Revisiting My Night With Reg now is to experience this heartbreaker of life and loss and friendship and family not just as a time capsule of a particular period of our lives but as a timeless classic, an intricately patterned play of layered and deeply poignant inter-relationships.
‘Ian McKellen scales new heights’: HAMLET – Theatre Royal, Windsor
Ian McKellen has never been an actor to shirk a challenge — or do things by halves. Having first played the title role of Hamlet fully 50 years ago, aged 31 — the age that Hamlet is at the end of the play — he has now returned to it, aged 82.
NEWS: The Last Five Years transfers to the West End
After a critically-acclaimed run at Southwark Playhouse and a successful worldwide stream via stream.theatre, Jonathan O’Boyle’s production of Jason Robert Brown’s award-winning musical The Last Five Years will play a limited season at the Vaudeville Theatre, running from 17 September to 13 October 2021.
‘Simply exquisite musical theatre’: THE LAST FIVE YEARS – Southwark Playhouse ★★★★★
Jonathan O’Boyle’s production of The Last Five Years has to be a definitive production of this complex and unusual work.
‘This production is the real deal’: THE LAST FIVE YEARS – Southwark Playhouse
It may be almost 20 years old, but Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years feels timeless and recognisable and this bold restaging at Southwark Playhouse is a triumph.
‘There is something life-affirming about it’: THE VIEW UPSTAIRS – Soho Theatre
Max Vernon’s musical The View UpStairs making its European debut at the Soho Theatre and running for just five weeks, commemorates the 1973 arson attack on a gay bar in New Orleans which was the most significant event of its kind until 2016’s Florida shootings.
‘As a launch to an ambitious season, it’s a fine start’: ABIGAIL’S PARTY – Hornchurch ★★★★
At Hornchurch, artistic director Douglas Rintoul seems to have gone for the faithful-to-the-first-production approach: for example, Melanie Gutteridge’s Beverly is a neatly dutiful homage to Alison Steadman.
LABOUR OF LOVE – West End
Comedy about Labour Party history is starry, but politically reactionary and tediously overblown.
LUNCH & THE BOW OF ULYSSES – Trafalgar Studios
In a powerfully devastating and unrelentingly humorous look at the dark and unspoken truths manifest in the psyches of men and women after decades spent together in a relationship, the double header of Steven Berkoff’s Lunch and The Bow of Ulysses at Trafalgar Studios is gripping theatre that will possibly provide less than comfortable cab rides home for some of the couples in the audience.