Theatre

Rapunzel BAC, London
At one point, Rapunzel’s friend the wild boar (a beautifully made puppet) defecates on the centre of the stage, apparently as a gift for Rapunzel. Edith Tankus’ hesitantly polite response perfectly expresses her character’s complex charm in an instant.
Dolan Cummings

On Religion Soho Theatre, London
There is a certain joy about the play's roughness, its not-quite-polished-ness, which allows the two strands of moving family drama and rigorous intellectual debate to co-exist happily while making it easier for the audience to get the most out of both.
Andrew Haydon

Waves National Theatre, London
This is not an 'adaptation' of Virginia Woolf's novel, this is a wholly new, completely original piece of theatre that has been explicitly marketed as being 'suggested by...' the novel. As a piece of theatre, this is wholly, wonderfully detailed, complex and absorbing.
Andrew Haydon

The Seduction Of Almighty God By The Boy Priest Loftus In The Abbey of Calcetto,1539 Riverside Studios, London
Howard Barker has described the Reformation as the worst thing to have ever happened to British art, claiming it as the point at which British art was forced irreversibly down the road of social function and utility. But, Loftus’s pitiless religious fundamentalism makes him a problematic hero for our times.
Andrew Haydon

Love and Money Young Vic, London
There are subtler ways Dennis Kelly could have got his anti-consumerist message across. Hanging Margaret Thatcher from the rafters whilst an irate Polly Toynbee beat her dead husk with an orphaned South African would have been one.
Emily Hill

Romeo and Juliet Barbican, London
This heavily-stylised Korean take on the star-cross’d lovers tells their story in extended dance and martial arts sequences, a swirl of colourful silk and much grinning (and even some waving) at the audience.
Emily Berry

The Glass Room Hampstead Theatre, London
How strange to devote one's life to arguing a position that is even 'almost certainly' complete rubbish. It is Pete, in a conversation with Myles and Tara, who asks the million dollar question: 'If you think the Holocaust was justified, why spend so much time trying to prove it never happened?'.
Dolan Cummings

Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? Royal Court, London
For years, Caryl Churchill has been one of Britain's most imaginative, challenging and inventive playwrights, but here it appears that she has written a reductive anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-American polemic, without much invention or subtlety about it.
Andrew Haydon

Amy's View Garrick Theatre, London
It's done in an archaic four-act style with a lavish set so delicious to look at that one can't help wondering what's hiding behind its obsessive detail. It would be easy to conclude that if Hare is seeking thoroughly to defend theatre, he fails. But there are more layers than that.
Emily Berry

Orestes Tricyle Theatre, London
The effect of the simplifications made by Shared Experience is to sandpaper the play's complexities. Instead of having Orestes played upon by an Iago figure, we have him battling with himself as a weak shadow of Hamlet, torn by his own psyche.
Iona Firouzabadi

Whipping It Up Bush Theatre, London
In December 2009, a Tory government governs with a parliamentary majority of three. This isn't modern political drama or satire - forget The West Wing or Yes, Minister - what we're looking at here is a Jacobean tangle of plot and counter-plot, dissembling and intrigue.
Andrew Haydon

The World in Pictures Riverside Studios, London
Socrates: Ah, I was 17 when I first saw Forced Ent. I was electrified. It was the first really successful piece of non-narrative theatre I'd seen. It was funny, moving, unnerving and utterly engrossing. This kind of work is valid and important, but that means it's important that it's done better than this.
Alex Ferguson

Zerbombt (Blasted) Barbican, London
This German production of Sarah Kane's play is almost the diametric opposite of 'In-yer-face' - it is right out of yer face, and a long way away on a beautifully designed set, in a nice, big, well-appointed auditorium. One effect of this near-forensic treatment is to lay the plot and characters rather bare.
Andrew Haydon

Project E: An Explosion BAC, London
Now our discussion in a performance arts venue of al-Qaeda's performance terrorism has been reproduced in an experimental play - and I am writing about my experience of watching an actor performing my discussion of al-Qaeda's performance terrorism for an arts magazine. Baudrillard would be proud.
Brendan O'Neill

pool (no water) Lyric Hammersmith, London
This collaboration between Mark Ravenhill and Frantic Assembly is a demented morality tale crossed with satire of modern friendships, me-culture, artistic aspiration, wrapped in Grand Guignol, as four friends exploit the inert body of their hospitalised friend in the name of art.
Andrew Haydon

The Cryptogram Donmar, London
Mamet's play tells us that parents are perfidious, adults destroy childhood, life is rubbish and nobody will give you a blanket when you really want one. Give me Peanuts any day.
Iona Firouzabadi

Television: Longford Channel 4
Making Ian Brady into a mesmerising Scottish Hannibal Lecter may or may not have served verisimilitude, but it sure as hell made for better television. It was suddenly a great pity that this wasn't just made-up so that there need be no concern about whether it was accurate.
Andrew Haydon

Faustus Hampstead Theatre, London
What was once an scurrilous attack on Christianity, albeit one that acknowledged the existence of God only to question His power, has been transformed into a hymn to radical, creative relativism and the value of art.
Andrew Haydon

Bones Bush Theatre, London
The black characters seem to exist to take Jennifer on an emotional journey in which she learns not to repress important truths. The dilemmas of such a character would be marginal to the point of non-existence in the new South Africa.
Ursula Strauss

The Seafarer National Theatre, London
This is a brief, almost humble play about the infinitesimal distance between ordinary life and the abyss, in which a drunken card game nearly ends in eternal damnation - but doesn't.
Emily Berry

Metamorphosis Lyric Hammersmith, London
On the third hand it might be read as a study of physical self loathing. On the fourth it is an existentialist analogy. Four hands? The outlandish simplicity of Kafka's premise defies any attempt to impose an absolute interpretation. Two hands certainly aren't enough. Nor are six.
Tom Charge Burke

Hermes Rosemary Branch Theatre, London
Hera, in all her bustling rage, is resplendent in peacock feathers, her coat made of gold stripes and black tiger flashes. The horror of Maya's labour ends in a comic birth in which Hermes grown head protrudes from a crude, cloth-baby body. It shouldn't work, it shouldn't work… and yet… and yet...
Emily Hill

Tobias and the Angel Young Vic, London
The balloons sway. The man swims. The fish glides. The orchestra plays. The man sings. The angel sings. The man fights. The fish fights. The fish is killed! The waters descend. The balloons drift away from the stage.
Lily Einhorn

Cabaret Lyric, London
Amid desperation and depravity, naked men and women dance in the background of Sally Bowles' bed. Beautifully choreographed by Javier De Frutos, they optimistically look upwards towards the sky, climbing a ladder, seemingly leading to heaven, before a cold, white light starkly shines upon their naked flesh...
Rhona Foulis

Rhymes, Reasons and Bomb Ass Beatz Oval House Theatre, London
Harold Finley raps, pouts, shouts, dances and sweats his way through a staggering number of seemingly random monologues until we begin to see that all the characters are caught in the same vast spider's web of relationships, fate and chance, bound together by chance meetings or lineage.
Andrew Haydon

In Extremis The Globe, London
Time is telescoped and our era seems to be sitting alongside medieval debates - can individualism and rationalism triumph amid religious extremism? But the play engages in dialectic and synthesis, ergo there is not a simple opposition between the rational and the religious.
Iona Firouzabadi

Tom and Viv Almeida, London
I was genuinely shocked by the gulf between the film, which is an intelligent, sensitive, subtle examination of love, pity, faith, compassion, morality, weakness, artistry and cruelty, and this stage version, which lacks any sense of cohesively presenting anything.
Lucy Wills

King Lear Barbican, London
What is most arresting about the Maly Theatre, St Petersburg's new production of King Lear is quite how matter-of-factly they are prepared to ditch swathes of the text. It is hard to imagine any English director with the guts, or sheer effrontery, to remove Lear's Fool from the final act.
Andrew Haydon

The Persian Revolution Lyric Hammersmith, London
Tintin's Captain Haddock remarks: 'An atomic research centre in this land of savages?' Ho-ho, we think, is this fearless company trying to draw parallels between the colonial doodlings of a Belgian racist and our own vexed times in the Middle East? Apparently so.
Andrew Haydon

Dumb Cuckoo Riverside Studios, London
The assertion of a Tatar identity, within and distinct from a Soviet identity, is the central focus of the play. Zafir and Ziatdin repeatedly revert to their indigenous folk music in order to remember their motherland and to prove their authenticity to each other.
Tom Charge Burke

After Mikuyu Oval House Theatre, London
Banda's regime lends itself to mickey-taking: the fly-whisk, entourage and banning of the Simon and Garfunkel song 'Cecilia' (as Cecilia was the name of Banda's powerful mistress), are presented in full absurdity, without discounting the fear and bullying just below the surface.
Ursula Strauss

The Alchemist National Theatre, London
What is striking in Nicholas Hytner's new modern-dress production of The Alchemist is quite how much nastier Ben Jonson was than his near contemporary Shakespeare. What is also striking is how much less nasty Nicholas Hytner is than Ben Jonson.
Andrew Haydon

Amadeus Wilton's Music Hall, London
The period setting of the venue itself, with ruined walls and notices warning the audience about the poor functionality of the building, works wonderfully with the stage art direction - all creating a haunting world, rotting with mediocrity, crying for greatness.
Ion Martea

Bobby Baker - How to Live Barbican, London
The show is charming but not sharp. Rather more silly than surreal, the humour is gentle and rather childlike - the comedy lies in the child's amusement at its own joke, rather than in the joke itself.
Emily Berry

Brixton Stories Lyric Hammersmith, London
The narrative darts between events in Ossie's conscious and subconscious mind, just as the actors dart from character to characters, with such ease that attempting to distinguish a singular 'reality' in the play is a meaningless task. Is this magical realism? Is it, god forbid, 'metatheatre?' Does it matter?
Tom Charge Burke

Edinburgh Fringe 2006
Various reviewers

Sugar Mummies Royal Court, London
There are fascinating themes here, and moments of risqué hilarity too. But there's nothing radical per se in a play about ladies wanting to get laid.
Matt Warman

Exiles National Theatre, London
The fact that, beneath the thinnest of disguises, Rowen is Joyce himself can't hide the fact that the man is an arse. His self-absorption and preciousness would scarcely be tolerable were they not sprinkled with Joycean stardust.
Ed Lake

A Right Royal Farce King's Head Theatre, London
Ultimately, the whole performance has the inimitable air of the village hall panto. It isn't very funny, it isn't very good, but there is a certain swagger and bravado from the performers, which leads one to think it isn't their fault.
Emily Hill

The 39 Steps Tricycle Theatre, London
Rather more farce than thriller, Patrick Barlow's version of the classic sends up its original genre with originality and affection. A mere four actors expertly play innumerable parts with pitch-perfect irony, racing through the action and dragging the audience along with them.
Emily Berry

Under the Black Flag The Globe, London
While rollicking comedy is the flesh of the play, its skeleton is that of a revenge tragedy - our hero, Long John, and his enemies are driven by vengeance to acts of violence. The whole could form a layered and complex tragicomedy, but instead what we get is a body at war with itself.
Iona Firouzabadi

The Comedy of Errors The Globe, London
Despite the many similarities and common antecedents, The Comedy of Errors is not a Carry On film, and there are complexities which go overlooked as a result of this chosen style.
Andrew Haydon

Blonde Bombshells of 1943 Hampstead Theatre, London
This 'comedy auditions' routine is a tried and tested scenario wheeled out in countless plays and films (The Full Monty, for example), which follow the same wobbly-audition-through-to-dazzling-final-performance storyline to far greater effect.
Emily Berry

Dysfunction Soho Theatre, London
The play is literally eye-opening. The absence of spoken dialogue onstage compels one to engage more closely with the actors' movements and expressions and to think about the uses of the body as a mode of expression.
Emily Berry

The Life of Galileo National Theatre, London
In David Hare's newly revised text there is something more complex going on than 'the clash of reason and unreason - secular truth and religious faith'. Truth and faith are fundamental themes, but they are commingled with expediency and human weakness.
Iona Firouzabadi

See How They Run Duchess Theatre, London
This is an unashamedly silly romp which would have the Arts Council fainting in the face of its non-PC, unenlightening, non-diverse agenda. The outside of the theatre is hung with union flag bunting and the box office protected by sandbags; as if expecting an air raid ordered by Tessa Jowell.
Andrew Haydon

Create Or Be Created - Jonathan Kay Inn on the Green, Ladbroke Grove, London
Normally the cringeworthiness of a show increases exponentially as the level of audience participation increases, but in a world where we're alienated from our work, our neighbours, ourselves, Jonathan Kay works magic because he turns strangers into friends.
Alex Ferguson

Perfection Old Red Lion, London
You don't feel sorry for Amanda and regret the choices she makes, unless you're a traditional misogynist, the sort of person who assumes female actors are only keeping themselves occupied with silly shows like this just until they fall pregnant.
Graham Smith

Woyzeck Barbican, London
Actors drop unexpectedly into manholes in the stage, flowers rain like arrows to stick, quivering, into the ground around a romantic scene, and a large moat-like series of fishtanks is revealed into which actors duly leap to swim, copulate and eventually drown.
Andrew Haydon

Rock 'n' Roll Royal Court, London
It might seem odd to suggest the state of Britain today is best explained by a play about Czech history from 1967 to 1990, but, since the collapse of the iron curtain and the advent of New Labour, the dominant question of British political theatre seems to have been: 'What the hell are we meant to do now?'
Andrew Haydon

Avenue Q Noel Coward Theatre, London
Lopez and Marx part-parody and part-celebrate the notion of 'finding oneself'. The audience is won over by the sheer fun and entertaining wit of the show enough that we forgive its soft-centred message. Life sucks, but hang in there, because fantasies can come true.
Rhona Foulis

Qabuka Oval House Theatre, London
Immigrants' tales are interspersed with an almost wordless tale of torture, attempted escape and failed asylum. The production is full of energy and inventiveness. Where it is less successful is in the emotional tone, which becomes increasingly jumbled as the show goes on.
Ursula Strauss

Paradise Lost Hackney Empire, London
Strip away the razzle dazzle, and what is left is a production stranded in its very own limbo. As Milton sagely observed, the mind is indeed capable of making a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell, but it is hard pushed to envisage either on this stage.
Hannah Knowles

The Bee Soho Theatre, London
The final twenty minutes or so of the play are an obscene ballet set to the chorus from Madame Butterfly, a pas de deux between Kathryn Hunter's insane Mr Ido and writer-director Hideki Noda's own Mrs Ogoro, a picture of feminine resignation.
Dolan Cummings

On The Third Day New Ambassadors Theatre, London
The point of this project was to offer someone a chance to put their play on in the West End, but the script selection process used by theatres and literary agents is there for a purpose. This play isn't the thing - it's not good, but it's not a pleasingly-trashy disaster, and it's all a bit upsetting, really.
Tom Davies

Dance: Russell Maliphant & Sylvie Guillem - PUSH Sadler's Wells, London
Maliphant is at his most cerebral when he is at his most physical and visceral. In Sylvie Guillem he has found a dancer who is perfectly attuned to the intellectual and physical challenge of his choreography.
Shirley Dent

Opera: Nixon in China English National Opera, Coliseum, London
This is a opera that celebrates heroic failure; it's not whether you win or lose, but the fact that you play the game. As Chou says 'We fight, we die, and if we do not fight we die'. Nothing about either Adams' opera or this ENO performance smacks of failure, however.
Gerard Lynch

A Midsummer Night's Dream Open Air (Regent's Park), London
Having seen the production and then gone back to the text, it struck me that in many ways the poetic truth of the original play is the transformative power of dreams. However, this theme was almost entirely obscured in the production.
William Chamberlain

Cruising Bush Theatre, London
There is still discomfiture about verbatim theatre, with many writers complaining that its works do not count as 'proper plays.' For all that, Cruising is well structured, funny and touching - irrespective of whether it is made up, entirely true, or fragments of truth edited into a more coherent entity.
Andrew Haydon

Fuerzabruta Roundhouse, London
It could be argued that the play is made up of little more than gratuitous spectacle. But after an hour of gazing upwards, open-mouthed, trying to keep one eye on the green glow of the fire escape, even the wow factor begins to seem profound.
Emily Berry

The Estate Soho Theatre, London
Is the play unsuccessful if, in borrowing heavily from other literary tropes, it succeeds in speaking directly to an often overlooked 'cultural mass'? Should it be criticised for its lack of originality when it can communicate to so many people using familiarity as a form of commonality between diverse audiences?
Lily Einhorn

Red Theatre 503, London
It's hard to work the play out, and harder to know if it's going to be worth your while. Red has just returned from a war, apparently traumatised by the experience, though in the abstract world conjured by the play it's not clear what might have been considered normal.
Dolan Cummings

Market Boy National Theatre, London
The six-year span of the play parallels Boy's development with that of the market place and the political landscape of Britain in the 1980s. The audience can enjoy its empathetic identification with Market Boy's maturation, but the journey - and therefore Eldridge's plot - is a predictable one.
Rhona Foulis

Hear and Now The Gate, London
Despite the general pleasantness, the play lacks something of the emotional grip such a desperate situation should have. Maybe because it is too clear where the play is going - the revelation of the man's secret (although the play does make the point that there are always more secrets).
Ursula Strauss

Shrieks of Laughter Soho Theatre, London
Waking and dreaming, reality and unreality, death and life are blurred and confused as much as night and day, which are immaterial in a production that refuses to provide any evidence of time and space. The set, sound and lights make a perfect, disjointed whole that anchors the story in limbo.
Lily Einhorn

The Overwhelming National Theatre, London
'Stop the killing, and worry about the political implications later', one might have said at the time. Well, we didn't stop the killing, but it is later. The Overwhelming is an invitation to reflect on some hard questions about Rwanda.
Dolan Cummings

4.48 Psychosis Arcola Theatre, London
Part of the reason for the play's popularity lies in the endless reinventions of the staging, and the effect this has on our understanding of the fractured narratives that criss-cross the play, which resembles Eliot's The Wasteland in terms both of style and of the sheer scale of the literary kleptomania.
Andrew Haydon

The Royal Hunt of the Sun National Theatre, London
By insisting so resolutely on the folly of various forms of belief Schaffer closes off some of the dramatic possibilities. I don't think it's director Trevor Nunn's fault that the first half of the play never seems quite to take flight.
Ursula Strauss

Play / Catastrophe Barbican, London
This is an astute pairing of two of Beckett’s most visually striking pieces; the three potted heads of Play contrasting with the directed movements of 'The Protagonist' of Catastrophe.
Andrew Haydon

The Winterling Royal Court, London
When the dramatic point of the play - the decision towards which a character has been heading for its entire course - can be so easily altered, it shakes your faith in the story.
Andrew Haydon

Burn, Chatroom National Theatre, London
Both plays seriously invest in the experiences of young people, giving centre stage to their subjects. The Connections transfer to the National holds up these plays as theatre for everyone, and there's something very right about that indeed.
Rhona Foulis

Year 10 BAC, London
In this hard-hitting play, the school playground is a terrifying place of bullying, drugs, homophobia, racism and sexual conquests, with the teachers either passive or powerless. Vinnicombe paints an alarmingly real picture of the issues of adolescence, but not the adolescents themselves.
Rhona Foulis

Taboos New End Theatre, London
The changes we are witnessing in Djerassi's 'Sex in an age of mechanical reproduction' throw up serious ethical dilemmas, but they also offer exciting opportunities to renegotiate the social and political networks in which we operate.
Helen Birtwistle

Masha and the Bear White Bear Theatre, London (now tranferred to the Tabard Theatre)
This is a subtle and suitably restrained affair that can prove challenging narratively - much is left for an audience to assume or work out in their own time, but the ambiguities are rarely frustrating or impede one's understanding of the characters themselves.
Tom Davies

Christmas is Miles Away Bush Theatre, London
Despite the ambling pace of Sarah Frankcom's production, Christmas sparkles in its emotional truth. At the end, Luke feels 'older, but not in a good way, not mature or wise.' This is a play about the value of youth for living and failing freely, 'before you've got to do it all for real'.
Rhona Foulis

Other Hands Soho Theatre, London
Laura Wade takes a fairly conventional premise and makes it interesting by introducing repetitive strain injury as an elaborate metaphor for her characters' feelings of self-estrangement and frustration.
Dolan Cummings

A Devilish Exercise: conjuring Marlowe at the Rose Rose Theatre, London
It is undoubtedly a neat idea: entangle Marlowe's works around the story of Faustus. But you need to be able to live up to the imagination of Marlowe and fill the space of the Rose to pull it off, and Into the Breach were simply not up to the job.
Shirley Dent

Imogen at the Oval House Theatre, London
The production has been put together in a respectful and tender way. It tries to tackle the sort of grief we'd rather not talk about. The grief that lingers long after a funeral, the grief that debilitates and against which well-meant advice to 'be brave and get on' just doesn't help.
Annette Mees

Titus Andronicus at the Courtyard at Covent Garden, London
Despite the gore, there is meaning hidden in this ancient tale. The man is first viewed as a hero, yet a hero capable of cruelty, a basic characteristic of human kind. From parent to child, customs and ambition lead man with no other choice but dwell in a state of malice.
Ion Martea

Thalidomide!! A Musical at BAC, London
Although the play is ostensibly a comedy, it's clear that Mat Fraser intends to make a serious point here, but by following every fact about thalidomide with a dose of 'Carry On' humour, he severely reduces the potential impact of the production.
Hannah Knowles

The Soldier's Tale at the Old Vic, London
We need more theatre to challenge and question and create new bonds between severed societies. But does this need to be at the expense of being engaged? I was not rapt and I wasn't hooked; I was borderline bored and this is one of the reasons we're finding it so hard to tempt the masses to the auditoriums.
Sarah Bowie

Gem of the Ocean at the Tricycle Theatre, London
Aunt Esther's home becomes both a spiritual and social sanctuary, offering an alternative to the white system of judgement. 'You can put the law on a piece of paper, but that don't make it right'. Esther holds up the document that held her identity, the legal piece of paper once brandished by her white master.
Rhona Foulis

The Gabriels at the Finborough Theatre, London
Van Badham's plays don't so much promote her own left-wing, feminist politics, as perform experiments on them, putting them in awkward situations, poking them a bit, and letting the audience sit back and see what happens.
Dolan Cummings

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