Arcadia at the Old Vic is a brilliant farewell to Tom Stoppard Life&Style Arcadia | Old Vic | ★★★★☆ Arcadia is a dizzying piece of work, as broad as the universe and as self-contained as a jigsaw puzzle. Through it Tom Stoppard addresses some of humanity’s great questions: do we have free will? Is poetry more important than science? Is there anyone Lord Byron didn’t shag? It opens [...]
Ballad Lines review: A muddled musical with moments of brilliance Life&Style A Jacobean vicar’s wife, a pregnant Presbyterian teen and a 21st-century New York lesbian walk into a bar – Ballad Lines is the result.
High Noon play review: New ground for the West End’s Westerns High Noon review and star rating: ★★ Westerns feel ripe for the stage, although very few have been staged as plays. The musicals are famous West End fodder: Oklahoma! was given a provocative, horny reimagining at the Young Vic in 2022, but while High Noon has some musical numbers courtesy of Bruce Springsteen’s back catalogue, [...]
Ariana Grande tickets for London musical ‘could easily go over £300’ January 16, 2026 “Dynamic pricing” has forced some West End ticket prices as high as £400 – will Ariana Grande’s new production of Sunday in the Park with George cost as much as an all-inclusive break in the Med? While some figures including Andrew Lloyd Weber have criticised dynamic pricing – the act of putting prices up in [...]
Oh, Mary! London review: Broadway smash falters in the West End January 8, 2026 Oh, Mary! review and star rating: ★★ Historical revisioning – storytelling that presents key parts of history in new and often fantastical ways – has become a major trend through shows like Six and Hamilton. The latest, Oh, Mary!, is a comic imagining of the life of Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd Lincoln in the [...]
The Great Christmas Feast review: A festive London must-do December 8, 2025 In a sea of A Christmas Carol stage adaptations, The Great Christmas Feast by The Lost Estate is easily up there with the best.
Paddington musical review: the bear’s a bit clunky, but the show is warm and fuzzy November 30, 2025 Paddington musical review and star rating: ★★★★ It feels like a fairly strange point in history when The Guardian “exclusively reveal” Paddington bear, transplanted from Michael Bond’s novels to the Savoy Theatre. Such has been the enormous hype around this musical, which has been shrouded in secrecy for seven years during production but has finally [...]
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold at Soho Place review: John Le Carré thriller grips on stage November 28, 2025 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold review and star rating: ★★★★ At the interval of David Eldridge’s adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, my friend and I placed bets on how we thought the play would end. We were both wrong. I’m sure many people who go to watch [...]
A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic: Twee as can be and a triumph nonetheless November 26, 2025 A Christmas Carol has almost every sickly sweet ingredient to make it utterly detestable, but our writer couldn't help but fall for it.
The Hunger Games on Stage review – Damp squib production fails to emit a single spark November 13, 2025 Watching The Hunger Games on Stage makes it immediately obvious why The Hunger Games should not, in fact, be on stage.