The poet laureate’s verbatim play about Brexit sinks into journalistic and untheatrical banality

Text of the day: “Secrecy is the curse of our British system.”

Grace Barnes’s excellent new book is both provocative and illuminating

Bad stuff and change in a time of pandemic: a derivative lockdown poem

Spirited comedy of cultural misunderstanding comes to north London from Broadway

Philip Ridley continues to surprise and delight with this brilliant new monologue — in the teeth of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown

Another over-hyped new play: this time about porn addiction, but superficially imagined and lacking in drama

Leo Butler’s wonderful new one is not a play, but a passionate book about a writer’s life and the craft of playwriting

Explore the work of a handful of British theatre’s brightest and most exciting writing talents

Censorship appears to be simple, but is actually quite complicated.

Nick Stafford’s sturdy beast rides again — and retains its colt-like freshness and wild beauty

Can theatre habituate us to extreme violence? Blasted is both a denunciation of the horrors of war and maybe a domestication of them

Favourite stage direction: “The funeral procession of Queen Elizabeth II goes past.”

Superbly plotted family drama beautifully explores the relationships between the personal and political

Can the stranglehold of naturalism and social realism in British theatre ever be broken?

One of the most important characteristics of contemporary British new plays is that they aim to provide a forum for the discussion of ideas.

Let us remember the radical acts of 50 years ago.

Peter Morgan’s award-winning story of Putin’s triumph is vivid, but lacks real complexity

New play about human beings caught up in the double binds of the two great superpowers is simply dazzling

The love affair between playwright and actor lasted far beyond their early divorce

Take an imaginative ride through 400 years of British theatre with our fictional guides

Populist show is now on its sixth cast, but despite some noisy shocks it fails to chill the blood

A few days ago, I watched the National Theatre At Home streamed recording of Michaela Coel’s award-winning Chewing Gum Dreams.

Lucy Prebble’s latest tells the story of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, but prefers buffoonery over analysis

Joseph Fiennes is mesmerizing as Gareth Southgate in James Graham’s sport-of-the-nation docu-drama

Joe DiPietro’s cult hit is enjoyable enough, but rather predictable in both form and content

Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestseller about Shakespeare’s wife and son is moving, but pedestrian

Text of the day: “There are good days and bad days.”

Nick Payne’s latest stars Nicola Walker and Paul Higgins, and is about a cruel loss. I’m a believer? No, not at all.

The Angry Young Men of the 1950s were more of media phenomenon than a coherent movement

The classic TV serial takes to the stage like a politician to a pay rise, but lags a bit behind reality

A couple of days ago, I was at the Soho Theatre.

The Royal Court’s international season continues with savage Ukrainian play about women and war

Adaptation of the John le Carré Cold War thriller is a tense courtroom drama, but could do with some more fleshing out

Maxine Peake struggles to make the voice of reason heard in a rather reactionary feminist history play

In the Brexit era, this site-specific revival of Agatha Christie’s 1953 courtroom drama works like a treat

Text of the day: “But it was no good.”

Fabulously queer extravaganza: London transfer for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s riotous comedy Western

The death of David Bowie provokes the Critic to take a trip down the motorways and side alleys of memory

Suzie Miller’s follow up to her massive hit Prima Facie stars Rosamund Pike, whose dazzling performance makes up for the questionable writing

Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People has been staged using help from AI — but what does AI think of the show?

Playwright or director? Who is ultimately responsible for a piece of theatre? Our Critic attempts to find out

More overviews of British new writing from the In-Yer-Face Theatre archive.

Text of the day: “I wasn’t.”

New Anthony Neilson two-hander about sex is playful, wise and funny, but fails to achieve a climax

Here is a sample from the introduction to my latest book about postwar British theatre — an alternative history

Brilliant new writing: new play about a paedophile ring foregrounds the voices of British Pakistani women

Al Smith’s new play was jinxed before it started — and, bogged down in cartoonish detail, it never really recovers

Artificial Intelligence is much hyped — but can it review a theatre show?

As a new production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is about to open in London’s West End, I was lucky enough to get the chance to watch The Impossible Itself (2010), Jake Ad…

Star cast give energy to a superb, if old fashioned, play about the anti-Semitism of Roald Dahl

The longest-running play in world history is in good shape, despite the lackluster and mechanical cast