Andrzej Lukowski

Hello, and welcome to the Time Out theatre reviews round up. From huge star vehicles and massive West End musical to hip fringe shows and more, this is a compliation of all the latest London reviews from the Time Out theatre team, which is me plus our team of freelance critics. December is the busiest time of year for London theatre – expect plenty of pantomime reviews and other seasonal fun but also a slew of major openings from across London’s many venues as the industry works itself to a frenzy before shutting down for Christmas. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025. A-Z of West End shows.

London’s theatre scene is the most exciting in the world: perfectly balanced between the glossy musical theatre of Broadway and the experimentalism of Europe, it’s flavoured by the British preference for new writing and love of William Shakespeare, but there really is something for everyone. Between the showtunes of the West End and the constant pipeline of new writing from the subsidised sector, there’s a whole thrilling world, with well over 100 theatres and over venues playing host to everything from classic revivals to cutting-edge immersive work. London's best shows to book for at a glance: Best musical: Beetlejuice, Prince Edward Theatre Best Shakespeare play: Romeo & Juliet, Harold Pinter Theatre Best celebrity show: Krapp’s Last Tape, Royal Court Theare Best for teens: John Proctor is the Villain, Royal Court Theatre Best play by the late Tom Stoppard: Arcadia, Old Vic This rolling list is constantly updated to share the best of what’s coming up and currently booking: these choices aren’t the be-all and end-all of great theatre in 2025, but they are, as a rule, the biggest and splashiest shows coming up, alongside intriguing looking smaller projects.   They’re shows worth booking for, pronto, both to avoid sellouts but to get the cheaper tickets that initially go on sale for most shows but tend to be snapped up months before they actually open. Please note that the prices quoted are the ‘official’ prices when the shows go on sale – with West End shows in particular

Oh yes it is! London panto season is back for 2025, and here’s Time Out’s complete rundown of every major pantomime in the city. London's best pantomimes at a glance: Best ‘classic’ panto: Cinderella, Hackney Empire Hippest panto: Jack and the Beanstalk, Lyric Hammersmith Best celebrity panto: Sleeping Beauty, London Palladium Christmas panto you can see on Christmas Day: Cinderella and the Matzo Ball, JW3  Best adults only panto: see our adult panto list For some Londoners the only time of year they'll visit a theatre, panto season is a bizarre, joyful, quintessentially British time to come together and watch some light-hearted spoof fairytales that revolve around men dressing up as women and/or farm animals. Within that, though, there’s huge variation, from the megascale London Palladium show with its filthy figurehead Julian Clary, to Clive Rowe’s brilliant panto purism at the Hackney Empire and JW3’s amusing Jewish spin that runs on Christmas Day itself. I’m Andrzej Łukowski, Time Out’s theatre editor, and while this page is simply intended as a round-up of London pantomimes, then it’s an *informed* round up – I have seen approximately four billion pantos over the last 15 years or so, and know what they’re all like, plus we’ll update this page with star ratings when our reviews of this year’s crop start rolling in in late November. London is a city that takes pantomime seriously, and even if the idea of seasonal frivolity fills you with dread, there’s a panto out there

Even after a couple of vintage years for new music, 2025 has been special. Sure, we didn’t get a clear-cut ‘song of the summer’, but artists have been instead putting out defining works in a longer format. The past 12 (well, 11) months have featured all manner of extraordinary album releases.  Belted-to-the-rafters country pop, plunderphonic majesty, ecstatic dance music, intimate electronic world-building, history-collapsing art rock, triumphant hip-hop… these are just a few of the sounds and styles that have been executed marvellously in 2025. Here are the year’s finest 25 albums, chosen by Time Out editors and contributors.

Urgently in need of some cool pressie inspo for your nearest and dearest? Don’t worry about it! Our London gift guide is here, and it features loads of lovely pressies to suit just about any Londoner you can imagine.  From nifty gadgets to stylish accessories, covetable homeware to kids’ gifts, our editors have got every base covered, including plenty of sustainable options and handmade bits from some of London’s coolest indie brands and makers.  Need even more present inspiration? Check out our roundup of London’s best Christmas hampers for 2025. Time Out’s 2025 Christmas Gift Guide at a glance 🏰 Best for tech nerds: Nothing headphones 💷 Best for foodies: Allday Goods knife 🔬 Best for style queens: Peachy Den scarf and mitten set 🎡 Best for cool blokes: Percival martini cap 🎨 Best for youngsters: Ty Beanie Bouncers RECOMMENDED: More Christmas fun in London. 

The great thing about having kids at Christmas is that you can vicariously relive the joy that comes with believing in Santa Claus. You may be a boring grown-up now, but it’s just as magical to watch your own little ones’ eyes light up as they see big man IRL. From a traditional Victorian hut to a gingerbread-themed alcove and the city’s only immersive black Santa experience at Noir Kringle, London has an assortment of grottos suited to every family. With help from Santa’s elves, each leaves kids with a special gift and a photo with the main man. Many also boast bonus Christmas activities from crafts and wintry trails, to film screenings and story time sessions. Be organised, though. Santa is a popular guy and often there isn’t enough of him to go round aren’t enough to meet the demand, particularly at peak times on weekends. So you’ll need to act fast to secure your slot and avoid tears and tantrums. Here are some great grottos in London to try for a holly jolly good time this year.  RECOMMENDED: Find more festive fun with our guide to Christmas in London.

Yes, Christmas is fun for adults. But it’s mostly fun for kids, who thrill to the sights, the sounds, the light and the implied magical forces of the season. Plus the presents. So many presents.  I’m Time Out’s theatre editor and lead kids writer, and I can confirm that as far as my own two children are concerned, Christmas is the most magical time of year. It’s also one of the few holidays where you’re not necessarily desperately scrabbling to find things to do with your kids every day during a two week holiday that is largely take up with family, opening presents and feasting, plus a handful of days on which London actually, properly shuts down. When are the school Christmas holidays in London in 2025? They run Monday December 22 to Friday January 2 2026. So in effect your children will be off From Saturday December 20 to Sunday January 4. And watch out for the school piling a cheeky inset day on after. Really, though, kids’ Christmas in London starts way before the schools break up: it’s pretty much go from when the big trees go up and the iconic lights are switched on. By the end of November you can easily meet Santa, go for an ice rink and take in a pantomime, all on a single day. This list is a best of things to do with kids over the London Christmas period. There is, unabashedly, a lot of highlighting of classic activities: have you been to Christmas at Kew? Great! You should go again. But there are also a handful of entirely unfestive events because maybe come early J

Hello parents and guardians! I’m Time Out’s children’s editor, and as a parent of two childen I can confirm that London is an amazing city raise kids in. You have to put in a bit of commuter time, but there’s a virtually endless stream of stuff for children to do, from playgrounds and parks to incredible kids’ theatres, free museums to slightly more expensive zoos and aquariums, and all sorts of stuff inbetween. London's best things to do with kids at a glance: 🦖 Best for dinosaur lovers: Natural History Museum and Crystal Palace Park 🦍 Best for animal lovers: London Zoo and Battersea Park Childen’s Zoo 🚣🏻‍♀️ Best for outdoor action: Lee Valley White Water Water Centre 👾 Best for videogame lovers: Power Up (Science Museum)  🪨 Best hidden gem: Chiselhurst Caves This is a sort of ever-evolving checklist of what we think the 50 best things to do in the city with kids are. Some of it is incredibly obvious: you’re probably aware that London has a Natural History Museum. But it’s worth stressing is a really, really great Natural History Museum, and whether you’re just visiting or have lived here all your life, a visit is a terrific day out. Alongside that, we’ve got 49 other ideas for things to do with childen in London – the focus is inevitably on younger children of nursery and primary school age, but we aim to cater for all here, from tots to teens. That’s all ages, all budgets and all times of the year – as well as adding new London attractions as they open or return,

It’s been another stellar year for music in 2025, packed full of belters, breakouts and hook-laden earworms.  Lorde returned to her angsty roots, Pulp dropped their first album since, and Bad Bunny reigned supreme on the streamers. We were blessed with new music from pop heavyweights Lady Gaga, Lily Allen and Robyn. In a plot twist, Rosalía dropped a classical album packed with religious references, and Turnstile made hardcore mainstream. Breakout stars CMAT, Addison Rae and Jim Legxacy proved that they are here to stay. Here Time Out editors and contributors have hand-picked the tracks they’ve had on repeat this year. These are the 40 best songs of 2025.  RECOMMENDED: The 25 best albums of 2025. 

This year of music has started with a bang. We’ve seen Chappell Roan go country, Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco smothering audiences with gushy love songs and Playboi Carti’s rapturous return from the underground. We've even been blessed with the return of Lorde! Alongside these pop heavyweights, we’re witnessing rap superstar Doechii continue her chart domination and the breakthrough of Gen Z artists like 2hollis, Tate McRae and Kai Bosch. What songs are defining 2025? Well, we’ve searched through our playlists and extracted the best songs of the year so far, to give you a mid-year vibe check of where we are currently at. But it doesn’t stop there. Keep your eyes peeled for updates to this list throughout the year as we’re still awaiting albums from Turnstile, Miley Cyrus, Pulp, A$AP Rocky and many more. RECOMMENDED: 🎧 The best albums of 2025 (so far)🎥 The best movies of 2025 (so far)📺 The best TV of 2025 (so far)

Hello! I'm Andrzej, the theatre editor of Time Out London, and me and my freelancers review a heck of a lot of theatre. This page is an attempt to distil the shows that are on right now into something like a best of the best based upon our actual reviews, as opposed to my predictions, which determine our longer range what to book for list. London's critics’ choice shows to book for at a glance: Best musical: Hamilton, Victoria Palace Theatre Best star casting: All My Sons, Wyndham’s Theatre Best for kids: Paddington the Musical, Savoy Theatre Best old classic: Les Miserables, Sondheim Theatre  Best for something a bit different: Titanique, Criterion Theatre It isn’t a scientific process, and you’ll definitely see shows that got four stars above ones that got five – this is generally because the five star show is probably going to be on for years to come (hello, Hamilton) and I'm trying to draw your attention to one that’s only running for a couple more weeks. Or sometimes, we just like to shake things up a bit. It’s also deliberately light on the longer-running West End hits simply because I don’t think you need to know what I think about Les Mis before you book it (it’s fine!). So please enjoy the best shows in London, as recommended by us, having actually seen them.

To say that William Shakespeare bestrides our culture like a colossus is to undersell him. Over 400 years since his death, the playwright is uncontested as the greatest writer of English who has ever lived. Even if you’re not a fan of sixteenth century blank verse – and if not, why not? – his influence over our culture goes far beyond that of any other writer. He invented words, phrases, plots, characters, stories that are still vividly alive today; his history plays utterly shaped our understanding of our own past as a nation. London Shakespeare plays at a glance: Best for Christmas: Twelfth Night, Barbican Best celebrity cast: Romeo & Juliet, Harold Pinter Theatre Best weird: The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Globe And unsurpisingly he is inescapable in London. The iconic Elizabethan recreation Shakespeare’s Globe theatre is his temple, with a year-round programme that’s about three-quarters his works. Although based in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Company regularly visit the capital, most frequently the Barbican Centre. And Shakespeare plays can be found… almost anywhere else, from the National Theatre – where they invariably run in the huge Olivier venue – to tiny fringe productions and outdoor version that pop up everywhere come the warmer months.  This page is simple: we tell you what Shakespeare plays are on in town this month (the answer is pretty much always ‘at least one’). We we tell you which of his works you can see coming up in the future. No other pla

This review is from 2014. Sunny Afternoon returns in touring form in 2026. The Kinks were a bunch of delightfully scrappy north London outsiders, and at a push you might say the same about this musical based on their songs, which transfers to the Harold Pinter from the wilds of, er, Hampstead Theatre.‘Sunny Afternoon’ doesn’t feel like a big West End show, but that’s a compliment to Ed Hall’s spunky production and its air of scrubbed-up anarchy. Its cast may only be modest in size, but by the end they all feel like old friends, wandering freely into the audience in a theatre made more intimate via cabaret seating and a runway projecting deep into the stalls. It sidesteps several musical clichés: none of the leads dance, and indeed the four actors playing the band could probably have everybody else currently on London’s stages in a fight. Only the most faint-hearted of souls will find anything to offend them – I don’t think there’s even any swearing – but the frequent cacophony of live instruments mark this as a breed apart.Written in collaboration with Ray Davies, Joe Penhall’s biographical book focuses on the life of the chief Kink. It teeters towards hagiography, but John Dagleish puts in the show’s most compelling performance as Ray. A troubled, sensitive soul who finds himself both massively famous and married with a child by the age of 20, he has an almighty freakout while brother and guitarist Dave (George Maguire) enjoys it all rather too much.It is great fun. Miriam B

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe This rousing monologue from actor Jade Franks has been a stonking hit this Fringe, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s an enthusiastically told fish-out-of-water story based on working-class Liverpudlian Franks’s - dare I say it - Legally Blonde-esque experience of going to study at Cambridge. You sense she’s probably taken a few liberties with a narrative that isn’t entirely watertight. But it is, nonetheless, a thoroughly winning hour. Working in a Liverpool call centre, the young Franks is piqued by an encounter with a testy posh customer who assumes she’s thick – so she decides she’ll go to Cambridge, crafts a banging statement, and then boom, off she goes. Clad in falsies and tight gymware, Franks is an ebullient hurricane, winning us to her side by sheer force of personality. I would say it feels like she lays her Eliza Doolittle credentials on a bit thick: the show implies she was going to spend her life working in a call centre until a random phone encounter led to her not only deciding to go to uni, but Cambridge to boot. I’d assume there’s more to it than that, and that she’s upped the fairytale factor in the name of entertainment – I could be off the mark but it sort of bothered me that the show feels so manipulative at points. A bit of artistic license is fine, and the show really comes into its own when she arrives in Cambridge and gets a job to supplement her studies (a big no no, and the fact ). The students

This review is from the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Clown princess Natalie Palamides first came to Fringe attention with ‘Laid’, in which she memorably committed to the bit of playing a woman who laid an egg every day, followed by 2018’s landmark ‘Nate’. A hysterically funny but weirdly poignant hour, in it the (topless but with chest hair drawn on) Palamides played the eponymous mess of a man, a pitiable dumpster fire of confused sexuality and toxic masculinity with audience interactions to die for. Picked up by Netflix for a special, it turned her into a hipster global name. Now finally here comes ‘Weer’. A natural evolution from ‘Nate’, its core concept is that Palamides plays both halves of a fractious young couple – Mark and Christina – at the same time, with her outfits and wigs divided asymmetrically down the middle (Mark on the right, Christina on the left) and her flipping from side to side depending on who’s speaking. Add to that, it’s a parody of ‘90s rom coms: it’s set in 1996 and 1999 and the pair are a Gen X couple who meet cute in the most ’90s way possible (I think also Palamides simply wanted to have the opportunity to have Mark repeatedly say ‘it’s Y2Kaaaaay’ in a stoner voice).  It is another virtuoso piece of batshittery from Palamides: on a technical level some of the stuff she’s doing is truly remarkable, especially when she’s mostly playing one character but being the arm of the other. It’s like that thing where you pretend to make out with yourself

It’s been five years since the last series of Operation Ouch!, the gleefully knockabout kids’ medical-slash-biology CBBC show that made stars of its identical twin doctor co-hosts, Chris and Alexander van Tulleken. They’ve got considerably more famous in the interim: Chris made a splash with his book Ultra Processed People (about the effect ultra-processed foods are having on us) while ‘Xand’ has presented numerous documentaries and is a regular on the BBC’s Morning Live. There is a new series of Operation Ouch! due in 2026, but in its absence the twins have kept the Ouch fires burning via live shows. This latest one debuted on an Australian tour in January 2025, which does raise the suspicion that the Van Tullekens basically do this for a laugh in between their increasingly serious ‘adult’ work. In case the name somehow didn’t give it away, Quest for the Jurassic Fart is almost certainly the goofiest stage show ever made by two identical 47-year-old medical professionals (a low bar, admittedly). Be warned: it’s a fair bit more ‘fart’ than ‘Jurassic’. As it begins, the Van Tullekens have been invited to address the annual conference of an extremely prestigious scientific society whose exact name I can’t remember, but all you need to know is that their acronym is FARTERS. The duo conclude that their ideal presentation would be one based upon the Van Tulleken ‘family fart collection’: a series of preserved celebrity parps. But they feel it needs something a little extra: a dino

Luxurient as a three-bird roast and just as overstuffed, the RSC’s transferring production of Twelfth Night is Shakespeare so rich it could give you indigestion. There is a lot going on in Twelfth Night at the best of times. The headline event is the adventures of young Viola, who shipwrecks in the coastal country of Illyria and attempts to go incognito, disguising herself as a man (Cesario), who inadvertently leaves a trail of broken hearts across the kingdom. If it was written today, that would probably be the whole plot, but Shakespeare was just getting started. You’ve also got the wealthy countess Olivia, who is in mourning for her dad and brother, but for whatever reason lives with a menagerie of bickering weirdos. There’s Orsina, ruler of the island, who has the hots for Olivia and, increasingly, Cesario. You’ve got Olivia’s uptight steward Malvolio, who the weirdos trick into believing Olivia is into him. There is a jester, Feste, who sort of does his own thing. And Olivia has a twin brother named Sebastian, who wanders around Ilyria having his own adventures, both siblings assuming the other to have drowned. Prasanna Puwanarajah’s production has received its fair share of rapturous reviews, but for me it was too much. There are added songs (by Gen Z chamber pop songwriter Matt Maltese) and dance sequences, some idiosyncratic character choices (notably Joplin Sibtain’s angry alcoholic Sir Toby Belch), a very high concept set from James Cotterill (the whole thing is a m

This review is from 2013. American Psycho returns reworked for 2026 with a completely new cast led by Arty Froushan as Patrick Bateman. You would think playing a murderous American yuppie with a rock-hard torso and a feather-soft grip on reality would be just the ticket for banishing the memory of loveable teatime alien The Doctor. But Matt Smith leaves surprisingly little impression as psychopathic stockbroker Patrick Bateman in this musical adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s social satire ‘American Psycho’. And that is the brilliance of his performance. Bateman is a hollow man, an identikit Wall Street hotshot, frequently mistaken for other Wall Street hotshots, who judges himself by the fractional material differences between him and his Wall Street hotshot peers. Bateman is on stage almost constantly in Rupert Goold’s production, yet Smith plays him as a strange void. His monotone voice, impassive features and perfectly toned physique are a constant deadpan, and he sings with the flat tones of the New Romantics, whose soaring electro-pop Duncan Sheik’s score apes. Smith is constantly in the foreground, but though his natural charisma draws us in, the eye slides off him. We see why Bateman is losing his marbles: his perfect Manhattan life is a prison, his only escape is to (apparently) start butchering people. ‘American Psycho’ is enormous fun. Sheik’s songs vary in hummability, but they’re generally hilarious, characters with no soul singing trashy, narcissistic pop songs

It would be a mistake to say the humour in Cole Escola’s massive hit Broadway comedy has been lost in translation to the West End: there was a lot of laughter when I caught Oh, Mary! on a Wednesday matinee. However, I’m afraid it was lost in translation to me.  I didn’t hate this lurid cabaret about Abraham Lincoln’s wife. But after the slew of American critics describing the life-changing injuries they’d suffered from laughing so hard at Sam Pinkleton’s production, the whole thing just felt a bit… ’70s? A little bit Airplane!, a little bit Benny Hill, maybe even a touch of Mr Bean… Really it’s broad, dated humour salvaged by a tremendous cast headed by Jamie Lloyd veteran Mason Alexander Park as Mary and the redoubtable Giles Terera as ‘Mary’s husband’ (ie Abe). Of course, a lot of British people like ’70s humour: this is a country that still remains dangerously hooked on the 1976 Morecambe and Wise Christmas special. But Oh, Mary! is an old-fashioned farce built on two gags: one, Mary is a boozy narcissist – borderline feral – who dreams of the stage; and two, Abraham Lincoln is gay. To be fair, there are few cows more sacred in America than Lincoln, and this is of course queer artist Escola co-opting the iconic president, not mocking gay people. Still I’d struggle to say what the difference would be in terms of execution. I don’t know much about Lincoln’s personal life, but the idea of him being a cartoonishly repressed gay man is not in and of itself that funny to me.  Ma

Thanks to the freakish success of the National Theatre’s 1992 production of An Inspector Calls – it’s still touring to this day – JB Priestley is largely destined to be remembered as a one-play playwright.  And to be fair, that’s still an amazing legacy. But away from the burningly intense social interrogation of Inspector Goole, Priestly has plenty to offer, including When We are Married, a somewhat dated but thoroughly delightful social comedy that stands out from the period pack by sheer weight of northernness.  Timothy Sheader’s twinkle-eyed revival finds a nice balance between updating the play and surrendering to its innate charms. His production begins with cynical charwoman Mrs Northrop (Janice Connolly) greeting us through the fourth wall as if we were a pantomime audience before launching into Gracie Fields’ 1938 banger ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’, a song that (as far as I can tell) has nothing to do with When We are Married beyond being released in the same year. Nonetheless, it clearly inspired Peter McKintosh’s delightful set, a dazzlingly yellow arts and crafts drawing room dominated by a preposterously huge potted plant. And on the more modern side, Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ plays out at what is possibly the single funniest point in the entire play for Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ to play out.  Notoriously bluff Yorkshireman Priestley didn’t go in much for either subtext or subplots, and part of the joy of When We are Married is that it’s basically based

Panto legend Susie McKenna was scheduled to perform an almost unthinkable feat this year and be responsible for not one, but two London pantomimes. She would write this year’s Catford Broadway show, following on from the last two Christmases where she’d both written and directed. And she would write and direct Aladdin & The Magic Lamp, the inaugural panto at the huge new Soho Theatre Walthamstow.  The latter didn’t happen, apparently because Soho Walthamstow wasn’t ready for a theatre show of its scale yet. Which leaves McKenna slightly stranded, unable to direct Dick Whittington and His Catford Cat because the gig had already gone to Peter Rowe.  Which must be doubly galling as the publicity material has made much of the personal nature of the show, it being a Windrush generation-themed affair that’s been billed as tribute to the parents of her wife, the redoubtable actor Sharon D Clarke. And it’s a neat concept: in a fizzy opening act, we see Durone Stokes’s big-hearted dreamer of a Dick (it’s a funny name, okay) arrive from Jamaica on the iconic passenger vessel. The 1948 London he arrives in is… distinctly panto-y, but some social issues are deftly raised: it’s never quite so gauche as to get bogged down in a big lecture about racism, but there are some tactful but still stinging allusions to the attitudes of the day. It’s a nice way to communicate what the Wishrush generation was to a young audience. However, my biggest frustration here was that after the first act, Rowe

The much-feted Sam Grabiner’s second play – following last year’s Olivier-winning Boys on the Verge of Tears – is a dark, dark comedy about a jaw-droppingly dysfunctional British Jewish family.  It is an anarchic meditation on the British Jewish psyche, that is really very fearless about ‘going there’ with certain political issues. It is about the British tradition of having a massive ding dong on Christmas Day. And it’s a comedy about living in London.  As the play begins, a bewildered Elliot (Nigel Lindsay) has arrived at the chaotic office conversion inhabited by his children Noah (Samuel Blenkin) and Tamara (Bel Powley), plus 10 other housemates who’ve mostly vacated the place because today is Christmas Day.  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Elliot exclaims in horror at the room’s most noticable feature: some sort of industrial heater, suspended from the ceiling in spectacularly unwise fashion, that periodically roars into life very loudly.  It’s a dinner-party play, kind of: food is the nominal main event (a Chinese takeaway, in imitation of New York Jewish tradition), and as is the way with the genre, secrets are unveiled, revelations are revealed, etcetera.  James Macdonald’s production feels genre-cliche free, though, in part because the ‘family’ is so shambolic that food simply feels like another thing for them to argue about. Joining dithering Noah and pathologically intense Tamara is Noah’s sweet non-Jewish girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke) and Tamara’s slick ex Aaron (Jacob F

I’m not sure if it’s heretical or actually normal to think Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s beloved BBC horror anthology series Inside No 9 is a bit patchy. But that’s how I tend to feel: there are some classic episodes, but by the end it felt like the duo were really fighting to inject new life into the 30-minutes-with-a-twist-at-the-end formula, and probably only succeeded about half of the time.  Stage/Fright, though, is a delight, the duo at the peak of their powers. Running at well over two hours, it dips into the TV show – the first half heavily revolves around the episode Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room – but it is a rare spinoff that feels totally a thing of the theatre. That’s partly a result of the pair’s long standing fascination with Grand Guignol, music hall, stand-up and other forms of stage entertainment (they of course began their careers in live sketch troupe The League of Gentlemen).  But while that’s represented in their script and Simon Evans’s production, the fact is that the duo both now have long and impressive stage CVs. Stage/Fright is a tribute to a theatre and the stage life in a broader sense – the play-within-a-play second act is informed by a genuine love of the theatre and a series of West End Wendy in jokes that may baffle non-theatre nerds – the spoofing of Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard during the second half is particularly delightful, especially when it audaciously segues into a found-footage horror homage. Theatres have featured in In

A major London trend this year has been the glut of tech-enhanced immersive exhibitions, that have typically taken some great historical disaster – the sinking of the Titanic, the eruption of Vesuvius – and made it ‘fun’ via AR, VR, film and other such gubbins. They’re certainly more appealing to kids than the average British Museum exhibition – but they are of course also basic as hell. That’s not the only way to use tech to craft an exhibition, though. As you’d probably gather from the title, The Museum of Austerity is an altogether more sober affair. A collaboration between the Young Vic, English Touring Theatre, Trial and Error Studio and the National Theatre, it contains accounts of the last days of those who died in Britain's so-called ‘austerity’ era after having their benefits cut by the DWP. Although there are a few facts and figures on the sterile white walls erected within the Young Vic’s Maria studio, the meat of the ‘exhibition’ is an AR experience in which you don a helmet that reveals eight virtual figures dotted throughout the space. Walk up to one and it triggers the testimony of a member of the subject’s family on the circumstances that led to their loved one’s death. Although the subjects and details vary, the stories are depressingly similar: the person was vulnerable or very ill; they died either because their benefits were cut as a result of the clampdown instigated by the Cameron government (most commonly by suicide), or their last days were simply made

The presents are opened. The turkey has been devoured. The advent calendar is a distant memory. You can’t really remember what that big fight yesterday was about. It’s Boxing Day, baby, and that of course means sales. London theatre basically loves any excuse for a sale, so it’s no surprise that it’s once again getting on the bandwagon with Boxing Day. A host of big hitting West End favourites are participating: there are discounts for tickets to see Wicked, MJ the Musical, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Hercules, The Devil Wears Prada, Matilda, My Neighbour Totoro, Oliver!, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables and many more. It’s run by TodayTix, which Time Out is a partner to. If you’re thinking shorter term, there’s still the opportunity to snap up discounts to the odd Christmas show like Cinderella at the Hackney Empire or The Nutcracker at St Martin’s Theatre.  And you can be tactical and get a nice price for a show yet to open: the likes of Summerfolk at the National Theatre, the West End adaptation of iconic Western High Noon and the Self Esteem starring Teeth ‘N’ Smiles are all included. Don’t delay – snap up a post-Christmas bargain today. The London theatre Boxing Day sale runs until Dec 28, after which it will become the New Year’s Theatre Sale until Jan 4 2026. Buy tickets here.   ICYMI: Time Out’s top ten theatre shows of 2025. Plus: the best new London theatre shows to book for in 2026. Get the latest and greatest fro

To be simplistic, 2025 was a year where starry revivals made more impact than any new plays or musicals. But a champagne year for Jamie Lloyd and Ivo van Hove is not a bad year for the wider theatrical landscape, with the rise of young star Ava Pickett a sign British playwriting has a lot of juice left in it. Here are my favourite theatre shows that I saw in London this year. The best London theatre shows of 2025 1= Much Ado About Nothing (Theatre Royal Drury Lane)1= Evita (London Palladium) Of course it’s feeding the hype machine to put Jamie Lloyd at the top of this list, and doubly to do it twice. The most in-demand commercial theatre director in the English-speaking world, he’s so ubiquitous that I saw two completely unrelated shows this year that parodied the look of his encores. Lloyd’s colossal success, fondness for celebrity casting and aggressively impressionistic stage tropes have generated a cottage industry of naysayers, who endlessly write him off as ‘the Emperor’s new clothes’, some 20 years into his career. You could positively smell their glee at his dud production of The Tempest that closed 2024, weighed down by a horribly out of her depth Sigourney Weaver. And so it was that for 2025 Lloyd proved ‘the haters’ wrong in an incredibly Jamie Lloyd-like fashion. First up was his utterly wonderful take on Shakespeare’s Much Ado, which cast Tom Hiddleston’s Benedick and Hayley Atwell’s Beatrice as the eccentric outsiders at an endless, pink confetti-saturated dance

★★★★ The parameters for judging a stage adaption of the horror film franchise Paranormal Activity are clearly quite different to, say, a production of King Lear.  It’s not the only consideration, but judgement does essentially boil down to one main question: is it scary? To which the answer here is a frazzled ‘oh my, yes’. Paranormal Activity (the play) is not just a stage transposition of Paranormal Activity (the film), although you can see why it bears the franchise name: there would be a lawsuit if not. While the plot plays out differently in terms of specifics, the fundamentals are identical.  James (Patrick Heusinger) and Lou (Melissa James) are a thirtysomething US couple who have just moved to a rainy London for his job, and to get away from things that were happening at their Chicago home. She believes she’s been haunted by a malevolent supernatural presence since childhood. He wants to be supportive but doesn’t want to pretend he believes in ghosts. She is taking strong antidepressants because she wants to be seen to be playing ball. Nothing weird has happened since they moved – but then, suddenly, weird stuff starts happening.  Clearly you can’t have found footage theatre. But in some ways the fact that Fly Davis’s set is nothing but the couple’s mundane two-storey house captures the genre’s claustrophobia nicely: did something just move in that corner? What’s happening on the top floor while the couple are in the lounge? A couple of grainy screens off to the side s

★★★★★ The Bridge Theatre has an incredibly consistent track record with musicals. Admittedly that’s because it’s only previously staged one musical. But it was a really good one, the visionary immersive production of Guys & Dolls that wrapped up a two-year-run in January. And great news: rising star Jordan Fein’s sumptuous revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods makes it two for two. After the slightly stodgy tribute revue Old Friends and the weird semi-finished ‘final musical’ Here We Are, this is the first actual proper major Sondheim revival to be staged in this country since the great man’s passing. And the main thing worth saying about 1986’s Into the Woods is that it’s the work of a genius at the peak of his powers: a clever send up of fairytales that pushes familiar stories into absurd, existential, eventually very moving territory. It’s both playful and profound, mischievous and sincere, cleverly meta but also a ripping yarn. While Sondheim is the marquee name, the book is by James Lapine (who also did the honours for Sunday in the Park with George and Passion), who does a tremendous job twisting the convoluted narrative into droll, accessible shape. But every second is filled with Sondheim’s presence: his lush, motif-saturated score of baroque nursery rhymes feels as vividly alive as the forest itself; his lyrics are sometimes hilariously bathetic, sometimes formally audacious, sometimes devastatingly poignant, often all three in a single song.  So that’s a big

Non-parents may only be hazily aware of Dav Pilkey’s long-running series of graphic novels devoted to the adventures of Dog Man, a police officer with the head – and brain – of a dog. If this sounds stupid, it’s meant to be (in a further meta move, the books are supposed to be written by George and Harold, the goofy tween protagonists of Pilkey’s older Captain Underpants books). Anyway, you either know this already or it’s completely irrelevant to you, but long story short, there was an off-Broadway musical made in 2019 that got good reviews, and now it’s headed to London. Jen Wineman’s original production is transferring to the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall next summer following a North American tour. As with the recent film, the musical is loosely adapted from the book A Tale of Two Kitties, which follows Dog Man’s tussling with his nemesis Petey the Cat and his affable clone son Li’l Petey. Again, you either know what I’m going on about here or you don’t, but New York reviews were warm, and it sounds like a summer holiday must for young fans of the series. Dog Man: The Musical is at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Jul 30-Aug 16 2026. Tickets go on sale Dec 5. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025 and 2026. The best kids theatre in London. Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and reviews to events and trends. Just follow our Time Out London WhatsApp channel. Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out London newsletter for the best

★★★★ It’s difficult to pinpoint why the moment Paddington walks on stage at the start of his new musical is quite so moving.  Spoiler alert: ‘Paddington’ is a small woman (Arti Shah) in a bear costume (by Tahra Zafar), with a regular-sized man (James Hameed) doing the voice and remote controlling the facial expressions from backstage. Which doesn’t sound groundbreaking but it’s enough to make us believe that Paddington is really in the room with us. Which is surely the point of the endeavor. He’s not the Paddington of the films: he looks different, more teddy-like, and Hameed’s voice is much younger and more boyish than Ben Whishaw’s. He looks more like the Paddington of Michael Bond’s books, but he’s not really him either, on account of all the singing he does and how much more wordy that makes him. He is a new Paddington. But he is, fundamentally, Paddington, right there in the room with us. Does that make it a good performance? I mean sure, he’s a triple threat: adorable, polite and also a bear. The normal rules for a musical theatre lead are suspended here. But Hameed can sing well, and there’s enough expression in both face and body for Paddington to feel genuinely alive to us. Shah doesn’t really dance, but a couple of elaborately choreographed sequences in which our hero pings around causing chaos are impressively physical. Main attraction aside, a fine creative team led by director Luke Sheppard has created a very enjoyable show indeed. It’s by and large a stage adapt

Where other arts slow down in December, London theatre accelerates frenziedly, and it’s a curiosity of the season that while there are gazillions of pantos and explicitly Christmas-themed family productions, it’s also the busiest time of year for ‘regular’ shows. If you’re after a panto or something to take the kids to, then do check out our respective lists. But there’s an abundance of serious dramas, world class comedies and cool indie plays debuting this month – here’s our guide to the best non-tinselly openings in town this month. The best new London theatre shows opening in December 2025 Photo: Manuel Harlan 1. Oh, Mary! There are lots of significant plays opening in December but no massive blockbusters – the year’s biggest show Paddington snuck in on the very last day of November. Still, Oh, Mary! is a pretty darn heavy hitter, and much anticipated to boot, being a transfer of Cole Escola’s outrageous Broadway comedy about Abraham Lincoln’s embittered, fame-hungry wife Mary. Giles Terera stars as Abe, with US performer Mason Alexander Park – great in supporting roles in recent Jamie Lloyd productions – stepping up to the lead role of Mary. Trafalgar Theatre, Dec 3-Apr 25 2026. Buy tickets here. Image: Bridge Theatre 2. Into the Woods Since Stephen Sondheim’s death we’ve had a revue show celebrating his career and even the premiere of his final musical. What we’ve not had is any major revivals of his classics, but that finally changes with this lavish Bridge revival

More than any other major London theatre, Hampstead has been at the sharp end of recent funding struggles: its last artistic director Roxana Silbert quit in 2022 as a result of the venue losing all of its Arts Council funding.  Still, the remaining team have limped on valiantly, in part helped by the patronage of the the late, great Tom Stoppard: annual revivals of his more obscure plays the last three Christmases have guaranteed bums on seats, and the rest of the programme has been no slouch. Following on from the first ever UK revival of Stoppard’s Indian Ink - which is about to start its run – Hampstead’s 2026 season will kick off with the world premiere of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Bird Grove (Feb 13-Mar 21 2026), which is a sort of origin story for the great Victorian author George Eliot, following the then Mary Ann Evans as the teenager comes into conflict with her father, who is determined to marry her off. Next up and in quite the coup, the US actor Stanley Tucci directs the world premiere of his countryman Richard Nelson’s Springwood (Jun 15-Jul 25 2026), a world premiere based on his screenplay for the film Hyde Park on Hudson, which starred Bill Murray as Franklin D Roosevelt. The stage play would seem to be basically the same idea, following a culture clash meeting between the US president and King George VI as the monarch became the first in history to make a royal visit to the USA on the cusp of the Second World War. Finally there’s the UK premiere of David Lindsay-

The death of Tom Stoppard at the weekend marked the passing of one of the greatest British playwrights of all time, and a giant of popular culture to boot, whose dizzyingly high-concept plays made his name but whose side-hustle as a screenwriter and script doctor left a huge mark on Hollywood, elevating films from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith to his own frothy but witty Shakespeare in Love. Although 88 was undoubtedly a ripe old age to reach, there’s still a sense he was taken from us too soon: his superb final play Leopoldstadt only premiered comparatively recently, in 2020, and Stoppard acknowledged that despite it being billed at the time as his last work, he was still tinkering with new stuff. He remained a public presence and supportive of the frequent revivals of his work. It’s no surprise that he will be a recipient of the West End’s ultimate honour: the lights of all its theatres will be dimmed in memory of Stoppard at 7pm this Tuesday (Dec 2). If you’re interested in paying your respects, there’s no perfect spot to do this, though meaningful places would include Wyndham’s Theatre (where Leopoldstadt ran), the National Theatre (which he was intimately associated with throughout his career) or the Old Vic (which staged his breakthrough Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and many plays since). Whatever theatre you’re near, Tuesday would be the night to pay your respects. There are also several opportunities coming up to see hi

★★★★★ Ivo van Hove is a nothing-if-not-mercurial director: his last London outing was the much derided (though I liked it) avant-garde ‘musical’ Opening Night, which was about as big a flop as you really get in the West End these days, closing weeks early. But expectations were always high for this revival of Arthur Miller’s 1947 breakthrough All My Sons, because Van Hove made his own UK breakthrough with his extraordinary 2014 production of Miller’s A View from the Bridge. And by Hove, he’s done it again. To some extent the secret of his triumph here is ‘cast really really good actors’, foremost Bryan Cranston and Paapa Essiudu, who offer two of the best stage performances of 2025.  But what van Hove has done is discretely uncouple Miller’s play from the naturalism that often stifles it. Running at the same length as the starry Old Vic production of a few years back but with no interval (ie about 15 minutes longer), Van Hove’s production really savours the writing.  All My Sons is an eventually bitter indictment of the American dream, that traces the downfall of Joe Keller (Cranston), a businessman and factor owner in suburban Ohio, 1947, who has recently avoided jail for his business’s role in selling cracked cylinder heads to the US Air Force, leading to the deaths of 21 pilots (yes, it’s what the band is named after). His partner Steve Deever was instead blamed and jailed. Photo: Jan Versweyveld When I’ve seen the play before, the production has tended to gallop towards

The (still) bright and shiny Young V&A’s first two exhibitions were devoted to foreign cultures and history – very foreign and very historical in the case of the recently concluded Ancient Egypt exhibition Making Egypt, while before that its first exhibition Japan: Myths to Manga took a look at centuries of Japanese iconography and its impact on contemporary pop culture. For its third exhibition, it’s time for something a little different. As the title suggests, Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends is an exploration of a rather more recent, rather more homegrown cultural phenomenon. Tying in with the 50th anniversary of the world’s most famous stop motion animation studio, it will take young audiences behind the scenes at Aardman and its iconic roster of claymation characters, from the eponymous man and dog to Shaun the Sheep, Chicken Run, and even ’70s legend Morph. Photo: David Parry There will be over 150 items on display, ranging from puppets and early character sketches for Aardman characters, to early examples of stop motion animation from the V&A archives.  But perhaps the real highlight will be interactive bits that take children behind the scenes of how an Aardman film is made – interactive activities will include storyboarding, designing characters, experimenting with lighting a set ands creating live action videos. Although the exhibition is suitable for all ages, the optimum audience is ages eight to 14. As ever with Young V&A temporary exhibitions, your

When the Royal Court recently announced that it would stage the UK debut of the hugely hyped Broadway smash John Proctor is the Villain, I’d wondered if the show’s UK lead Sadie Sink might come over with it. The answer, it would seem, is a resounding ‘no’ as the Stranger Things star has, delightfully, announced she’ll be doing a totally different play in London at the same time, starring in a new production of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet directed by Brit auteur Rob Icke. The youthful Sink will, naturally, play Juliet, one half of Western literature’s most famous doomed couple with Romeo, who’ll be played here by the even younger Noah Jupe, who is probably best known for playing Marcus, the middle child in A Quiet Place and its sequel. He makes his stage debut opposite Sink, who is more of a theatre veteran: the flame-haired actor made her own debut over a decade ago in the title role of a Broadway production of Annie. What can we expect? Although Icke is an enthusiastic rewriter of the classics, he rarely touches Shakespeare’s language, but does often impose quite radical new interpretations of the action onto the likes of Hamlet and Player Kings (his mash-up of Henry IV parts 1 and 2). His productions are always modern dress, and generally artsy but in an accessible way, and tend to be stacked with a recurrent core crew of British stage actors (though expect more fresh faces for the play’s sundry teenage characters). Though always popular, Romeo & Juliet is definitely going