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Theatre
10. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Staging a bestselling book that has already been adapted into a film starring bona fide national treasures (Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton) might have been daunting. But, in Chichester, Katy Rudd’s musical of a man’s Bunyanesque journey to visit a dying woman met that challenge with lo-fi eccentricity and folksy songs with a foot-stomping spirit (composed by Michael Rosenberg, AKA Passenger). In the West End from 29 January. Read the review
9. The Railway Children
As site-specific shows go, this adaptation of E Nesbit’s classic was hard to top. It began with a ride on a vintage stream train in West Yorkshire, depositing the audience in a disused engine shed at Oxenhope. The story was given an Anglo-Indian twist and Joanna Scotcher’s stupendous set design incorporated track lines. There was one monumental set piece after another, including a train chugging in. Read the review
8. Measure for Measure
Emily Burns excised all the comedy from her modern-dress RSC production to turn this problem play into an intense and dangerous drama about sexual coercion and hypocrisy. Tom Mothersdale was a darkly magnetic Angelo and Burns even resolved the jarring ending to give the heroine, Isabella, her much-deserved freedom. Read the review
7. The Maids
Jean Genet’s drama about two maids playing sub-dom games and enacting murderous fantasies about their overbearing mistress has never felt so fearlessly punkish. Adapted and directed by Kip Williams at the Donmar Warehouse, it used smartphone content, projected on to screens, to give a modern resonance of influencer culture and the compulsive pull of online image-making. Read the review
6. 1536
Ava Pickett’s award-winning debut play was set in rural Essex where three Tudor-era women (played by Tanya Reynolds, Liv Hill and Siena Kelly) banter, bicker, dream and confide, with a growing puritanism and Anne Boleyn’s execution in the air. Staged at the Almeida, it has a West End run from May. A play filled with complex female characters and razor dread. Read the review
5. Hot Mess
Beginning as a meet-cute between Humanity and Earth, this climate disaster romcom was the best musical at the Edinburgh fringe. It proved that a deeply weird idea can fly in the right hands – in this case, the super-talented duo Jack Godfrey (music and lyrics) and Ellie Coote (book and direction). Heaps of humour, intelligence and two remarkable performers in Danielle Steers and Tobias Turley. Read the review
4. Animal Farm
George Orwell’s farmyard allegory of fascism has been dramatised umpteen times so how did Amy Leach’s touring production manage to make it freshly harrowing? Partly because of its talented cast but also because of the physicality of its staging and potent, lyrical use of British Sign Language. Read the review
3. Much Ado About Nothing
Jamie Lloyd’s celebrity casting paid off with a confetti-filled bang in this modern reworking of Shakespeare at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, with Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston as the sparring, midlife singletons Beatrice and Benedick. As joyous as the most riotous kind of wedding, there were disco lights, pumping bass, plushy animal masks and enough chemistry to set the room alight. Read the review
2. Return to Palestine
This charismatic tragicomedy by Jenin’s Freedom Theatre was devised almost a decade ago but could not have been revived at a more potent moment, at Theatro Technis in London. Taking place on a tiny strip of white cloth and based on stories collected from across Palestine, six performers used physical theatre, clowning and oud music to searing effect. Read the review
1. Stereophonic
David Adjmi’s play about the creative pains of making music received a record-breaking 13 Tony award nominations when it ran on Broadway – and for good reason. It began quietly as an unnamed 1970s band arrive at a studio to record an album, then turned up the tempo with slow-burn magnificence to draw a profound, funny and vivid portrait of these musician-couples as they fought, flirted, cried, made up. And when the songs came (written by Will Butler of Arcade Fire) they were a hurricane of pure, skinless emotion, with every performance raising shivers. The set at the Duke of York’s theatre was constructed as a replica studio behind glass, complete with a console and two hippy engineers. A thunderbolt of a show. Read the review. Arifa Akbar
Comedy
10. Sam Nicoresti: Baby Doomer
When she and her girlfriend wondered how to pay for their upcoming wedding, Sam Nicoresti had a brainwave. “It’s easy, I’ll just win the Edinburgh comedy award!” And so she did, with this big-hitting, bid-for-the-mainstream hour, packed with jokes about gender transition, Gollum and a farcical incident in a high street changing room. Read the review
9. John Tothill: This Must Be Heaven
His first and second standup shows both nearly drove John Tothill to an early grave – one, when the drugs trial that funded it went wrong; the other, when its run fell foul of a critical bout of appendicitis. But the third, which related the latter misadventure, broke him – and his fizzy, scholarly but hedonistic comedy – into the big time. Read the review
8. Tim Key: Loganberry
Goodness me, Tim Key was in masterful form with this latest idiosyncratic standup hour, premiering at the Edinburgh fringe and touring in the new year. An oddball spin on the midlife crisis show, toying with Key’s supposed angst about his age, self-worth, celebrity status and singledom, it revealed an act in complete command of his unlike-any-other style. Read the review
7. Ayoade Bamgboye: Swings and Roundabouts
The best newcomer award at the fringe has launched some big talents over the years – Tim Minchin, Sarah Millican, Harry Hill. You wouldn’t back against Ayoade Bamgboye joining their ranks after this super-bright, always surprising and tricksy tale of cultural crossover and coming of age. One of 2025’s most arresting debuts. Read the review
6. Simple Town
Simple by name, slippery by nature, this comedy quartet from New York made quite the splash on the fringe, watering the arid local sketch-comedy landscape with smart-slacker vignettes forever dodging your efforts to pin them down. A welcome reminder of how joyful team comedy can be. Read the review
5. Adam Riches and John Kearns ARE Ball & Boe
Premiering last Christmas (after annual “Best of” lists had already been compiled!), but revived this year, Kearns and Riches’ affectionate send-up of the crooning duo made for an utterly irresistible hour, exploring double-act dynamics and the art v commerce struggle in patently ridiculous fashion. Read the review
4. Elouise Eftos: Australia’s First Attractive Comedian
Can you be sexy and funny? Can you be funny about being sexy? And if the answer’s yes, then why the backlash against Aussie import Elouise Eftos’s fabulous provocation of a show? Eftos lays out her ideas, and the pushback against them, in character (or is she?) as the hottest woman in the room, in a fantastically teasing hour on our vexed relationship with good looks. Read the review
3. John Early: The Album Tour
There’s a brand of comedy that splays across the stage millennial solipsism in the age of social media, and its high priest is John Early. This rare UK appearance by the Search Party star, at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, was a 2025 highlight, a variety night of pop covers, character work and standup comedy laying himself, and his vexed generation, bare. Read the review
2. Cat Cohen: Broad Strokes
Broad Strokes told the story of what happened when the most neurotically self-absorbed act in cabaret-comedy, New Yorker Cat Cohen, experienced a stroke at 30 (“isn’t that so creative?”) The diametric opposite of “trauma comedy”, the result was playful, musical, whip-smart and deliciously coy with our expectations that Cohen take her material remotely seriously. Read the review
1. Nick Mohammed Is Mr Swallow: Show Pony
It’s been a big year for actor-comedian Nick Mohammed – and not just because of The Celebrity Traitors. Had he gone nowhere near Ardross Castle, 2025 would have remained a big step forward for the 45-year-old, who delivered a career-best standup set, Show Pony. Most of his previous stage work shrouded Mohammed like a traitor’s cloak behind magic, memory tricks and his bumptious northern alter ego, Mr Swallow. Here, Mohammed gave us that beloved character, but more of himself too – or at least the version of himself our identity-obsessed age demands. So was this a coming-out party, or a satire on a culture that demands Mohammed play up the identity it ascribes to him? Intriguingly, hilariously, it was both – and much more besides. Read the review. Brian Logan
Dance
10. Ebony Scrooge
A late entry into the Top 10 for a new Christmas show from ZooNation, experts in feelgood energy and putting a twist on classic titles. Choreographer Dannielle “Rhimes” Lecointe turned Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into a hip-hop fable, the dancers as tight as Scrooge’s accounting and a helluva lot more fun. Read the review
9. Akram Khan: Thikra
OK, so you might have to forget about trying to work out the story – narrative clarity has never been Khan’s strong point – but the magicking up of an enveloping atmosphere and a strong eye for visual drama and design absolutely are. Thikra swirled around themes of life, afterlife, spirits and spirituality. Read the review
8. Manuel Liñán: Muerta de Amor
A show with all the emotions turned up to 11 – as you’d expect from flamenco – especially passion and desire. But with Liñán, it’s never in a trite way. The choreographer and his all-male cast dealt in neediness and vulnerability as well as coursing testosterone, with singer Mara Rey matching them for power. Read the review
7. Quadrophenia
A mod ballet powered by an orchestral version of the Who’s Quadrophenia album, as well as by the timeless frustration and alienation of youth and a wardrobe full of Paul Smith suits. Perhaps it shouldn’t have worked, but it did, thanks to strong designs, killer riffs and dancer Paris Fitzpatrick in the lead. Read the review
6. We Should Have Never Walked on the Moon
A very cool event. In a collab with Rambert dance company, French collective (La)Horde took over the whole Southbank Centre, with 80 performers appearing across multiple levels and spaces, inside and out. The result was a buzzy if often bleak take on the distractions of screen-filtered 21st-century life. Read the review
5. Trisha Brown Dance Company
The late Trisha Brown was a titan of postmodern dance and this was a welcome chance to see 1985’s Working Title. Brown’s reputation is well known, but the revelation of this double bill was companion piece In the Fall, by French choreographer Noé Soulier: an immensely satisfying exercise in clarity. Read the review
4. Nico Muhly’s Marking Time
Three new dance works set to the music of Nico Muhly and each one a corker. Jules Cunningham offered up their strongest work yet; Maud Le Pladec gave us sirens in sequins and Michael Keegan-Dolan stole the show with a wild ride featuring folk singer Sam Amidon and a clan of dancing skeletons. Read the review
3. Royal Ballet: Perspectives
There was beautiful partnering for the male leads William Bracewell and Matthew Ball in Cathy Marston’s world premiere, Against the Tide, inspired by Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto. This triple bill also saw the Royal Ballet’s first stab at a work by American Justin Peck, attacked with sunny energy and precision. Read the review
2. Figures in Extinction
You have to admire choreographer Crystal Pite, not just for her craft – masterful as it is – but for the way she tackles real-world issues, like the precarious future of our natural world (and humanity itself) in this collaboration with Complicité’s Simon McBurney and Nederlands Dans Theater. Things seem more hopeful in Pite’s hands. Read the review
1. Thick & Tight: Natural Behaviour
An utterly unique and eccentric duo – Daniel Hay-Gordon and El Perry – who somehow manage to be completely left-field and yet very accessible at the same time. This show, the format like a series of sketches, had satire, silliness and lip-syncing. It had thoughtful portraits of cultural icons and the warmth of community – with a host of guest dancers, amateur and professional. It had the pure pleasure of moving to music and some moments of divine dancing. It also had Perry and Hay-Gordon dressed as an orange pantomime horse with Donald Trump’s face coming out of its bottom. What more could you want? Read the review. Lyndsey Winship
