Theatre review: Oliver!

After a 2024 full of shows with punctuation in the title, the West End gets the OG musical hit in 2025 with the transferring Chichester Festival Theatre production of Lionel Bart's Oliver Exclamation Mark. Charles Dickens' (Chickens to his friends) story of child trafficking, wifebeating, murder, grooming gangs, antisemitism, alcoholism and a quadruple revolve sees Oliver Twist's (Cian Eagle-Service, alternating with Raphael Korniets, Jack Philpott and Odo Rowntree-Bailly) mother die in a Victorian London workhouse giving birth to him. The child is raised there until the age of eleven, at which point he annoys Mr Bumble (Oscar Conlon-Morrey) by politely asking for a second helping of gruel and has to be got rid of. It being a century too early to sell him to a 1970s DJ, Bumble sells him to an undertaker, but soon the boy is back out on the streets.

Theatre review: Mary Poppins

Disney© seem to have well and truly moved into the Prince Edward Theatre, as no sooner has Aladdin ended its run than Mary Poppins is back at the same theatre where this version of P L Travers' stories debuted in 2004. This is the Julian Fellowes adaptation which uses familiar songs from the film by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, rearranged by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe who also provide a few new numbers of their own. Zizi Strallen (part of the Z-series of Strallens that also includes Zeppo, Zumba and Zermajesty) takes over the iconic title role of the magical nanny who flies in out of nowhere one day to take care of Jane (Ellie Kit Jones, alternating with Adelaide Barham, Imogen Bourn, Charlotte Breen and Nuala Peberdy) and Michael (Edward Walton, alternating with Joseph Duffy, Samuel Newby, Gabriel Payne and Fred Wilcox) Banks.

Dance review: The Red Shoes

Time for one of my very occasional dips into the world of dance - this year my mum decided she'd like to be taken to the ballet for Christmas, and when she heard that Matthew Bourne had adapted a film she remembers fondly, The Red Shoes, into a new ballet that decided it. Bourne's also looked to the cinema for his music, choosing the work of Bernard Herrmann - best known for scoring Hitchcock films, although most of the music used here predates that collaboration. In many ways the story is a natural fit for a ballet as it's about ballet: Victoria Page (Ashley Shaw) is a dancer in the Ballet Lermontov who's never really caught the attention of its conductor Boris (Sam Archer,) and so has never got further than background roles. That's until prima ballerina Irina (Michela Meazza) is injured on tour.

Dance review: Lord of the Flies

Sweaty topless dancing boys made Matthew Bourne's name when he first gender-flipped the swans in Swan Lake a couple of decades ago, and he obviously knows they still don't hurt if you've got tickets to sell. An obvious source of raging testosterone, though a less obvious choice for ballet, is a novel I studied at O'level, and I'll hazard a guess so did both the people reading this: William Golding's Lord of the Flies is rarely absent from the GCSE English curriculum. If by some chance you haven't read it, or did and have blocked it from your memory, it's the story of a group of schoolboys during World War II, who survive a plane crash that kills all the adults. Trapped on a desert island they follow very proper, English rules of behaviour led by Ralph (Sam Archer.) Until, that is, the rest of the boys realise these rules no longer apply to them, and the island descends into violence and chaos.

Dance review: Play Without Words

Matthew Bourne's Play Without Words, which he first produced at the National ten years ago, gets revived for a tour to mark the 25th anniversary of Bourne's New Adventures company. Set in 1965, with a jazzy, trumpet-heavy score by Terry Davies, the show is based on Robin Maugham's The Servant and Joseph Losey's film version. Bourne's dance retelling of a story of multiple infidelities uses up to three dancers at a time to play each character: Anthony (Adam Maskell, Chris Trenfield, Richard Winsor) initially resists the temptation of housemaid Sheila (Anabel Kutay, Hannah Vassallo) but eventually succumbs, only to be caught by his manservant Prentice (Daniel Collins, Alastair Postlethwaite, Neil Westmoreland.) Prentice blackmails his boss with the information, but Anthony's fiancée Glenda (Madelaine Brennan, Saranne Curtin, Anjali Mehra) is herself cheating with a mystery man.