Kate Wyver

"This is a coruscating production about the desperate grasp for power, and how it does no man or country any good." Full Review

"The storytelling behind the characters lacks some clarity, but the idea of the avatar as puppet is where the play is most inventive. ... The best parts of the play are set away from their phones and social media entirely. " Full Review

" 'A Gig for Ghosts' is a gorgeously tender, quiet story of love and death. ... how we keep the ghosts of our memories, our loved ones and their stories, alive." Full Review

"It may not be slick in the slightest, but with 'Evita Too,' the Sh!ts are proving themselves to be an unlikely pair of state-of-the-nation playwrights." Full Review

A brilliantly tricksy new production by Lucy Kirkwood ... in text and direction, this play also delights in the way theatre is made. A heady production with stellar performances. Full Review

The cast of eight unravel this world of ancient Rome with gusto, but it hardly feels ... as if the person in charge could make or break the country. To the audience, it just feels like a bit of a laugh. Full Review

Shakespeare’s challenging text has been streamlined to a neat two hours in this contemporary production. Its innards have been snipped and significantly shuffled...The result is a production cleanly cut, sharply told. Full Review

There is a lot to love: with a wonderfully wild energy throughout, it’s happily queerer than the film, and the well-known songs really are spectacular. Full Review

...Fair Play throws us into the brutal ignorance and invasiveness of the way elite sport approaches gender, with results that disproportionately impact Black women. Full Review

Rare Earth Mettle has enormous scope, but it tries to do too much...It’s incredibly smart, but there’s not quite enough heart. Full Review

The stories are simple and to the point but lose none of their potency. By nature of its form, Metamorphoses can’t tie up the disparate threads of its tales. But these are eternal stories, beautifully and accessibly told. It’s hard not to have a good time. Full Review

for a previous production This show is not scary enough to cause nightmares, nor is it gruesome or graphic or gory; it’s more human than the creepiest horror movies. But there are genuinely chilling moments, scary enough that the whole theatre is tense and pin-drop quiet. Full Review

Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo is luminous in Benedict Lombe’s passionate memoir-monologue that weaves lyrical storytelling with untiring protest. Full Review

Although After Life is based on a film, its best parts are pure theatre. The performers play with the liveness and the artificiality of recreating a memory. Full Review

The writing at times still feels like it’s finding its feet, slipping between insight and cliche, but Mercy is such an affable host that the room is eager to watch her grow as she goes.' Full Review

Within Battye’s writing is a comic, astute commentary on female friendship...But as it is, Scenes With Girls refuses to break out of the cliches its characters rail against.' Full Review

Without a strong enough pull towards the personal or political, the production thrashes about. The teams switch shirts until they’re so muddied you can no longer tell – nor care – which side anyone’s on.' Full Review

Jay McGuiness and Kimberley Walsh have chemistry in the lead roles but this revival is flat and insipid, and the story’s sexual politics are still a problem. Full Review

Michelle Terry’s volcanic Hotspur...is wholly commanding: of her soldiers, of our attention and of the text. It is as though the words don’t exist until they leave her mouth. She’s so good it is hard to look elsewhere...' Full Review

Maxine Peake offers a wild exhaustion as Leigh’s Woman, consumed by the desperation to conceive, but her performance is stifled by a formulaic script that leaves no space to stretch between the words.' Full Review

"A sense of surprise is lacking throughout, the wordplay is laboured and the physical comedy feels sloppy, so their knowing glances are unearned. ... the timing, the creativity that is missing throughout much of the rest." Full Review

“The dialogue here is sharp and sarcastic, but it tells a little more than it shows. The writing is strongest in the sections where we see the effects of mounting pressures, rather than when we just hear about them in conversation.” Full Review

"The dry script is not improved by the sparse set or unconfident staging." Full Review

"It’s a romp. At once a recognition of the fear of change and rejection and a celebration of open-armed community." Full Review

A stylish rework of the August Wilson character-study sees a standout performance from Wil Johnson. Craig’s direction provides the whole show with a laid-back ease. Full Review

This is astute, impressive writing, with thoughtful staging, confident performances, and delicate, rumbling sound design underlining the sharpest moments of horror and gut-punch grief. Full Review

Vicky Featherstone’s production has great control in the way it slowly feeds us information, toying with the confusion it creates as myth and history collide. Sci-fi is too rarely done on stage but here McDowall has chosen the perfect medium. Full Review

This production of Dick Whittington – truly the most incomprehensible of all panto plotlines – is almost blindingly glitzy, packed to the rafters with glittering lights and fizzing pyrotechnics. Full Review

for a previous production Presented in association with Brent Borough of Culture, The Wife of Willesden is a celebration of community and local legends, of telling a good story and living a life worth telling. Not bad for an original text that’s 600 years old. Full Review

Directed by Ed Madden, the characters’ unravelling feels completely natural...Yellowfin has a smart set-up but the impact of the action always feels one-step removed. Full Review

Although it’s the shocks and screams that make us jump, there’s a vivid sense that the scariest thing on this haunted island isn’t the threat of a ghoulish presence, but the potential of what one human can do to another. Full Review

for a previous production There’s a lot of talent on show in 'Operation Mincemeat', but it would need several significant cuts to have a real emotional impact. It runs for two and a half hours; there is a sharper, shorter show buried inside. Full Review

for a previous production Jones’s dialogue is quick, sharp and clever...[Jasmine Lee-Jones] is a brilliant, dynamic writer, and this is a striking debut. Full Review

for a previous production Joyful, painful and wholeheartedly life-grabbing, Cruise is an ode to the gay men who lived, loved and were lost during the Aids crisis. Full Review

Misogynistic comedy is a rotten apple... Flat insults, bland puns and painful verse let down this staging of Shakespeare’s problematic play, which charges ahead without a trace of satire.' Full Review

With firecracker performances and singalong sounds, this version of the Bing Crosby classic glistens with sexy razzmatazz, but tenderness lies beneath the shiny surface. Full Review

In this immersive show we are promised a globetrotting night of drugs and sex…but are left loitering in a living room...' Full Review

Jealousy and lechery divert the idle rich in Elle While’s production of the Shakespeare romcom, but well-dressed schemings lack chemistry...' Full Review

It is here that Amankwah truly takes control, demonstrating “the mettle of [her] pasture”. Her earlier performances are strong, but now she is majestic...' Full Review