Sarah Crompton

"For all Turner and Coleman's energy, you never quite get to know this couple, so the play feels less profound and less moving than it should." Full Review

“It's a tightrope act of performance, wonderfully mastered here. The entire thing breezes away the January blues with glorious brilliance. It is an utter treasure.” Full Review

"This Streetcar isn't quite as revelatory as that extraordinary production. But it is nevertheless a thoughtful and insightful look at a great and emotional play...and where the fear of both can tear a woman's mind to shreds." Full Review

" 'As You Like It' is the first new production to come to @sohoplace, and it graces the space with its fresh approach. New thoughts for a new theatre feel like a good place to end the year." Full Review

"It's that humanity the show needs. It's full of effects and enchantment, but it is only when Bert and Rose are kept firmly in view that it truly finds the extra level it seeks." Full Review

"It's an intense collapse, riding Shakespeare's language to find his own meanings, an extraordinary performance at the heart of a revelatory and relevant production." Full Review

for a previous production "It is all ... both magical and evocative of the celebratory season. It is also one of those productions where everything ... comes together to create an absorbing and assured telling of a story that has arguably become over-familiar." Full Review

"This is a vibrant, multi-coloured telling, of an astonishing, mascara-coated life, riding the wave of television...It's not a show of great depth, but it has enormous panache and verve as it whisks through its strangely significant tale. I really enjoyed it." Full Review

"It's a chilling performance rather than a moving one...Good isn't perfect, but its lessons demand to be understood." Full Review

"Their conversation is funny and vital, their movement loose and full of dance...The evening sustains itself with performances that sweep you away." Full Review

" 'Eureka Day' is a bracing corrective to the idea that you can only discuss serious issues with a straight face." Full Review

"Byrne reveals himself as a writer with an eye for detail and the soul of a poet – and as an actor of considerable power and finesse. It's an understated night of theatre, but a rich one." Full Review

" 'Silence' is essential viewing – an act of collective remembering that propels a key moment in history back into the spotlight, where it belongs." Full Review

"It is dramatic, but feels like the setting for a different play, not an intimate series of conversations where tensions across generations are exposed. The writing is warm and funny; the set is alienating." Full Review

I enjoyed the spirit of the show. Director Amy Hodge keeps things moving along briskly and with some sophistication. This musical doesn't quite change the world, but it offers a great time en route. Full Review

Every performance is outstanding in Tinuke Craig's sensitive and lively production right down to the smaller characters. Every detail of stage and scene ... is lovingly right. It's a fine production of a fascinating play. Full Review

Moss ... has done something quite remarkable. While upping the fun and the fizz, she has also made it an inclusive power-house of a musical. She also hauls it into 2022. Ellen Kane's choreography is truly fabulous. On its own terms, the whole thing succeeds with magnificent, all-embracing confidence. I had the best of times. Full Review

At the heart of it all is Duff, incandescently powerful. It is a truly great performance in an unruly yet riveting play that reveals Steel as an outstanding talent. Full Review

The writing is at times wonderfully acute and funny ... But this recognisable honesty in the writing is undermined by odd notes of contrivance ... [it's] true to life, but not necessarily riveting drama. Full Review

With Comer as its protagonist, blazing away, it is impossible to avert your gaze. She brings its arguments to forceful life and in the process creates an unforgettable moment of theatre. Full Review

[It] is magnificently staged. Co-director Maxine Doyle's choreography is, throughout, utterly transporting. It was beautiful and memorable, but I longed for more to help me make sense of it. Full Review

However, there is a lot of pleasure to be had en route in Rachel O'Riordan's lively production, cleverly choreographed by Malik Nashad Sharpe. Simon Slater's music and Kinnetia Isidore's costumes mix the contemporary and the 17th century to striking effect. I smiled throughout; it's a sign of how high a bar Bartlett has set himself that I emerged vaguely disappointed. Full Review

The result, in Bartlett Sher's smooth, beautifully modulated production which arrives in London with Rafe Spall as Atticus, is an engaging and intelligently acted affair... Full Review

It's a play that's easier to admire than to love, but nonetheless a challenging, fascinating contest to witness. Full Review

The achievement of Helen Edmundson's adaptation and Rufus Norris's sensitive, fluent direction is that of all great art: it makes its points through its characters rather than by imposing arguments on top of them. Full Review

"What an extraordinary work this is, not so much a play as a provocation, one that overturns traditional theatrical structures in order to make its points and leaves you full of questions – but smiling broadly at the same time." Full Review

"Under its comic surface, 'The Unfriend' does in fact have quite a few darker themes, not least how little we know about the people we meet, and the methods by which we judge them." Full Review

"For all its oddity, and over-writing, the play grips...It may not come back for another 40 years, but it feels like an important piece in the history of theatre." Full Review

"It's an enjoyable evening, full of good performances, and an emotional reminder of what a deeply held belief in people's capacity for change and forgiveness can achieve." Full Review

"This is a fantastic performance, full of gentle detail – shoulders wriggling in distaste, eyes wide in discovery – and Corrin provides the compelling heart of a problematic play." Full Review

"It's a finely-etched portrayal in a play that is full of brilliant insight. It's also essentially theatrical...That makes me want to punch the air." Full Review

"Munro's writing is always beautifully pitched and poised. Yet here, somehow, it feels devoid of passion." Full Review

"It is angry, but also funny, warm, and insightful, written and performed with feeling and piercing thought." Full Review

"The entire ensemble is lively and engaging. But it's the band and the music that are the star, the qualities that lift this show above the average and turn it into an uplifting evening." Full Review

"It's a strange, provoking play, full of difficult emotions and fierce feeling...its re-emergence here, at this time, feels doubly apt, as if by its very bleakness it brings a little light of insight." Full Review

"Some of the plot twists seem overly conventional, while others feel underwritten and underdeveloped. 'The Clinic' is an ambitious undertaking, that never loses the attention, but it doesn't make the impact Baruwa-Etti's talent deserves. It's big, bold and unruly, but not quite as focussed as it needs to be." Full Review

"Kesting's powerful performance roots the play's fury with the basic unfairness of life in the human heart." Full Review

"'The Trials' is designed to make me and everyone like me – the dinosaurs – acknowledge and recognise our guilt." Full Review

Director Moritz Von Stuelpnagel holds the wildly divergent tonal shifts together as best he can, and the cast are never less than watchable but the overall impact is strangely muffled. Full Review

The plot doesn't make sense. I kept wondering what this play would have been like if it had been written by a woman ... As it is, everything seems equivocal. It's an interesting evening, but not a satisfying one. Full Review

The songs ... are not in themselves memorable and their targets are horribly obvious. Director Peter Rowe keeps the whole thing moving fast enough. I suppose it's all good fun, but by the end I felt irritated by the show's sheer lack of sophistication. Full Review

It's all cleverly paced, caring about detailed moments, quiet scenes, as well as the larger swell of events. It's a supremely assured cast, bringing to life a complicated story in a play that proves the value of history for understanding today. Full Review

It is the most thorough rethinking of Rodgers and Hammerstein that you are ever likely to see, a sensational reassessment of a classic show that both asserts its greatness and casts it in an entirely fresh light. I think it is a masterpiece. Full Review

[Rylance's] performance is such a wonder it's hard to describe. Every nuance is felt; his identification with the character so strong that he simply is. But the strength of the production is the way that the new group of youngsters who surround Rooster. It is quite simply just wondrous. Full Review

It's that sense of voice, of education unlocking an ability to speak, that makes The Corn is Green such a powerful story. This production reveals that truth under the melodramatic gesturing. As Noel Coward said of cheap music, it is extraordinary how potent it is. Full Review

What holds the piece together, apart from the sheer questing intelligence of the writing, is Latif's controlled direction and a performance of extraordinary range and power from Meikle. Both dignified and comic, doubting and assured, her kindly, thoughtful presence gives this bold, brilliant play its centre and its emotional heart. Full Review

The writing shimmers with power: it's an analysis of Putin and every autocratic ruler, as much as the present dangers in the United States...It's this central argument, presented with forensic care that makes The 47th pack such a knockout punch. And Carvel's Trump, darkly ferocious, gives it its villainous heart. Full Review

It's stirring, engrossing stuff, smoothly directed by Nicholas Hytner, purring along at pace, and full of thought-provoking observations. Full Review

It's all terrifically done...Maybe it's the timing of the production that just makes it feel heart-pressingly pointless. It is a production I admired, but not a play I ever want to experience again. Full Review

What Max Webster's modern-dress production proves is how many ways Henry V can be interpreted, revealing Shakespeare's uncanny understanding of the brutalising effects of any war. Full Review