Alexander Cohen

If, like me, you shrug bah humbug to Panto season and its saccharine cavalcade of festive frivolous fluff then you would do well to seek refuge at the Globe and its intelligently calibrated Winter offering of All's Well That Ends Well.

​​​​​​​Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. That’s the hypothesis of Harry Fehr’s new iteration of The Elixir Of Love, a self-reflexive swipe on 1970s sitcoms drunk on the saccharine sentimentalism of second world war triumphalism. Pip pip. Tally ho.

There’s a whiff of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem about Richard Bean’s Reykjavík. Come and raise a melancholic glass to the old world of superstition, mythic tales of magic and monsters, fated to be swallowed by the bloodless age of bureaucracy. It’s like spending an evening with that old man in the pub the light of whose eyes fades as he recounts tales of yonder realising that things ain’t what they used to be.

Zinnie Harris’s 2019 incarnation of The Duchess of Malfi, matter-of-factly titled The Duchess (of Malfi), desperately yearns to conjure the sexy metatheatrical cunning of Van Hove, Mitchell, Ostermeier. It stumbles toe-curlingly at every hurdle.

There’s a ghost of a good show lingering beneath the surface but it never materialises

Tobias Kratzer’s production pulls the rug from underneath you.

A must for Shakespeare completionists

If Roots is the demure first part of the Almeida’s “Angry and Young” season, Look Back in Anger is the explosive finale. How could it not be when the human flamethrower Jimmy Porter is the burning star at the centre of its orbit?

The Almeida’s ”Angry and Young” season is a stroke of curatorial brilliance. Arnold Wesker’s 1958 Roots and John Osborne’s 1956 Look back in Anger face off, a roaring lion in one corner, a growling tiger in the other.

A single house in the Middle East is the focal point in this stage adaption of the Israeli-French filmmaker’s documentary trilogy from La Colline - Théâtre National. Borders, identities, geographies, cultures and people change, and yet its four walls remain the same.

Confluences of history weave together in Lyndsey Turner’s pulsating new production

Stella Feehily's new play examines the life of pioneering astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Is it serendipity or a testament to good writing? A day after the government mandate two thousand prisoners to enjoy an early release a new production of Our Country’s Good premieres: a play about deported British convicts forging a new life in newly colonised Australia couldn’t be timelier.

Heavily reliant on strong vocals

It only premiered last October, but Death of England: Closing Time, the final chapter in Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s state of the nation triptych, not only retains its spine-frosting freshness, but feels more dangerous than ever.

What is there to be said about the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra that hasn’t already been said? For twenty-five years it has united Arab and Israeli musicians under the baton of Jewish co-founder Daniel Barenboim (late Palestinian Critical Theorist Edward Said is the other co-founder); their declaration of unity and of humanity, in the face of growing darkness echoes disarmingly loudly as they return to the Royal Albert Hall with a sensuous romantic double bill of Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major and Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 9.

Some actors can play a role. Sure. Only a handful can inhabit it living and breathing. Even fewer are so convincing that you can’t imagine anyone else in their shoes. Paapa Essiedu is the latter. Without a doubt. Not even a second of doubt.

The guns fire loud and sonorous for the opening salvos of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s Death of England trilogy. A staggered premiere over four years at The National Theatre from 2020, new kid on the theatreland block @sohoplace (it’s really called that) have collated the trilogy (Michael, Delroy, and Closing Time) in rep in the West End.

When food takes centre stage, it is usually as a conduit for humanity. Somewhere in the pseudo religiosity of ritual and the flurry of flavours we summon stories of cultures, families, histories across time and geography.

The lights flash on, a writer stumbles into his scantly decorated flat. A woman follows, champagne on her breath, flirtatious glances smuggled between them. It’s late at night and the inevitability of retiring to the bedroom looms. But it is not what it seems.