Theatre

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 […]

TIM WALKER reviews The Wipers Times, on at Arts Theatre, London, until December 1, in this week’s Stage Review. One of the most wearying aspects of Brexit has been the endless harping back to the days when Britain was at war. Boris Johnson likes, of course, to see himself as Churchill, and the way the […]

Heart-throb Douglas Booth proves he is more than just a pretty face. Astonishingly still working after lately celebrating her 93rd birthday, Dame Angela Lansbury attributes the longevity of her career to her plainness in youth. It is was typically self-deprecating remark from this great survivor, but maybe she has a point. She explained that the […]

‘A very boring play that is very well acted’. TIM WALKER reviews The Height of the Storm. The first thing to be said about The Height of the Storm is that it is a very boring play. The second thing to be said about it is that it is very well acted. I suppose Dame […]

Confession of a theatre critic. When it comes to Harold Pinter, I feel we critics are party to a conspiracy against the theatre-going public. At some point, one of our number ­– possibly inebriated – must have knocked off a review saying that there is some point to this man’s plays, that there is more […]

A chance to make a great escape. Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, until January 5 Bonnie Langford in 42nd Street. PHOTO: Brinkhoff/Moegenburg – Credit: Archant Musicals traditionally do well in bleak times so it’s no wonder that 42nd Street is doing a roaring trade. That grand old showman Michael Grade is behind this lavish stage version […]

TIM WALKER reviews Foxfinder at the Ambassodors Theatre, London, which runs until January 5. It is seldom acknowledged that theatre-reviewing is actually one of the most stressful jobs in journalism. I was all set to review Sylvia at the Old Vic for you this week, but, for a second time, I got a last-minute email […]

Tim Walker on Indhu Rubasingham, the best and brightest young theatre boss we have in this country. One of the occupational hazards of being an artistic director of a theatre is that you can all too easily find yourself distracted from what’s happening on the stage by the lampshades that need to be replaced in […]