Theatre

This year’s Festival d’Avignon – a celebration of song, music and dance – kicked off with a rebellion against Brexit

Her live show, Medico, offers laughter as a medicine for life's troubles and has taken the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by storm

Simon Williams has written a very clever and thoughtful play with an unusually sure grasp of the human condition

The return of La Cage Aux Folles, the show that proved too much for Thatcher-era Britain

Portuguese comedian André De Freitas is on a mission to put his country on the map, one joke at a time

The production is intelligent, well-acted, but oh, so boring

Adam Penford’s production of the classic musical speaks to our populist times

A new version of an Italian classic comes to the UK, in more ways than one

Unlike the joyless reworking of Oklahoma!, this gets the point of a big, old-fashioned musical

The writers have taken a film that I couldn't imagine could ever be improved upon and managed to improve upon it

Frank and Percy lets the two old stagers do their thing, which is what makes it work so well

Europe’s first celebrity is celebrated in a treasure trove of objects at Paris’ Petit Palais

Jack Thorne's telling of an early BBC struggle is unfocused, often boring and poorly realised

An Aspects of Love revival feels uncomfortable three decades on

The stage version of Brokeback Mountain is well-meaning, well-acted and well, pointless

1990s musical Once on This Island gets a sensational revival

Based on a WWII deception that fooled the Nazis, Operation Mincemeat is a deft pastiche

Many TV comedy actors come a cropper when they turn to serious stage roles, but the League of Gentlemen star captures Sir John magnificently

A new play about Sidney Poitier is a fitting allegory for our immoral times

The Brexit architect follows in a long line of stage heroes who are morally questionable or downright loathsome

Noel Coward's play is funny now in a way that is tragic

This musical is a joyous explosion of colour, light and good humour

There’s almost certainly a great play to be written about gay black and mixed-race men but this sadly isn’t it

It’s nothing short of terrifying that Tom Basden has managed to shift a story of Italian police corruption so effortlessly and convincingly to a metropolitan police station in this country

A triumphant production about life, love, growing old and dying has absolutely restored my faith in theatre

Sleepova is one of those free-flowing, slice-of-life dramas that, with a no-frills staging, places a vast amount of pressure on the individual actors to make something of their parts

It’s clear everyone has tried very hard to make this show work. They failed

The story of a bored Liverpudlian housewife finding love on a holiday to Greece now feels very dated

This has been said to be a dark reimagining of the old classic, but it is taking the word too literally

If we’d been allowed to judge it on own terms, Rachel O’Riordan’s production works perfectly well as a slice-of-life drama

This is an atmospheric drama set during the second world war in a claustrophobic boarding house not far from Cardiff Docks

With its central theme of doomed, forbidden love, it is also a pretty odd play to put on around the time of Valentine’s Day