Theatre

Once in a Lifetime at the National Theatre, London
This is a sketchy play for a sketchy world, in which no one really communicates and, as a writer character says, 'Nobody is acting like a human being'.
Rhona Foulis

Walk Hard - Talk Loud at the Tricycle Theatre, London
Walk Hard's sketch of 1940s America opens up political and social questions about the meaning of freedom, integration versus segregation, and the potential cost of both of these - questions that do still resonate, not least in the current dialogue of 'multiculturalism'.
Rhona Foulis

Almost Blue at the Riverside Studios, London
It seems unfortunate that this piece will inevitably be judged against the mantra 'bold, innovative and challenging', but this is what it must have set out to be, and in doing so with such zeal, it has perhaps lost just a little of its heart - as well as its skin.
Lily Einhorn

When You Cure Me at the Bush Theatre, London
Thorne uses the language of therapy as a device to convey information to the audience, but because the therapist is offstage, characters' self-awareness comes from an outside source and we barely see characters evolve on stage.
Rhona Foulis

Paul at the National Theatre, London
What's missing is not magic, but passion - and it's not that the latter can't be secularised, just that it isn't here. When Paul persuades Peter to believe in the resurrection in spite of his first hand knowledge that it didn't happen, we can only look on in admiration: we are certainly not involved.
Dolan Cummings

Alice Trilogy at the Royal Court, London
It's a chilly play, not just because of the Royal Court's overzealous air conditioning, but because our involvement with Alice is sketchy, skittish and fleeting.
Tom Davies

Brontë at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, London
By foregrounding sexual politics, at times Brontë overstates its contemporary political stamp, at the cost of Shared Experience's characteristically visual and experimental style.
Rhona Foulis

Point and Shoot at the Camden People's Theatre, London
The fallibility of photography does not seem to have been of much concern to this production. Apparently, at a time when war is being fought on a television screen near you, and faked photographs are flying around the media, the world has forgotten JM Barrie's fairies.
Lily Einhorn

Cleansed at the Arcola Theatre, London
It is hard to categorise this play, for in such a brutal world, moments of tenderness and beauty stand out all the more. But why should theatre fit neatly into categories?
Beth Gough

Exquisite Pain at the Riverside Studios, London
Rendered artlessly, other people's pain is just boring, but the therapeutic aim of achieving numb indifference is equally at odds with any artistic or literary sensibility. In between, and intermittently, the story becomes deeply engaging, moving and appalling.
Dolan Cummings

Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Bridewell Theatre, London
The script is ridden with jokes and innuendo, but this is a deeply uncomfortable play, and this production from the Tower Theatre company fails to tap into its dark undercurrent.
Hannah Knowles

No-One Sees the Video at Theatro Technis, London
Our consumer expectations are held up aloft, begging the questions: what happiness will we really gain with that purchase? Is there any space for human issues in a world of buy and sell?
Alan Francois

3 Days in July at Soho Theatre, London
One child wrote in her diary that 'everyone's forgotten about the G8 Summit, it seems not to be important anymore'. This was an appropriate summary of the second half of the play.
Clarissa Woodberry

Totally Practically Naked in My Room on a Wednesday Night at the Tristan Bates Theatre, London
It is not the issues of the Oedipal complex or the tackling of 'humans as bisexual beings' theme that might lift the play above the average. There is something more subtle, epitomised by the length of the title, the opening scene, the erratic pace, and the bleeding nose scene at the end of the play.
Ion Martea

What We Did to Weinstein at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London
In some ways, the play is disappointing - populated by stereotypes, prone to clumsy exposition and unedifying rants - nonetheless, it is also provoking and, in places, powerfully written.
Michael Caines

Bottle Universe at the Bush Theatre, London
Superbly staged and acted, Bottle Universe contains plenty of adolescent frustration expressed in acts as futile as trying to fend off raindrops by hitting them.
Michael Caines

Chicken Soup with Barley at the Tricycle Theatre, London
Shona Morris's warm but desperate Sarah punches to the heart of Wesker's political commitment. Morris proves that, though rarely produced, Chicken Soup's themes of political apathy, disenfranchisement and familial disintegration still resonate for a modern audience.
Rhona Foulis

Not In My Name at the Camden People's Theatre, London
Devised as a promenade performance, in which physical horror (often only implied, rather than actually depicted) contributes to a continuous feeling of uneasiness throughout, this is an experience none should be afraid to engage in.
Ion Martea

On Tour at the Royal Court, London
Gregory Burke fudges his politics by attempting to thrill his audiences with the theatrical equivalent of a Guy Ritchie film.
Rhona Foulis

Two Thousand Years at the National Theatre, London
A grandmother's death does not provoke real wails of epic mourning, because these characters are only human. They're too human, untranscended, to give us a play that feels like it's about anything more than one family. To be about the family, modern and timeless; that was Leigh's sadly disappointed least aim.
Matt Warman

Playing with Fire at the National Theatre, London
To David Edgar's credit, there is nothing simplistic about the political complexions of those involved. British politics no longer has the same clearly identifiable positions that might lend themselves to stereotype, and accordingly developments in the play are not at all predictable.
Dolan Cummings

The Philanthropist at the Donmar Warehouse, London
There's a sense of flickering humanity - not redemptive, but stubborn - that runs through Simon Russell Beale's performance and the production as a whole that lifts what is a far from perfect text to another level entirely.
Tim Markham

Romance at the Almeida Theatre, London
The charades are effective and amusing to a point, but what does this rollcall of familiar Jewish or gay stereotypes and insults really amount to? Romance offers only its words for judgement, and it proceeds by quips. Conversations don't develop, because they are short-circuited by acerbic one-liners.
Emilie Bickerton

The Cure at Troy at the Cockpit Theatre, London
The crippled and world-weary Philoctetes and the young and idealistic Neoptolemus express the essence of the play and produce some memorable moments. When Philoctetes berates Neoptolemus for betraying him, the agony of both characters is palpable.
Benedict Henriques

After the End at the Bush Theatre, London
The play expresses for me this sense of being under siege from unseen forces both within and without, and the tendency to build our own little shelters from the big bad world, and from each other. The terrorist threat merely slots into this wider outlook.
David Clements

Amy Evans' Strike at the Courtyard at Covent Garden, London
Despite the reduction of politics to education, education, education, and the reduction of education to qualifications, qualifications, qualifications, there are other values that are more important than education.
Dennis Hayes

Harvest at the Royal Court, London
Richard Bean is particularly skilled at showing how conflicts which may seem at first to belong exclusively to their parochial period, will shape the family’s future long after their instigators are dead. For the most part, this makes for a convincingly eked out history and an intelligent, intriguing drama.
Michael Caines

Radioplay at BAC, London
By the time Francis finally pulls into London Victoria coach station, Radioplay hasn't simply told us about Uncle Richard's journey from successful broadcaster to drunken failure: it has revealed a much broader narrative, that of humans' hazardous journey through life.
Hannah Knowles

Fewer Emergencies at the Royal Court, London
I'm not sure that this production (or the piece) justifies itself as theatre rather than literature. There is certainly space between the words for them to breathe, but at times the production is ponderous rather than simply thoughtful.
Beth Gough

Ducktastic at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle upon Tyne
All things considered, Ducktastic has a great writing pedigree; recognisable talent; a failsafe idea; and a terrific opening number. Where then, as they say, did it all go wrong?
Austin Williams

The Timekeepers at the New End Theatre, London
It may be that humour helped Dan Clancy get through writing about the Holocaust, but Hans seems a bit too cheerful considering the tyranny he is enduring in the camp and the awareness that the never-ending piles of watches he and Benjamin are mending day after day used to belong to millions of innocents like themselves.
Nathalie Rothschild

Edinburgh Fringe 2005
Various reviewers

Antigone at Hell’s Mouth at Soho Theatre, London
This is strange paradox: a rousing, lively, terrifically performed and innovative play that is trying to say something utterly retrograde and unsympathetic.
Emilie Bickerton

Prometheus Bound at the South Theatre, London
Despite some powerful moments, the production does suffer from a lack of momentum especially in the later stages. The first in a trilogy of which the other plays are lost, there is not enough sense of a dramatic trajectory, rather just a change in mood.
Ursula Strauss

President of an Empty Room at the National Theatre, London
The performance of Paul Hilton as Miguel the agitated junky and self-appointed President is cold-sweat-in-a-hot-room intense and highly compelling.
David Clements

The Seagull at the Greenwich Playhouse, London
Describing the plot is like staging the play with the only aim to follow the script: the actors are pushed into the stage, and rushed through the script as if they are the competitors in McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, blindfolded, and fooled about the real purpose of the game.
Ion Martea

Behind the Iron Mask at the Duchess Theatre, London
There are certain rules to the musical genre that have served it well over the years: minor key emotionalism, gradual crescendos, key-change bridges, dramatic duets, the show-stopper, etc, each one gratuitously absent from this production.
Austin Williams

Mary Stuart at the Donmar, London
The Fotheringay Castle scene brings to a heady climax the sheer isolation and, yes, existential angst that comes with absolute power, absolute deprivation and the futility that attaches itself to each.
Tim Markham

The Suppliants at BAC, London
The suppliant maidens have fled Egypt and forced marriage to their first cousins. So asylum seekers then. To its credit, the production leaves the contemporary parallels as self-evident and does not beat you over the head with them.
Ursula Strauss

Aristocrats at the National Theatre, London
The Chekov cliché about Friel does resonate, in dramatic structure, theme and tone. Friel resists adopting a political high ground, but the contemplative tone and measured pace precludes any emotional ‘pull’ towards his impenetrable characters.
Rhona Foulis

Amid the Clouds at the Royal Court, London
A poetic title for a poetic play - but is Amid the Clouds theatre?
Rhona Foulis

Shoreditch Madonna at Soho Theatre, London
Everyone in this play feels he or she has to pretend just to get through life. They have to renounce their true feelings to maintain the front expected of them by the world. They all seem to wait for someone to save them from themselves.
Annette Mees

Talking to Terrorists at the Royal Court, London
A question that is frequently asked about verbatim theatre is whether it really has any place in the theatre at all. Talking to Terrorists offers the clearest possible defence yet.
Andrew Haydon

The Laramie Project at the Sound Theatre, London
If political/moral theatre is to work, it has to challenge its audience into questioning its own ideas and values instead giving it a pat on the back.
Hannah Knowles

The Obituary Show at the Bush Theatre, London
The problem with the production is that if you can't celebrate its bizarre humour, nor can you engage with its loose narrative, because there is nothing really at stake.
Rhona Foulis

Double at Riverside Studios, London
COSmino's characters represent otherness in various recognisable forms, just as Double can be deciphered in different ways. The stunning visual imagery is a sensual charm in itself.
Rhona Foulis

The Quare Fellow at the Tricycle Theatre, London
Behan's spit and sawdust Ireland bares little relation to today's smoke-free continental wanabee. And Kilburn - the Tricycle's home - is not what it used to be either.
David Clements

Way to Heaven at the Royal Court, London
'My mission was to look and to see', states the Red Cross representative at the beginning of the play: in Way to Heaven, Mayorga passes on this mission to his audience - look and see, but do not judge.
Hannah Knowles

The UN Inspector at the National Theatre, London
The test of the play is when the anguished Kenneth Cranham delivers the lines, 'What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves!' Farr takes no chances, rewriting the lines to be directly relevant not just to a 21st century audience, but also to the audience at the National Theatre.
Patrick Hayes

As You Like It at Wyndham's Theatre, London
One can’t help feeling that were this actually a boy pretending to be Rosalind and the real Rosalind were to walk in, the simple excuse 'He was pretending to be you, dear' might not quite wash.
Andrew Haydon

The Importance of Being Earnest - a Trivial Comedy by Two Serious People at the Barbican, London
The suspension of disbelief has no place here, we are watching actors struggle with masks just as much as their characters.
Annette Mees

Three Women and a Piano Tuner at Hampstead Theatre, London
This is a puzzling and sometimes slight play in the watching, but a quiet and humane success in the remembering.
Andrew Haydon

This Is How It Goes at the Donmar, London
It is impossible to sympathise with any of the characters. It's like watching ants, except that instead of gathering food they're involved in a racially loaded love triangle.
Dolan Cummings

Smack at Soho Theatre, London
The first hit is everything and the slippery slope all-consuming. Hearing the parallel lives of slobbering, scratching junkie Janey and composed, straight Janey, it seems that life could only ever have been this way for these two different personalities.
Ruth Sheldon

Best Friends at the New End Theatre, London
The play follows Sofi, Tirza and Lali, from their first pivotal bonding experience in the girls toilets at school, sharing illicit cigarettes passed below the cubicle doors, to a later stage in life, when mysterious events have led to a rift in their three-way friendship.
Amy Matthews

Tristan and Yseult at the National Theatre, London
The point of the play is to refute the Hollywood vision of love as the preserve of the chosen few, the beautiful people, whose unglamorous sidekicks are allowed only cutely comical affairs with equally goofy partners.
Dolan Cummings

Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams at the Finborough Theatre, London
The museum becomes a parallel and an explanation for Luca's and Luciana's relationship as the play progresses - a refuge of hope for people who have had hope taken from them.
Hannah Knowles

Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Globe, London
Marcello Magni's conviction, energy and invention is startling and infectious. It's worth a fiver just to see him.
Tom Davies

Kingfisher Blue at the Bush Theatre, London
Kingfisher Blue comes on like a gritty, urban, issues-based play - all dodgy plumbers and East End London council estates - yet it soon becomes apparent that the writer Lin Coghlan doesn't have a clue which issue she's confronting.
Tom Davies

Theatre of Blood at the National Theatre, London
'What has theatre, or sex, or death, or dreams, or pain, or love ever had to do with "quality" or "relevance" or "excellence"?'
Dolan Cummings

The Tempest at the Globe, London
The Globe has shown that the Elizabethan stage was dynamic, physical, and bawdy. Most importantly, it has shown a genuine respect for the audience's intelligence.
Munira Mirza

Osama the Hero at Hampstead Theatre, London
Dennis Kelly excels as a writer of monologues, and it is sometimes fractured monologues that drive Osama the Hero, and its treatment of the politics of fear.
Dolan Cummings

Emily's Kitchen at the Oh! Art Centre, London
The strapline 'Are you living comfortably?' captures not only the theme of the play, but in its reference to 'Are you sitting comfortably', the company's aptitude for good old-fashioned storytelling.
Hannah Knowles

Phallacy at the New End Theatre, London
Phallacy too often slips into cardboard cut-out arguments between science and art. Perhaps the trouble is that the question of artistic authenticity has lost its bite in recent years. The unique aura of an art object has been on the wane for some time now.
Josie Appleton

National Alien Office at Riverside Studios, London
The characters are solid and strong, and yet lack depth or development. The tendency to rely on stereotypes and easy moral and social truisms is particularly damning in the Other, who at times is so one-dimensional he could be in a Lilt advert.
Amy Matthews

Julius Caesar at the Barbican, London
Democracy or imperialism? Clear boundaries between the two are hard to maintain. Deborah Warner's version presents us with three equally unacceptable versions of political legitimacy.
Ursula Strauss

Essay review: Democracy Bores
Michael Frayn's Democracy at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, Broadway, New York
Frayn's Willy Brandt has elements of both Blair and Clinton. It is the apolitical nature of Brandt's leadership that is both his strength and weakness. He is able to transcend politics only because of his ability spontaneously to connect with the public through a peculiar form of apolitical, poignant populism.
Philip Cunliffe

If Destroyed True at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London
Throughout, the play runs the risk of sliding into slushy sentimentality: at times, it seems almost to be saying that all of the modern world's problems can be solved with a hug. However, there is something extremely compelling about the innocent - almost naïve - quality of the play.
Chris Wilkinson

The Comedy of Errors at Greenwich Theatre, London
Exaggerated gestures are used a great deal, and many of the lines of the Antipholuses are given with real anger, vividly bringing to life their frustration at the farcical situations with which they are faced.
William Chamberlain

Two Into War at the Riverside Studios, London
The two monologues work well together because they are both emotional responses to war. Not great politics, no soldiers, only the stories of how death and destruction affect innocent bystanders.
Miranda Curnew

Jackson's Way at BAC, London
Whether consciously or not, Adamsdale seems to be parodying more than just the curious notion of life coaching. Rather, he seems to lampoon the notion of self-esteem and the broader notions of therapy culture.
Roy Crosland

Easter at the Riverside Studios, London
It is only with an elusiveness of moral certainty and of the personal embodiment of universal values that the garishly redemptive ending can be swallowed, and it is when the cast is expected to embody both the strictures of Strindberg's dialogue and the chaos hinted at underneath, that things go seriously awry.
Tim Markham

The Orpheus Complex at the Greenwich Plahouse, London
Orpheus is here so in love with Death that he seems to have no interest in Eurydice, so there is no real sense of a conflict or struggle with opposing desires. However, one suspects that the important thing about this play is really the wonderfully composite moving images created on stage.
Ursula Strauss

Mammals at the Bush Theatre, London
The instinctive speech and behaviour of the children unwittingly expresses the human condition better than the self-analysis of their adult counterparts, because ultimately, no matter how hard we try to define ourselves as humans, explanations will always elude us.
Hannah Knowles

The Heiress of the Cane Fields at the Greenwich Playhouse, London
Julio Dinis' is a familiar literary theme; pivotal moments of socio-political change have always offered great artistic and dramatic potential. There are traces of Hardy in his affiliation with the countryside; yet the author has generally been overlooked in the canon of European artists.
Rhona Foulis

Pyrenees at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London
Greig has created an intricate exploration of memory and the fluid nature of identity. He shows how even the way we self-identify in terms of nationality or ethnicity has as much to do with our own conscious or unconscious personal choice as it has to do with our actual circumstances.
Chris Wilkinson

Thomas More at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon
The play contains a plea for the essential universal condition of humanity. In this production though, the RSC is trying to make a more modern - a more relevant - and ultimately a more crass point.
Austin Williams

The Girl with Red Hair at Hampstead Theatre, London
There is a pleasing sense of emotional development to a play in which nothing much happens: we feel, rather than see, the dramatic denouement.
Rhona Foulis

Poor Beck at Soho Theatre, London
For me, the disappointing brilliant Persil-white of Myrrha's underpants takes something from the play's dramatic climax, but this could conceivably be symbolic.
Dolan Cummings

Midwinter at Soho Theatre, London
Midwinter is interestingly lyrical in its writing, but Harris's guarded production doesn't reveal the symbolism of her poetry. Where are we? What is the war? And who are these people? An oblique narrative spirals into too many unanswered questions, with too little drama to sustain our interest in resolving them.
Rhona Foulis

Mercury Fur at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London
It is occasionally hard to relate the innate sense of societal cynicism to Philip Ridley's apparent faith in the basic goodness of the individual and, well, the power of love, but his writing, the acting, and the design of the entire production make Mercury Fur theatrically intriguing.
Amy Matthews

A Raisin in the Sun at the Lyric Hammersmith, London
The script is full of drama and dramatic potential. Hansberry shows the economic, social and familial ramifications of racially stratified 1950s America. By exclusively focusing on one black family, she conveys intra-racial conflict with not a hint of blame and a lot of humanity.
Rhona Foulis

Body Anonymous at Baron's Court Theatre, London
All the play's characters are afraid of being unimportant, unwanted, rejected. These fears dominate their behaviour and make them lead deeply self-centred lives, particularly the maddening Jen who is so scared of never being loved that she becomes obsessed with the indifferent Mark, because he is vaguely nice to her.
Hannah Knowles

Project C on Principle at BAC, London
We are presented with a well chosen set of characters who give a convincing picture of life at the top and bottom ends of London society. The actors double-, triple-, even quintuple-up their roles with a good deal of precision.
Andrew Haydon

Lovers From Hell at the Oval House Theatre, London
The themes are universal, those of love, lust and loss, but the tone still lies, perhaps a little uncomfortably, between established gay culture and a more objective exploration of theatre's relationship with homosexual characters.
Amy Matthews

Whose Life Is It Anyway? at Comedy Theatre , London
The fact that this play hasn't caused offence should be a worry for anybody who takes what, for once, deserves to be called a 'life and death' issue seriously.
David Clements

Miss Julie at the Greenwich Playhouse, London
Miss Julie is still a thoroughly modern (or indeed postmodern) character; her malaise - manifested by moods, depression and confusion about identity - is of far greater relevance to the situation of the masses in the 21st century than the jobsworth inverse snobbery of the maid Christine.
Patrick Hayes

Cargo at the Oval House Theatre, London
They bring disease and terrorism; they swamp our schools and rape our women; sometimes, they even eat swans...
Chris Wilkinson

Take Me Away at the Bush Theatre, London
Through bleak humour, Gerald Murphy charts the corruption of the patriarchal family. Take Me Away questions the status of the family institution today, but proffers no alternative for disaffected men, who refuse to relate to each other.
Rhona Foulis

The Small Things at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London
Bernard Gallagher and Valerie Lilley are too good in their roles, almost perfectly capturing the flaws and weariness of the two isolated characters, ironically to the detriment of any sense of a universal human tragedy.
Patrick Hayes

Etta Jenks at the Finborough Theatre, London
Meyer comes to the trite conclusion that as porn pawns, women have lost control of their bodies and therefore themselves. The play could more interestingly have explored the ways in which screen actresses and celebrities in general lose ownership of their bodies.
Rhona Foulis

Colder Than Here at Soho Theatre, London
What do you do when you know you are going to die? Myra devises a PowerPoint presentation on homemade funerals, complete with tacky sound effects. Her husband and daughters struggle to see the funny side, until Myra forces them to confront their own fears, and get on with their lives and each other.
Beckie Mills

Tejas Verdes at the Bush Theatre, London
It is a fundamentally human tragedy of inconceivable torture. In this appropriately intimate performance space, five powerful actors deliver their monologues directly at the audience, showing that the political is essentially personal.
Rhona Foulis

Strictly Dandia at the Lyric Hammersmith, London
The obvious themes of the Romeo recipe recur and resonate with Indian traditions: arranged marriage, defined and justified as 'fate'; parental control and expectations; and the radical potential of all-conquering love.
Rhona Foulis

Blood Wedding at the Baron's Court Theatre, London
Perhaps director Susie Clare added the introduction because she was afraid Lorca's highly poetic, stylised language would prove alienating to the audience. Instead it is the awkward exchanges in the new material and the radical shift in tone between this and the play itself that proves difficult to comprehend.
Hannah Knowles

Macbeth at the Almeida, London
Macbeth here dies laughing, a blessed release from a godless world, but it is not moving. Because if it were moving then this would not be a true portrait of pointlessly cruel, unnecessary and postmodern existence.
Matt Warman

Bites at the Bush Theatre, London
Whether or not Bites really does scare the audience, it is not itself entirely at ease. In a sequence of food-related playlets, it roves from place to place, looking for trouble, and finding it everywhere.
Michael Caines

Losing Louis at the Hampstead Theatre, London
I can see why people are talking about this play deserving a West End transfer. The production itself is superb, and although the script may not change the world, it certainly makes for a highly enjoyable evening.
Rachel Wagstaff

Head/Case at Soho Theatre, London
The complexity of the relationship between language and identity is vividly brought to life by characters who experience language as meaningless, yet cling to words which provide them with security.
Ruth Sheldon

Patience at the Finborough Theatre, London
Where did it all go wrong? Can you pinpoint the moment, the bad decision or the unlucky break that made your life fall apart? The message of Jason Sherman's play seems to be that everyone's life is always falling apart.
Dolan Cummings

Fix Up at the National Theatre, London
Kiyi's bookshop and his history have become not so much a source of knowledge and enlightenment as a painful retreat, a pathetic excuse for a real life.
Matt Warman

World Cup Final 1966 at BAC, London
Arguably, the audience is one of theatre's great underexploited resources, but World Cup Final 1966 makes use of everything including our hair and teeth.
Dolan Cummings

The History Boys at the National Theatre, London
The play is uproariously funny, but cleverly turns to a tone of gentle seriousness, its social message refusing to be dismissed as mere comedic fun.
Rhona Foulis