Everything Theatre Reviews, interviews and news for theatre lovers, London and beyond

The world isn’t short of new Sherlock Holmes stories. Several hundred have been written since Conan Doyle hung up his pen, and in the main they stick closely to the character of the original stories. So why is it that, when bringing Holmes to the stage, dramatists feel the need to give the famously asexual detective a love life? It started with the ill-fated Sherlock Holmes – The Musical, featuring a woefully miscast Ron Moody in platform heels (he was ...

ImmerCity’s lastest immersive murder mystery takes place in and around St Matthews Church in Bethnal Green. It’s 1955, and memories of the war still resonate. You’re present at the wedding of Jim Slice, son of East End gangster Micky, to Maud Sweetly, the daughter of feisty widow Cheryl. But Maud has failed to show up; and neither her twin sister, nor her cousin Bernie, can explain why. It’s left to the priest, Reverend Gris, to keep the two warring families ...

An outstanding one-man show about an ordinary solider’s wartime experiences.

It’s the impossibly distant year 2020, and the world is on the brink of nuclear war. King Nigel Farage rules the Disunited Kingdom of England and Northern Ireland, and Trump’s popularity is higher than ever: “He gave us our jobs back,” exclaims one satisfied voter, “I’m now a full-time Muslim hunter.” Trump The Musical plays, as the central character tells us, to “the biggest musical theatre crowd there has ever been”. A riotous evening of song and dance, satire and ...

A tasting menu of nine short, sharp, witty plays that leaves you fully sated

“Cigarette, dear?”“No thank you, dear.”“I think I might have a cigarette, dear.”“No you won’t, dear.”“Very well, dear.” And so the scene is set: in two inflatable armchairs, presided over by a goldfish on a gold pedestal, sit Mr and Mrs Fox. She – in a luminous, captivating performance by Alice Marshall – is domineering, supercilious, wilfully mispronouncing words and oblivious to the feelings of those around her; he – a foppish, Wooster-like Jack J Fairley – is an ineffectual, waistcoated ...

In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged a week-long press conference from their bed in a hotel in Montreal. Set in the round, in the intimate space of the Cockpit Theatre, Bed Peace opens with the narrator, an exuberant and likeable Helen Foster, outlining the setting in rhyming couplets. It hurtles through some personal history, from Yoko’s miscarriage, through the couple’s wedding in Gibraltar, to their eventual bed-in in Montreal (although, curiously, ...

As you enter the small 60-seater basement space of the Pleasance Theatre you see a cast of five: three musicians playing Eastern European folk music on a cello, a guitar and an accordion, with two young men unaccountably wearing dresses, swaying in time to the music. Enter Madame Fanny (Kate Stokes), who’s also credited as the lead writer. She explains that it’s some time in the late 18th Century, and that she’s about to relate tales of her travelling exploits. ...

It’s 1942 in a transit camp in Holland. Four Jewish detainees make up the camp’s concert party: impresario Victor (Lloyd Morris), dancer Anna (Faye Maghan), her sister Millie (Eloise Jones) and Anna’s lover Peter (Nick Devallé). When Millie discovers that their sick mother, Ette (Cate Morris), has been put on the notorious Tuesday List for transportation to a concentration camp the sisters form a plan of action: to ingratiate themselves with the camp’s commandant, Conrad (Mike Duran), in order to ...

Following texted directions to the secret location “somewhere on the Victoria Line”, you make your way to a disused warehouse on the outskirts of town. Welcomed by a woman dressed as a 1930s aviator, speaking an imaginary language that hovers somewhere between Japanese and Klingon, you’re handed a beer – never a bad thing in a theatre – and led into the dining room. This turns out to be a vast octagonal space, hosting a dozen round 8-seater tables, mounted ...