Andrzej Lukowski

Greetings of the season. Well, I'm actually writing this in early September. But then, how long is Christmas theatre season in London exactly? Certainly it’s in full swing by late November, with virtually every pantomime and kids’ show in the city up and running way before Advent, with most of them running until the new year. London's best family Christmas shows at a glance: The National Theatre’s big show: The Jungle Book, National Theatre Olivier Best for laughs: Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Days of Christmas, Alexandra Palace Theatre Best new spin on an old fave: The Snowman, Peacock Theatre. Best returning Christmas classic: A Chistmas Carol, Old Vic. Best for babies: Univers, Barbican I’m Time Out’s theatre editor, and I have seen more pantos and Julia Donaldson adaptations than any human being should. But also it’s always an exciting time of year: Christmas is the best time to take children to the theatre because there are such a dizzying array of options, for all ages. This list is an attempt to try and put some order on the gargantuan breadth of children’s and family friendly theatre across the city during the season. It doesn’t include long running West End shows – you know about The Lion King, right – but is an attempt to compile as many festive shows for young audiences as possible, at theatres big and small. We’ve divided our list into family-friendly Christmas shows – that is to say, shows suitable for children, but that you could easily visit without – and

Hello – I'm Time Out’s theatre editor and also a parent, something that has a lot of overlap in London, a city with three dedicated kids theatres and where pretty much every other theatre might stage a child-friendly show. London's kids theatre shows at a glance: Best long-running musical: Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre Best for teens: The Hunger Games: On Stage, Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre Biggest new musical: Paddington the Musical, Savoy Theatre  Best for babies: Home Song, Unicorn Theatre. This round up focusses on the flagship shows at London’s kids theatres – that’s the Little Angel, the Unicorn and Polka – plus other major shows aimed at or suitable for youngsters. On the whole, pre-school and primary children are the age groups best served specifically, because secondary school aged teenagers can generally see adult theatre perfectly well (and will indeed often be made to do so!). So while the odd teen focussed show will make it in here, if you’re looking for something to do with teens why not consult our reviews page or what to book list. Our London kids’ theatre page normally contains information for all the main children’s shows running in London theatres this month and next month, and is broken down into three categories. Theatre for all the family is suitable for any age, including adults without children. Theatre for older children is specifically aimed at school-age children and teenagers. Theatre for babies, pre-schoolers and younger children d

Hello, and welcome to the Time Out theatre reviews round up. From huge star vehicles and massive West End musical to hip fringe shows and more, this is a compliation of all the latest London reviews from the Time Out theatre team, which is me plus our team of freelance critics. December is the busiest time of year for London theatre – expect plenty of pantomime reviews and other seasonal fun but also a slew of major openings from across London’s many venues as the industry works itself to a frenzy before shutting down for Christmas. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2026. A-Z of West End shows.

This rolling list is constantly updated to share the best of what’s coming up and currently booking: these choices aren’t the be-all and end-all of great London theatre in 2026, but they are, as a rule, the biggest and splashiest shows coming up, alongside intriguing looking smaller projects.   London's best shows to book for at a glance: Best musical: The Greatest Showman, Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Best Shakespeare play: Lear, Yard Theatre. Best celebrity show: The Lives of Others, Adelphi Theatre. Best revival of a modern classic: August: Osage County, Noël Coward Theatre. Best for something different: Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Barbican Centre. London’s theatre scene is the most exciting in the world: perfectly balanced between the glossy musical theatre of Broadway and the experimentalism of Europe, it’s flavoured by the British preference for new writing and love of William Shakespeare, but there really is something for everyone. It’s also beweilderingly big: between the showtune-centric West End and the constant pipeline of new writing from the subsidised sector – plus the Wild West of the fringe – there’s well over 100 theatres and over venues playing host to everything from classic revivals to cutting-edge immersive work. This is my attempt to make sense of all that for you. These are shows worth booking for, pronto, both to avoid sellouts but to get the cheaper tickets that initially go on sale for most shows but tend to be snapped up months before they actually op

The epic slog of the summer holidays is over but look! Here comes a new challenger as the October half term comes barrelling into view. And even though we’re just a few weeks away from the hottest summer on record, plummetting termperatures and shorter days will mean you have to find more to do than ‘go to the park’. Fortunately: this is London, there’s always loads to do, with Halloween giving the darkening evenings a spooky shot in the arm. My name is Andrzej and I’m Time Out’s lead kids’ writer and also parent to two London-based children. As ever, the idea with this list is to highlight the best new, returning or last chance to see shows; London also has plenty of evergreen fun for children of all ages, quite a lot of which you can find in out list of the 50 best things to do with kids in London. When is October half-term this year?  This year, London’s May half-term officially falls between Monday October 26 and Friday October 30 (ie children will be off continuously between Saturday October 24 and Sunday November 1). For whatever reason, certain boroughs (including mine) inflict a double half-term upon their students, in which case your holiday will run Monday October 19 to Friday October 30 (or in total Saturday October 17 to Sunday November 1). Here’s our roundup of all the best things to do with your children this October half-term.

October 2026: The frankly exceptional Impala in Soho has taken the top spot as our favourite new restaurant in London, but coming up close behind is Kid, which is just around the corner. Other new additions include Kismet in Borough Market, Cloudstreet in Stoke Newington, Bar Blondie in Queen's Park, Hon's BBQ in Hackney Wick and Kinz in Notting Hill. Hungry yet? Every week, a frankly silly amount of brilliant new restaurants, cafés and street food joints arrive in London. Which makes whittling down a shortlist of the best newbies a serious challenge. But here it is. The 20 very best new restaurants in the capital, ranked in order of greatness and deliciousness. All of them have opened over the past 12 months and been visited by our hungry critics. So go forth and take inspo from this list, which is updated regularly. Check in often to find out what we really rate on the London restaurant scene. And look here for all the info about the best new openings in October 2026. London's best new restaurants at a glance: 🥩 Central: Impala, Soho 🍷 North: Cloudstreet, Stoke Newington 🦐 South: The Victory, East Dulwich 🍝 East: Hon's BBQ, Hackney Wick 🥗 West: Maai by Nikita, Fulham Leonie Cooper is Time Out London’s Food and Drink Editor. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines. RECOMMENDED: The 50 best restaurants in London. The hottest new openings, the tastiest tips, the spiciest reviews: we’re serving it all on our London restaurants WhatsApp channel. Follow

London is more than two thousand years old. It’s a world-class hub for history, art, culture and politics. Frankly, it’s a bit overwhelming. What is the best way to explore a city that has so damn much on offer? Where do you begin in an area that’s 1,572 square kilometres? The answer: on foot.  This is where a guided walking to tour comes into it. Street tours. Museum tours. Food tours. There are literally hundreds to choose from in the capital. So this is where I step in, tour guide-esque, with some suggestions of my own, to help you understand all that history a little better.  A great tour guide will inspire and fascinate you – before you know it, you’ll enthusiastically be sharing the stories you heard with Linda on the checkouts at your local supermarket, or Iqbal at work. The ones included here are the well-worth doing and unsung tours that deserve your attention. Yes there’s your usual Changing of the Guard and Westminster Abbey tours, but there’s also some more offbeat ones which are frankly exceptional.  Why take my word for it? I’m a tour guide myself. I have since led all sorts of walks around London, from cemetery tours, queer history walks to pub outings. I regularly guide in places like The British Museum and National Gallery and after a decade in the industry, here are some of my choices for an unforgettable experience. Need more sightseeing inspiration?🛥️ Here are London’s best boat tours💂‍♂️ Check out our list of 101 things to do in London🛏 Or stay in one

Yes, trick-or-treating is a no brainer in terms of Halloween fun for kids. But there’s more to the second-most fun holiday of the year (after Christmas, of course) than trying to extract bucketfuls of sweets from your long-suffering neighbours.  Halloween typically coincides with the school half-term holidays (it does this year) and typically most major London attractions have a half term theme that will run for at least the length of the holidays, if not longer. meaning you and the family can really make the most of the city’s spooky, child-friendly events on either side of October 31. While our half-term list does include some of the bigger Halloween events, much of what’s on it has no bearing on the spooky season – this one, however, is strictly haunted events only. From pumpkin picking to scary movies, there are loads of wicked things to do on and around October 31 2026. Happy Halloween! RECOMMENDED: Our complete guide to Halloween in London for everyone.

For many people, musical theatre basically is theatre, and certainly there are a hell of a lot of musicals running in London at any given time, from decades-long classics like Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera to short-run fringe obscurities, plus all manner of new shows launched every year hoping for long-running glory. London's best musicals at a glance: Best of the oldies: Les Miserables, Sondheim Theatre. Best for families: Paddington the Musical, Savoy Theatre The next big thing: The Greatest Showman, Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Funniest musical: Operation Mincemeat, Fortune Theatre. Best for something different: Kimberly Akimbo, Hampstead Theatre. Here Time Out rounds up every West End musical currently running or coming soon, plus fringe and off-West End shows that we’ve reviewed – all presented in fabulous alphabetical order. SEE ALSO: How to get cheap and last-minute theatre tickets in London.

From Arts and Crafts and the pre-Raphaelites through to pop art and the YBAs, the UK has borne several of the planet’s most important visual movements. Fitting, therefore, that we’ve also got a world-leading roster of galleries. But these institutions don’t just show off British art: between them they boast a truly formidable collection of global art. You name a major artist – yep, any artist – it’s pretty much a dead cert that a UK gallery exhibits their work. Better yet, the UK’s finest art galleries are diverse in purpose and spread evenly across the land. You’ll find all sorts of exhibition spaces in major cities, sure, but there are also arty gems in smaller towns, alongside attractions ranging from blustery seaside enclaves in Scotland to dazzling sculpture gardens in Cornwall. To top it all off, plenty are free to visit.  When putting together Time Out’s guide to the best art galleries in the UK, we didn’t just take into account which places have the biggest names. We also wanted to spotlight the boldest programming and our favourite curators, as well as pick out galleries that feel like a spectacle. After all, art is even more special when you’re viewing it within another piece of art. Art-ception, if you like.  The vast majority of the list below features art galleries outside London (for the capital’s top art destinations, see this list). And if you’re looking for non-art attractions, you can find Time Out’s guide to the best museums in the UK here. RECOMMENDED: 📍

October 2026: The latest additions to this list come from across the city, with Romy Gill at The Pem showcasing her fine-dining regional flavours in a posh Westminster hotel, Tamila in Kings Cross (and now with another outpost in Soho) doing an all-day menu of south Indian smashers, Kokum laying on some seriously high-end cooking in East Dulwich and the imposing Oudh 1722 giving Borough a taste of double Michelin starred Brummie chef Aktar Islam.  London’s South Asian food scene is a mosaic of flavours showcasing the culinary traditions of everywhere from India and Pakistan to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Rather than one unified cuisine, it reflects the complex cultural tapestry that has evolved through centuries of migration, trade, and gastronomic exchange across the subcontinent. For the diaspora, food goes beyond sustenance; it’s an expression of identity, memory, and community.  London’s best Indian and South Asian restaurants at a glance: 🇱🇰 Best for Sri Lankan food: Rambutan, Borough Market 🍛 Best for a quick curry: Tamila, Kings Cross ⭐ Best for a Michelin star meal: Trishna, Marylebone 🍚 Best for a street-food snack: Shree Krishna Vada Pav, Fitzrovia 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Best for a family feast: Kokum, East Dulwich Rooted in philosophical teachings, including the mindful and balancing principles of Ayurveda, South Asian food in London emphasises reverence for natural ingredients and the simple joy of eating. From masala-rich Pakistani karahis and delicate vegetaria

October 2026: Sunday roast season has finally returned to London. A boozey, end-of-the-weekend lunch is what we're all about in this city, and as well as more unique takes on the roast from the likes of the Macbeth in Hoxton and Buster Mantis in Deptford, we're all about celebrating the classic meat-spuds-and-gravy variety of Sunday lunch. Enjoy masterful takes on the roast at The Golden Tooth on Green Lanes, The Duke Organic in Islington, and The Camberwell Arms in south London. And we're happy to announce the return of two of our favourite roasts; the all-vegan slap-up roast at LD's Kitchen, now at the Imperial Palace of Big Red in Camden, and Ling Ling's Chinese-inspired roast at Godet in Islington.  London’s best Sunday roasts at a glance: 🥩 Central: Quality Chop House, Clerkenwell 😇 North: The Golden Tooth, Newington Green ⛪ South: Old Nun’s Head, Nunhead 🌈 East: The Nelson’s, Hackney 🍻 West: The Mall Tavern, Notting Hill Sunday lunch. There’s nothing quite like it. An elemental meal, one that Londoners take incredibly seriously. Debates about what constitutes the ‘perfect’ Sunday roast have been known to last for hours. There is no shortage of top roasts and Sunday lunch options in London. We’ve rounded up the city’s best Sunday meals from a host of pubs, restaurants and breweries all around town. What makes a good roast? For us, it’s simple; a welcoming room is a good start, maybe in a pub with an open fire during the winter months. Then it comes to the plate –

An immersive theatre show in a Westfield is not, on the face of it, an obvious match. The fact that Absurd City creators Wake the Tiger – who have a sister venue in Bristol – insist on calling this new Shepherd’s Bush attraction an ‘amazement park’ does not make my heart sing. The adverts, featuring a wacky-looking pigeon, do little to inspire confidence that this is going to be significantly different to the sort of insta-fodder immersive experiences that have popped up all over the capital in recent years. As it turns out, Absurd City is really good. Maybe not Punchdrunk good. But as good as large-scale immersive work gets away from the masters. It boasts ravishing, highly detailed, creepy/funny design and a modest but engrossing plot that you can choose to engage with or not, (plus a cheeky anti-capitalist message that gains an added piquancy from the giant mall outside.) I’m not quite clear if I missed a little bit of intro or not, but there’s certainly very little ado as you ascend four sets of escalators and enter the Absurd City itself. What is the Absurd City  you ask? Well at first it does seem to be a succession of cool insta-friendly rooms. Crucially, they’re very cool insta-friendly rooms: we enter through a weird dilapidated plane; there’s a room shaped like a giant elongated phone box, where the ceiling is all phones; there’s a room full of rubber ducks; a sweetshop manned by a creepy mannequin made of sweets; a gigantic banana; that sort of thing. Part of the r

This review is from November 2018. Huddle returns to the Unicorn for 2026. Penguins, never exactly out of fashion, are particularly on-trend this season thanks to the emperor penguins who made global headlines after a BBC camera crew controversially rescued them from a gully.Huddle, from Filskit Theatre, doesn’t offer anything quite so nerve-wracking, but it’s certainly more good news for everyone’s favourite flightless birds. Against a deadpan animated backdrop of a larger colony, Joseph Barnes-Phillips’s Papa Penguin squawks and waddles and gets up to general penguin business. Of course, he looks like a dude in a penguin suit, and part of the charm of Huddle is how far the creative team have gone with this: Papa Penguin is a sort of semi-anthropomorphised creature, with a small clutch of physical possessions that he hoards on his rusty old sled, above which hangs a line he uses to hang fish on. It’s a slightly surreal but charming flourish.He also appears not to have a mate, but is nonetheless blessed with an egg that duly hatches into Victoria Dyson’s Penguin Chick. The rest of Katy Costigan and Sarah Shephard’s production is basically two adults making penguin noises at each other – and it’s just delightful, packed with nice little details like Dyson’s costume (by Maxwell Nicholson-Lailey), which sheds layers of grey fluff as she slowly advances towards adulthood. Some mild peril kicks in at the end, as Papa Penguin is forced to head out to sea to get more fish and the r

Last summer I was at an arts festival in Poland and so was Tilda Swinton, performing a show of her own devising called Embodying Pasolini. Performance art rather than theatre, it was definitely interesting, and very much in keeping with a post-fame live career that has seen her eschew conventional stage acting: in the ‘90s she famously slept in a glass box for a week at the Serpentine gallery, a signature piece she revived a couple of decades later in New York. Which is very cool and very Tilda Swinton but also kind of a shame because Swinton by all accounts tore up the stage in her twenties before settling on film as her medium. You don’t begrudge Derek Jarman for luring her away to the world of arthouse celluloid. But it would be nice if she still did normal plays! What’s shocking about Man to Man, the wholesale rival of the Swinton-starring 1987 version of German playwright Manfred Karge’s monologue, is that it is a normal play. Maybe not a conventional one. But as the curtain lifts to reveal Swinton leering away at us in whiteface, house coat, Y-fronts and a shock of punky blonde hair – a sort of incongruously elegant hybrid of Johnny Rotten and Rab C Nesbitt – there’s something reassuringly actorly about the sarf London growl she adopts, so far from her own fluting tones. Obviously we’re all here to see Tilda Swinton the icon. But this isn’t one of her arch performance projects, it’s a proper play, in which she loses herself in a proper character. It’s a show that predat

Describing the plays of James Graham as ‘history podcast theatre’ would be mean and inaccurate but also a bit true. To be clear, Graham has produced many wonderful works of drama. But even when he’s not at his absolute best dramatically you’ll still come out of one of his historical dramas having learned a lot. The Standard of Living isn’t quite Graham at his best dramatically, because where his finest works have tended to be hyper-fixated on small, manageable periods of history. Here he almost has too much to say about his subject: the great economist John Maynard Keynes. Photo: Manuel HarlanNatalia Osipova and the ensemble Did he want to write a drama about Keynes’ membership of the Bloomsbury Group and the tensions that crept in between the gay economist and his bohemian artist pals when he went to work for the government, and when he later dumbfounded them by bringing home a woman, the blunt Russian ballet star Lydia Lopokova (Natalia Osipova)?  Did he want to write a play about Keynes’ rivalry with the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston)? Here the two are depicted as genuinely fond of each other, but so aghast at the other’s economic visions that they can’t help but becomes enemies. Or is The Standard of Living about… the standard of living, and Keynes’ belief in not only spending out of a recession, but that an infusion of art – be that the Degas paintings he snaps up for a song at the beginning, or Arts Council England which he founds at the end – is

Although End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland isn’t even the first Haruki Murakami adaptation to play at the Barbican, I nonetheless maintain that his works are unadaptable. By that I mean that it’s almost impossible to replicate Murakami’s tone, wherein his protagonists – typically deadpan thirtysomething male loners from Tokyo –  live boring lives that are encroached upon by baffling metaphysical forces. It’s magical realism, but it’s magical realism where beautifully precise descriptions of the protagonist making lunch are as important as the strange alternate worlds they find themselves entering. Put it on stage, and it’s inevitable that the magic overrides the mundane. French director-choreographer Philippe Decouflé heads an otherwise Japanese adaption of 1985 classic Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (I have literally no idea why the name has been swapped around) that does an impressive job of conjuring the twin, cryptically interlinked strands of the novel. The End of the World is a mysterious walled town – revisited by Murakami in his recent The City and Its Uncertain Walls – populated by herds of unicorns and people without shadows. We witness it through the eyes of regular guy Boku (Kiita Komagine), who has his shadow (Shuntaro Miyao) severed by the town’s Gatekeeper (Shinya Matsuda). Decouflé deploys dreamy projected backdrops and stilt-augmented dancers to play the unicorns. They look great, and both director and adapting writer Ako Takahashi

We all love a plot twist but New York theatremaker Andy Sandberg’s play Affluenza feels like a cautionary story about what happens when you twist too hard. Well actually maybe ‘plot twist’ isn’t right: it’s more that writer-director Sandberg is obsessed with the idea of bamboozling us, with each new scene in his play determinedly defying expectations and eliciting a bigger WTF than the last. This isn’t inherently a good thing. Especially if your expectation was that you were going to see Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp in the lead role of Dylan, an American teenager who kills two people in a drink driving incident and whose parents agree to the outlandish defence that he was simply too cocooned by privileged to understand the gravity of his actions. And to be fair Schnapp does play Dylan, who is based on real-life Texan teen Ethan Couch. But it’s a supporting role – in the first scene he wanders briefly through his parents’ posh living room while they talk to the very expensive New York lawyer they’ve flown out. Then there’s one set in his bedroom. And that’s kind of it for this version of Dylan. It’s odd: you have to think that having a not-too–big role may have been what tempted Schnapp into making his stage debut. But he’s perfectly good here and could clearly have handled more. Affluenza then abruptly leaps ahead to after the trial, where Dylan successfully escaped with a slap on the wrist. It certainly subverts our expectation of a courtroom drama with a juicy role for

This review is from 2024. In 2026 A Christmas Carol returns to the Old Vic for its tenth and presumably final year, as its director Matthew Warchus’ very final piece of prgramming at the theatre. Giles Terera will play Scrooge. Although it’s the second most influential Christmas story of all time, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a tale that’s disseminated by adaptations rather than because everyone still religiously reads the 1843 novella. And for eight Christmases in a row – including 2020! – the main form of dissemination for Londoners has been the Old Vic’s stage version, which packs ‘em into the huge theatre for two months every year. I haven’t been since it debuted in 2017, when Rhys Ifans played supernaturally reformed miser Ebeneezer Scrooge. Back then, Matthew Warchus’s production of Jack Thorne’s adaptation was simply a stage version, of a story endlessly retold each year. Now it is essentially the version, not because nobody else does it (in 2022 I counted 11 adaptations), but because of the unparalleled scale of its success: it’s certainly the most successful stage adaptation of this century, and quite possibly ever. Eight Christmases on and it’s charming, but groans under the weight of its own success. What really struck me on second viewing was the conflict between Thorne’s smartly empathetic text and Warchus’s ecstatically OTT Christmasgasm of a production. Making a few judicious departures from Dickens, Thorne seeks to humanise Scrooge, get to the heart

The big question with adapting The Hunger Games for the stage is that is it not totally nuts to adapt The Hunger Games for the stage? A substantial proportion of Suzanne Collins’s smash 2008 YA novel is set during the titular Games, which are a sort of gladiatorial reality TV contest in which heavily armed teens murder each other until there’s only one left,  Historically this sort of thing is not theatre’s strength. A cheeky duel, absolutely. But a half-hour plus nonstop combat sequence featuring 24 fighters and multiple sub-locations is… tricky. And to their credit, director Matthew Dunster and a top-notch creative team do a pretty damn good job of finding a way forward, deploying aerial work, pyro, video screens, some tightly drilled choreography, the odd song and a highly mobile, rapidly changing set from Miriam Buether to create a sequence that’s coherent and gripping, even if it’s hard to really hand on heart say this is as effective a representation as in the beloved Jennifer Lawrence film (as much as anything, without close ups it’s tricky to follow who all the minor characters are). But it’s solid, and I found it hard not to admire the quixotic but skilled attempt to translate something so action-packed to the stage. A hybrid of The Running Man and The Devil Wears Prada Dunster is not a subtle director, and in many ways that suits Collins’s novel. He picks out the themes of class oppression between the gaudy dandies of the Capitol and dirt poor folk of District 12 –

This review is from summer 2026; Death Note: The Musical returns spring 2027. Death Note: The Musical is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's classic mid-’00s Death Note manga, which concerns Light Yagami, a Tokyo high school student who (via a capricious death spirit) comes into possession of a book that kills anyone whose name is written in it. Frank Wildhorn, Jack Murphy and Ivan Menchell's adaptation is largely drawn from the first half of the series and simplifies the story in various ways. But it’s doesn't take any major liberties, other than the fact they’re all singing now. This is potentially good news for fans of the series, of which there are clearly a lot: I caught the show the Monday after press night and it was rammed, with a noticeably large number of boy tweens in attendance (the age advice is 12-plus and I’m not sure I’d let my boy tweens watch it but let he who casts the first stone etc). If you’re not a pre-existing fan of the series you may well – like me! – spend the whole time with your jaw on the ground wondering why the hell this is all happening and why the characters are all like this.  It was always going to be an unconventional musical, but the retention of the bizarre, generally sociopathic, undoubtedly manga-accurate behaviour of almost every major character feels like a missed opportunity to do something more interesting and tragic with this story. I would have liked more liberties, please. A gleefully

This review is from 2017. See official website for the current cast. Okay, let’s just get this out of the way. ‘Hamilton’ is stupendously good. Yes, it’s kind of a drag that there’s so much hype around it. But there was a lot of hype around penicillin. And that worked out pretty well. If anything – and I’m truly sorry to say this – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the US Treasury, is actually better than the hype suggests. That’s because lost in some of the more waffly discourse around its diverse casting and sociological import is the fact that ‘Hamilton’ is, first and foremost, a ferociously enjoyable show. You probably already know that it’s a hip hop musical, something that’s been tried before with limited success. Here it works brilliantly, because Miranda – who wrote everything – understands what mainstream audiences like about hip hop, what mainstream audiences like about musical theatre, and how to craft a brilliant hybrid. Put simply, it’s big emotions and big melodies from the former, and thrilling, funny, technically virtuosic storytelling from the latter. ‘Alexander Hamilton’, the opening tune, exemplifies everything that’s great about the show. It’s got a relentlessly catchy build and momentum, a crackling, edge-of-seat sense of drama, and is absolutely chockablock with information, as the key players stride on to bring us up to speed with the eventful life that Hamilton – the ‘bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Sc

This review is from 2019. I would seriously question whether any other show on the planet bar ‘Les Misérables’ could get away with junking its original production and carrying on as if nothing had changed. But ‘Les Mis’ could be transposed to space, or underwater, or to the height of the Hittite empire and it would basically be the same show as long as the singing was on point. In case you missed it: the world’s longest-running musical that’s still playing shut for six months recently while the Sondheim Theatre (née Queen’s Theatre) was renovated by proprietor and producer Cameron Mackintosh. It has returned, not in the original Trevor Nunn RSC production, but a new(ish) one from Laurence Connor and James Powell that has already been rolled out around the globe, with London the last bastion of the ‘classic’ ‘Les Mis’. The ditching of the original has caused disgruntlement in certain quarters: hardcore stans distraught that the exact show they grew up with no longer strictly exists; and the original creative team, notably director Nunn, who understandably feel a little betrayed by the whole affair. All I can say is: yup, I really dug the old revolving stage too, but its loss is bearable. The songs are the same, the score is the same (accepting that it was tweaked to make it a bit less ’80s a few years back), the costumes are the same, many of the current cast are veterans of the original production, and the text is still Nunn and John Caird’s adaptation of Claude-Michel Schön

This review is from 2024; the cast has now largely changed apart from Matt Henry. As of October 20 2026, Teri Hatcher will be taking over the role of Miranda, with Stevie Doc as Andy and Taila Halford as Emily. Some people are reflexively cynical about musicals adapted from movies, suggesting they’re cynical cash grabs that take money and attention away from original ideas. But they deserve a fair hearing. For starters, it’s hard and expensive to make any musical, and few make serious money – nobody does it because it’s low hanging fruit. Moreover, live musical theatre is a very different medium to film, and at best the appeal of screen to stage lies in seeing a story that was great in one medium be great in another, for different reasons. It’s about familiarity, but it’s also about discovery, reinvention, about leading an audience onto something new by way of something they already like. Heck, Stephen Sondheim’s final musical is technically a movie adaptation, and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for you, peasant, The Devil Wears Prada had me flummoxed, though. It is, of course, an adaptation of the 2006 millennial classic about a mousy young journalism graduate who blunders into the job of PA to a tyrannical, Anna Wintour-alike fashion editor (the film was itself an adaptation of Vogue-alumnus Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel). The songs are by none other than Elton John, with lyrics by Shania Taub and Mark Sonnenblick. The director-choreographer is Broadway v

★★★★ After a recent spate of pretty weird London Chekhovs - see Jamie Lloyd and Thomas Ostermeier’s Seagulls and the Donmar’s very eccentric Cherry Orchard - here’s reliable old master of naturalism Ian Rickson with a typically elegant take on the latter play. Although that’s not to say this Cherry Orchard is a bog standard linen-suits-and-samovars job. Far from it.  Adapting playwright Conor McPherson cranks up both the bitter and the sweet as he massages the plot and dialogue for some big laughs - see Karl Johnson’s delightfully OTT old codger servant Firs, who is mad as a hatter and swears like a trooper. More importantly, there an absolutely storming performance – dare I say career best – from the perennially underestimated Stephen Mangan as Yermolai Lopakhin. A self-made man of humble origins, his relationship with the lofty but impoverished household of Lyubov Ranevska (Kristin Scott Thomas) is the complicated heart of play.  Mangan’s Lopakin starts off as the usual fish out of water, condescended to by Ranevska and her pompous brother Goev (Peter Wight) when he presents them with a pragmatic plan to monetise their indebted estate. But where the character tends to properly lose patience with them in most interpretations, that’s not really the case here. Yes, he gets frustrated at their refusal to admit they must change or lose their home. But he remains genuinely awed by them, almost a sort of stan. When he throws in his hat to try and buy the estate it’s a curiously vu

Bent coppers, beware! Line of Duty series seven is due in the new year and around the same time you’ll be able to try your own hand at foiling police corruption and trying to remember who H was supposed to be. Line of Duty: Operation Echo is a new immersive experience landing on the streets of London.  Although the likelihood of a shockingly abrupt death is presumably lower than in the Jed Mercurio-helmed TV show (to be clear we’re expecting the odds of this to be zero) it does sound all very thrilling. You and your team of two-to-eight players are sent to roam the streets of central London in a four-to-five kilometre, two-to-three hour adventure that will see you ping between locations where you’ll ‘uncover clues, solve escape room-style puzzles, decipher riddles and wrestle with moral dilemmas’ as you look into another explosive case of perfidious police corruption. It’s the latest from CityDays, who offered similar puzzle-solving based city experiences for the likes of The Traitors and Race Across the World. The immersive show is not written by Mercurio and it’s unclear if it will have any bearing on series seven, which should be screening around the time Operation Echo launches. We’d guess it won’t, but it’s officially enforced and the odds are at least one of the core cast members might have pre-recorded a bit of dialogue. Though if Adrian Hilton isn’t on hand to do a load of fruity swearing: you’re very welcome to do it yourself. Line of Duty: Operation Echo launches ea

Founded in 1760, Hamleys isn’t just the oldest toyshop in London: it’s the oldest and most influential toyshop in the world. (It’s older than the United States of America). And that means the world pays attention when it announces its annual Festive 15 – a roundup of the toys that its in-house experts believe will be massive this present-buying season, based on a mix of toy fair trends, in store trends, educated guesswork and (let’s not pretend otherwise) a little pushing of its own in-house lines. There is no formal number one, but some themes have definitely emerged, the two biggest being Squishies and Doom. Photo: HamleysBig Squij range Although technically only a single toy line, Squishies (RRP £10) comprises a multitude of ultra-soft, low-cost stress relief toys and has proved to a runaway success – although Hamleys don’t choose a number one, they appear to pretty much be being pitched as the unofficial toy of the year. Taking in everything from a duck to a dumpling and with new additions added to the range every month until Christmas, Squishies are both on trend and extremely affordable, and are at least nominally good for stress levels.  The other big trend: Doom. That is to say, Doctor Doom. The iconic metal masked villain is joining the MCU this Christmas as the antagonist of Avengers: Doomsday and there are two items in the Festive 15 devoted to him: an impressive Lego bust (£45), and a cool light up action figure (£30) that’s being marketed as both a toy for kid

Although the idea of Quentin Tarantino – the film nerd’s film nerd – writing and directing a stage play initially seemed like a sort of mad joke, The Popinjay Cavalier (for so ’tis named) really is happening. Indeed, it’s happening soon: previews begin in February for the West End comedy, which will move into the Phoenix Theatre soon after Stranger Things: First Shadow clears out.  And in even bigger news the star has officially been announced as Sacha Baron Cohen, in his professional stage debut: the news had leaked a month or so ago but it’s still pretty huge. Although details of the plot haven’t gotten significantly clearer since the last update we would assume that Cohen will be playing the title role. There is also some clearer suggestion as to why Tarantino wanted to tell this story. We’re told the 1830s-set The Popinjay Cavalier ‘is inspired by the classic swashbuckler genre of old Hollywood, including the writings of George Bruce, Ernst Vajda and Jesse Lasky Jr’. While you have to think that his apparent mental block around directing a new movie (because he said his 10th film would be his last) may have stopped him doing this on screen, in 2026 it does feel like an idea that might work on stage than as a silent movie. Like Tarantino, Cohen is nominally an outsider to the theatre industry, although he acted at university and studied clowning in Paris under the legendary Philippe Gaulier, plus of course much of his screen work is based upon live interactions with unsusp

In 2004, Trey Parker and Matt Stone inflicted a brutal drive-by on the original production of Rent via their song ‘Everyone Has Aids’, a merciless parody of Jonathan Larsson’s socially conscious rock opera. Clearly it didn’t bury the musical – it would run for another four years on Broadway – but you do have to think it signalled that the original, tragic but wholesome Rent had become so successful that you couldn’t stage it the same way a second time.  Step forward Luke Sheppard, director of its first West End revival. He’s probably the most successful commercial British musical theatre director of the moment thanks to his big, bright, lightly ironic smashes & Juliet, Starlight Express and the all-conquering Paddington. But he does have another mode that he demonstrated in the Live Aid musical Just for One Day – an overtly stylised sexy waifs-and-strays aesthetic, where a nominally naff period of history is given a post-gender makeover that makes it look a bit like an FKA Twigs video.  And now it has a spiritual successor in his revival of Rent. The concert-like production is based around an ensemble of hot androgynes and self-consciously beautiful misfits, dressed like a more-stylish-than-it-sounds collision of Dickensian urchinwear and early Pearl Jam chic. Sheppard has put a large amount of additional audience seating on the stage, which hems the action into a small performance space with minimal sets. The score has been tweaked: guitars sound gnarlier than on the very ‘9

The glut of big celebrity openings in September has left October a shade quieter than usual. It’s still one of the year’s busiest months however, and there’s still some pretty enormous plays: most notably Keira Knightley’s first stage role in over 15 years, in the latest from Britain’s hippest director. Elsewhere we have two members of the Stranger Things cast making their UK stage debuts in two very different shows, and a month that runs the gamut from the first ever UK production of (oh yes) High School Musical, to a massive-scale Japanese language adaptation of one of Haruki Murakami’s most out-there early novels.  The best new London theatre shows in October 2026 Photo: Sonia Friedman ProductionsStephen Dillane, Keira Knightley and Luke Thompson 1. The Lives of Others We should always be excited when Brit auteur Robert Icke returns to the stage to direct a play and what a treat it is that we get two this year. Following on from March’s boldly conceptual take on Romeo & Juliet, The Lives of Others is his first stage adaptation of an arthouse film – something the European directors he’s influenced by are massively into, but has never really caught on in the same way in British auteur circles. The Lives of Others is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning 2006 German film about a Stasi agent and the relationship he develops with the couple he spies upon. You can always trust Icke to get a superlative cast, and the big draw here is Keira Knightley in her first stag

The last time Rowan Atkinson starred in the West End as a comedian – as opposed to an actor – was way back in 1986. The New Revue, a series of sketches he made in collaboration with his pals Ben Elton and composer Howard Goodall, followed up 1981’s Rowan in Revue, the Olivier-winning show he’d made with Goodall and Richard Curtis A hell of a lot has changed since then. Seminal ’80s comedy Blackadder turbocharged the careers of all four men, paving the way for the even greater success of projects like Mr Bean and Love Actually.  But now the gang are getting back together as Atkinson limbers up to return to the stage for what you have to imagine might be one last time, given the fact he’s 71 and playing Mr Bean looks absolutely knackering. For play Mr Bean he will in Rowan Live, Atkinson’s first live show in 40 years. It will tap into his blockbuster screen success to bring Mr Bean and Blackadder to the live stage for the first time (bar a couple of short charity one-offs).  Photo: Playful ProductionsRowan Atkinson Exactly what we’re getting isn’t 100 percent clear, but it seems likely that Blackadder and Bean will be classic material, alongside some of Atkinson’s most iconic skits from Not the Nine O’Clock News. But there will also be new material written with Curtis, Elton and Goodall, in a show directed by Raz Shaw. The Gillian Lynne Theatre is a large theatre and a month of shows there is the equivalent of playing The O2 a few times over. You also have to figure that if i

First things first: although the Natural History Museum has pledged to open a new room a year inside its building for the next five years, this luxury family hotel suite isn’t one of them. It is in fact at the Park Plaza London Riverbank, a glossy four-star international hotel in Vauxhall that commands astonishing views of the Thames and Houses of Parliament. If you want to stay overnight at the NHM you can in fact do that via its beloved Dino Snores programme. But don’t go expecting anything this fancy. As you would hope from the name, the Riverbank’s new Natural History Museum Dinosaur Family Suite has been made in collaboration with the NHM, and has indeed been billed as the ‘lost study’ of Sir Richard Owen, the Museum’s founder. Obviously that bit’s made up (Owen died in 1892; the hotel only opened in 2005) but this isn’t tacky lip service to the museum, but rather about as premium a commercial kids’ experience as you’re going to get in London. The suite has been beautifully decorated, with the adult bedroom sporting everything from dino printed walls to a book-lined ‘study’. It’s stuffed with family-friendly boardgames and there are pull-out drawers with displays of semi-precious stones and plastic pinned butterflies in them. (It also, by-the-by, comes with an absolutely insane view of the Thames). Photo: Will Ireland/PinPepThe main bedroom The real jewel in the crown is the kids’ room, which is hidden behind a bookshelf: maybe not the most concealed entrance of all t

★★★★★ I don’t think @sohoplace is the perfect venue. Nowhere with that name could be. But I do think it is the perfect venue for a production of Edward Albee’s 1962 masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Certainly it goes without saying that any play starring Gillian Anderson could run in a much bigger theatre. But Marianne Elliott’s in-the-round production is so intimate – not to mention intense – that after a while the thrill of Anderson and her co-star Billy Crudup being a couple of metres away is replaced by a sort of horror, a sense that we are not simply watching events from a distance, but are physically in the room for the madness. It’s also a nice USP for a revival of an all-time classic that has a pretty much definitive film version and also gets a West End revival something like once a decade (Imelda Staunton did it in 2017; Kathleen Turner in 2006). Photo: Johan PerssonThe cast Miriam Buether’s living room set is both an impressively tasteful collection of high-end mid-twentieth century ergonomic design and somewhat ominous, its unnaturally circular shape giving it a claustrophobic retro futuristic spaceship feel, its distant doorway the airlock  The living room belongs to George (Crudup) and Martha (Anderson), a history professor at a mid-tier American university, and his wife, who is the daughter of the college’s president. Alone together in the opening scene, they bicker and snipe. But that’s nothing compared to the hell they unleash when George’s new y

Aussie film star Elizabeth Debicki is no stranger to the British stage, having starred in the National Theatre’s Red Barn a decade ago, and opposite Ewan McGregor in the West End’s My Master Builder last year. She’s never appeared in any Shakespeare at a professional level before, but that will all change next year when she forms the starring attraction in the RSC’s 2027 Stratford-upon-Avon summer season by appearing as the company’s first ever female Richard II (Apr 10-May 22 2027). If she can carry off the verse, it promises to be a smart piece of casting: Richard is often portrayed as a fey, otherworldly figure – casting a six foot two woman in the role will only accentuate this. Daniel Raggett will direct the production in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Before that in the RST will be director Elizabeth Freestone’s modern take on Coriolanus (Feb 6-Mar 20 2027), considering Shakespeare’s drama about a disaffected Roman general through the lens of resource scarcity and contemporary populist politics. Damian Maloney will star as Coriolanus. Later on in the summer, the RST will play host to the beloved Romeo & Juliet (Jul 6-Aug 28 2027), in a production we don’t know a huge amount more about yet, but will be directed by Joanna Bowman. Photograph: ShutterstockRoyal Shakespeare Company (RSC) venue in Stratford-upon-Avon, England If it’s an all-Shakespeare line-up in the RST, the smaller Swan Theatre is a little less predictable next year. Its 2027 will kick off with Born with

★★★ Describing the plays of James Graham as ‘history podcast theatre’ would be mean and inaccurate but also a bit true. To be clear, Graham has produced many wonderful works of drama. But even when he’s not at his absolute best dramatically you’ll still come out of one of his historical dramas having learned a lot. The Standard of Living isn’t quite Graham at his best dramatically, because where his finest works have tended to be hyper-fixated on small, manageable periods of history. Here he almost has too much to say about his subject: the great economist John Maynard Keynes. Photo: Manuel HarlanNatalia Osipova and the ensemble Did he want to write a drama about Keynes’ membership of the Bloomsbury Group and the tensions that crept in between the gay economist and his bohemian artist pals when he went to work for the government, and when he later dumbfounded them by bringing home a woman, the blunt Russian ballet star Lydia Lopokova (Natalia Osipova)?  Did he want to write a play about Keynes’ rivalry with the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (Laurie Kynaston)? Here the two are depicted as genuinely fond of each other, but so aghast at the other’s economic visions that they can’t help but becomes enemies. Or is The Standard of Living about… the standard of living, and Keynes’ belief in not only spending out of a recession, but that an infusion of art – be that the Degas paintings he snaps up for a song at the beginning, or Arts Council England which he founds at the end

★★★ Don’t get me wrong: there’s always room for a bit of Noël Coward. The man knew how to craft a quip, and it can be easy to forget that the dandy playwright’s depictions of infidelity and drug abuse were radical in their day. Private Lives is an all-time banger. You are a bad person if you don’t like Brief Encounter. But this revival of 1924’s Hay Fever feels like almost every detail of it could have been copied from a production a century ago, from Frankie Bradshaw’s drawing room set to the cast’s RP-tastic performances as dysfunctional poshos the Bliss family. Weren’t the Angry Young Men supposed to have put a stop to this sort of thing?  Well, no of course not: people aren’t going to a revival of a classic Coward comedy starring Richard E Grant to see an urgent state-of-the-nation address. It’s glossy comfort theatre. Photo: Marc BrennerRichard E Grant (David Bliss) But this frothy number about the eccentric game-playing of the bonkers Blisses has obviously aged. In 1924 it was an outrageous contemporary satire. In 2026 it’s a nostalgic period piece. And director Emily Burns seems to want to keep it that way.  And you know what: it’s very nearly good enough to style it all out on casting alone. Guesting American Christine Baranski brings a pleasingly doleful turn to reluctantly retired actress matriarch Judith Bliss, who must play hostess (of sorts) when each of the four Bliss family members invites a guest to stay without telling anybody else. Charles Edwards is beaut