Theatre

TIM WALKER gives his take on the comic play Present Laughter The laws of the land and the social mores that prevailed during most of Noël Coward’s life meant that he had – in common with a great many other playwrights, such as Terence Rattigan – to be subtle when it came to addressing the […]

TIM WALKER reviews Bitter Wheat at Garrick Theatre One imagines Harvey Weinstein must be flattered that John Malkovich should now be playing a character so obviously inspired by him on the London stage. Sure, he would probably have preferred it if the star hadn’t felt the need to don a fat suit, but, other than […]

‘On the surface, this is an incredibly stylish piece of theatre’. TIM WALKER gives four stars to the Chichester Festival’s Plenty. If playwrights like Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan wrote plays that largely show Great Britain as she likes to see herself, David Hare has a habit of writing about her as she really is. […]

Bold, challenging theatre which encapsulates the joy and misery of that crazy thing called love. Kiln Theatre, London, until July 6 “All you need to know about A Doll’s House is a woman walks,” says Suzannah, the bohemian actress played by Sirine Saba in Samuel Adamson’s new play, Wife. Ibsen’s classic hastened the march towards […]

TIM WALKER speaks to Michael Longhurst about the Donmar Theatre’s revival of Europe – and why he is keen that it sends a very political message. “This country has been sitting on a powderkeg for too long. A spark was bound to catch. He said he’d tighten up on immigration controls. After all… feelings were […]

TIM WALKER’s latest stage review says a career revival for aging teen idol Matthew Broderick has failed to launch. What does Matthew Broderick, the fresh-faced, teen-idol star of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, do when he gets older? He makes an attempt at relaunching his career on the West End stage. I’m not quite sure if […]

Tim Walker reviews stage show Anna. The peculiar acoustics of the Whispering Gallery, directly beneath the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, mean it’s possible to randomly eavesdrop on the conversations of strangers, even if they are some distance away. Ben and Max Ringham, the sound designers of Anna, achieve the same effect in this startlingly […]

TIM WALKER reviews Orpheus Descending at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. I’m on a theatrical bender without end, and, take it from me, I’m on the hard stuff. I’ve downed three Arthur Millers in quick succession and now it’s time for a shot of Tennessee Williams, who is, quite frankly, right up there with […]

TIM WALKER reviews Arthur Miller’s best-known play Death of a Salesman. Musicals and comedies have traditionally always been in demand during bleak times, but London would appear to have come to the view that it’s beyond cheering up and is bingeing on Arthur Miller, the theatrical equivalent of a bottle of Bruichladdich with a Mogadon […]

Tim Walker reviews stage show Small Island. A white couple find themselves the parents of a black baby and they’ve not adopted him. This sounds like the start of an awful racist joke, but it’s what happens towards the end of Small Island, and, given the setting is post-war Britain, there’s nothing remotely funny about […]

In this week’s stage review, TIM WALKER, reviews All My Sons at the Old Vic. ‘I just want everybody to be happy,’ trills Jenna Coleman, playing the love interest in All My Sons. This being an Arthur Miller play, that was always going to be at best a forlorn hope. Indeed, the sense of despair […]

Top Girls is a play that fails the test of time, writes TIM WALKER. The National Theatre rightly sees that it has a responsibility to keep alive old and more modern classics and that’s presumably why it has chosen to revive Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. When it was first presented almost 40 years ago, it […]

Grief is the word as TIM WALKER reviews the production featuring Cillian Murphy. Barbican, London, until April 13 Just after 9/11, the Queen observed that ‘grief is the price we pay for love’. The sentiment may not have been original – a psychiatrist named Dr Colin Murray Parkes had more or less coined the phrase […]

TIM WALKER gives his review of Fiddler on the Roof at Playhouse London, which is running until September 28. Familiarity can breed contempt with even the greatest shows, so it’s just as well that Sir Trevor Nunn has thought outside of the box with his revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Even the Playhouse’s large […]

In this week’s stage review, TIM WALKER, reviews The Twilight Zone at the Ambassadors Theatre. There’s a scene in The Twilight Zone that speaks very much to our disorientating times. A man who has installed a bomb-proof shelter beneath his home is retreating into it with his family ahead of a nuclear war. His neighbours […]

In this week’s stage review, TIM WALKER reviews Tartuffe at the National Theatre. The National Theatre offers excursions to both heaven and hell at the moment. Turn left when you enter the main building and you are on your way to the former, in a once-in-a-lifetime production of Follies. Turn right and, for just the […]

Tim Walker review The Son, which runs until April 6 at Kiln Theatre, London. When I look back on my teenage years, I realise an awful lot of my time was spent fretting about how Peter Barkworth would cope with finding out that his wife Hannah Gordon was having an affair with Keith Barron in […]

Follies, National Theatre, until April 6 When the National Theatre gets a production absolutely right – and let me say immediately that’s what it’s achieved with its revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies – it lifts you in a way that no other venue in the world can quite manage. I have seen a few productions […]

David Suchet delivers great value as the eccentric Gregory Solomon, alongside Brendan Coyle. Wyndham’s Theatre, until April 27 There is a world-weariness to Arthur Miller’s plays that doesn’t normally start to have much resonance with theatregoers until they reach middle age. It’s one of the few advantages of the peculiarly bleak times in which we […]

A prisoner of the Internet It’s not enough for youngsters these days to live their lives, but they have also to be seen to be living their lives on social media. On Instagram, in particular, appearance often matters a lot more than reality and that is what Sasha gets only too well. She posts some […]

The new play starring Cate Blanchett is as torturous as its name is long, writes TIM WALKER. One of the reasons I love going to the theatre more than ever is that in this age when virtually every aspect of our lives involves staring at a computer screen, 
it is about the only time, outside […]

TIM WALKER’s stage review of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s show Aspects of Love. Two weeks before Aspects of Love first opened in the West End, Roger Moore dramatically withdrew from the cast, saying that he couldn’t cope with the technical demands of the singing. Three decades on, when I got to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s show […]

TIM WALKER’s stage review of Approaching Empty. The Kiln Theatre in north London has once again made good on its stated mission to encourage artists of all ages and backgrounds with its latest production, Approaching Empty. It is by Ishy Din, a former cab driver of Kashmiri origin, whose family made their home in Middlesbrough. […]

TIM WALKER on the play that Jeremy Corbyn should watch. Si�n Brooke and Alex Hassell in I’m Not Running at the National Theatre by David Hare. Photo by Mark Douet – Credit: Photo by Mark Douet There can be few, if any, audiences traditionally so predisposed to voting Labour than the National Theatre’s. The playwright […]

Tim Walker finds Pinter’s Party Time and Celebration to be an unexpected pleasure. It is hard as a theatre critic not to take almost as much pleasure in the hatreds as the enthusiasms. Over two decades of reviewing, I have seldom, if ever, had a good word to say about Harold Pinter. His work always […]

Tim Walker reviews the National Theatre’s production of Edgar Allan Poe’s grisly tale, The Tell-Tale Heart Peter Cushing knew his craft and numbered among his fans Laurence Olivier, who cast him as Osric in his 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet, and he toured with the great actor and the Old Vic Company in Australia. One […]

TIM WALKER reviews A Christmas Carol at the Charles Dickens Museum. When A Christmas Carol is done really well – and Dominic Gerrard does it sublimely – members of the audience are compelled to play the part of Scrooge, albeit passively from their seats. This powerful work ought always to grab hold of everyone out […]

Writing fraternal wrongs Sam Shepard’s True West is supposedly a homage to the vanishing American West, but it’s more about a writer losing control of what he’s writing and the triumph of mediocrity over talent.​ There is, of course, only one difference between good writing and bad writing, and that is, in the case of […]

In his latest review, TIM WALKER watches Joanna Murray-Smith’s Switzerland at London’s Ambassadors Theatre. When Christmas approaches – and with it the prospect of big family reunions – the thoughts of the nation always seem to turn inexorably towards murder. No festive season is, after all, complete without Miss Marple making an appearance on television, […]

Tim Walker gives five stars to this production about a highly-strung minister’s daughter who, falls in love with a local lad named John, but is never quite able to find a way to express it until it is too late.​ As a young reporter, sent out to do big interviews, I had a stock question […]

Orpheus goes down in style at the National Theatre, says TIM WALKER Hadestown 
National Theatre, until January 26 The National Theatre likes to put on a big blockbuster in the run-up to Christmas and Hadestown is certainly that. It’s a big jaunty, lively, rhythm-and-blues re-imagining of the ancient myth of Orpheus descending into the underworld […]

Tim Walker gives five stars to this heartfelt cry for tolerance. The one thing that Indhu Rubasingham, the brilliant artistic director of the Kiln Theatre, has always got is the big picture. It’s all very well to keep obsessing about the refurbishment and the new branding she’s put in place at the venue – both […]