Shared a couple of highlights and lowlights from 2025

Reviewed Christmas Day at the Almeida - another great anti-festive show, even if it could’ve done with being a bit more decisive about the eerie abstract elements that decorate it like strange, dark baubles

There’s little fun of the fair in Oldham Coliseum’s Christmas show. A dull and fusty Jim Cartwright revival with none of the bravery and risk-taking of the theatre’s manifesto that we’re handed on our way out

Aardman characters + Circa acrobaaatics. What should be a surefire hit ends up a shear (🐑) waste of talent

The Everyman’s panto once again chooses a story it’s not especially interested in performing, and the design seemed noticeably cheaper this year too. But a great dame stops it becoming fee fi ho hum

I will be the five millionth person to say All My Sons is incredible. People have picked out individuals perfs like Paapa and Marianne, but how rare is it to see a cast where absolutely nobody puts a single foot wrong?

Royal Exchange hit-maker Raz Shaw has done a great job with what I don’t think is an amazing musical. Although the pace occasionally makes it feel like Singin in a Tornado, this is sunny stuff with a strong chance of rain-drenched rapture

Now this is more like it

Brolly-tree for Singin’ in the Rain at the Royal Exchange

I caught the Toby Jones/David Harewood Othello, which often looked great but essentially hammed the whole thing up in a jarringly overripe way that consistently made the audience laugh while rendering Othello a comic fool rather than a tragic hero

Dinsdale’s Scrooge scrimps slightly on grumpiness, but the BSL performers really added something to the story, and a brilliant Ghost of Christmas Past puppet really added something to the scares

Second Cinders of the week – this one Cinder-better than the last

I didn’t think every twist worked, but I liked that it decided Christmas shows can have the imagination to do something a bit different

Anyway, this “spoilt and entitled horrible little ignoramus” just saw End at the National and loved it! Such rich but understated performances. Not seen anyone crumple their face like Clive Owen. The hour and a half flew by; I almost didn’t want it to end

My weekend began with a 1,353-word email from the director of the show I reviewed in the FT this week, which began like this (below), went on to say I’m not fit to clean the boots of the production team, and concluded by saying “Yours is a remarkably ugly contribution to the world.” Happy Saturday

I thought this was a bit of a turkey. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice muster up all of seven forgettable songs that make you wonder why they bothered. But nothing else in the messy show seems to have a clearer idea of what is going on or why on.ft.com/4oSkkT8

For a limited time only, you can get 20% off an Exeunt subscription, granting you 100% access to some of the best voices in theatre criticism. Which I would surely take up myself were I not one of said best voices in theatre criticism.

Very late to writing up my Line of Beauty thoughts, but I thought it had great performances in a pretty uninspired, trad production that made you feel Grandage's reverence for the novel above much else upstagereviews.wordpress.com/2025/11/15/t...

Ft. me on Oli Hurst’s revival of Dennis Kelly’s Orphans, which has another fantastically full-on performance from John O’Neill, but not a whole lot else

I felt I had more to say after writing my Marina Abramovic review the other week, and thankfully so did some of the other critics. Cue an Exeunt discussion about endurance, bodily diversity and whether the thing really needed to be four hours at all

Nick Payne's new play is full of the frenzied agitation and dislocation of being left without answers in the wake of a family catastrophe, but I felt it lacked the quiet devastation that must surely accompany it upstagereviews.wordpress.com/2025/10/27/t...

Despite an incredibly forceful performance from David Shields, I thought Punch was far too bombastic. It felt as crass and sensationalistic as a tabloid headline. And moratorium on adults playing teenagers, especially teenage roadmen 🥴

This felt like a great idea that lacks the parts it needs to fulfil the director’s ambitions of it having a big further life. Those parts being great songs and/or a great book

Joe Penhall has written some great plays, but hasn’t written a great book here. Don’t think the solution to the story’s simplicity (The Kinks became big then fell out) is to saddle it with a load of cliches and make Ray Davies the most irritatingly earnest character imaginable

Marina Abramović is still making remarkable large-scale work at 78 – even if she is also still resorting to some glib imagery here and there. But I otherwise loved this often hypnotic four-hour odyssey through her surreal rituals about sex, life and death

This has moments of wonder, largely thanks to Scott Brooks’s Ariel, which it almost ruins with its lack of discipline. Not least throwing in a 10-minute naff magic show, complete with audience participation, near the end when the play already struggles to wrap itself up swiftly

Cracking new (albeit Mamet-indebted) comedy with fangs where Alastair Michael’s professor and Matt Holt’s Dean, who moves twitchily like a velociraptor, play an absurd game of brinksmanship that spirals as they devolve into beasts, finishing with one of Foley’s characteristically brilliant endings

A man with the imagination of Alan Turing is given a production with little theatrical imagination. A potentially riveting drama becomes a patience-tester about the code-breaker www.ft.com/content/e795...

Wasn’t sure what to expect with this, but it was great - so much thought and effort clearly gone into the clever production design and vivid detail of the performances. Michael Hugo a particular hoot

Back in the Sheffy T reviewing Elizabeth Newman’s first show as AD: a production whose main problem is that it’s a production of Dancing at Lughnasa, a play that makes you think it must’ve been a fallow year when it won its Olivier www.sheffieldtribune.co.uk/the-crucible...

Reviewed Manchester’s Darkfield triple bill; I’m yet to see the light with their shows

A certain irony sat in the NT waiting to see a show about how the manosphere and toxic masculinity take root in young men while flag-bearing rally-goers flood in to use the loos. (“What’s this place then, a casino?” one asks)

Felt this treated the damage Whitehouse caused a little too lightly, and found its efforts to take equal sides a bit exhausting and messy. But Samuel Barnett’s performance(s) were powerful, tender and upstaged Peake’s pretty one-note turn www.ft.com/content/fe0b...

Just out of Giant - a towering piece of theatre and performance from Lithgow. The way he pouts - somewhere between a sneer and a sickly-sweet pucker. Dragon-like, then retreating into feeble wincing with his ailing back, both sly and pathetic. And equally crafty, needling writing

Caught up with the Almeida’s Moon for the Misbegotten last weekend, which, despite a nice performance from Ruth Wilson, on the whole for me felt destined to be forgotten upstagereviews.wordpress.com/2025/07/27/a...

Glad to have caught the penultimate perf of this (well, the last one before they perform it at actual 4:48am). It managed to make a long, oblique howl feel naturally conversational and direct. Contemplative but studded with dark bite. “Remember the light and believe the light”

Catching up on Liberation (or, as it’s otherwise known, Manchester International Festival’s entire theatre programme for 2025)

Caught up with Till The Stars Come Down after missing its NT run. A stunningly good play, especially its faultless first half. The kind of show that would work brilliantly in the round at the Royal Exchange, if only it consistently programmed more new writing

My contribution was a toss-up between ‘the time Jason Manford commented his own 1* review of my review of his performance in Curtains’ and ‘the time I got shat on by a seagull on my way to a press night’. The seagull seemed classier

Happy birthday @millmedia.bsky.social

Hamlet Hail to the Thief is a discordant union of Shakespeare and Radiohead https://www.ft.com/content/17bc7914-34e7-4498-afc6-073c1847b69f

Radiohead chief bleaksmith Thom Yorke has (co)created this doomy bleakfest for everyone who thought Hamlet could do with being more bleak and doomy. I wasn’t convinced it gains as much as it loses www.ft.com/content/17bc...

I think if you’re going to get away with programming your own play to open your first season, it probably needs to be better than this. But it has a couple of nice performances and a vibrant set www.whatsonstage.com/news/takeawa...

My May rec (avoided picking the obvious FI/RSC Hamlet adaptation because I’m countercultural) + spotlight on the most promising director in Manchester for my money

I thought Manhunt's final act was strong, after a clumsy start. But I'm not sure it had enough to say to justify making it - I'm sure Icke's said art shouldn't offer easy answers, but that's largely what I feel we got here upstagereviews.wordpress.com/2025/04/13/m...

Peter Mullan is on Kop form as Bill Shankly, even if I’m not sure Phillip Breen has found the best way to tell his story on stage www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/a...

Strangely lowkey, underpowered Steinbeck that makes a couple of interesting decisions but overall feels as quiet and timid as a mouse www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/m...

Probably came across as a total purist in this, and fully accept the plays can take a bit of reworking, just a bit bemused by the prevailing attitude to directing Shakespeare which seems to be slap on A Concept at all costs

Glad we’re finally getting to hear another side of the story: “marketing gimmicks planned around it, which allegedly included handing out fake drugs to theatregoers when they arrived… sending young people who are black and brown out with baggies in their pockets”

I had not expected to fall in love with Shirley Valentine. I could not imagine a better production of the play than this. (And it’s just extended @liveveryplay.bsky.social) www.livpost.co.uk/did-we-reall...