Scott Matthewman

Adaptation and Director: Séamus Rae Musical Director: Jamie Powe James Joyce’s short story The Dead, the final and longest in his anthology Dubliners, was once described by T.S. Eliot as one of the greatest ever written. The tale of Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta starts at a traditional Twelfth Night party hosted by Conroy’s …

Writer: Olga Ravn, adapted by Joanna Bednarczyk Director: Łukasz Twarkowski Even those unfamiliar with Olga Ravn’s International Booker-nominated science fiction novel The Employees will recognise the themes in both the book and this audacious stage adaptation from Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski. The setting is a spaceship on a long voyage away from Earth. The grubby uniforms and …

Writer: Lauren Mooney Director: James Yeatman Luigi Galvani’s discovery that passing electric currents through dead animals would cause them to twitch and convulse as if alive was the start of understanding how the body and brain interact. It was also the catalyst for a new breed of Gothic horror, most notably Frankenstein. More Life, the …

Actor and storyteller Jack Holden’s debut play, 2022’s Cruise, was a truly astonishing piece of theatre. Retelling the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis through the memories of a caller to a present-day LGBT hotline, Holden conjured up a world that was…

Writer: Jack Bradfield Director: Ed Madden Dungeons and Dragons, the granddaddy of tabletop role-playing games, is having a comeback of late. Not that it ever really went away, but the people who bought into its semi-improvised fantasy storytelling in the 1970s and 1980s are now the ones in charge of recycling big IPs in Hollywood, …

Writer: Peter Mottley Director: Paul Olding The story of Henry V, as retold through Shakespeare’s plays, starts with the preceding plays, Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2. It tells of how Prince Hal, heir to his father’s crown, spends more time carousing in taverns with friends, including Sir John Falstaff, Bardolph, Mistress Quickly and …

Choreographer: Mette Ingvartsen In the decades since its invention, skateboarding has grown into a mass-market activity. At the elite level, it has been featured in the last two Summer Olympic Games, while elsewhere, it has spawned subcultures that have pervaded clothing, music, and all aspects of popular culture. Musically, skate culture embraces elements of both …

Writer and Director: Chng Yi Kai Around the world, LGBTQ+ people’s stories are different – and yet, common threads are universal. Stories of rejection, acceptance, togetherness and loneliness exist wherever queer people live. As part of the Queer East Festival’s foray outside its traditional film-based roots, ChngYi Kai’s When the cloud catches colours explores queer …

Writer: Laith Elzubaidi Director: Emily Ling Williams In recent years, society has made strides against using terms that describe mental ill health as pejoratives. Some terms are so ingrained into our cultural idioms, though, that they persist: when someone’s behaviour is irrational or otherwise out of the ordinary, it’s easy to describe them as “crazy” …

Book: Robert Horn Music and Lyrics: Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally Director: Jack O’Brien In his first production in his inaugural season as Artistic Director, Drew McOnie has brought over a Broadway musical comedy that garnered nine nominations and one win at the 2023 Tony Awards. Shucked is set in an isolated community in middle …

Book: Joseph Stein Lyrics: Sheldon Harnick Music: Jerry Bock Director: Jordan Fein The first thing one notices in the transfer of Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre’s production of Fiddler on the Roof is, of course, the set. The wheat-laden roof of Tom Scutt’s impressive design is now movable and less curved, flying up to reveal a space …

The company of The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs at the Kiln Theatre, London. Picture: Mark Senior The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs continues at the Kiln Theatre, London until 12 July 2025. Over recent years, the number of spaces dedicated to LGBTQ+…

Kiki & Herb are Trying! continues at Soho Theatre Walthamstow until 5 July 2025.

Picture: Danny Kaan In 1983, an impressive-looking building in Brixton had fallen into disrepair. Opened in 1929 as the Astoria Variety Cinema and Theatre, it showed its last film in 1972. Brief attempts to use the venue as a disco and rock venue…

Writer: William Shakespeare, adapted by Kwame Owusu Directors: Emily Ling Williams and Malik Nashad Sharpe The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is one of the best-known of Shakespearean passages. It contains a reference to the play’s duration as “the two hours’ traffic of our stage,” but it’s rare for a modern performance to honour that

Writer: Tim Connery Director: Alex Donald Comedian Larry Grayson’s career peaked in the early 1980s, when he took over hosting BBC1 Saturday night staple The Generation Game. His role on that show afforded glimpses of his stand-up routines, which were camp, gossipy stories of a bevvy of characters with innuendo-laden names and escapades. Tim Connery’s

Writers:  Bush Moukarzel, Ben Kidd and Zoë McWhinney, adapted from the book by Ilya Kaminsky Directors: Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd It starts relatively lightly. It didn’t have to: Deaf Republic’s source material, Ilya Kaminsky’s sweeping epic story told in a series of poems, begins with devastating lines: “And when they bombed other people’s houses,

Choreographer: Sadeck Berrabah Music: TRex When starlings flock in the evening sky, they will twist and loop into mesmeric patterns. Individually, they are merely flying: together, their murmuration is bewitching. It is understandable, then, why French choreographer Sadeck Berrabah has chosen Murmuration as the title for his work that takes individual movements by a 30-plus

Choreography and Music: Hofesh Shechter Dreams are funny things. They usually comprise snippets of life mixed in with pure fantasy, making wild, veering narrative U-turns. And every so often, there may be a splash of nudity. That sums up Hofesh Shechter’s Theatre of Dreams, a fantasia in which a lone figure enters a figurative rabbit

Writer: Stacie Burrows Songs: Stacie Burrows and Sam Small Director: Katierose Donohue Enriquez The great writer and humorist Mark Twain is widely believed to have said that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. The attribution is probably false – the closest in Twain’s writings is a much longer phrase about how the kaleidoscopic