Andrzej Lukowski

The West End has a reputation for being expensive, and the best shows can look like they’re sold out. But have no fear: there are cheap theatre tickets to almost every show in London, that can be purchased at the last minute… if you know how to get them. Here are our tips on where to find them, how to get cheap London theatre tickets, and the best ways to get last minute tickets to sold out London theatre shows. If you’re planning a visit to London and want to combine a show with a hotel stay, check out the best hotels in the West End.

Roll up, roll up: the Edinburgh festival is back. The 75th annual Fringe is bringing 49,827 performers and 3,171 shows to more than 250 venues in the Scottish capital, where theatre, comedy, art, music and dance will fill every nook and cranny. There’s big-hitters, like Ian McKellen starring as Hamlet and Alan Cumming’s one-man show exploring the life of Robert Burns. There’s up-and-coming comedy stars, like Rosie Holt and Leo Reich. There’s theatrical walking tours, international showcases, and so many street performers you really won’t know where to look. With so much to choose from, what’s actually worth your time? The Time Out team have been out and about reviewing shows across the Edinburgh Fringe and Edinburgh International Festival – get stuck in, have a read, and add a few more shows to your ‘must-see’ list. We’ll be updating this page with more reviews throughout August.  RECOMMENDED:  Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe10 of the best comedy shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 202211 of the best jokes and one-liners ever told at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Touch wood, but there's every reason to think that 2022 will be the first year since 2019 that London’s theatres won’t have been forced to close en masse as a result of the global pandemic. We’re not out of the woods yet, but theatre survived 2020 and 2021 and it’s not going away any time soon. So with just the tiniest note of caution, let’s get excited for London theatre in 2022, as the plays, musicals and other good stuff we’re used to by-and-large return to how they were. These choices aren’t the be-all and end-all of great theatre in 2022, but they are, as a rule, the biggest and splashiest shows of the year, the big highlights in the year’s theatre diary – the shows worth booking for, pronto. Want to see if these shows live up to the hype? Check out our theatre reviews.

The ’80s – and, by extension, ’80s songs – can sometimes be viewed as if they were all some big, fabulous kitsch experiment, in which everybody dressed up ridiculously – big hair, scrunchies, power shoulders – and all music was cartoonishly OTT, be that the daft excesses of hair metal, the stygian gloom of goth, or the bouncy good cheer of synthpop.  Let’s be honest: all those things did in fact happen, and for the most part they were great. They form a big part of the joy of listening back to the decade that had a booming nostalgia industry attached practically the moment it ended. But the ’80s was about so much more than the sum of its eccentricities: there's a huge difference between ‘an ’80s song’ and ‘a song from the ’80s.’ This is the decade that gave us peak Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson, that launched Public Enemy and NWA upon the world. New Wave stalwarts like Talking Heads and Devo found new grooves while transcendent artists like Marvin Gaye and Paul Simon offered up some of the best work of their careers. Electronic innovators like New Order rewrote the rules of music. And as the decade wore on, rap’s early ripples turned into a tsunami that changed the face of pop music forever. In compiling this list of the very best of the decade, there was a lot to consider: lasting impact, cultural relevance, actual musicianship, catchiness, coolness and, of course, nostalgia. But mostly, we curated with maximum enjoyment in mind while limiting the list to one song per

Breakups songs don’t fit one simple pattern, because breakups don’t fit one simple pattern. Okay, maybe they fit three or four simple patterns, but we’re talking some pretty radical extremes of feeling: are you happy, are you sad? Did you dump or were you dumped? Do you want them back or do you never want to see them again?  Breakup anthems are complicated things that run the full gamut of emotion. Sadness and grief are certainly the classic ones. But some are righteous cries of joy that signal the end of a bad relationship. Others are thoughtful meditations on human connection. And others… well frankly they’re a little toxic, songs about burning the very concept of love to the ground.  The best breakup songs distil raw, universal human emotions into sonic symphonies. On this list, you'll find wounded soul singers and divas walking unbowed from the ashes of bad relationships. There are indignant rappers and spiteful rockers. Adele is lurking in the shadows of her ex's place, as she is wont to do. And among the 55 greatest breakup songs of all time, you're certain to find something to relate to. And if it’s all too bleak, well, we've got a list of pick-me-up songs ready for you to queue up to help the healing begin.  Listen to these songs on Amazon Music RECOMMENDED:💔 The best heartbreak songs😭 The best sad songs🍸 The best drinking songs❤️ The best love songs😂 The best funny songs

Alright: time to get physical and also musical. Contrary to what the very ripped personal trainer at the gym keeps screaming at you, sometimes the best motivation for working up a sweat isn’t the grunting encouragement of a stranger clutching a protein shake. Often, you just need the right song to get your blood pumping, your body moving and you mind in the zone. The perfect workout song is, to some extent, an elusive beast that heavily depends on what type of music you’re into: presumably there are people out there who work out to showtunes, and good for them. The unifying factor is enough energy to power the national grid, and a decently fast beat to help you keep the pace up. Beyond that, all bets are off,  To help you on your fitness journey, we tapped our stable of music geeks – some of which are in much better shape than others – to scour their knowledge of hip-hop, pop, classic rock and for 55 high-energy motivators. Some may seem like pretty leftfield choices, but all of them should get your pulse racing. Strap on the sweatband and get ready to move.  Written by Kristen Zwicker, Marley Lynch, Hank Shteamer, Gabrielle Bruney, Brent DiCrescenzo, Sophie Harris, Andy Kryza, Andrew Frisicano, Nick Leftley, Tim Lowery, Carla Sosenko, Kate Wertheimer, Steve Smith and Andrzej Łukowski. RECOMMENDED:🏃 The best running songs💪 The best motivational songs🤩 The best inspirational songs🎸 The best classic rock songs⚡️ The best songs about power

Time was, ‘pop’ meant manufactured acts whose music erred towards the disposable. Sure, there were a few certified geniuses like Michael Jackson or Madonna. But for all the units shifted, in the twentieth-century pop never seemed to be the zeitgeist artform of the day: the Beatles weren’t pop; Pink Floyd weren’t pop; Dolly Parton wasn’t pop; NWA weren’t pop. At the dawn of the new millennium, all the rules for pop went out the window. A complicated series of cultural shifts that can largely be attributed to the internet kicked in: suddenly the bottom fell out of the market for guitar-based music, and suddenly it was sophisticated pop production that was getting the audiophiles drooling. It’s an age we’re absolutely still living through, with little sign of letting up. And so, for this list, we’ve taken a long listen to some of the biggest bangers of the last 20-plus years and did what feels nearly impossible: we’ve ranked them. As a genre, pop has always been nebulously defined, so while we’ve broadly speaking excluded rock, country and hip-hop (though elements of all those things appear), you’ll find R&B jams, dance-floor fillers and insanely catchy earworms not even the snootiest of snobs can deny. These are the best pop songs of the twenty-first century.  RECOMMENDED: 🎉 The best party songs ever made🎸 The best classic rock songs🎤 The best karaoke songs🎶 The best ’80s songs🎵 The best ’90s songs

There are probably esoteric forms of death metal that have a less intimidating reputation to outsiders than country music does. The most quintessentially American genre of music and – frankly – one with some of the weirdest people in it, it can seem like its own bizarre world that’s impenetrable to anyone not deeply versed in its singular ways. But seriously: country music isn't all pickups, whiskey, fights, American flags and men wearing extremely big hats. Sure, some of it is, but at its core, country's all about overcoming hardship, familial pride and heartbreak. Those values span the legacy of the genre, from Hank Williams to Willie Nelson to Dolly Parton and all the way up to Lil Nas X's breakout and Orville Peck's alt-country anthems. There's pop country and disco country, traditional country and outlaw country. But at its heart, all country is intertwined. This list spans the history of the genre, from classic artists like George Jones to modern-day superstars (Yes, Taylor Swift is here... no, we're not sorry), and we’ve limited the list to one song per artist. You'll find songs for true believers and naysayers who claim to hate the genre wholesale. And among the 30 ditties below, you're sure to find something to get your toes tapping. RECOMMENDED:😊 The best happy songs😂 The best funny songs🎉 The best party songs ever made🎤 The best karaoke songs🕺 The best pop songs of all time  

Help make Christmas even more magical while they’re still gullible with a festive theatre show created especially with small people in mind. Treat them to a pre-Christmas present at one of London’s excellent shows for your young ’uns. RECOMMENDED: Find more Christmas shows in London. 

Oh yes it is: London panto season returns for 2022, with familiar faces, familiar stories, and yet somehow holding on to a constant sense of anarchic family fun. There are plenty of punters who never set foot in a theatre throughout the rest of the year who make an exception for pantomimes. From the megascale London Palladium show with its filthy figurehead Julian Clary, to Clive Rowe’s brilliant panto purism at the Hackney Empire, London is a city that takes pantomime seriously. Even if the idea of seasonal frivolity fills you with dread, there’s a panto out there for you. RECOMMENDED: The best London theatre shows to see in 2022.

After two years largely out of action due to the pandemic, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe will finally bounce back to full strength this summer. For three weeks (August 5–August 29 2022), the Scottish capital becomes home to comedy giants, serious thespians, hilarious first-timers – and a bunch of genuine weirdos – all putting on shows left, right and centre. So where to start? Cut to the chase with our pick of tickets to fight for at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2022, plus the Edinburgh International Festival which runs alongside.  RECOMMENDED: Your ultimate guide to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe10 of the best comedy shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 202211 of the best jokes and one-liners ever told at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

The aggressive diversification of the ‘Stranger Things’ franchise gathers steam with ‘Stranger Things: The Experience’, an immersive theatre spin-off of the retro horror Netflix smash that has, for whatever reason, landed in a bleak industrial unit opposite Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Banish all thoughts of north west London, though. The year is 1986, and we’re supposed to be participants in a sleep study being conducted at the creepy Hawkins Lab in the town of Hawkins, Indiana, where the show is set. It’s a slow start. After answering some perfunctory questions about our sleep habits, we’re split into colour-coded groups and put in a series of queues in which we’re eyeballed by actors posing as scientists. It’s actually pretty weird how many of them there are: as far as I can tell they’ve basically been hired solely to stare at us while we queue; certainly they don’t come back into it once the show starts properly. If you love waiting while being stared at, you’ll love the first 20 minutes of ‘Stranger Things: The Experience’, which begins by not so much immersing you in a world as keeping you on hold outside it. The middle section marks the relatively innocuous beginning of our lab visit, and comes to a head in a room in which a researcher makes us do some puzzles, which leads to him concluding that we all have extraordinary psychic powers (which are deployed by making extremely naff hand gestures). It’s pretty tepid up to this point: I’m struggling to think of another imm

The world has reached a tipping point: the extent of the unfolding environmental catastrophe is now such that the much-maligned category of ‘climate-change theatre’ is finally starting to feel horribly zeitgeisty. Dawn King’s dystopian drama ‘The Trials’ is set in a near future in which the climate has collapsed entirely. Any adult who was aged over 18 in the year 2018, with an above-average salary and an excessive carbon footprint is eligible to be tried and executed for their part in all this. And the juries are bored, angry, hormonal teenagers, who are given just 15 minutes to deliberate each case, which they judge on the basis of a single recorded plea from each defendant. King is intentionally ambiguous about her world: is this only happening in Britain, or globally? Are there unseen adults in charge with the younger generations kept occupied with what are effectively show trials? But the hints are compelling enough: democracy is briefly discussed in the past tense as a failed system in which the previous generation simply voted for whoever told them what they wanted to hear. The mass slaughter of ‘guilty’ adults is framed in essentially Malthusian terms: in theory, killing them isn’t vengeance, but the necessary reduction of a population now competing over vastly diminished resources (if you’re not familiar with the theories of the philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus… then think Thanos).  ‘The Trials’ works both on an allegorical level – how will our children judge us? –

Headspinningly metatheatrical sketch troupe Sheeps’ wonderfully-named tenth-year anniversary Edinburgh Fringe retrospective show ‘Ten Years, Ten Laughs’ isn’t quite what it purports to be. For starters, this is their twelfth year at the Fringe. And while it does mostly reprise material from their old shows – notably 2018’s ‘Live and Loud Selfie Sex Harry Potter’ – that’s not the whole story. Daran Johnson, Liam Williams and Alastair Roberts are too mischievous to simply do a straight greatest hits show, and it’s obvious something’s up when they immediately seek to assure us that they will definitely be performing their viral lockdown web hit ‘Three Cowboys on the Range’. I won’t spoiler where the show goes with this. But let’s just say it’s very understandable if you’ve not heard of the sketch, and its eventual, sublimely high-concept deployment makes for a tremendous climax, possibly their finest moment to date, and a sure sign that Sheeps still have ‘it’. Whether or not they want to do anything more with ‘it’ is TBC.  Is a retrospective – one that cribs a lot of its structure from its predecessor – a cop-out, speaking of the fact that its creators have moved on with their individual careers to the point that thrashing out a full new hour seems unlikely?  Or is it a well-earned look back, that’ll be playing to audiences to whom the material is either new or a welcome reprise? Potentially both of those things are true. But whether ‘Ten Years…’ proves to be a swan song or a st

There is nothing out-there or formally challenging about about ‘Kathy & Stella Solve A Murder!’ and that’s a good thing: sometimes all you need late night at the Fringe is a raucous mini-musical about two lonely women from Hull whose so-so true crime podcast is given an unfortunate boost when a top crime author is murdered on their doorstep. We discover that the late Felicia Taylor was in town revisiting the case of the Hull Decapitator serial killer. But then her severed head is sent to Kathy and Stella. It’s a mixed blessing: on the one hand, their heroine has been brutally murdered. On the other hand, this could be the thing that really turns the podcast around.  ‘Kathy and Stella’ is pretty amusing on the subject of true crime podcasts, specifically their questionable ethics and over-familiar fandoms. There’s a minor but very funny character later on who bills himself as an ‘anti-true-crime activist’, which cracked me up. In general, though, it’s not overly obsessed with parodying the genre - if you’re after that see The Onion’s peerless ‘A Very Fatal Murder’. Where it’s brilliant is in its depiction of friendship between nerdy female outsiders. Though it’s actually written by two blokes – director Jon Brittain and Matthew Floyd Jones – actors Rebekah Hinds (Kathy) and Bronté Barbé (Stella) have wonderful chemistry together that’s at least somewhat believable amidst the cartoonish chaos. Hinds’s Kathy is bolshy and outwardly confident – but she never sticks at anything fo

The hand of history weighs heavy on Vir Das, the Indian stand-up whose viral monologue ‘The Two Indias’ – in which he unsparing took his home country to task for its manifold societal failings – caused such a sensation that he thought he was going to be thrown in jail when he returned home from the International Emmys in November 2021. ‘Wanted’ is nominally framed around that. It starts with a ten-minute warm-up section (‘this isn’t the show’ he assures us) to accommodate the fact that ‘Indians are always late’. But when the show proper begins, Das leaps into a description of that fateful flight home, and a concerned air hostess pressing a gin into his hand on the grounds that he was probably going to need it. It’s all set up to be the focus of the night, a proper exciting theme… but it falls a bit flat. On one level it’s for good reasons: Das avoided prison. But even so, you’d think there would be more material in the experience than he actually manages to muster in a routine that flits back to the central story without ever seeming as interested in it as we are. It turns out to be just a comparatively small part of a polished, laidback set that focuses heavily on lighter material relating to Indian culture: the difference between Indian and British toilets; the Indian schooling system; the Indian equivalent to the Emmys.  It’s all enjoyable stuff, and it’s also an agreeably different experience to watch a show that gently decentralises the white Western members of the audie

This play with songs promises a lot, most notably music from all sister indie-folk trio The Staves. But ‘Blood Harmony’ feels much less than the sum of its parts, and though the songs are pretty, they’re not originals. They feel shoehorned into Matthew Bulgo’s text as pleasant interludes rather than adding much to the action. You can see the connection: The Staves are three sisters and ‘Blood Harmony’ is about three sisters; ‘blood harmony’ is a poetic term for the closeness of sibling voices when they sing together, and the sister characters sing together here. It all sort of fits but I can’t help but feel the prominence of the band’s name oversells how much they have to do with it. Anyway: ‘Blood Harmony’ follows the sibling trio in the immediate aftermath of their mum’s death. It’s entirely set in the loft of their family home: sweet, nervy youngest Chloe (Eve de Leon Allen) was living there with their mother to the end. Maia (Kashini Misha), an addled fuck-up, is also on hand. And turning up late there’s Anna (Philippa Hogg), the horsey high flying one who has a fancy job somewhere abroad, and has hardly seen her family in recent years and intends to just make a flying visit here. In its favour, it’s a genuinely heartfelt piece about family, death, estrangement and the need to heal and give each other space. Although the songs don’t specifically comment on the action on stage, they are nice interludes, almost framed like mini music videos as the actors break away from the

Sami Ibrahim’s ‘A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain’ is a sloggy allegorical drama about colonialism and refugees that will open the new Gate Theatre when it transfers to London in October. It’s a shame, because at present the cast of three is doubled with that of the far superior ‘Half-Empty Glasses’, which doesn’t appear to be getting a transfer. But them’s the breaks. The play is set on a soggy, bureaucracy-bound island ruled by a king, that does a roaring trade in wool and takes a dim view of the rights of other countries. In other words, it’s set in a version of Britain, albeit a sort of strange, magical realist one where the wool of the sheep is spun into rainclouds that drift out over the rest of the world. Elif (Sara Hazemi) is a refugee to those shores, fleeing oppression at home, and has a job shearing sheep and spinning clouds. But she failed to petition the king to become one of his subjects when she arrived and is effectively on the island illegally, working for a local landowner whose son she falls pregnant by. The landowner’s son leaves, and she doesn’t want the landowner to have control of their child, so she moves away to the city and takes a backbreaking job cleaning up the rainwater that sluices through the city’s streets, all the while waiting through the interminable, yearslong process required to become subjects of the king. Ibrahim’s writing isn’t so much heavy-handed as portentous: the allegorical world he crafts is actually potentially pretty compelling an

Somewhat disorientating at a festival full of actual stand-up comics, Marcelo Dos Santos’s monologue ‘Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen’ is a play structured like a stand-up set, with Samuel Barnett’s neurotic gay comedian protagonist working up a routine apparently based upon his character’s real love life. It’s framed around his relationship with a nice American man, whose personal details are chopped and changed as the show wears on, but who is always extremely hench (I learned the phrase ‘cum gutters’!) and extremely affable, to the point that he somewhat freaks Barnett’s character out - all the more so when he discovers that his new boyfriend has a medical condition that stops him laughing. The meat of the show is the comedian’s suspicion – and, indeed, fear – of the stability the American offers, and his constant indulgence in largely depressing casual sex on the side. The title comes from his innate, self-loathing fatalism: he doesn’t allow himself to enjoy life because he’s already convinced the worst will happen. Maybe the self-loathing gay fuckup who is also a comedian trades in a few tropes, but the eventual problem he faces – that it infuriates him his boyfriend doesn’t laugh at any of his jokes, even though doing so might literally kill him – is a pleasingly absurdist one.  It’s funny, and it takes real skill from director Matthew Xia to direct an actor in a small in-the-round quasi-stand-up set. Barnett is absolutely terrific: funny and

Every Fringe needs a Big Tear Jerker, and this year the title unquestionably goes to Haley McGee’s ‘Age Is A Feeling’, a prodigiously wise, sad and beautiful contemplation of a life. A barefooted McGee sits in a high wooden chair in front of us. Her age is somewhat indeterminate – she could be anywhere from late twenties to early forties – a fact that suits the show, which she performs in a circle of flowery poles, each with a word that corresponds to a story. At intervals throughout, audience members are invited to choose from a selection of the words. The stories that aren’t chosen are discarded, and we never get to hear them (though in some cases we get a brief outline). It’s kiiind of a gimmick: McGee’s point is that nobody ever truly knows a person, not even themself, and so we’re deliberately presented with an incomplete life. But what we’re presented with doesn’t feel particularly incomplete, and I kind of wonder if McGee just wrote too much material for the show. But it adds a certain artsy structure to proceedings, gives it a form beyond McGee just telling us a yarn - it’s a bit of a gimmick, but it’s not gimmicky. Anyway: McGee’s narrative starts at her protagonist’s twenty-fifth birthday: she recounts her dad telling her his belief that you can only hire a rental car from that age because it’s only then that your brain has finished developing. Somebody tells her age is a feeling, and McGee’s monologue goes on to try to convey how somebody’s entire post-25 life migh

Tim Crouch’s continuing odyssey into THE VERY NATURE OF THEATRE ITSELF continues with ‘Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel’ in which the veteran provocateur manages to somewhat rope his other love Shakespeare into his ongoing quest. Striding on to the bare Lyceum studio wearing a big set of VR goggles, Crouch starts the show describing what would appear to be a different, fancier theatre he can see through the headset, one with £65 seats, restricted sightlines and pre-theatre dining options, stalls and a circle. It’s a bit disconcerting and also quite funny, as he points at various members of the real audience and equates them with a different virtual crowd: the woman who illicitly snuck into a stalls seat; the man who overate and is seriously struggling to hold it down.  Later, Crouch goes on to describe a production of ‘King Lear’ that he can see through the goggles, in which I believe he’s seeing the action from the perspective of the Fool. He describes a future in which going to the theatre is long redundant, having been entirely replaced by VR productions like this ‘Lear’. But he also puckishly points to the fact that what he’s created in this room is theatre: despite the intentionally microscopic budget, a whole world has been created only in our heads, in this room, because of his words (it’s pretty obvious the headset doesn’t actually work and there is no expensive VR Shakespeare, but he cheerily confirms it). ‘Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel’ is like a passive-aggressive love

‘2:22 – A Ghost Story’ will commence its fourth West End run from September 6, with the distinctly unconventional casting of ‘Love Island’ presenter Laura Whitmore in the lead role of Jenny. Is this a terrible idea? We’ll find out soon, but Whitmore is stage trained, and the first cast of ‘2:22’ did feature Lily Allen, who had a similar lack of on-stage experience and turned out to be excellent. She’ll be joined by ex-Busted member (and musicals veteran) Matt Willis, plus actors Tamsin Carroll and Felix Scott. Until September 6 the cast is Tom Felton, Mandip Gill, Beatriz Romilly and Sam Swainsbury. The below review is the from the original summer 2021 run starring Allen. The plot of Danny Robins’s ‘2:22 – A Ghost Story’ revolves around Sam, an astronomer and inveterate know-it-all – played to excruciating perfection by Hadley Fraser – who believes he has the answer to everything. Specifically, we’re talking about the existence of ghosts: Sam does not believe in them, and it’s not really a spoiler to say Sam is proven very wrong. Well I can relate to Sam here, as I went into ‘2:22’ firmly believing I had its number, and I’m happy to say I did not. Still, I had my reasons. Number one, horror plays that aren’t called ‘The Woman in Black’ tend to be terrible. Number two, writer Robins comes into the West End on the back of a zeitgeisty paranormal podcast (‘The Battersea Poltergeist’), but his actual playwrighting CV is pretty obscure. And number three, it stars Lily Allen: nothi

At first glance, rising star playwright Dipo Baruwa-Etti’s new show for Paines Plough looks like it might be a worthy but pretty simplistic drama about Toye, a gifted Black GCSE student who challenges his school over the lack of Black British history on the syllabus. You know how it is: system is bad, boy stands up to system, boy triumphs over system. That sort of thing. But ‘Half-Empty Glasses’ is an awful lot cleverer than that. Toye is best friends with Asha (Sara Hazemi) and Remi (Princess Khumalo), who is the head girl of his school. Together, they set up a sort of Black history lunch club to expand their classmates’ horizons. So far, so polite. But after the successful first session, Toye becomes increasingly fussy about which figures are talked about. The school starts trying to clamp down on the impromptu lessons, using Remi as a reluctant enforcer. And loyal Asha starts to clash with Toye after he tetchily dismisses her when she suggests the sessions might include editions reflecting her own Middle Eastern background. Toye is not necessarily wrong about the curriculum requiring reform. But his off-hand dismissal of anything his female friends have to say is troubling. He angrily struggles to justify why he’s being so uncompromising about disrupting this school when he’s actually working hard to try and get a transfer on a music scholarship to a private school: Remi and Asha are going to be left to clean up the mess. And moreover, it’s very clear that his obsessive an

Almost exactly a year after the British tabloid press went nuts at Shakespeare’s Globe for staging a production of ‘Romeo & Juliet’ that included trigger warnings and a suicide helpline number, the iconic Bankside institution has caused another splash with new play, Charlie Josephine’s ‘I, Joan’. Although the ‘Romeo & Juliet’ ‘scandal’ literally made front pages (‘Wokeo & Juliet’ declared the front page of The Sun, tenuously), the brouhaha over ‘I, Joan’ seems rather more bitter. The crux of the issue is that the play imagines French national heroine and Catholic icon Joan of Arc – whom the English burnt at the stake in 1431 – as being non-binary, using they/them pronouns, with the role performer by Isobel Thom, a non-binary actor, and the concept art featuring chest binders. Photo by Shakespeare’s Globe While the press has seemed more pruriently fascinated than actively incensed over ‘I, Joan’ – though there have been a couple of negative opinion pieces – its coverage has fed off a huge social media backlash from what one might refer to as the gender-critical community, who could most charitably be described as feeling that reimagining a female historical figure as non-binary is an act of female erasure.  There doesn’t seem to be any particular call to cancel it, more mass disapproval, but still, it’s a pretty remarkable backlash against a play that nobody has actually seen yet. Should it be controversial?  Again, it’s difficult to overemphasise the fact that nobody has ac

Yes, as Brixton keeps reminding us, David Bowie was born there. And what did he achieve in Brixton? Nothing: he was not a revolutionary seven-year-old. If we’re talking the Man Who Changed The World, the true spiritual home of David Bowie in London is undoubtedly Beckenham. It’s in BR3 that the Bromley-raised superstar held his Arts Lab music nights, it’s where he lived in a big old manor house with the Spiders from Mars while they recorded their seminal albums ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, ‘Hunky Dory’ and ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’, and it’s in the Croydon Rec park that he organised, compered and performed at the one-day Growth Summer Festival on August 16 1969. The last decade or so has seen an annual festival held in the park in tribute to the Thin White Duke, and to serve as a fundraiser for the restoration of the park’s iconic Victorian bandstand (which the original festival was held on). Bowie was actually alive when the fundraising effort began, leading one to wonder how the hell much a Victorian bandstand costs, but we’re told the end is finally in sight and work will finally start in September and wrap up next April. Launched as Memory of a Free Festival and latterly renamed Beckenham’s Bowie Oddity, the latterday festival is a bloody good day out for any self-respecting Bowie fan. The vibe is basically tribute gig-meets-church fête, and while line-up details tend to be kept under wraps, it’s typically a mix of acoustic acts doin

Emma Corrin made quite the splash in last year’s West End debut. Famous for portraying one controversial real-life figure in ‘The Crown’ – Diana Spencer – the actor bagged an Olivier nomination for ‘Anna X’, in which they played a thinly veiled version of Anna Sorokin, aka the ‘fake heiress’ who befriended and defrauded Manhattan high society. Now Corrin returns to the stage to play a fictional character, albeit one so famous they’re practically as iconic as Diana and Sorokin. Corrin will be leading a brand new West End adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’, her exuberant comic novel about an immortal, gender-switching androgyne. Born male in the reign of Elizabeth I, Orlando lives on for 300 years having a bloody good time, occasionally inexplicably changing sex. This new version will be directed by the great Michael Grandage, from an adaptation by Neil Bartlett. It doesn’t have a venue yet, but we’re promised one will be announced soon. ‘Orlando’ will run in the West End this autumn. To sign up for more information, go here. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2022. ‘The Crown’ Season 5: everything we know.

The original celebrity Londoner, Dippy the Diplodocus finally came home to the Natural History Museum in 2022 after years spent touring the UK, taking his prodigious Jurassic bulk to every corner of the British Isles. He is, however, only here as a temporary guest: his spot in the main hall was ceded to Hope the Blue Whale when he went off on his jaunt, and it’s not been returned: instead, he’s only back as a pop-up exhibit until he heads off to another, TBA museum as a long-term loan in 2023. That’s kind of sad, but to ease the pain of parting, a special Dippy Dino Snore has just been announced for October. For those unfamiliar, a Dino Snore is a kids’ overnight stay in the Natural History Museum, complete with activities, talks, a film and breakfast, for kids aged seven to 17 plus at least one accompanying parent. They are extremely popular and the normal ones are sold out well into next year, but the special October Dippy edition has only just been announced and there are still tickets available (though there probably won’t be for long). It’s, uh, pretty much the same as a normal Dino Snore, and for logistical reasons, you’ll be physically sleeping underneath Hope. But there will be a special focus on the beloved diplodocus in the activities section of the evening – it’s the ultimate way to say bye-bye to London’s and history’s most iconic sauropod. The Dippy Dino Snore is at the Natural History Museum on Saturday October 22. Tickets cost £87 and include breakfast. 100 bes

The exact semantics of what constitutes a West End theatre are as boring as they are confusing. But while London has had new West End-sized theatres in recent times (notably the Bridge), and just last year Trafalgar Studios was extensively revamped into the very different Trafalgar Theatre, there hasn't actually been a fully new large-scale theatre built from scratch in the West End since Time Out own’s looming concrete neighbour the Gillian Lynne Theatre opened its doors in 1973. We’ve known for a while that Nimax – one of the major West End theatre owners – was building a new venue as part of the redevelopment of Tottenham Court Road, sitting directly above the Elizabeth Line and adjacent to the former site of the legendary Astoria music venue.  Well, now Nimax boss Nica Burns has offered a first look and shared its name. The bad news first: its name is – in total seriousness – @sohoplace, which sounds like a bottom-tier internet café from 2003 and does strongly feel like the worst name for any theatre in London, possibly the UK, possibly the world. Hysterically, it doesn’t even own the Twitter handle @sohoplace, which seems to be the possession of someone who tweeted just once, back in 2017. On Twitter, Facebook and Instagram it’s in fact @atsohoplace. Still, most West End theatres eventually end up getting renamed after somebody who died, so fingers crossed for that, eh? On the plus side, @sohoplace (aaaargh!) is a hypermodern 602-seat theatre that will, uniquely for the

Even when it opened back in April, there were bits of Punchdrunk’s brilliant new immersive theatre show ‘The Burnt City’ – set during the Trojan War – that got pretty damn hot by the end, especially in the dense warren of the city of Troy. So it’s something of a relief to audiences that’ll be braving it during the heatwave – especially next Tuesday (it’s blessedly shut on Monday) – that the show has been temporarily retooled to put less pressure on both punters who spend the bulk of the show on their feet, and the performers who are essentially performing challenging modern dance routines for three hours.  As revealed to the Evening Standard, the basic deal is that firstly, the show is now two-and-a-half hours long instead of the usual three, and secondly, for the first half an hour audiences will simply be exploring the (stunning) empty building, ie there will be no performers until half an hour into the show. This means the dancers will only have to perform for two hours, which makes them vastly less likely to faint.  The policy will be in place until the weather gets ‘back to normal’, which currently looks to be next Wednesday, when temperatures are predicted to drop into the mid-20s. For what it’s worth, my top tip on arrival at the truncated shows would be to leave Mycenae (where you arrive), head straight to Troy and the cabaret bar, enjoy the cabaret bar while most people are wandering around exploring, head back to Mycenae for the start of the performances, follow the

Come next summer it’ll be seven long years since the greatest live act in the world last played in London, when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played approximately the millionth Wembley Stadium gig of their career. While Springsteen’s one-man show ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ has seen The Boss play solo in New York for a couple of long stints, the pandemic very much put paid to the stadium tours that he and his old pals the E Streeters had embarked upon over the last couple of decades. Until now! Or more accurately, next year! As widely anticipated – due to them having already announced dates in loads of other European countries – Brooce and band are finally hitting the road again next year, with their epic meander around Europe finding time for an Edinburgh date (May 30) and a Birmingham one a couple of weeks later (Jun 16) before finally coming to London for two shows as part of British Summer Time in Hyde Park on July 6 and 8. The tour will presumably be tangentially tied to 2020’s exuberant but mortality-tinged last E Street album ‘Letter to You’, but it’s not explicitly tied to it, and the Boss and his band are, of course, famous for playing three-hour-plus sets heaving with deep cuts and hits, frequently dropping entire classic albums into the mix. Basically, if you’re seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band live before, you don’t need any prompting to know you need to get tickets. If you’ve not seen them before: well with most of the band’s core members in t

Netflixのレトロホラーの代表作「ストレンジャー・シングス」シリーズは、あと1シーズンで終了する予定だ。しかし同社は、このヒット作がドラマを越えて今後も「生き続ける」方法をいくつか発表した。 その中では、スピンオフ番組の新作も行われると明かされたが、最もファンが興味をそそられたのは、「舞台化」だろう。 現時点で情報公開はほとんどされておらず、例えばその舞台作品が、どの都市で見られるのかなどの情報は分かっていない。しかし制作陣に、イギリス人のソニア・フリードマンとディレクターのスティーブン・ダルドリーが名を連ねていることから、ロンドンのウエストエンドが「初演の地」になるのではないかと考えられる。そうでない場合でも、おそらくニューヨークのブロードウェイで始まり、その後ウエストエンドへ移ってくることになるだろう。 舞台版「ストレンジャー・シングス」というのは、なかなかに荒唐無稽なアイデアに思えるかもしれない。しかしこの6年間、フリードマンが製作に関わった舞台版「ハリー・ポッター」が上演され続けていることを忘れてはいけない。  またNetflixの発表にあった一文、「新しい舞台は『ストレンジャー・シングス』の世界と神話の中に設定されている」という記述は、単にこれまでのドラマで生き残った人たちの物語を引き継ぐのではなく、ドラマでの出来事に「隣接」したものになることを強く示唆している。ストーリーとスタイルの両面で、舞台化において可能性の幅を大きく持たせているといえるだろう。 脚本を誰が書いているのかなど「未解決」の部分が多いが、非常に興味をそそられる内容であることは間違いないはずだ。 関連記事 『A ‘Stranger Things’ stage play is coming to London, probably（原文）』 『「ストシン」で再人気のケイト・ブッシュ、「世界は狂ってしまった」』 『ロンドンの「全裸自転車イベント」、今年も1000人が集結』 『舞台開幕に合わせて赤坂周辺が「ハリポタ」一色に』 『舞台は二条城、リアルとメタバースで楽しむネイキッドの夏祭りが開催』 『ニューヨークでウォーホルをテーマにした没入型演劇が上演』 東京の最新情報をタイムアウト東京のメールマガジンでチェックしよう。登録はこちら  

Netflix’s retro horror flagship show ‘Stranger Things’ may only have one more series left, but a slew of announcements from the streaming giant this week set out how its legacy will live on beyond the series. As well as a bona fide spin-off TV show, the most intriguing announcement was the advent of a ‘Stranger Things’ stage play. A new stage play set within the world and mythology of Stranger Things, produced by prolific and multi award-winning producers Sonia Friedman, Stephen Daldry (The Crown, Billy Elliot, The Reader), and Netflix. Daldry will also direct. — Netflix (@netflix) July 6, 2022 That seems to be all the information about the show out there at the moment, and we therefore can't in any way confirm where it'll debut. But the presence of British producer Sonia Friedman and British director Stephen Daldry strongly points to it starting out life in the West End – and if it doesn't, it’ll presumably begin in Broadway and then transfer over.  A stage version of ‘Stranger Things’ may seem like a moderately wild idea, but let’s not forget that we’ve had a Friedman-produced stage version of Harry Potter running for the last six years. The description ‘set within the world and mythology of “Stranger Things”’ also strongly suggests that it’s going to be adjacent to the events of the TV series rather than simply carrying on the stories of whoever survives the last series, which gives it a lot of scope in terms of both story and style. There are a lot of unanswered que

Since Punchdrunk’s superlative new show ‘The Burnt City’ opened back in April, we have been partnering with the immersive theatre legends to bring a weekly release of £25 rush tickets to our readers. Well, all things must pass, and while ‘The Burnt City’ is booking until December, our partnership is reaching its end. So that means you have just three more opportunities to buy cheap tickets to visit the wild hedonism of Troy and arid desolation of Greece in the company’s two-building, Trojan War-themed extravaganza.  Find out more about it here, but basically you sign up, we'll let you know what time on a Thursday the tickets go on sale, and then it’s first-come, first-served to get them. The show will hopefully be sticking around for many a month yet, but this may be your last chance for a while to get in for just £25. Sign up here for our rush tickets here, with the final release on July 21, for dates July 26-31. ‘The Burnt City’ is booking until December 4. The best new theatre shows to book for in London in 2022. Immersive theatre in London.

Peter Brook, who died at the weekend aged 97, revolutionised British theatre at least a half-dozen times via an endless slew of visionary projects, from his epic nine-hour stage adaptation of the Sanskrit epic ‘Mahābhārata’ to his revolutionary 1970 production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ that essentially did away with the set. His last years saw him as more of an elder statesman-type figure, producing pared-down, spiritually-leaning works from his base in Paris, many of which transferred to edgy Young Vic in London: he was prolific pretty much until the end, directing several plays during his nineties. However, Brook was a West End powerhouse in his younger years, directing numerous hit shows for the London stage, including operas for the Royal Opera House and myriad productions for the RSC. It’s no surprise then that he’s following in the all-too-recent footsteps of Stephen Sondheim and Antony Sher in being given the West End’s biggest honour: the lights of all its theatres will be dimmed in his memory at 7pm tonight. Farewell to another theatrical giant. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2022. A huge cloud of artificial fireflies will float over Greenwich this summer.

The 2022 edition of London’s biggest street theatre fest the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival already boasts one jaw-dropping spectacular in its line-up in the form of ‘Island of Foam’ (Sep 3-4), which will see torrents of multicoloured foam flood the streets of Greenwich. And now there’s a rival for spectacle of the festival with the newly announced opening show. ‘Spark’, by Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde, will see thousands of artificial sparks float over Greenwich on the nights of August 26 and August 27, in a work designed to re-imagine the idea of fireworks by taking inspiration from fireflies. Exactly how it works we’re not actually sure, but the sparks are supposed to float ‘organically’ through the skies, and are fully biodegradable and this far better for the environment than fireworks. What are the sparks actually made of? How do they float? What makes them light up? We do not know the answers, but they clearly look very cool, and like everything else in GDIF you can watch them for free. A whole host of other new stuff has also been announced for the festival, ranging from the return of old favourites the Greenwich Fair (Aug 27) and Dancing City (Sep 10-11), to ‘Follow Me’ (Aug 28-29), an interactive parkour journey through the Moorings Estate in Thamesmead, and ‘There Should Be Unicorns’ (Sep 2), top theatre company Middle Child’s outdoor hip-hop musical.  Greenwich + Docklands International Festival run Aug 26-Sep 11. See the full line-up here. A tsunam