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London Living Large
The City Life Magazine | Reviews & Ratings.

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The Playboy of the Western World ★★★★ National Theatre | Until February 28, 2026

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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...
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Beauty and the Beast: A Horny Love Story ★★★★★ Charing Cross Theatre | Nov 21, 2025 - Jan 11, 2026

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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...
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My Fair Lady ★★★★★ The Mill at Sonning | Nov 20, 2025 - Jan 17, 2026

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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...
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David Copperfield ★★★★ Jermyn Street Theatre | Nov 20 - Dec 20, 2025

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It seems like an impossible task. Can you really squeeze all of the incidents and characters of one of Dickens' sprawling novels into a two-hour theatrical production and have all of the people played by only three actors? Amazingly, the Guildford Shakespeare Company manages to do just that. This theatrical version of Dickens' semi-autobiographical masterpiece is remarkably faithful to the original story, and somehow the small cast brings to life each of the author's wonderfully eccentric creations. From the ever optimistic Mr Micawber to the unctuous Uriah Heep every figure David Copperfield encounters on his life-journey becomes a believable and engaging personage. As in the novel, we begin at the moment of David's birth and end with his marriage to a paragon of Victorian virtue. Along the way we are introduced to a plethora of weird characters and must navigate a convoluted plot that is riddled with coincidence. Refreshingly in this telling, the familiar Dickensian...
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All My Sons ★★★★★ Wyndham’s Theatre | Until March 7, 2026

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Bryan Cranston’s star shines brightly in Ivo Van Hove’s splendid revival of Arthur Miller’s 1946 masterpiece. Cranston is a completely compelling presence as Joe Keller, the kindly older businessman who plays imaginary games with neighbourhood children. His portrayal is simply remarkable as this pleasant veneer is peeled away and the war profiteer and self-serving sophist beneath it are revealed. The games he shares with the children echo the ones he plays with his family and friends, whom he draws into colluding with his pretence of innocence and with the web of rationalisations he has spun for his past actions. Miller’s work carries an epic weight that Van Hove captures with his sparse staging, and Cranston’s performance evokes the moral authority and emotional force of Greek tragedy. As Joe’s wife, Kate, whose belief in her husband is tied to her certainty that her son survived the war, Marianne Jean-Baptiste also gives an unforgettable performance. The strong cast is completed by P...
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End ★★★★ National Theatre | Nov 13 - Jan 17, 2026

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End is the third play in David Eldridge's trilogy about couples at different stages of their relationships. In this final instalment, Alfie (Clive Owens) and Julie (Saskia Reeves) confront Alfie’s imminent death from cancer. Their exchanges are at once humorous and deeply affecting as they revisit memories, moments of happiness, regrets, and past conflicts. Plans for the funeral become conversations about dying and tentative imaginings of what might lie ahead. Each of the three plays is set in the morning, a liminal period between night and day that suggests transition and vulnerability. However, in this instance, the strictly limited timeframe feels somewhat contrived. Too much is compressed into a span that in reality would unfold over several days. Dividing the play into a series of distinct scenes with overlapping discussions might have made for greater verisimilitude and prevented some of the abrupt changes in tone and subject matter. Within ninety minutes all five of Kübler...
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St. Martin in-the-fields: Lunchtime Concerts ★★★★ FREE

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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
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The Spy Who Came In From The Cold ★★★ @sohoplace | Nov 17, 2025 - Feb 21, 2026

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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...
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Daniel’s Husband ★★★ Marylebone Theatre | Dec 4, 2025 - Jan 10, 2026

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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...
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Indian Ink ★★★★★ Hampstead Theatre | Dec 3, 2025 - Jan 31, 2026

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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 in...
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The City Life Magazine | Reviews & Ratings