Once More with Feeling! Most versions of The Nutcracker ballet aim to create magic. It is, after all, a ballet about the transformative power of dreams and imagination, prompted by a mysterious magician figure and set to a Tchaikovsky score that is itself musical magic. So it was with all four Nutcrackers I saw in […]
Breaking Bach, The Movie
Daring Marriage of Bach and Hip Hop Now on film In the summer of 2025, a packed Usher Hall in Edinburgh rose as one to acclaim a daring, unique marriage of two, on the surface antithetical, art forms: the sophisticated baroque music of J.S.Bach and the visceral street dance of disaffected urban youth – hip […]
Protein Dance – The Magic Flute
Mozart’s Opera Undergoes the Luca Silvestrini Treatment. Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute is long, running for about three hours, and possesses a famously convoluted plot, laden with esoteric philosophical concepts. It’s very much a grown-up affair, but you wouldn’t know it from Protein’s simplified 75-minute dance-theatre adaptation, which is faithful to the original (well, mostly), […]
New English Ballet Theatre – The Nutcracker
When Clara Met Derren… New English Ballet Theatre’s The Nutcracker is a slimmed-down affair, suitable for a small-scale company, and none the worse for that. For one thing, both narrative and characterisation are immaculate, so that, even if unfamiliar with the plot (unlikely), you don’t need to read the excellent programme synopsis to follow the […]
Best West End Theatre 2026:
London West End Theatre Previews Anyone who was burnt badly by the news that tickets to see Gary Oldman in Beckett’s ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ are already sold out, knows that you can never be too hasty in securing next year’s theatre tickets. Although 2026 still feels like a lifetime away, star-studded productions, promising new shows […]
Indian Ink – Hampstead Theatre
Hampstead Theatre reprises Tom Stoppard’s play. It seems especially poignant that Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink opens at Hampstead Theatre soon after the playwright’s death a few weeks ago. First premiered in London in 1995, Indian Ink returns to London with one of the original actors, Felicity Kendal, for whom Stoppard wrote the original radio play […]
Turandot From the Royal Opera. A Winter Spectacle Worth the Cold
Puccini’s epic show Turandot returns to Covent Garden. Puccini’s Turandot, with its combination of myth, ritual and emotional extremity, suits dark evenings and the build-up to Christmas, when audiences seem especially ready for spectacle and intensity. Set in a fantastical ancient Peking, the opera unfolds with a story of ceremony, fear, and the possibility of love, moving […]
Gawain and the Green Knight at Park Theatre
A witty workplace comedy enlivens a medieval tale Cult British sitcom The Office (2001) set the standard for comedy drama about apparently unremarkable people. The show’s co-creator, Stephen Merchant, said in an interview that a great story “jolts [a person] out of their life and gives them a way of reframing it”. There couldn’t be […]
English National Ballet Nutcracker
A Fresh Take on the Christmas Ballet and a Sugar Plum to Savour English National Ballet’s Nutcracker, now settled in at the London Coliseum for the festive season, is fresh, colourful, very original and, occasionally, a little too sweet – just like all Christmas treats should be. If Sir Peter Wright’s productions of The Nutcracker […]
The Playboy of the Western World at the Lyttelton Theatre
A Trip into the Heart of Rural Ireland There’s been a big buzz about the new National production of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. It has a starry cast led by Nicola Coughlan (Bridgerton), who is reuniting on stage with her Derry Girls colleague Siobhán McSweeney. With fellow Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke (The […]