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Beauty and the Beast National Theatre, London SE1 Katie Mitchell takes Beauty and the Beast and sprinkles a little fairy dust on it to give it a new look. Here, [...]

Jack and the Beanstalk Hackney Empire, London E8 Clive Rowe's lung power in a musical number can drive you back in your seat. It is matched by his overall energy, [...]

Season's Greetings National Theatre, London SE1 Alan Ayckbourn is as acute a chronicler of domestic misery as, say, Strindberg. The principal difference is that Strindberg never wrote of a libidinous [...]

THEATRE Once Bitten Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond One of the busiest members of Sam Walters' company in this production is Sophie Acreman. She is not an actor, and is not [...]

Beauty and the Beast National Theatre, London SE1 Katie Mitchell comes up with another winning show for Christmas, taking the well-known story of Beauty and the Beast and sprinkling a [...]

Matilda Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon Roald Dahl's children's book, now given a musical stage adaptation by the RSC, rightly extols the joy and value of knowledge for its own sake. This makes [...]

THEATRE A Flea in her Ear The Old Vic, London The Hotel Coq d'Or possesses the two elements crucial to classic farce: plenty of doors and almost as many . [...]

THEATRE The Animals and Children Took to the Streets BAC, London One of the joys of 2007's Edinburgh Fringe was a show entitled Between The Devil And The Deep Blue [...]

Once Bitten Orange Tree, Richmond Sam Walters directs an early French farce by Alfred Hennequin and Alfred Delacour for Christmas. David Antrobus plays a lawyer trying to do the right [...]

THEATRE Jack and the Beanstalk Hackney Empire, London When Clive Rowe sings Nilsson's 'Without You', you're grateful for the advance notice the song gives you. Its muted, reflective beginning gives [...]

King Lear Donmar Warehouse London WC2 A tempting proposition: Derek Jacobi, who was a great Hamlet, now takes on the other Everest of Shakespearean roles - the aged, scared, cantankerous [...]

THEATRE Arcola Theatre, London Gandhi and Coconuts Arcola Theatre, London 'It's very vile,' remarked my companion in the interval of The Cradle Will Rock . After a shocked second I [...]

THEATRE Kin Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London Sometimes it is hard to avoid feeling ancient at the Royal Court. Polly Stenham's tales of neglected mid-teens began the trend, then earlier this [...]

Jack and the Beanstalk Hackney Empire, London E8 Hackney's pantomimes have acquired a deserved reputation as the most fun in London. They don't go in for star casting in mainstream [...]

THEATRE Trafalgar Studio 1, London If you know enough already about Judy Garland to take the decision to go and see End Of The Rainbow , it will tell you [...]

THEATRE Almeida Theatre, London In all sorts of fields, from religion to interior decor, there is a particular kind of sparseness that is paradoxically ostentatious in its asceticism. So also [...]

The Invisible Man Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1 Ian Talbot directs the Menier's Christmas offering this year: a revival of Ken Hill's splendidly spine-tingling stage version of the HG Wells [...]

The Rivals Haymarket, London SW1 It was a nice idea to open the refurbished Theatre Royal in Bath with Peter Hall's production in September. Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play is set [...]

National Theatre(Olivier), London Fela! contains more than two dozen musical numbers in just over two and a half hours. This takes some doing, since the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's songs were [...]

THEATRE Gate Theatre, London 'Darkly comic' has become one of the self-defeating cliches of theatrical blurbs, like 'Lecoq-trained'. When applied to Tom Basden's modern Kafka adaptation, however, it is for [...]

Alessandro Baricco's play receives its UK stage premiere as part of the Donmar Warehouse's season showcasing its resident assistant directors in Trafalgar's smaller studio. Roisin McBrinn and solo actor Mark [...]

THEATRE Lyric Hammersmith, London I have seen Sarah Kane's play performed in German, performed by a cast of disabled actors and even performed in a room in the very Leeds [...]

Novecento Trafalgar Studios London SW1 The Donmar Trafalgar season got off to a cracking start with Beau Willimon's Lower Ninth . Next up is Roisin McBrinn's staging of a monologue [...]

Barbican, London EC2 In strong contrast to Complicite's A Disappearing Number , which also recently returned to London, Simon McBurney's second co-production with the Setagaya Public Theatre of Tokyo concentrates [...]

Garrick Theatre, London Something about J B Priestley's 1938 play seems conducive to de luxe comedy casting. Like its last West End outing in the mid-1990s, this revival boasts more [...]

THEATRE Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London SW1 In vino veritas is a dramatic staple. Some time after the halfway point of a play, one or more characters will usually [...]

THEATRE La Soiree South Bank Big Top, London La Soiree is, you might say, the continuation of La Clique by other means . . . although it might be truer [...]

THEATRE Barbican Theatre, London Silence and stillness can have very different effects onstage than on-screen; in a live context they seem more aberrant, even confrontational. Pier Paolo Pasolini cut to [...]

THEATRE Apollo Theatre, London Clifford Odets' 1950 play seems to encourage connections and revisitations. The stars of its 1954 film version, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, reunited for High Society [...]

The Dublin Theatre Festival continues to cast its net ever more widely and richly. This year's programme has brought to Ireland the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed's trilogy of one-on-one pieces [...]

THEATRE Hamlet National Theatre (Olivier), London Rory Kinnear has for a little while now been known to theatre aficionados as the finest actor of his generation. All that was needed [...]

THEATRE Caryl Churchill, an adventurer in dramatic content and form, was always more likely than most 'high-culture' writers to pick up on tropes that have long been commonplace in the [...]

THEATRE Hampstead Theatre, London If Edward Hall were to satisfy all critical observers with his first production at the Hampstead helm following Anthony Clark's troubled tenure there, even a new [...]

THEATRE Chichester Festival Theatre There is probably not a British actor currently working who straddles 'straight' and musical theatre as successfully and comprehensively as Janie Dee. Here at Chichester she [...]

Or You Could Kiss Me National Theatre, London SE1 Handspring Puppet Company was last at the National creating the beautiful equine puppets that are such a central component of War [...]

THEATRE Fraulein Julie Schaubuhne, Berlin Kristin, the scorned and lovelorn cook, gets almost as raw a deal from playwright August Strindberg as from Jean the valet and Miss Julie. Even [...]

THEATRE Hamlet Crucible Theatre, Sheffield A year or so after the last big Battle of the Hamlets, which saw Jude Law pitted against David Tennant in their respective portrayals of [...]

THEATRE National Theatre (Lyttelton), London When The Tricycle's mammoth programme The Great Game: Afghanistan returned this summer (prior to an American tour that has just begun in Washington) it was [...]

THEATRE Minerva Studio, Chichester I'll bet Ayn Rand loved The Master Builder . Its young, fiery, self-willed female antagonist Hilde Wangel suddenly reappears in master builder Solness's life 10 years [...]

THEATRE The Rivals Theatre Royal, Bath A wash and a lick of paint ([pounds sterling]3.65m-worth thereof) have done the Theatre Royal in Bath no end of good and, to judge [...]

THEATRE Bedlam Shakespeare's Globe, London The first play written by a woman to be staged at the Globe in either its modern or original incarnations is about the big picture [...]

Arcola, London There is no inherent reason for much theatre to be staged more or less end-on to the audience but, by the same token, there is often not quite [...]

THEATRE Noel Coward Theatre, London The Mousetrap has never been made into a film; consequently, even after half a century, it still makes sense to ask the audience not to [...]

EARLY MUSIC De Jerusalem a Cordoue Theatre de L'Ile Saint-Louis Paul Rey, Paris THEATRE The Thunderbolt Orange Tree, Richmond THEATRE Tiny Kushner Tricycle Theatre, London The title is not just [...]

In the frenzy of the Edinburgh Fringe you can encounter a whole range of theatrical moods and genres, and even a variety of ideas about what constitutes theatre and how [...]

THEATRE Edinburgh Playhouse We live in a debased age, when melisma is a pointless vocal exercise in every other pop or R'n'B song, when stage musicals not only pre-plan their [...]

Fringe solo shows Various venues Since there are some 2,500 shows on at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, it may seem plain wrong to refer to the cost of bringing a [...]

THEATRE The Sun Also Rises Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh If there really were no second acts in American lives, as F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed, we would have been out of [...]

Regular visitors to the Edinburgh Fringe sometimes feel the impression of the one-trickiness of certain ponies. Cork-born Enda Walsh, for instance, is a terrific playwright, but for a few years [...]

EDINBURGH FRINGE Udderbelly's Pasture, Edinburgh Music theatre has in recent years established a major presence on the Edinburgh Fringe (although this year its dedicated venue in George Square has vanished). [...]