Review: The Devil and Mister Punch

Although light entertainment's favourite wife-beater made his stage debut 350 years ago, this surreal tribute to Mr Punch, performed within and around an oak-panelled puppet theatre bedecked with bunting, has a very Victorian feel.

Julian Crouch's production is packed with ideas that subvert the art of puppetry, while the story told here is much more Punch than Judy.

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Review: The Pitchfork Disney

There has been revisionist talk of late questioning the reputation of the so-called In-Yer-Face movement. It asks whether all those urban, often sexually explicit and violent plays of the 1990s, which so shocked critics and audiences, really amount to a golden era of drama?

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Opera: Cosi Fan Tutte

There is only one reason to see this ninth revival of Jonathan Miller's production of Mozart's Così Fan Tutte. But it's compelling.

Sir Colin Davis' conducting is peerless. It's easy to take him for granted, so familiar a presence is he in London's musical life.

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Review: She Stoops to Conquer

In these times of austerity, it appears the National has made the decision to boost the nation's morale with some very funny comedy.

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Review: Travelling Light

There is a brilliant premise to Nicholas Wright's warm-hearted tribute to the Jews who built Hollywood.

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Review: Our New Girl

This drama by Nancy Harris is the final offering under the artistic directorship of Josie Rourke, who is moving to the Donmar Warehouse. It is set in the kitchen of pregnant Hazel (Kate Fleetwood), formerly a high-flying lawyer, who has a fractious relationship with her eight-year-old son.

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Review: Fog

In Toby Wharton and Tash Fairbanks's new drama, Wharton plays the eponymous Fog, who could easily have been a looter on London's streets during last year's riots.

He is in his late teens, carries a knife, deals in drugs and has moved into a high-rise with his father, Cannon (Victor Gardener), an ex-soldier.

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Review: Pippin

Best to ignore the moral of this 1972 musical by Stephen Schwartz, summed up by the lyric, "It never was there, it always was here".

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Opera: Die Meistersinger Von Nurnberg

For the ROH's Christmas treat, a six hour midsummer opera. Perverse you might think, until you hear Antonio Pappano's wondrous conducting of perhaps the most beautiful of all opera scores.

He brings an Italianate delicacy, never remotely ponderous, and is easily the best thing about this otherwise pleasant but hardly compelling revival.

The main problem is Wolfgang Koch's Sachs.

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Review: Haunted Child

Julie (Sophie Okonedo) has been abandoned by her husband Douglas (Ben Daniels). Out of the blue, he turns up looking like he has been abducted by aliens. In a way, he has. He has fallen in with a religious group that believes in, among other things, celibacy, the discouragement of music, and reincarnation.

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Review: The Ladykillers

If it is comfort fare you are after in these recession-hit times, Ealing comedy is the apple crumble of showbiz.

This reworking of the classic 1956 caper miscasts Peter Capaldi as criminal mastermind Professor Marcus, leader of a gang planning a robbery.

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Review: The Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare teaches us that it does not much matter how ridiculous a plot is as long as the emotions are true.

You can have identical twins (here played by Lenny Henry and Chris Jarman) who each have identical twin servants (Lucian Msamati and Daniel Poyser), and then concoct a cockamamy story about siblings being separated as children by a great storm, and then unknowingly brought back togethe

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