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 – Time Out theatre editor Andrzej Łukowski – plus our freelance critics. RECOMMENDED New theatre openings in London this month. A-Z of West End shows.

Six. Weeks. Or thereabouts. Officially the 2025 London school summer holidays run Wednesday July 23 to Friday August 29. But many schools will break on Monday 21 July, and virtually all of them will add a teacher training day or two on at the start of September. So let’s call it what it is: six big ones – more than most parents’s annual leave. So good luck with that! And I mean it: my name’s Andrzej, and I’m Time Out’s theatre and kids editor, and as a parent of two I have to deal with this nonsense every year myself. So to help you organise and plan, here are my picks of the best new and temporary London family events this summer, from theatre shows to dinoaurs, exhibitions to magicians. These are events likely to either only be on this summer or new to London. For evergreen ideas for things to do with children in the capital, see our 50 Things To Do With Kids In London. For general London summer ideas see our summer in London guide.

L.A. covers a mind-bogglingly massive volume of land (and for that matter, ocean too). So it’s no surprise that Los Angeles packs in an enormous number of world-class attractions. If you’re a tourist looking for things to do, you’ll have no problem finding vacation inspiration, from Hollywood tours to a day at one of the city’s best beaches. Even locals might very well find ways to fall in love with the city all over again in our extensive list of the best Los Angeles attractions. RECOMMENDED:📽️ The best studio tours in Los Angeles This article includes affiliate links. These links have no influence on our editorial content. For more information, click here.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is back for summer 2025. For three weeks (August 1 – August 24), the Scottish capital is home to comedy giants, serious thespians and hilarious first-timers, all putting on shows left, right and centre. It’s a huge, colourful celebration of all sorts of performing arts, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.   But with so much choice on offer, it’s difficult to know where on earth to start. Here’s our pick of the best theatre shows accounced so far. The programme is famously enormous (over 3,500 shows), so we’ll keep adding to the list in the run up to the festival and will update it based upon reviews when the festival actually starts.  While most of our recommednations are from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025, the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) is running alongside it as usual – the EIF is slimmed down this year and has few fewer theatre shows than usual, but it does have one big one in particular… RECOMMENDED: Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe10 of the best comedy shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 202411 of the best jokes and one-liners ever told at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

It’s the largest arts festival in the world – there’s nothing quite like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (August 1-August 24 2025). With literally hundreds of comedy shows to choose from, flicking through the phonebook-like Fringe programme can be more than a little daunting. So we’re here to help. From stand-up legends to award-winning newcomers, these are the comedy shows we’ve either seen and reviewed or are most excited about at this year’s festival. Got some downtime between gigs? Then check out our pick of the best pubs, restaurants and afternoon tea in Edinburgh.  RECOMMENDED: Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe The best theatre shows at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe The best kids’ shows at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe

Edinburgh in 2025: Well, we don’t need to say it, do we? Soon, Edinburgh will be in the midst of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025. Its official dates this year are August 1 to 25, but you’ll find brilliant cultural things to see and do here throughout the summer, and some Fringe shows will even start early in July. But as ever, there are plenty of reasons to visit this wonderful city, all year round. Read on for our ultimate guide.  Hayley Scott: ‘I grew up in Edinburgh and I still can’t get enough. Years spent living elsewhere have made me increasingly appreciative of the city, but it’s hard to pin point exactly where its charm lies. There’s its small size, making it extremely walkable (provided you aren’t afraid of some rain and the occasional hill), and there’s its rich and well-preserved history, meaning parts of the city feel otherworldly, even to someone who calls it home. Growing up I would wander the botanic gardens feeding bread to the squirrels, and now I stroll the cobbled streets via wine bars, restaurants and – depending on the time of night – chippies. Ready to walk, drink, dance and all the rest of it? Get your waterproof on and explore.’ 📍 RECOMMENDED: Ultimate guide to what to do in Edinburgh What free things are there to do in Edinburgh? Plenty. A number of our top museums have free entry year-round, including the National Museum of Scotland, the National Gallery, the Portrait Gallery and the Modern. But it’s not just galleries – some of Edinburgh’s most

So you’d like to go to the Edinburgh Fringe but you haven’t booked anywhere to stay yet – is it a practical option on a budget? The first thing to say is that for complicated-ish reasons there is currently a severe lack of short-term accommodation in Edinburgh during the Fringe, certainly compared with what there used to be, and the odds of you getting an incredible bargain on a gorgeous apartment on the Royal Mile are somewhere close to nil. And we hate to say it, but things are exacerbated in 2025 – at least in the second week of the Fringe – by Oasis’s string of dates at Murrayfield Stadium.However, don’t despair – here are five tips for sorting yourself out. 1. Throw (some) money at the problem Airbnb can still be your friend, insofar as it does still have properties available, you just need to accept that come July or August you’re probably looking at over £100 a night for a private room unless you’re very lucky, and vastly more for a whole place. It’s a lot! And it’s been exacerbated by recent tightening of licensing rules by the city. But it does the trick, it’s cheaper if you can divide the price with friends, and if you can afford it then internalising the message ‘Edinburgh is pretty expensive’ is better than looking morosely for a bargain that probably won’t come. 2. Do it like a student Part of the problem with short-term Fringe accommodation is that – long story short – a change in Scottish tenancy law a few years back meant that landlords were no longer able to

TV channel U&Dave has taken it upon itself to crown the ‘best joke’ of the Edinburgh Fringe each year for the last decade plus. That’s quite a challenge, given that the arts festival welcomes in hundreds of shows and hopeful comics to the city. Its annual competition, the Funniest Joke of the Fringe, names a winner from a competition shortlist drawn up by a panel of comedy critics, before members of the public are asked to pick their three favourite jokes. Last year, Mark Simmons, who first got into comedy more than a decde ago, took home the award with his snappy one-liner about a ship, taken from his PHB’s Free Fringe show at the Liquid Room Annexe. In 2023, Lorna Rose Treen took home the prize with her gag about an unfaithful zookeeper, which was ranked one of the best by 44 percent of those surveyed. It turns out U&Dave audiences basically like zingers, one-liners and snappy puns: there’s rarely overlap between the Joke of the Fringe and the winners of the main comedy awards. Which makes sense: Joke of the Fringe is voted for by people at home, not people seeing entire shows. And it’s all to the good, an opportunity for acts who might not get the attention otherwise to step into the spotlight.  We’ll share the 2025 winner when it arrives, usually in the final week of the Fringe. Keen to hear the previous winning jokes? Check them out below. RECOMMENDED:Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024The best comedy shows at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024The best

What is immersive theatre? A glib buzzword? A specific description of a specific type of theatre? A phrase that has become so diluted that it’s lost all meaning? Whether you call it immersive, interactive or site-specific, London is bursting with plays and experiences which welcome you into a real-life adventure that you can wander around and play the hero in. I’m Andrzej Łukowski, Time Out’s theatre editor, and let me tell you I have run the immersive gamut, from a show where I had to take my clothes off in a darkened shipping container, to successfully bagging tickets to the six-hour Punchdrunk odyssey there were only ever a couple of hundred tickets released, to quite a lot of theatre productions where the set goes into the audience a bit and apparently that counts as immersive. There is a lot of immersive work in London, some of which is definitely theatre, some of which definitely isn’t, some of which is borderline, some of which is but doesn’t want to say it is because some some people are just horrified of the word ‘theatre’.  This page has been around for a while now and gone through various schools of thought, but the one we’ve settled on for now is that the main list compiles every major show in London that could reasonably be described as ‘immersive theatre’, while the bottom list compiles a few of our favouite immersive shows thet you probably wouldn’t describe as theatre though it is, naturally a blurry line. Whatever the case you can mostly only really decide wh

To say that William Shakespeare bestrides our culture like a colossus is to chronically undersell him. Over 400 years since his death, the Stratford-born playwright is virtually 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. 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 playwright is staged nearly enough to get his own page. But for William Shakespeare, it’s essential.

There are over a hundred theatres of all shapes and sizes throughout London, from tiny fringe venues above pubs to iconic internationally famous institutions like the National Theatre. And at the heart of it is the West End, aka Theatreland. What is a West End theatre? Unlike Broadway, where there are strict definitions based upon capacity, there is no hard and fast definition of a West End theatre. However, West End theatres are all commercial theatres – that is to say, they receive no government funding – and on the whole they are receiving houses, that is to say they don’t have in house artistic teams creating the work that they show (although often theatre owners like Andrew Lloyd Webber or Nica Burns may commission or even create the work). They are mostly based in the West End of London, although it’s not a hard and fast rule, with two major ‘West End’ theatres at Victoria. Most West End theatres are Victorian or Edwardian, although Theatre Royal Drury Land and Theatre Royal Haymarket have roots a couple of centuries before that, while @sohoplace is the newest (it opened in 2022). Capacity is similarly all over the shop: the 2,359-set London Coliseum is the biggest; the smallest is generally held to be the 350-set Arts Theatre. Many mid-size theatres like the Harold Pinter, Duke of York’s or Wyndham’s are greatly in demand for drama and serve as home to several different productions every year. Others, like the Lyceum or His Majesty’s have played host to a single musica

There are a hell of a lot of musicals running in London at any given time, from decades-long classics like ‘Les Miserables and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ to short-run fringe obscurities, plus all manner of new shows launched every year hoping for long-running glory. Here we round up every West End musical currently running or coming soon, plus fringe and off-West End shows that we’ve reviewed – all presented in fabulous alphabetical order. SEE ALSO: How to get cheap and last-minute theatre tickets in London.

This review is from the original 2017 Old Vic run for Girl from the North Country, in July 2017. It returns to the theatre with a new cast in July 2025. Whatever you do, don’t call it the ‘Bob Dylan musical’. Yes, the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman may have once described himself as ‘a song and dance man’. But playwright-director Conor McPherson’s bleak, Dylan-soundtracked ‘Girl from the North Country’ is a play with songs that avoids the trappings of musical theatre like the plague – there are no dance routines, no happy endings, and the Old Vic stage remains dimly lit and half-shrouded in darkness. Dylan himself had no creative input, but one assumes it was always implicit in his licensing of the songs that it wasn’t ever going to be a big tits-and-teeth West End show with Bob’s name in lights. Taking place in the Dustbowl at the height of the Great Depression, ‘Girl from the North Country’ extracts the Steinbeckian strand from Dylan’s oeuvre, and might be imagined as an extra story that didn’t make Todd Haynes’s haunting, Dylan-inspired film ‘I’m Not There’. It’s set at an inn in Duluth, Minnesota (Dylan’s hometown) in 1934. Nick Laine (Ciaran Hinds), the gruff owner of the establishment, has many problems, not least the apparent dementia of his wife Elizabeth, played by Shirley Henderson in a truly bewitching turn, intense, otherworldly, almost rockstar-like. The show is set entirely in the inn, and follows the Laines and their patrons, who range from Joe (Arinze Kene), an ex

Obviously Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is a ludicrous film to adapt for the stage, especially for a modestly budgeted touring show with no set changes and a cast of seven. As much as anything else, Alfred Hitchcock’s absurdist conspiracy thriller is best remembered for two of the most audacious setpieces in cinema history: an attack by a machine gun-toting crop duster plane on an Illinois cornfield, and a final showdown on top of Mount Rushmore. But whimsical auteur Emma Rice has long abandoned any fear of adapting impossible source material. She doesn’t attempt to faithfully recreate a given film or book so much as drag it into her own private dimension, where it’s forced to play by her rules. North by Northwest is an interesting choice nonetheless, because it’s so hard to classify. Despite its huge impact on the genre, it’s not really an action film. And it’s not really a comedy. But there’s a definite twinkle in its eyes as it follows Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant in the film, Ewan Wardrop here), a mediocre middle-aged adman who gets dragged into an elaborate conspiracy after being mistaken for George Caplan, a spy who does not in fact exist. Arguably Rice disrupts a delicate equilibrium by making it overtly comic, with dance sequences, miming to ’50s pop hits, and a spectacularly knowing, fourth wall-breaking performance from Katy Owen as shadowy spymaster The Professor, who serves as the show’s narrator and tour guide. It’s jarring at first, but Rice pulls it off because

This review is from the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe. Adam Riches’s comedy shows have long been high concept, high effort affairs; now he crosses over to the dark side of the Fringe programme (aka the theatre bit) to make his Summerhall debut with Jimmy. It’s a one-man-show about US sportsman Jimmy Connors, the bad boy of ‘70s tennis, who was eventually eclipsed by the likes of Boris Becker and John McEnroe. They, however, retired as relatively young men. Jimmy is set at the 1991 US Open: with the 39-year-old Connors now way down in the rankings, we meet him just as he’s losing a match to Patrick McEnroe, John's little brother. Connors is not happy,  a wounded old tiger with nothing but contempt for an opponent he knows he’d have swept past a decade ago. There are no actual balls in Tom Parry’s production. But there is a lot of sweat: racket in hand, Riches hurls himself energetically around the ‘court’ in recreation of Connors’s actual moves. I’m sure it’s not a perfect replica, but Riches is bloody good, both lucidly conveying the flow the match and conveying a level of dogged persistance that feels important for Connors’s story.  Although it has a lot in common with Richard’s comedy shows - character work, accent work, just a lot of work - it’s definitely not trying to be funny in the way that they are, with just a ghost of his usual infamous audience interactions. The gangly Riches does undeniably remain an intrinsically amusing performer, but the category change makes sense. Ev

This review is from London, October 2024. Arcade will play at thet 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, along with Darkfield’s Eulogy and Darkfield Radio. Blackout theatre specialists Darkfield – aka Glen Neath and David Rosenberg – have spent years crafting meticulously disorientating immersive worlds that audience members experience via sophisticated headphones-based binaural sound design, performed in entirely lightless shipping containers. On the whole, they feel like surreal, sinister dreams: evocative but you’re effectively a passenger – just along for the ride, with no real agency of your own, and as the (very short) shows wear on and you get acclimatised to the darkness I’ve generally found the whole thing starts to feel a bit sillier. Arcade is a clever and unsettling leap forwards, giving you a degree of agency as you’re stood at an old school arcade machine with a big button on it that you press to indicate ‘yes’ in the choose-your-own-adventure style story. You do not in fact play an arcade game, but the general understanding in the interactive story relayed through your headphones is that you’re an avatar named Milk in a game that you could either interpret as intended to be imagined as sophisticated VR or taken literally as a headphones game from Darkfield. Whatever the case, you’re thrust into a violent, absurdist dystopia and while one button might not sound like a lot of agency, when I got shot point blank in the head within about 30 seconds of starting after making an inn

In 1983, the year the internet was created, a doomsday cult of nerds decided to create a repository for every web page ever created. These would be printed out in binary, put into bound editions, and then fed to a weird network of fluffy fungi, with the understanding that on January 1 2025 some sort of rapture would be achieved out of all this data. Unfortunately it didn’t happen – a non event described as ‘the epic fail’ – possibly because the system was being poisoned by the toxic levels of fake news now contaminating the web. But maybe YOU can help..? As far as I can make out from actually having seen it, that's the basic premise behind new immersive theatre company Sage & Jester’s inaugural show Storehouse, which I think is worth sharing because beyond ‘it’s an immersive theatre show’ it was pretty unclear what was actually involved on the basis of the advance publicity. Unfortunately Storehouse is also absolute nonsense, a pretty but torpid vanity project that’s the brainchild of businesswoman Liana Patarkatsishvili, who I assume also bankrolled this expensive show, staged in a gargantuan Deptford warehouse.  Patarkatsishvili – daughter of the late Georgian billionaire and media mogul Badri Patarkatsishvili – is clearly concerned with ‘misinformation’: last year she funded an art installation in Edinburgh called Illuminated Lies on the same subject. Which is fine but simply lobbing money at an idea you care about doesn’t inherently make for great art, even with talented

This review is from the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe. Darkfield’s hallucinatory audio dramas are practically their own genre and I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to say that if you’ve seen one before, you basically know what you’re getting yourself into with a newie. ‘Seen’, of course, is not the operative word: like predecessors ‘Seance' and ‘Flight’, ‘Eulogy’ takes place in total blackout conditions, inside a sealed shipping container, with the show prerecorded and relayed via headphones - a trippy audio drama relayed in disorientating binaural sound. There’s a twist with this one, which is that our headsets have microphones in them, and throughout the show we’re asked a series of yes/no questions about ourselves - it’s mostly at the beginning and I started to wonder if there had been any point to it, but it actually builds up to an extremely amusing twist at the end – it’s a throwaway gag, but it’s a good throwaway gag. Otherwise, it’s a traditional Darkfield adventure: that is to say, a batshit crazy story that involves us being entered into some sort of bizarre contest at a strange hotel, where we’re put under the charge of a ‘helper’ who seems to be tasked with taking us through a ritualistic series of actions that must be followed to the letter if we’re to succeed in the contest. We do not follow them to the letter… and things get very dark. The plots in Darkfield shows always seem to follow the vertiginously swirling logic of dreams, with abrupt changes in location an

Even if you have literally never wanted to be part of the crew of a spaceship you’ll probably have a fun time at Parabolic Theatre’s Bridge Command, an immersive theatre show slash team-bonding exercise slash LARPer paradise that sees you and your fellow contestants take command of the, uh, bridge of a spaceship and undertake a variety of missions that run the gamut from diplomacy to warfare. Occupying the spot in the Vauxhall arches that formerly hosted renowned gay sauna Chariots, Bridge Command is not a slick, cutting-edge vision of the future, and presumably budgetary limitations are part of this. But that’s fine: it very much has its roots in a wobbly sets golden age of sci-fi, with the earlier iterations of Star Trek looming particularly large. After donning our military jumpsuits, we are ‘teleported’ into the depths of space and onto an Earth battleship that will form our base of operations. There is a background scenario here, wherein humans fled a polluted Earth, found a magic element in the depths of space, went back home to fix Earth, only a load of colonists stayed behind and set up new galactic dominions, and we’re out there looking for more of the magic element. It’s best not to think too hard about it, but at the same time the performers throw themselves into it with impressive conviction - I was particularly delighted when the person operating the teleporter earnestly fielded questions relating to my phobia of teleporters.  Following said teleportation we’re i

A theatre industry truism is that playwright Terence Rattigan – a titan of the mid-twentieth century British stage – had his career unfairly derailed by the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, and is surely due a revival soon. I’m skeptical about this, mostly because I remember people saying it for at least the last 15 years, a period in which I have seen an awful lot of Terence Rattigan plays, usually revived to great acclaim. The truth is that there was absolutely no way his work was ever again going to scale the insane success of his commercial heyday: he is the only playwright in history to have two plays notch up over 1,000 West End performances. But if his lifelong insistence on writing about posh people undoubtedly took him away from the post-War zeitgeist, he remained pretty damn popular in his later years. And this despite the fact he’d long moved away from the frothy populist comedies that gave him his mega hits, having shifted shape into something altogether more melancholic. That’s a long way of introducing the Orange Tree’s new production of his penultimate play In Praise of Love. You can see why it doesn’t get revived much: it’s a bittersweet chamber piece that feels like it is set in a very specific time and place, that involves posh people. It’s also based on the lives of actor Rex Harrison and his third wife Kay Kendall, who are considerably less well known now than they were 50 years ago.  But if you’d struggle to see it doing three years in the West End, Amelia S

Nicholas Hytner’s exuberant 2019 take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream was simply too much fun to leave to the history books: what a joy it is to have it back. To bring you up to speed, it’s a show in the same lineage as the Bridge’s recent Guys and Dolls: designed by Bunnie Christie, half the audience sit in the round, while the other half stand on the floor where the fairy-filled action of Shakespeare’s comedy unfurls on mobile platforms that rise and fall around them (I stood, only cowards sit).  It is joyously queer: pretty much everyone in it gets a crack at snogging everybody else. And Hytner’s key textual intervention is swapping the bulk of fairy monarchs Oberon and Titania’s lines, meaning that it’s JJ Feild’s Oberon – not Susannah Fielding’s Titania – who has it off with Emmanuel Akwafo’s exuberant Bottom. Has much changed since last time? It doesn’t feel vastly different conceptually, though new leads Feild and Fielding put a different spin on what are very explicitly the lead roles. As is tradition they also play the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta in the bookending Athens-set sections, but there is the strong suggestion that they in fact play the same characters throughout.  Feild is harder edged and more menacing than his predecessor Oliver Chris in the Athens sections; when playing Oberon there’s a softness and vulnerability there. It’s a performance sympathetic to the production’s suggestion that the bulk of the play is Theseus’s dream, in which his cruel mach

This review is from 101 Dalmatians’ original 2022 run at the Open Air Theatre. It returns to the Hammersmith Apollo for a summer 2025 run starring Sydnie Christmas as Cruella de Vil. Adapted direct from Dodie Smith’s 1956 kids’ book – ie, absolute not a Disney production – ‘101 Dalmatians’ is a scrappy affair. It’s the first ever original musical from the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, and it boasts charming puppetry, big-name writers and a scream of a turn from Kate Fleetwood as the evil Cruella de Vil. But by the towering standards of the OAT – known for its revelatory musical revivals – it’s pretty uneven.  If you just view it as a fun kids’ show, you’d be more forgiving. In fact, I was pretty forgiving: I skipped press night and took my children the following afternoon. However, I wouldn’t say it’s really been pushed as a show for youngsters: historically the OAT’s musicals are aimed at an adult audience, the evening finish is certainly too late for my children, and the foregrounding of Fleetwood’s villainous Cruella de Vil in the publicity recalls Disney’s more adult-orientated spin-off film of last year (‘Cruella’). Anyway: my kids had fun at Timothy Sheader’s production. I mean, it starts with a protracted bottom-sniffing scene, for crying out loud, as grown-up dalmatians Pongo (Danny Collins and Ben Thompson) and Perdi (Emma Lucia and Yana Penrose) meet for the first time, give each other a good honk up the backside, fall in love and nudge their bookish, introverted

This review is from January 2022. The friend who was supposed to come with me to ‘Moulin Rouge! The Musical’ dropped out because of a migraine, and honestly, hard relate: director Alex Timbers’s dementedly maximalist ‘remix’ of Baz Luhrmann’s smash 2001 film is pure sensory overload. Frequently I found myself cackling hysterically at it, on my own, for no particularly good reason, other than how *much* it all is. If you can remember any of the 2001 film’s music beyond ‘Lady Marmalade’ (here present and correct as show opener, complete with sassy, snappy choreography from Sonya Tayeh) you’ll remember that the soundtrack largely consists of medleys of other people’s songs. So we have ‘Sparkling Diamonds’, aka ‘Diamonds are Forever’ smushed into ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ or the semi-infamous ‘Elephant Love Medley’, a wilfully preposterous amalgam of the cheesiest lines from myriad famous pop tunes, a veritable one-track sex mix. You have to think that it’s essentially this that drew Timbers and music supervisor Justin Levine to ‘Moulin Rouge!’, as they’ve gone absolutely nuts with the idea, pumping the story full of pop songs old and new, fragmented and whole. Like a glittery cow jacked up with some fabulous experimental growth hormone, ‘Moulin Rouge!’ is now bulked into a veritable behemoth of millennial pop bangers. There are the ones that were in the film. There are some that were around when the film was made but weren’t included (‘Torn’; no kidding, the theme from

This musical masterpiece is fiddly in more ways than one. Written by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein, 1964’s Fiddler on the Roof is a brilliant but disarmingly complicated work, for which every production must find a balance between the lighter stuff – shtetl nostalgia and the weapons-grade quipping of its milkman protagonist Teyve – and the fact that it’s a story about the end of rural Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, that clearly foreshadows the Holocaust.  Recent British productions have tended to play up the grit of the story, which is based on the Yiddish short stories of bona fide shtetl dweller Sholem Aleichem. However, that can have its own pitfalls when the writing is undoubtedly more funny than sad. But director Jordan Fein’s superb take – a transfer from Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre – manages to find its own, brilliantly idiosyncratic balance. The tone here is, for the most part, drolly surreal, a dark clown show underpinning everything from the gags to the choreography (by Julia Cheng) to Fein’s penchant for a weird tableau. Jewish life in the village of Anatevka has a constant absurdity to it as Adam Dannheisser’s Teyve must attempt to placate his five daughters and their extremely modern ideas about love while also sucking up to the local Russian constable in the hope the pogroms will be gentler. Key to all this working is US actor Dannheisser as Teyve. Avoiding the obvious temptation to tackle the role as if he’s delivering a stand up set,

The school summer holidays are famously a nightmarish month-and-a-half of trying to amuse children unaware of the fact that you’re desperately trying to keep them entertained during a break that is longer than all your annual leave put together. Still, there are some bright spots, especially living in London, and a big one is London Kids Week. Run by the Society of London Theatre, it’s nothing so vulgar as ‘a sale’, but is rather an initiative to get children into a theatre during the school hols by offering under-18s free tickets when accompanied by a paying adult. In addition, up to two further children’s tickets can be booked at half price by the same adult.  It’s a damn good deal with no real catch (there isn’t even a booking fee), beyond the fact that inventory is limited, although rarely massively so. Get in early, though, and you might be able to snag (free) tickets to one of the special workshops or other activities laid on as part of the ‘week’, which you can book for now and runs the length of the summer hols, from July 21 to August 31 (a strange definition of ‘week’ but whatever). It’s always a good showing and runs the gamut from full on kids’ theatre like The Smeds and the Smoos and The Tiger Who Came to Tea – clearly aimed at younger audiences – to much more adult fare like Stranger Things: The First Shadow and the Rachel Zegler-starring Evita that will theoretically allow you to impress teens at an affordable price.  To book, and for the full list of shows – wh

Did you ever wished you could have participated in the infamous events of January 6, 2021, when a mob attacked the US Capitol building in Washington DC only to be narrowly thwarted by law enforcement? Of course you don’t: it would have been horrible. But an unusual and eye-catching immersive theatre show called Fight for America! seeks to recreate the most infamous day in recent American history as a gigantic tabletop board game with over 10,000 hand-painted miniatures. Staged in the Stone Nest arts centre on Shaftesbury Avenue, the show is the brainchild of multimedia performance company the American Vicarious with design by Games Workshop legend Alessio Cavatore. Photo: J Elon Goodman There are two teams: red – representing the attackers – and blue – representing the defenders. Up to 20 audience members can pay the higher ticket price to actually participate in the game, guided by a games master into making decisions that will shape the outcome of the assault as thousands of miniatures are moved around a gigantic 14-foot model of the building itself. The remaining audience members pay a much lower ticket price to spectate. Photo: J Elon Goodman Clearly this is a somewhat provocative idea for a show, although it sounds entirely fascinating. It appears the point is not to let you LARP January 6, and the show materials don’t get into the ideology of Team Red – which we’re all pretty familiar with at this stage – in any significant way. But January 6 happened and by most in

Ncuti Gatwa’s time on Doctor Who proved to be pretty brief. But he didn’t put his feet up in the gap between his two seasons – theatre was his first love and he got straight back on that stage last Christmas to star in the National Theatre’s hallucinogenically camp take on Oscar Wilde’s classic ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, the first the NT had staged since the ’80s. The Max Webster-directed production was a roaring great hit and now it’s set to transfer to the West End, replacing Mischief Theatre’s ‘The Comedy About Spies’ at the Noël Coward Theatre. Gatwa’s not coming along though: whether he’d have been up for it is a moot point, as he’s already busy starring in the RSC’s new West End play Born with Teeth.  However, a fine replacement has been found for the role of young ‘bachelor’ about town Algernon Montcrieff: it’s Olly Alexander, who hasn’t been in Doctor Who but did make his name as actor in ‘It’s A Sin’, another show by Russell T Davies. Wilde’s play is very much an ensemble affair and there is no news on further casting at this stage, though we dare to dream that the mighty Sharon D Clarke will return as the formidable Lady Bracknell. If you want to know a little more about what the production was like last time, then read our four-star review here. The Importance of Being Earnest is at the Noël Coward Theatre, Sep 18-Jan 10 2026.  The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2025. London’s most spectacular free festival has just announced its 2025 line-up.

Whether you consider yourself a theatre fan or not, Greenwich + Docklands International Festival is always a highlight of the annual London calendar, bringing together spectacular, essentially unclassifiable outdoor entertainment to the open spaces of Thames-side London. In recent years shows have included a recreation of the Northern Lights, a bevy of glowing swans, and a performance on a melting artificial iceberg. Now it’s back for 2025, and the first tranche of announcements for this year’s festival are upon on. First things first: we have dates! The festival will run in its traditional late summer slot, this year August 22 to September 6. There’s basically too much stuff to list in full, but I’ll pick out a few highlights and you can catch up with the full bill here. You can always rely on GDIF for a spectacular opener, and this year it comes from hench French parkour troupe Lézards Bleus, who will get things underway with Above and Beyond (Aug 22, pictured top), a dazzling opener in which eight performers will astound gathered crowds as they leap over the roofs of central Woolwich. Great news for families: the beloved Greenwich Fair (Aug 23 and 24) will return to central Greenwich after skipping last year. It brings family friendly games and street performance to the heart of the borough; there’s stuff on all day with highlights within the programme including all-female Belgian circus company Cie Des Chaussons Rouges’s high wire show Epiphytes in Greenwich Park. Down on

If you want to look for unifying trend in June 2025 London theatre, then it’s very much about classic shows being brought back: last year’s Fiddler on the Roof, 2019’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2011’s London Road and most remarkably still, a sort of (it’s complicated) reprise for the original 2000 production of Sarah Kane’s posthumous masterpiece 4.48 Psychosis. On the other hand, there’s more to the month than old stuff and for many the real treat will be a first chance to see a couple of big shiny American shows: David Adjmi’s wildly acclaimed Fleetwood Mac (sort of) drama Stereophonic, and the latest massive Disney musical Hercules, which makes its English language premiere at Theatre Royal Drury Lane this month. The best London theatre openings in June 2025  Photo: Scarlet Page 1. Stereophonic US playwright David Adjmi’s drama – with songs by erstwhile Arcade Fire man Will Butler – comes to the West End as the most Tony-nominated play of all time. It’s still pretty bold of producer Sonia Friedman to plonk a three-hour play with no famous people in it directly into the West End, although the subject matter should serve as enticement: Stereophonic is a fictionalised account of the legendarily fraught recording sessions for Fleetwood Mac’s landmark album Rumours.  Duke of York’s Theatre, now until Sep 20. Buy tickets here. Image: Guy J Sanders 2. 4.48 Psychosis To state this straight away, 4.48 Psychosis is totally sold out already: the only day you’re getting in is on

We’ve known for a while that Rupert Goold – the man who transformed the Almeida from chintzy backwater to London’s most important theatre – would be stepping down to take over at the Old Vic, and that he’d be taking his chief lieutenant director Rebecca Frecknall with him. What we’ve had no idea of is a timeframe. Until today (May 28). The bad news is that Goold is definitely off, and that he’ll direct his final production for the theatre early next year, with Frecknall bowing out in the summer.  The good news is that if you’ve enjoyed the last 12 years of his programming then there’s still quite a lot more to come: today’s final announcement takes us right up to the end of next year, encompassing ten productions. Although we will presumably find out who Goold’s successor is fairly soon, there’s clearly no rush: their first show seems unlikely to run any sooner than January 2027. It’s almost too big to call ‘a season’, but this final tranche of shows looks pretty mouthwatering, combining the sense of zeitgeist and event that’s always dominated Goold’s programming from the off with the embrace of writers and directors of colour that was learned on the way after some initial criticism of his Almeida as a white boys’ club. Photograph: Peter Moulton / Shutterstock.com Without further ado, then! The first show to be announced is a smaller one: 81 (Life) (Aug 21-23) is a community theatre show by playwright Rhianna Illube and 81 people from the Islington community. It’s billed as

Actor David Harewood has history with Shakespeare’s tragedy of race and jealousy Othello: as a much younger man, way back in 1997, he became the first Black actor ever to play the doomed Moorish general at the National Theatre. And now he’s doing it again: this autumn Harewood will reprise the role in a new production by War Horse director Tom Morris that will cast Toby Jone as his nemesis Iago and US actor Caitlin FitzGerald as his wife Desdemona. There will also be music from indie icon and prolific theatre composer PJ Harvey. Quoth Harewood: ‘It’s very exciting to be tackling this monumental part once again. Last time around I was very conscious of breaking through a particular glass ceiling and I probably felt the weight of that. No concerns this time and I’m looking forward to starting afresh.’ Othello has been in the news thanks to the Americans: the play is relatively rarely done Stateside and this year has seen a big Broadway revival starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal that attracted lots of attention but tepid notices, exacerbated by general irritation at the $3,000-plus cost of the top tickets Morris’s production won’t attract a tenth of the hype, but there are good odds it’ll be considerably better: Harewood scored great notices first time out and has remained a fine stage and screen actor, last seen in the West End in James Graham’s excellent Best of Enemies. Morris is an excellent director who London has seen little of in the decade he spent running th

John Le Carré’s 1963 book The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is quite probably the greatest spy novel of all time and certainly one of the greatest works of English literature to come out of the Cold War. A critically acclaimed but film adaptation starring Richard Burton came out in 1965, and a new TV miniseries has allegedly been in the works for years, but it’s never really had a truly iconic adaptation a la Le Carré’s borderline ubiquitous Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Maybe its first adaptation as a play could be the one. Written by veteran playwright David Eldridge and directed by heavyweight former Headlong boss Jeremy Herrin, this inaugural stage version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold scored great notices at the prestigious Chichester Festival Theatre last year and now it’s heading our way.  It stars Irish actor Rory Keenan as hardbitten Cold War spy Alec Leamas – on the cusp of returning from the field after the elimination of his East German network of agents, he’s pushed by spymaster George Smiley into just one more job. But as he stages a defection to the other side, matter become hugely complicated when he falls for idealistic librarian Liz Gold. Agnes O’Casey and John Ramm return as Liz and Smiley. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is at @sohoplace, Nov 17-Feb 21 2026. The best new London theatre openings to book for in 2025. The Young Vic has announced Nadia Fall’s inaugural season.

From the people who brought you London Theatre Week – which is actually a month long, and happens twice a year – here comes the Summer Theatre Sale, which is, by most definitions, running in late spring.  But who cares when you once again have an opportunity to take the sting out of the cost of West End tickets? As with all these sales (which Time Out is a partner on), the basic deal is very simple: many if not quite all of the West End productions in London participate. Some, established shows like Book of Mormon and Matilda are offering a few quid off, which is obviously totally worth it. Others, you can get some pretty stonking savings: there’s 43 percent off prices for Tina – The Tina Turner Musical, which has recently announced that it’ll be calling it a day in September. You can get a walloping 75 percent off for the last few weeks of Ryan Calais Cameron’s excellent new thriller Retrograde. And if it is undeniably taking place before most definitions of summer, it is a very good sale for actually getting your summer in order and snapping up tickets for what will hopefully be extremely popular shows before the reviews come out and ticket sales go nuts: highly recommended shows with big savings now that probably won’t soon include wildly acclaimed US drama Stereophonic – a fictionalised account of the making of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours – the return of the Bridge Theatre’s excellent immersive A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and another chance to see acclaimed Bob Dylan musical

It’s been a long time since we had a proper season announcement from the Young Vic: its previous artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah announced his departure – ands a year’s worth of programming – in February 2024. But his successor Nadia Fall has been beavering away behind the scenes, and finally has her first season ready to go. And a very decent season it is, focussing on the Young Vic’s historical bread and butter of big name classic plays with interesting directors.  Photo: Isha ShahYoung Vic artistic director Nadia Fall Fall will kick things off herself in September by directing the first Joe Orton production London has seen in an age, tackling the 1964 classic Entertaining Mr Sloane (Sep 15-Nov 8), a dark comedy about a lodger who infiltrates a brother and sister’s family home, to the deep misgivings of their father. Not seen in London since 2009, this production will star Tamzin Outhwaite and Daniel Cerqueira as middle-aged siblings Kath and Ed. The big show over Christmas will be the UK premiere of US playwright Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Dec 2-Jan 31 2026), which previously ran on Broadway in a production starring Robin Williams. Set in a chaotic post-Saddam Iraq, surrealist director Omar Elerian’s production will star David Threlfall as a fast-talking tiger wondering what the hell he is doing in the chaos of Baghdad – the production will also star Arinzé Kene, Ammar Haj Ahmad and Hala Omran. Into next year and Jordan Fein – director of the rece

It’s been some time since a really big West End musical has closed on us, but alas: Tina – The Tina Turner Musical has just announced that it’ll be ending its run this September after seven years at the Aldwych Theatre. That’s no mean feat – a handful of behemoths like Les Mis have enjoyed decades-long runs, but with its mix of massive pop hits and gripping true story, the autobiographical Tina has enjoyed a lifespan far greater than the average musical, and it must stand as one of the more successful jukebox shows in history, beaten only by Mamma Mia!, We Will Rock You, Buddy and Jersey Boys. It certainly feels like it opened in a different world – legendary rock singer Turner was still with us on its press night, where she made one of her final public appearances. Now it’s due to be off, but it leaves in good order, with a final four months left to go before it departs London as the longest running show to ever play the 1,200-seat Aldwych. On the plus side, where one door closes another opens and we’re liable to see something new at the theatre shortly thereafter. There is no word yet on what it’ll be and the the usual theatre rumour mills are largely stumped: historically the Aldwych tends to to play host to musicals, though a play could easily plug the gap temporarily; there are a lot of Broadway hits sloshing around that could easily move in, or a new show like A Knight’s Tale, currently having out of town tryouts in Manchester. Tina announcing its departure strongly sug

One of the more pleasant surprises of the year has been that Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition you see advertised everywhere. Yeah, it’s kind of basic, but in a really high tech way, with all sorts of fun VR and immersive film bits and bobs that certainly offer a good two hours of distraction for younger audiences. And now we’re getting a sister exhibition. Admittedly the story of the Titanic may be less appealing to tween audiences, but adults obsessed with the doomed ship should be in heaven with the lavish The Legend of the Titanic: The Immersive Exhibition, which comes to Canada Water events space Dock X this summer. Photo: Set Vexy Although it will presumably lack the balls-tripping weirdness of the many sections of Tutankhamun devoted to the Egyptian afterlife, there will be plenty of immersion to get immersed in: we’re promised an augmented reality recreation of Southampton harbour, actual recreations of first and third class cabins, historical artefacts (original and replicas), a VR tribute to the ship’s famously determined orchestra, an immersive film charting the ship’s voyage and a ‘5D metaverse featuring interactive elements and 5D sensory experiences, including simulated smells and a realistic reconstruction of the different classes and areas of the ship’. There’s also a child-friendly activity room and Café de Parisien, a replica of the on-board cafe serving food and drink. The Legend of the Titanic: The Immersive Exhibition is at Dock X from Jul 25, ticke