Alexander Cohen

As achingly monotone as it is aggressively monochrome.

Don’t be fooled. It’s midwinter and a rotund man with a big white beard is centre stage. But this is no schmultz-fest panto. It’s Simon Russell Beale as A.E Housman in Blanche Mcintyre’s sober new production of Tom Stoppard’s portrait of the artist as an old man, The Invention Of Love.

We love watching a rich family crumble on stage. From Oedipus and his mother to Chekhov’s families fractured by existential angst, to Ibsen’s split by socio-politics paradigm shifts. The Hubbards, the family of former plantation owners in Lilian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, could be the spiritual successor of them all

One for the Brecht completionists

“This ain’t NWA, it’s NW6.” The preshow warm up rapper unironically proclaims down a booming mic. What a line.

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 writes BWW's critic.

A must for Shakespeare completionists. Read our critic's take.

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