Thursday, April 20, 2023
BLAZING MUSIC HOLDS THE HOUSE TOGETHER After 1930’s Donegal at the NT the day before, Dancing at Lughnasa portraying a group of women meeting stress and poverty with danci…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:26AMWednesday, April 19, 2023
A SAD LOST WORLD . A HUMAN BEAUTY There is particular genius in creating a play which doesn’t build to a showy debacle but grips you with the possibility of an unnamed crisis, and so f…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:11AMTuesday, April 18, 2023
ABBASOLUTELY A DELIGHT If there is a formula for a cheerful touring play in our frazzled and disputatious times, it would go like this: warm but a bit rude…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:09AMFriday, April 14, 2023
NEVER FLAT, COWARD There ’s always a slight frisson when Noel Coward’s rueful, dark-streaked romantic comedy is revived in our censorious age. We are nine decades on from the night i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:06AMThursday, April 13, 2023
LOVE, DEATH, GRIEF It’s a joy to have the intimate Swan auditorium open again, refurbished after going dark in the first sudden Covid closure, and to see once again a strong, ni…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:32AMWednesday, April 5, 2023
SEA FRET I’ll give it one thing: over an hour into this infuriating two- hour play there’s a brief but wonderful part for the veteran June Watson. She stumps in with octogenar…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:57AMTuesday, April 4, 2023
BEAUTIFUL SCIENCE. UGLY WORLD Unexpectedly enthralled, I spent an hour and a half eavesdropping on six nuclear physicists, and couldn’t be more glad to have caught up on thi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:04AMSunday, March 26, 2023
BLISS WITH THE BLISSES I don’t always make it through the Oxfordshire lanes to the gorgeous, eccentric, water-wheeled Mill, but the thought of Issy van Randwyck as Judith Bliss lured me . …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:30AMSunday, March 19, 2023
FUTURE IMPERFECT Artificial intelligence and robotics have long been a boon to us ethical-scifi buffs, films like AI and I, Robot mercifully saving us from rocket ships and aliens …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:58PMWednesday, March 15, 2023
HYTNER ROLLS ANOTHER WINNING DICE Daniel Mays has played a lot of tough-guy roles but has by nature a rather innocent and worried-looking face. It is this quality that Nick Hytner sp…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:23AMTuesday, March 14, 2023
RIDE A WILD APP In a week when tech firms shuddered at the shock demise of their favourite bank, how better to spend 90 minutes withJoseph Charlton’s exhilarating, fast moving 3…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:28PMSunday, March 12, 2023
A RADIATING RESPONSIBILITY Since I watched Sizewell A going up as a child, live close to Sizewell B and dwell amid a forest of local posters furiously condemning Sizewell C, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:17PMTuesday, March 7, 2023
SUGAR RUSH I can never resist scribbling down rhymes in new musicals, whether in a spirit appalled or admiring. Take a bow Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary – writers of this extreme ca…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:00AMSunday, March 5, 2023
AN UN-SOLEMN WARNING FROM THE FUTURE H.G.Wells is the inspiration, with a larkily extrovert Dave Hearn from Mischief Theatre pretending to be his great-grandson, heir, and owner of th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:59PMFriday, March 3, 2023
MORE DETAILS, MORE DEVILRY An Afghan army officer flees the Taleban and finds safety on the 23rd floor of Grenfell Tower. His local nickhame is “Sabar”, meaning “pa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:48AMTuesday, February 14, 2023
HIGH ABOVE THE BRUTAL AND BELOVED CITY It’s an architectural moment. Within the stark brutalist NT is a set in homage to a brutalist landmark: the early 1960’s Park Hill Fl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:15AMFriday, February 10, 2023
COUGAR CHAOS The Greeks just go on giving. Writer-director Simon Stone’s play, set today amid the upper-middle classes of Holland Park and second-home Suffolk, credits itself m…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:53AMThursday, February 9, 2023
A MONETARY MORALITY PLAY Three hour-long plays, two intervals, three men in black frock-coats explain some financial history in a revolving glass box in front of a projected , m…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:05AMMonday, February 6, 2023
A TALE FOR TODAY FROM A PRUSSIAN PAST Here’s a love story, an idyll of 18c Prussia: Corporal Anastasius Linck, a Hanoverian musketeer in dashing white breeches and shiny buttons …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:25PMWednesday, February 1, 2023
SITCOMS MADE US, BUT CAN WE MAKE THEM? It’s a very good idea, bang on the money: David Cantor and Michael Kingsbury (TV sitcom writers with a pedigree) set their play in a bland pr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:51AMMonday, January 30, 2023
A BLAST OF DAFT JOY Zip-a-dee-doo-dah! Here’s a treat. Disney music, blasting out before this vigorous 65-minute one-man spree, sets the mood. It is carnivalesque, fantastical,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:52PMSunday, January 29, 2023
A PATIENT TO TRY PATIENCE It must be challenging to play a psychiatrist at work , maybe especially in Finsbury Park where there are bound to be a few in the audience. Yo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:11PMWednesday, January 25, 2023
Just a few new notes on this , as its completes its triumphant national tour with (amazingly) no stopping-injuries despite the heroically vigorous slapstick direction by Lindsay Posner (move…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:15PMThursday, January 19, 2023
HELLMAN’S LESSON IN HUMANITY Theatre can offer few more topical messages for a nation which might hesitate over Ukraine’s needs than this neglected one-set domestic play by Lilia…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:28AMPULLING THE WOOL Most dystopian visions set themselves quite far in the future. Misha Levkov, however, keeps us in 2025, specifying that productions should always be set a cou…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:22AMWednesday, January 18, 2023
AN OLD INJUSTICE REMEMBERED An old man steps onstage alone: upright, soldierly in khaki as a former US war hero who is, he says resignedly, “brought out every year on the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:37AMFriday, December 23, 2022
A TALE FOR ALL TIMES The story of Nelson Mandela has become almost a folktale: imprisoned for 27 years for campaigning against the hideous “apartheid” regime which kept the black ma…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:42AMSunday, December 18, 2022
THIS DAME HAS A WHOLE LOT BEHIND HIM I last saw Sir Ian McKellen onstage as Lear, missed him as the oldest Hamlet ever, but far longer ago saw him in a frock at the … Cont…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:15AMFriday, December 16, 2022
BREEZILY BLOWING IN FROM 1908, FRESH AS EVER In Mole End on Christmas Eve,in a burrow cosy with domestic detail they’re breaking out the beer and sardines and reminiscing about t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:34PMTuesday, December 13, 2022
A TRAGICOMIC BEAUTY Hard to express how much I loved Stephen Karam’s play. Maybe it just hit the right moment: yomped through freezing night, strikes and ‘severe delays” readi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:31AMSunday, December 11, 2022
THE MOST ENJOYABLE STRIKE YOU’LL SEE THIS CHRISTMAS I love it when the theatre perfectly fits the show. Artists can overcome a wrong space, but there’s gleeful concord when it su…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:16AM 
