’ scouse. The traditional Tyneside dish, made from whatever meat, bones, or leftovers can be found in the cupboards, is a hearty working-class meal that reflects both Geordie ingenuity and endurance. The play clearly intends to offer a similar tribute to its roots. However, in the production, the disparate elements fail to cohere. The main storyline of the two eponymous protagonists and their shared dream of securing season tickets to their beloved football club is obscured rather than enriched by histories of Gerry’s two sisters, his abusive father, and his suicidal mother. While this material provides background about inheritance, damage, and class survival, it feels simultaneously excessive and underdeveloped. Tonally, the show is also jarring. It shifts rapidly between social realism and broad comedy, with these alternations feeling less like deliberate contrasts and more like unresolved collisions. Dance routines, rapping, a...
Full Details »

Paranormal Activity ★★★ Ambassadors Theatre | Until April 25, 2026

Image
The Paranormal franchise has a proven following, and horror fans are likely to enjoy this new stage incarnation. When James and Lou relocate from Chicago to London in search of a fresh start, it soon becomes clear that leaving their problems behind will not be so easy. He has a new job and she can work remotely, yet, as the programme hints, hauntings are not always tied to places. Sometimes they attach themselves to people. James must contend with his prying, Bible-quoting mother via a laptop screen, while Lou quickly realises that her grandchild- obsessed mother-in-law is the least of her concerns. Darkness, sudden loud noises and the occasional effective illusion are used to draw the audience into their increasingly unstable world. While this production recalls the successful 2:22 A Ghost Story and the long running The Woman in Black, it lacks the technical ingenuity of a show like Stranger Things: The First Shadow . Fly Davis’s set is a meticulously detailed two storey house, but ...
Full Details »

High Noon ★★★ Harold Pinter Theatre | Until March 6, 2026

Image
When it was first written, the 1952 film High Noon drew much of its force from the then political context and from Gary Cooper’s Oscar-winning performance. Created during the era of McCarthyism by Carl Foreman while he was under scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee, the film’s moral urgency, combined with Cooper’s quiet integrity, helped secure its status as a classic. The tale of a small-town marshal who confronts an anarchic threat to the rule of law struck a deep chord with audiences. In this allegory, Will Kane stands isolated as he faces an approaching tyranny that leaves his fellow citizens paralysed by fear. Set against their timidity and willingness to submit to intimidation or to flee, his resolve appears all the more heroic. Kane’s ordeal is further complicated by the two opposing forces that inform his personal life and underscore his symbolic role as the law. His Quaker wife embodies noble but impractical ideals, grounded in a faith that rejects violenc...
Full Details »

BIGRE / “Fish Bowl” ★★★★ Sadler's Wells Peacock Theatre | Jan 28 - 31, 2026

Image
The art of mime has deep theatrical roots in France, evolving from commedia dell’arte and 19th-century pantomime into a modern form centred on gesture, silence, and physical storytelling. In the 20th century, Marcel Marceau elevated mime to international prominence through his character Bip and his poetic, wordless exploration of human emotion. At the same time, filmmaker Jacques Tati brought mimetic comedy to cinema, using precise physicality and keen observation to satirise modern life through his iconic Monsieur Hulot. This tradition is closely linked to silent film comedy, where meaning is carried through movement rather than speech. Like Marceau and Tati, silent-era figures such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton relied on gesture, timing, and physical invention to convey character and emotion, revealing a shared visual language of humour and poetry beyond words. The Compagnie Le Fils du Grand Réseau continues this lineage by translating French mime and visual comedy into a con...
Full Details »

Beautiful Little Fool ★★ Southwark Playhouse, Borough | January 15 - Feb 28, 2026

Image
The story of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald is a love affair and a tragedy seemingly made for the stage. He was a brilliant writer who descended into alcoholism and was largely forgotten by the time of his death. She was his muse, and possibly his collaborator, who died in a fire at the asylum where she had finally found some measure of peace. Together, they came to symbolise the Jazz Age, that feverish period of reckless hedonism between the world wars, driven by aimlessness and quiet despair. In Beautiful Little Fool , their story is narrated by their only daughter, Scottie, as she wanders through an archive filled with the remnants of her parents’ lives. One of the challenges of dramatising real people is shaping a narrative that serves a clear purpose while leaving out biographical details that, though intriguing, do not fit thematically. The musical never fully overcomes this challenge. Unnecessary anecdotes, such as the story of Gertrude Stein coining the term “Lost Generation,” appe...
Full Details »

Orphans ★★★★ Jermyn Street Theatre | January 5 - 24, 2026

Image
Phillip is an emotionally immature, developmentally challenged recluse, protected and controlled by his impulsive and potentially violent older brother Treat who supports them both by stealing. Together they inhabit a sealed world of rituals, games, and shared fantasy. However, when Treat kidnaps Harold, an apparently wealthy criminal on the run, this act proves far from the solution he expects. Instead, the power dynamic shifts as Harold, himself an orphan, assumes an almost parental role, exposing the brothers to an alternative way of living beyond their self-made confinement. In just two weeks, he becomes a conduit to the outside world and offers the boys a new vision of themselves. Harold’s repeated rendition of “The Prisoner’s Song” underscores the play’s central metaphor of entrapment. Phillip is paralysed by his fear of leaving the apartment, Treat by his reliance on violence and control, and Harold by his desperate attempt to outrun the past. While Lyle Kessler’s dark vision e...
Full Details »

A Ghost In Your Ear ★★★★ Hampstead Theatre | Dec 6, 2025 - Feb 14, 2026

Image
Who doesn’t love a good ghost story? In this case, out-of-work voiceover actor George is hired to narrate a chilling tale, only to gradually realise that he may also be living one. Soon, the audience understands that they too are being drawn into the haunting. Jamie Armitage’s clever new work is a smart addition to one of theatre’s oldest genres, and it works quite brilliantly. As George is pulled from the comfort of central London into the desolate sound studio, the audience wearing binaural headphones is similarly drawn into his growing unease. The supernatural story being narrated and the one unfolding around him gradually merge, becoming our own lived experience. It is a neat trick, expertly handled by writer and director Armitage. George’s fear is contagious, and his trauma becomes collective. George Blagden, playing his tormented namesake, holds the audience in thrall with remarkable control. Using only his voice, he conjures both the character’s emotional unravelling and the eer...
Full Details »

The City Life Magazine | Reviews & Ratings