Friday, May 6, 2022
NURSING ACROSS CONTINENTS    Kayla Meikle, stalwart in Victorian dignity and Caribbean matriarchy, addresses us firmly at the start of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s manic, som…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:01AMWednesday, May 4, 2022
IN THE MIDDLE OF LIFE’S JOURNEY..THROW A PLATE OR TWO    Ah, middle age! Waists spreading outwards, options contracting, marriage all too familiar, parents getting olde…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:21PMThursday, April 28, 2022
SEXUAL ASSAULT , HARD LAW, AND AN ASTONING WEST END DEBUT   Forget the cold sadistic clotheshorse Vilanelle from Killing Eve. Actually, forget all Jodie Comer’s screen awar…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:09AMTuesday, April 26, 2022
HALF A CENTURY OF HAPPY MISCHIEF Full disclosure: I have been following this man around for the best part of 50 years. Went with my brother Mike to his first show, Housewife Superstar, at th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:48AMFriday, April 22, 2022
NOW THE TWO PLAYS TOGETHER HENRY VI: REBELLION.    ENGLAND IN FERMENT, AND SOME DANGEROUS WOMEN    We are in the 1450s, in a dangerous doldrum: Henry V of Agincou…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:52AMWednesday, April 20, 2022
ENGLAND IN FERMENT, AND SOME DANGEROUS WOMEN    We are in the 1450s, in a dangerous doldrum: Henry V of Agincourt is long dead, his stripling son married to pretty French…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:22PMTuesday, April 19, 2022
DO WE STILL LOVE ROOSTER?   So it’s back, another St George’s day before a west country village fair.  Twelve years on from Jez Butterworth’s glorious s…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:11AMSunday, April 17, 2022
THE ORANGE MONSTER RIDES AGAIN  The first thing to say is what everyone has said: that Bertie Carvel as Donald Trump is magnificent. Eerily so, capturing not only the ex-Presiden…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:04PMSunday, April 10, 2022
THE LOST BOYS OF THEATRE…   The tiny Actors’ Centre is reborn under its new name, and since this play is set in what was a traditionally febrile, theatrical, subv…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:08AMThursday, April 7, 2022
 QUEER AS FOLK BY THE INFINITY POOL Jeremy O Harris is a much feted American playwright (a Tony for Slave Play) adept at drilling in to the moment: BLM, fashionable white guilt, sh…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:03AMWednesday, April 6, 2022
SCIENCE, SIBLINGS, SOUND AND FURY   This is a satisfying play. To take a painting analogy, it satisfies not in the way that a perfect still-life vase might, but more like a Ka…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:35AMMonday, April 4, 2022
CAMPING ON THE PLANKING At the Coliseum last autumn Gilbert and Sullivan’s seagoing Savoy Opera was immense, with a huge revolving ship, Les Dennis as the first sea lord, a massive ch…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:46PMFriday, April 1, 2022
THE SHADOW OF A BEGINNING, ALABAMA 1936    Forget, for the moment, both the fame and the the arguments over Harper Lee’s classic novel: Aaron Sorkin’s stage …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:33AMThursday, March 24, 2022
WELCOME BACK, BITING SHARP AS EVER   In 2010 Bruce Norris’ play wowed the Royal Court: this is a ten-year anniversary (well, plus two years lost to Covid) so forgive me for…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:01PMTHE ROUGH TOUGH BIRTH OF A CITY   It is not often I resort to drawing in the notebook, but there it is: half an hour into the first part of David Hare’s play about the city pla…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:40AMWednesday, March 23, 2022
A PLAY IS A PLAY IS A PLAY IS A WEDDING   With typical wit, the doughty little Jermyn has captured an intellectual-farcical oddity from New York complete with author-director …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:51AMSaturday, March 19, 2022
BRACING, BELTING, BENIGN    At the end of the evening the great diva, director and muse informs us that we too must sing. In a packed house, on the far side of a pandemic whi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:41AMThursday, March 17, 2022
 LEARNING TO LIVE     Sometimes judging others harshly is a relishable guilty pleasure. In Ruby Thomas’ wonderful 80-minute sequence of snapshots of family t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:17PMWednesday, March 16, 2022
NOT A FINE ROMANCE Â Â Mamet plays are Marmite plays. You can applaud Speed the Plow, adore Wag the Dog on screen, and have a pleasurable argument with the opposite sex after a particu…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:49AMTuesday, March 15, 2022
LOVE AS AN UNCOURTLY CONTEST   In 2009 – and again in Chichester 2018 – I missed Mike Bartlett’s mischievous, half-earnest play about a gay man wrestling wit…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:59PMFriday, February 25, 2022
A VIGOROUS, HEARTSHAKING BRUSH OF OPPOSITES    Two artists in a studio:  the older one pale and floppily blond, languidly self-protective, drawling, preaching a cool…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:30AMTuesday, February 15, 2022
AN ORDINARY TRIANGLE TWISTS INTO NIGHTMARE     The French novelist-turned-playwright Florian Zeller hit the British theatre scene a few years ago with two comedies: The LieÂ�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:58AMFriday, February 11, 2022
HOMAGE TO A HEALING CHAOS    If – like Prince Charles – you grew up with the Goons in the background (“Ying Tong! Bluebottle! He’s fallen in da wat…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:31PMFriday, January 14, 2022
MIDDLECLASS MOUNTAIN MISERIES    Inspired programming here.  You’d find a decent overlap in any January Venn diagram of regular Donmar audiences and people who wish th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:29AMThursday, January 13, 2022
Puppets move the heart…    It was a third attempt ( like so many, it has had cancellations and suspensions), and I missed it in Sheffield 2019 through illness. So I bou…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:14AMWednesday, January 5, 2022
SONGS FROM THE LAND    There’s a lovely serendipity here. The main theatre is running PEGGY FOR YOU (till 29th) while the little downstairs space has Neil Leys…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:18AMFriday, December 31, 2021
PLAGUE YEAR Part 2 –  2021  Below, if you care to scroll , I chronicled the shows that met my return from chemo-then-lockdown in 2020.  An enfeebled theatrical year…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:55PMThursday, December 30, 2021
PART 1: THE ONSET   I set out, in this eerie Twixtmas gap, to chronicle and celebrate the return of live theatre since May 2021. And this will follow. But when I tott…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:49AMSaturday, December 18, 2021
A SHARP , SERPENTINE, SUPERB PERFORMANCE      Lounging in the small hours on her office couch, under a wall of posters for her many clients’ shows – both fa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:57AMFriday, December 10, 2021
A PRIMA DONNY JOINS THE FEARLESS FOUR   Last year as a family we came to see the doughty quartet doing this variety show, an adult-joking non-panto to fill the fearful gap. I…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:31AMThursday, December 9, 2021
1968 AND ALL THAT James Graham’s mission might seem unfashionable: trawling 20c history and public culture, looking not for villains and heroes but for the nuances of human behavi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:35PM 
