Reginald D Hunter spurns good taste, Sara Pascoe goes solo, and Jan Ravens is everyone elseTop calls in this year's fringe comedy bingo " where punters make a mental tick each time jokes on …
Kemp Powers' play is set in a dingy motel room in Miami on the night of 25 February 1964, after Cassius Clay (as Muhammad Ali then was) had earlier beaten Sonny Liston to gain the world heav…
Michael Head's new play is based on the book They Took the Lead by Stephen Jenkins, which tells the true story of events at Clapton Orient (now Leyton Orient) Football Club during the First …
Angel by Henry Naylor, Gilded Balloon ****Rehana tells us what her hometown Kobane in Syria, is like - "A small border town where nothing happens … like Berwick-on-Tweed," she says " a typ…
Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves - first performed in 1969, in the round at the Library Theatre in Scarborough - was only his second play. Already, though, it has a few Ay…
This is set in "a world midway between Elizabethan pageant and haute-couture catwalk", a programme note for Scena Mundi's production says - and the initial signs certainly point to that. The…
You might think that the combination of a play about one of the funniest comics of the second half of the 20th century, written by his biographer and directed by a member of Monty Python wou…
Who could disagree that, ten years on, the Abba musical extravaganza Mamma Mia! is still unbelievably good?It's not often I arrive at the theatre in a grump, but a long and unexplained bus d…
Derren Brown calls himself a mentalist, but he's also a great showman, as his latest show, Miracle, attests. With its simple set, this is seemingly an evening of straightforward illusions. B…
How wonderful it would be if Greg Kotis's play was a rapid response to David Cameron's alleged interest in porcine affairs. Not only wonderful to those still laughing about the imaginary hig…
Paul, Jan and Louis, three young men living in a gritty part of south London, are bored and broke and, for them, there are two kinds of Britain - one with money and power, and the one they l…
Walking the Tightrope, Underbelly Potterow ★★★★ Subtitled The Tension Between Art and Politics, this collection of eight short plays on the subject of censorship…
A Richard Bean play is always to be welcomed - he wrote England People Very Nice and One Man, Two Guvnors, two of the most enjoyably rambunctious comedies of recent years - but also with a n…
Comedian and writer Mark Steel recently found out the story behind his adoption in 1960. And the truth was so extraordinary that you almost couldn't make it up …Families are funny things, …
Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham was a huge hit, a small-budget British film that in 2002 unexpectedly found an international audience way beyond its setting in suburban west London, a…
Football is a subject close to Patrick Marber's heart. He's a lifelong Arsenal fan and during his sojourn away from London (and writing, as he was suffering from writer's block for much of i…
The 87-year old singer, comedian and all-round entertainer knows how to work a crowd, says Veronica Lee
A couple stand on the stage, squaring up to each other. They are in the middle of an argument. The Man has just, out of the blue, suggested they have a baby. The Woman, understandably, needs…
Owen McCafferty's new play could have had as its starting point John Updike's line "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face", for it deals with stand-up comedian Steve Johnston, who hung…
There is a tree on stage. Not a real tree but a full-size fake one (made by Take 1 Scenic Services) that reaches the ceiling, with lots of branches and leaves. As the audience enters the Old…
Birmingham Hippodrome claims to stage the UK's biggest pantomime - a proud boast that highlights its productions' West End-level of investment. And this year's venture, Jack and the Beanstal…
The audience for this show could probably be divided into to two camps; those who fondly remember watching Morecambe & Wise on ITV or the BBC, and those who weren't even born when Eric M…
Ireland has had not just an economic meltdown in the past few years, but also a social one. The country that thought it had seen the back of emigration going back several generations has had…
One of the oddities about theatre is that there can be a gripping performance at the heart of an underwhelming production - and so is the case with Maxine Peake's Hamlet, directed by Sarah F…
The traffic warning signs into Limerick City from Shannon Airport told their own story: first "Giant saga in progress", then "City of Culture giant event", followed by "Giant's diversion". H…