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 2026. A-Z of West End shows.

For many people, musical theatre basically is theatre, and certainly there are a hell of a lot of musicals running in London at any given time, from decades-long classics like Les Misérables 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. London's best musicals at a glance: Hippest musical: Hadestown, Lyric Theatre Best of the oldies: Les Miserables, Sondheim Theatre Best for families: Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre The new big thing: Paddington the Musical, Savoy Theatre  Funniest musical: Operation Mincemeat, Fortune Theatre Here Time Out rounds 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 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 London theatre in 2026, but they are, as a rule, the biggest and splashiest shows coming up, alongside intriguing looking smaller projects.   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 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. It’s also beweilderingly big: between the showtune-centric West End and the constant pipeline of new writing from the subsidised sector – plus the Wild West of the fringe – there’s well over 100 theatres and over venues playing host to everything from classic revivals to cutting-edge immersive work. This is my attempt to make sense of all that for you. These are 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 pr

There’s perhaps nothing more magical than seeing a play or musical in the open air, and London is absolutely the city for it. In defiance of the weather gods, our outdoor theatre season now stretches from March to late October: we’re are just that tough. Or at least, optimistic about the weather. Substantially it revolves around a few key theatres, notably Shakespeare’s Globe – open March to October and generally boasting a cheeky outdoor Christmas production – and the delightful Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, which is open late spring to the very end of summer. The former specialises in Shakespeare plays, while the latter has a musical theatre focus. Althoiugh the summer is now basically over, the open air season continues for quite a while, especially at the Globe, where the main outdor theatre remains open until the end of October, and reopens in December for this year’s Christmas show Pinocchio. Not sure what you'll need for an open-air theatre trip? Then don’t miss our guide to practical open-air theatre info.  If you’re interested in taking in some outdoor cinema this summer, head to our dedicated page.

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 celebrity cast: Romeo & Juliet, Harold Pinter Theatre Best weird: The Tempest, Shakespeare’s Globe Best for kids: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Unicorn Theatre 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

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,

There’s a heck of a lot to get excited about in Britain over the next 12 months or so. Between now and 2027 Brits will gobble down platefuls of new restaurants’ grub, slurp tasty bevs in fresh bars, get cultural fixes at museum exhibitions, spectate at globally-renowned sport events and even witness moments of proper historic importance. In 2026 the UK will see the return of the Bayeux Tapestry (not seen on these isles in 900 years) and the completion of the nation-spanning King Charles III Coastal Path. Among the likes of new music festivals and theme parks will be the world’s biggest Irish cultural event, the premiere of one of this century’s most highly anticipated stage musicals and centenery celebrations for a globally-loved children’s character.  And that’s just the stuff that’s planned – who knows what else will define the year? Without further ado, here are the 16 best new things to do in the UK in 2026, chosen by Time Out editors and contributors. RECOMMENDED: 📍 The 14 best places to visit in the UK in 2026.🏛️ The 26 best new things to do in London in 2026.🌍 The best new things to do in the world in 2026.

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. London's best immersive shows at a glance: Best for dinner theatre: Faulty Towers the Dining Experience, President Hotel Best for Trekkies: Bridge Command, Vauxhall Arches Best for music lovers: Mamma Mia! The Party, The O2 Coolest: Lander 23, Carriageworks I’m Andrzej Łukowski, Time Out’s theatre editor, and 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 for, 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 des

The Christmas holidays barely feel like they’re over but oh look: here’s our old pal February half-term, back again. Dealing with the little ones for a week in the middle of what is arguably the bleakest month of the year is always a bit of a shock to the system. But fear not! By way of acknowledgement of all this London really steps up with the indoor activities challenge, with the annual Imagine festival at the Southbank Centre as ever leading the way for a week in which there’s in fact plenty to do. Read on for our top tips.  My name is Andrzej and I’m Time Out’s lead kids’ writer and also parent to two children who go to school in Bromley, where for some reason the local authorities think we want a two-week half-term. As ever, the idea with this list is to highlight the best new, returning or last chance to see shows; London also has plenty of evergreen fun for children of all ages, quite a lot of which you can find in out list of the 50 best things to do with kids in London. When is February half-term this year?  This year, London’s February half-term officially falls between Monday February 16 and Friday February 20 (ie children will be off continuously between Saturday February 14 and Sunday February 22).  Here’s our roundup of all the best things to do with your children this February half-term.

Borough is known for having one of the best food markets in the world, but it’s also home to some seriously good restaurants as well as the brilliant market. The Borough Yards development – just next to this historic, edible wonderland – is where you’ll find some of the latest and greatest spots to have a sit-down feast, including west African restaurant Akara and southern Thai sensation, Plaza Khao Gaeng. If you’re off to SE1 and your stomach is rumbling, then consult this list so you can hunt down all our favourite spots for a fabulous feed, from contemporary Greek classics at Oma and Pyro, to pasta at Padella, classy French cuisine at Camille and seafood at Applebee’s.  RECOMMENDED: The best restaurants in London Bridge. Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines.

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). London's best West End shows at a glance: Best musical: Hamilton, Victoria Palace Theatre Best for families: My Neighbour Totoro, Gillian Lynne Theatre Best ’80s classic: Les Miserables, His Majesty’s Theatre Funniest show: Operation Mincemeat, Fortune Theatre  Hippest hit: Hadestown, Lyric Theatre 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 sm

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 ✈️ The best weekend breaks from London 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 photogenic sites can be seen free of charge: stroll through the historic Dean Village along the Water of Leith walkway, totter down the cobbles of picture-perfect Victoria Street and take in the view of the city after clambering to the top of Arthur’s Seat. And there’s more: check out our guide to the best free things to do in Edinburgh.  🏨 Ready to book? Here’s our guide to where to stay in Edi

I have in the past been guilty of suggesting all Cirque du Soleil shows are the same, but the return of the insect-themed extravaganza OVO does in fact demonstrate the Quebecois circus giants are capable of change.  Specifically, the excruciating unreconstructed clown sections – wherein male flies rubbed their faces up against the boobs of a female.. ladybird? – have been significantly toned down and de-misogynised. Which is good! Aside from being outdated ’70s-style humour, it was a really weird thing to put in a show with a substantial family audience.  Anyway: OVO 2.0 isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly an improvement.  I mean, it’s basically the same as every other Cirque du Soleil show that comes to the Royal Albert Hall: about two hours long, with a visually arresting but not exactly vigorously realised theme (insects). You get about a third slightly ‘meh’ clowning, a third elegant but not really pulse-quickening acrobatics set to wibbly new age musicl, and about a third face-meltingly impressive, borderline superhuman feats of physics-defying extraordinariness. If I was put in charge of a Cirque du Soleil show I would pitch doing one that’s entirely the latter category, but hey ho. The best bits of this Deborah Colker production remain very good: at the tamer end, a glow-in-the-dark diabolo section is a lot more haunting and elegant than it sounds. At the more ‘scrape your jaw off the floor’ end, the first half finale – in which teams of acrobats fling each other around

What is Bubble Planet? Having opened at the tail end of 2023, Bubble Planet is another manifestation of the popular phenomenon that I’m calling Instagrammable immersive family experiences. This one is a particularly close kin to the now defunct Balloon Museum. Where is Bubble Planet? Located in the increasingly culturally vibrant Wembley Park, I’m about 75 percent certain it’s in the same building the last Secret Cinema show was in, just a few minutes walk from the station. What happens at Bubble Planet? The theme is nominally bubbles, though this is interpreted extremely freely, from a balloon room and a ball pool, to a computer generated ocean and a VR experience, both of which do technically feature bubbles. There is a lot of descriptive text on the wall, but it’s mostly waffle rather than anything you need to pay attention to. Is it any good? God help me, I have been to a lot of these things with my children and maybe I’m developing Stockholm Syndrome but I’d say Bubble Planet is the best example in London of This Sort Of Thing: I have literally seen some of these rooms (or something very close to them) before, but not in a combination that so conspicuously maximises the fun. Unburdened by the weird artistic pretensions of the Balloon Museum or the penchant for padding out the attraction with rubbishy little rooms where not much happens a la most of the other experiences, Bubble Planet all killer no filler, if by ‘killer’ you mean ‘room full of giant balloons that keep bu

One of theatre’s greatest mysteries is how Disney literally made the most successful musical of all time and then proceeded to learn absolutely nothing from it. Virtuoso director Julie Taymor included all the dumb stuff required by the Mouse in her version of The Lion King – farting warthogs, basically – but nonetheless crafted an audacious and iconic production that departed radically from the aesthetic of the film and is still in theatres today. Subsequent Disney musicals like Aladdin and Frozen aren’t bad, but they take zero risks – effectively just plonking the film onstage – and are not in theatres today. And here comes Hercules, the next in the megacorp’s long line of perfectly adequate, not very imaginative adaptations of its bountiful ’90s animated roster. Book of Mormon director Casey Nicholaw’s production is good looking and high energy. Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s book is appropriately big hearted with a handful of very funny gags. The show’s not-so-secret weapon is the retention of the film’s sassy quintet of singing Muses. Here turbocharged into a full-on gospel group, they’re a whole lot of finger snapping, head shaking, quick-changing fun, and also add a note of character to Alan Menken’s likeable but unremarkable Alan Menken-style score. Hercules is a unit of generic Disney stage entertainment However, the Muses are also symptomatic of the fact that the show’s Ancient Greece comes across as a reskinned small-town America, without having any comment to m

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 gush a

This review is from 2021.  This long-gestating musical version of ‘Back to the Future’ – it has literally taken longer to bring to the stage than all three films took to make – is so desperate to please that the producers would doubtless offer a free trip back in time with every ticket purchase if the laws of physics allowed. It is extra as hell, every scene drenched in song, dance, wild fantasy asides, fourth-wall-breaking irony and other assorted shtick. You might say that, yes, that’s indeed what musicals are like. But John Rando’s production of a script by the film’s co-creator Bob Gale is so constantly, clangingly OTT that it begins to feel a bit like ‘Back to the Future’ karaoke: it hits every note, but it does so at a preposterous velocity that often drowns out the actual storytelling.  As with the film, it opens with irrepressible teen hero Marty McFly visiting his friend ‘Doc’ Brown’s empty lab, where he rocks out on an inadvisably over-amped ukulele. Then he goes and auditions for a talent contest, hangs out with his girlfriend Jennifer, talks to a crazy lady from the clock tower preservation society, hangs out with his loser family… and takes a trip 30 years into the past in the Doc’s time-travelling DeLorean car, where he becomes embroiled in a complicated love triangle with his mum and dad. It is, in other words, the same as the film, with only a few minor plot changes (the whole thing about Doc getting on the wrong side of some Libyan terrorists is the most obvi

This review is from 2024; the cast has now largely changed except Vanessa Williams and Matt Henry Some people are reflexively cynical about musicals adapted from movies, suggesting they’re cynical cash grabs that take money and attention away from original ideas. But they deserve a fair hearing. For starters, it’s hard and expensive to make any musical, and few make serious money – nobody does it because it’s low hanging fruit. Moreover, live musical theatre is a very different medium to film, and at best the appeal of screen to stage lies in seeing a story that was great in one medium be great in another, for different reasons. It’s about familiarity, but it’s also about discovery, reinvention, about leading an audience onto something new by way of something they already like. Heck, Stephen Sondheim’s final musical is technically a movie adaptation, and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for you, peasant, The Devil Wears Prada had me flummoxed, though. It is, of course, an adaptation of the 2006 millennial classic about a mousy young journalism graduate who blunders into the job of PA to a tyrannical, Anna Wintour-alike fashion editor (the film was itself an adaptation of Vogue-alumnus Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel). The songs are by none other than Elton John, with lyrics by Shania Taub and Mark Sonnenblick. The director-choreographer is Broadway veteran Jerry Mitchell. There’s some serious talent involved.  And yet being turned into a musical does… almost no

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 adaptation

This review is from 2013. Brace yourself for a shock: ‘South Park’ creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Broadway-munching musical is not particularly shocking. Sure, there are ‘fucks’ and ‘cunts’ and gags about baby rape – but most of it is deployed ironically; beneath it all, this is a big-hearted affair that pays note-perfect homage to the sounds and spirit of Broadway’s golden age. The strapping young Latter Day Saints missionaries in ‘The Book of Mormon’ are as cartoonish as any ‘South Park’ character, with the endearing alpha-male woodenness of the ‘Team America’ puppets. In other words, they are loveable, well-intentioned idiots, traversing the globe like groups of pious meerkats, convinced they can convert the heathen through sheer politeness. And if they have doubts, then as Stephen Ashfield’s scene-stealingly repressed Elder McKinley declares in glorious faux-Gershwin number ‘Turn it Off’, ‘Don’t feel those feelings – hold them in instead!’ His advice is ignored by the show’s heroes, narcissistic, highly-strung Elder Price (Gavin Creel) and dumpy, lying Elder Cunningham (Jared Gertner). The pair are sent to Uganda in an effort to convert a village to Mormonism, a religion that essentially tells the penniless villagers how great distant America is. The locals are not keen: Price cracks and unwisely clashes with a crazed local warlord; Cunningham makes up his own version of Mormonism which involves fucking frogs to cure oneself of Aids. ‘The Book of Mormon’ is, above

Britain and Hawaii have a complicated history marked by surprisingly cordial relations in the face of considerable adversity.  Captain Cook famously met his end in a skirmish on Hawaiʻi Island in 1779. Then, almost 50 years later in 1824, King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu – monarchs of the now united archipelago – came to London on a diplomatic mission to shore up support from the Empire. Tragically, they both died of measles while waiting for an audience with George IV. But the visit went well diplomatically. After a rogue British captain seized control of the islands for five months in 1843, the Royal Navy booted him out and restored sovereignty (though Queen Victoria sort of shrugged helplessly when asked for help following Hawaii’s annexation by the Americans in 1893). This is all by way of say that Britain had as close a relationship with the Kingdom of Hawaii as anyone during its 98-year existence, and this led to a relatively large amount of cool Hawaiian stuff being acquired by the British Museum and Royal Collection over the years: some of it, inevitably, under shady circumstances, but for the most part accumulated by trade or as lavish royal gifts. And it also means there’s a good story: new exhibition Hawaiʻi: a Kingdom Crossing Oceans does offer some background on the archipelago’s pre-monarchical past and American future, but it largely focuses on relations between our two kingdoms and the ill-fated royal visit.  There’s plenty of fascinating stuff here, fro

Putting a film western on stage is an odd idea that doesn’t seem any less odd having seen High Noon, an adaptation of the classic allegorical 1952 movie starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. It’s an impressive show in a lot of ways. Thea Sharrock’s direction deftly conjures a dusty desert town using flexible sets, lovely period costumes (from Tim Hatley) and some sparse but effective gun slingin’. It’s theatrical, too, in the sense that the cast sing a lot more Bruce Springsteen songs than they did in the film, and an ever-present clock implacably ticks down to the title time.  And it’s got two sensational leads. I wasn’t really a massive fan of Billy Crudup’s recent one-man show Harry Clarke. But he’s the best thing about High Noon as the vulpine Sheriff Will Kane, who begins the story marrying and reluctantly hanging up his badge before he’s hauled out of retirement almost immediately upon the news that jailed outlaw Frank Miller has been released from prison and is on the noon train to town, hellbent on revenge.  Crudup is not a physically imposing man, and is older than Cooper was, but it’s his steely intensity combined with a sense of genuine vulnerability that binds the show together, as he tries and largely fails to form a posse to oppose Miller. The townsfolk are either seeking to avoid danger or have actively fallen out with the upright but abrasive lawman.  His new bride is tough, independent-minded Quaker Amy Fowler, played by the mighty Denise Gough, who imbues th

In An Interrogation, his debut as a writer-director, Jamie Armitage tackled the police procedural, which is not something you see in the theatre very often. Now he’s back with an even more ambitious oddity in the form of A Ghost in Your Ear, an MR James-ish horror story with a mischievous metatheatrical gleam in its eye. The show was created with sound designer siblings Ben and Max Ringham, and makes use of sophisticated binaural design - that is to basically say that you wear headphones, with some of what you hear being pre-recorded. George (George Blagden) is an actor in need of a few bob, quick, so he’s accepted a last minute job narrating a ghost story that he’s not actually read in advance. The gig was secured by his recording engineer pal Sid (Jonathan Livingstone), acting on behalf of a suspect sounding third party who wants the recording done ASAP. Anisha Fields’ set, then, is simply a bland, boxy recording studio. At first, everything is played dead straight: after some initial banter with Sid, George gets down to business, adopting a slightly mannered, slightly old fashioned RP to narrate the yarn of a man who decides to houseclear the country pile of his late father after the contracted company abruptly backs out. The only obviously creepy thing going on is the presence of a weird human-head shaped recording mic, although apparently this is simply what you use to record binaural sound (‘Billy big binaural!’ is how George describes Sid).  In part, it feels like a ge

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 show u

The Aldwych Theatre spent much of the last decade as home to Tina, the smash bio musical about Tina Turner. And this summer the theatre will see another new musical about a different American singing titan move in to replace it. Sinatra the Musical has possibly the most self-explanatory name in theatre history, but it case you can’t guess, it concerns crooner, actor and general icon Frank Sinatra. We’re long past the We Will Rock You/Mamma Mia! era of extrapolating silly new plots from a musician’s greatest hits, and so aside from said hits we get a biographical story set in 1942, at a pivotal time in Sinatra’s life and career. Having recently departed the popular Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, Sinatra’s career seems to have hit the skids, as has his marriage to Nancy Sinatra thanks to an affair with rising Hollywood starlet Ava Gardner. But a New Year’s Eve concert at the Paramount Theatre in New York offers him the chance for a ‘comeback’ that will in truth be the launchpad for one of the greatest careers in popular music history. Helmed by top Broadway director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall and with a book by playwright Joe DiPietro – best known for the hit musical Memphis – Sinatra the Musical had tryouts in Birmingham in 2023 and has been made with the blessing of the Sinatra estate. This does mean that the odds of it saying anything particularly controversial about Ol’ Blue Eyes are pretty low, but the 1942 settings is certainly avoidant of Rat Pack cliches that have already

Playwright Kimberley Belflower’s drama John Proctor is the Villain was the big Broadway hit of 2025, a dazzlingly clever response to and remake of Arthur Miller’s landmark play The Crucible, set in a US high school, with added Taylor Swift songs. And this spring, it’s heading our way. Although casting is TBA – it had Sadie Sink on Broadway, but won’t over here as she’s doing Romeo & Juliet at the Harold Pinter Theatre instead – Danya Taymor’s seven times Tony-nominated production is the one we’re getting, restaged at prestigious new writing theatre the Royal Court. It’ll play as part of its hugely exciting 70th anniversary season that also includes long-awaited returns to the London stage from Gary Oldman and Tilda Swinton.Set in a school in a small town in rural Georgia, John Proctor… centres on five female classmates who are not only studying The Crucible, but get caught up in Crucible-like events as debate whether or the play’s nominal hero John Proctor is indeed the villain, as opposed to Abigail Williams, the young woman he has an affair with and then discards. This sharp, funny reimagining is fuelled by pop music, optimism and rage, as its protagonists expose the darkest secrets of their small town. Tickets are going fast – and will go faster when the cast is announced – but with a high school setting and young vibe, the Royal Court Theatre and Time Out have teamed up to offer under-35s exclusive access to 2,000 tickets at £25 - your best chance to bag an affordable tic

Hardcore musical theatre nerds may remember that in 2020 we were due to get a transfer of the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s 1984 classic Sunday in the Park with George. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a typically virtuosic work by the late genius that was inspired by the pointillist painter Georges Seurat's work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and follows a fictionalised version of the artist plus – years later – his cynical great grandson.  Long story short, if the Gyllenhaal version hadn’t got gazumped by the pandemic it’s unlikely that Sunday in the Park with George would come back around so soon. But it did, and so the coast is clear for Wicked lovers Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande to reunite as leads of a fresh production directed by Marianne Elliott, with design by Tom Scutt, that’ll run at the Barbican… next summer. That’s pretty much all we know for now, though it’s worth flagging up the fact that Elliott directed Bailey in an absolutely tremendous production of Sondheim’s Company back in 2018, so the omens are extremely good. His stage CV is rather longer than hers, but she did do a couple of shows in the US pre-popstardom and it’s actually quite thrilling to get her stage debut as a massive star.  As possibly the most musical theatre thing to have ever happened it’s clearly going to be enormously popular – one can imagine Americans might try and get involved – so while there’s a long time until it runs, you can ma

A new Punchdrunk show is always a big deal. And blessedly, they’re becoming increasingly common. After the eight-year gap between 2014’s The Drowned Man and 2022’s The Burnt City, the immersive theatre legends fired out another two in the form of 2024’s Viola’s Room and this, their latest, Lander 23, with an unnamed National Theatre collaboration due next year. But every one still feels like an event, not least because nouveau Punchdrunk is given to startling reinvention, after years of spectacular but essentially similar shows. Now you genuinely never know what they’ll do next. Although it’s been running since November, you won’t find any official reviews of Lander 23 out there, as the current run of the computer game-derived live action sci-fi show has been deemed ‘early access’, AKA a work in progress. However, after some negotiation the company was happy to let me in to report back some impressions.  It’s a mission-based ‘stealth exploration game’ divided into two halves Really very different from anything Punchdrunk have made before, Lander 23 sees you put in a team of four, which is then subdivided into two groups of two. Sent to an alien planet to harvest a resource called Radiance, you get roughly an hour of game time, following 30 minutes of scene setting and tech stuff. Half of your mission time will be spent in a ‘landing craft’, manning a console that allows you to track the other half of your team, who will be making their way through an abandoned colony trying t

The first time around, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s train-tastic musical opus Starlight Express ran for a walloping 18 years, one of the most successful theatre productions in West End history. The second time around, its first major revival has lasted under two years: it’s just been announced that Luke Sheppard’s 2024 production will be heading to the great train shed in the sky (it’s actually going on tour) in early May. That’s not bad, though: two years is still bloody good, especially considering it was staged miles away from the West End at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre. Starlight Express got largely great reviews, and just because a show has done one 18-year-run it doesn’t follow that it’ll have a second – a lot has changed since Webber’s zeitgeist-chomping ’80s heyday.  And you’ve still got a few months to see it: the family friendly musical about a group of racing trains will remain fixed to the tracks throughout the upcoming half term and Easter holidays before pulling out of town on Sunday May 3. Exactly what will replace it is an interesting question. When it launched Troubadour Wembley Park was simply a receiving house for a rotating hodgepodge of shows, but with Starlight Express and The Hunger Games: On Stage – at sister venue Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre - there are signs that the Troubadour chain of large, modern outer London theatres is moving towards a West End-style model of focussing on long runs of individual shows. Wherever the case, you have about fou

Despite Brixton’s occasional, pitiful attempts to lay claim to David Bowie, the Thin White Duke was a Bromley man through and through. He grew up there, went to school there and spend much of his twenties – and early rise to fame – living in Beckenham.  Tourism opportunities for going back to Bowie’s roots in the southeast are relatively limited: there’s a walking tour, a village fete-like Bowie festival in August, and some florid signage outside the Beckenham Zizzi’s, formerly the Three Tuns pub where Bowie had his Arts Lab club in the ’60s. Now, however, a major new tourist attraction is putting Bowie back in Bromley big time. And it’s not a gaudy Ziggy museum or anything like that: London’s latest David Bowie attraction is his old family home.  Photo: Heritage of London TrustYoung David Bowie plus cat, c 1956 The Heritage of London Trust has acquired 4 Plaistow Grove, Bromley, a modest terrace where the great man lived between the ages of eight and 20. He lived here as he wrote his first songs, including his iconic early hit ‘Space Oddity’.  In collaboration with the David Bowie Archive, the house will be restored to its exact ’60s appearance, with the centrepiece, naturally, being Bowie’s bedroom.  It should be fascinating for Bowie completists, and also people who really like ’60s houses: exactly how much a day out one small house constitutes is TBC but presumably fairly limited, but it’ll also serve as a skills workshop for young people via the Trust’s Proud Places an

Tony Gilroy’s wildly acclaimed Disney+ Star Wars series Andor has made breakout stars of numerous actors, many of whom were already well-established Brit theatre stalwarts – Denise Gough and Kyle Soller perhaps being the most obvious examples.  But for many the big star of the second and final series was young British actor Elizabeth Dulau, whose small series one role as Kleya Marki – assistant to Stellan Skarsgård’s spymaster Luthen Rael – was greatly expanded into a much bigger, much more nerve-wracking season two role (no spoilers, but the episode in which she infiltrates a hospital is not for the faint of heart). Dulau had done a little stage work prior to Andor, with roles in shows at the Young Vic and Southwark Playhouse. But now she’s bona fide lead actor material, and the next main house play at Hampstead Theatre has a very juicy lead role for her. She’ll play the young Victorian woman named Mary Ann Evans, who would later go on to literary immortality under her pen name George Eliot, in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new play Bird Grove. Bird Grove concerns the attempts of Evans’ father Thomas to marry her off just as she stood on the cusp of greatness. Dulau will play Eliot and Owen Teale will portray Thomas in Anna Ledwich’s world premiere production at Hampstead Theatre, a mid-size off-West End mainstay that should offer a safe space for Dulau to give a first flex of her leading lady muscles. Bird Grove is at Hampstead Theatre, Feb 13-Mar 21. Buy tickets here. The best new

Hello and welcome to 2026. Or if you’re reading this in 2025, welcome to… the future!!! January in London used to be an entirely predictable month, insofar as there were very few new openings apart from the mime festival and Cirque du Soleil, with the month essentially being carried by all the prestige shows that opened in December.  But these days it’s all change. Okay, not the bit about Cirque du Soleil or the mime festival (although the latter did change its name a few years back). But a recent trend is for big West End shows to begin previews in December and hold first nights in January, which may or may not be a way of deferring critical scrutiny throughout the lucrative Christmas period, but certainly peps up the January openings list. The big guns are major new shows starring Denise Gough and Sheridan Smith, but it’s an enjoyably eclectic January that also takes in the return of the Almeida’s acclaimed American Psycho musical, London’s first chance to see Jade Franks’ acclaimed Edinburgh smash Eat the Rich (but not me mates x) and a truly mind-bending take on The Tempest from avant-garde legend Tim Crouch. Plus the mime festival and Cirque du Soleil. The best new London theatre shows opening in January 2026 Photo: Johan Persson 1. High Noon The West End has a long and ignoble history of screen-to-stage play adaptations that sounded like a bad idea and were: who remembers The Exorcist? Or Fatal Attraction? There are also some pretty damn great ones: think Brief Encoun

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