Author: The Reviews Hub - London

Away From Home is a varied cabaret line-up by a cheerful bunch of Musical Theatre graduates from London’s Mountview Academy. They finished their MA a couple of years ago and have reunited for this joyous evening of songs and stories at the back-of-a-pub Golden Goose Theatre. Their generous take on the theme of home expands to include places, people, language, culture and food. Between them, these young performers represent a dozen different countries, and their harmonious, inclusive, international approach to identity is an excellent antidote to the narrow-minded divisiveness infecting contemporary life. The programme kicks off with Mikki Villa from…

Writer: Kimberly Belflower Director: Danya Taymor Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which premiered in 1953, may have been a dramatisation of 17th-century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, but it was also a thinly veiled allegory of the contemporary anti-Communist witch hunts being undertaken by Joe McCarthy. Since its publication, The Crucible has become a standard high school text. That forms the foundations of Kimberly Belflower’s play, in which a small group of English Literature students in a small town somewhere outside Atlanta, Georgia, are studying the text. The class teacher, Dónal Finn’s Carter Smith, is adamant that John Proctor, the principal…

Writer: Candice Mac, in collaboration with James Lyon Director: Candice Mac The latest creation by Other Mysteries Theatre seems unsure of what kind of play it wants to be. The one-man show, starring co-writer James Lyon, takes to The Hope Theatre in Highbury to meander comedy, absurdism, mental illness and maudlin self-pity. James Lyon is Robert Moor, an ex-soldier living in isolation on Moor Island. With a collection of anthropomorphised rubber ducks as companions, he goes about his day, hiding from the monsters that threaten to disrupt his solitude. Lyon is good generally, keeping the audience on their toes. The…

Creators: Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo Large portions of Italian artists Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo’s hour-long performance work, The Present is Not Enough, consist of a group of queer people sitting or lying together in various states of undress. The clothes are dominated by denim, which, together with some of the male-presenting performers’ moustaches, lends a 1970s air to a tableau that also reminds one of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. But the way in which the group sit, surveying its surroundings and locking eyes with audience members – not unkindly, sometimes flirtatiously, with a hint of mystery –…

Critics are an essential part of the theatre ecosystem, and in a world where personal opinion and bendable facts lead governments, critics offer a standard of independent, measured feedback that the theatre industry values enormously. Well, we would say that, but these are the words from some of the winners of the 2026 Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards that took place at the National Theatre on 26 March, hosted by Mark Lawson as Acting Chair of the Drama Section. Offering awards in 12 separate categories celebrating all kinds of contributions to production and performance in the calendar year 2025, it included…

Writer: Hugh Walpole Adaptor: Rodney Ackland Director: Brigid Larmour This pleasingly grown-up play depends on words, suggestion and action rather than gimmickry. It dates from 1935, when it is set, and wears the test of time rather well. Each of the three titular old ladies has a room in a boarding house. All are poverty-stricken, lonely, anxious and struggling, but they manifest their inner turmoil differently, and the ragged dynamic between them is the driving force in this taut, 90-minute play. Mrs Lucy Amorest (Julia Watson) is a grandmotherly, tea-brewing type whose only son has disappeared abroad and rarely bothers…

Writer and Director: Jon Lawrence  A table, three chairs and an overhead light comprise the stark set of a police interview room. In this space, stands a middle-aged dapper man in tweeds with smoothed back hair, polished leather shoes and a yellow carnation in his lapel. How did this smartly dressed individual come to be here, accused of murder? He doesn’t look like a murderer, but then again, one of the policewomen, with a tattooed neck, doesn’t look like a member of the constabulary. Appearances can be deceptive. Trials of a Gentleman,  a one-hour, one-man, one-act show, explores the divergence…

Choreographer: Alexandrine Yewande Hemsley Yewande 103 is an improvising performance troupe that has chosen to share its musing in movement with an audience at the Lilian Baylis studio of Sadler’s Wells Theatre. The hour-long event begins with a drawn-out speech-cum-poem from one of the performers, followed by a long sequence of laying out a big silk carpet, followed by another performer crawling under it and standing, squatting, sitting beneath the shroud, followed by dividing up the fabric and distributing it to the audience in the front row. And that takes care of half the advertised running time. The rest of…