GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI LEARNS ABOUT LASPO*… “When I was growing up the poor were seen as unfortunates. Now they’re seen as manipulative. Grasping. Scroungers. It’s ver…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:49PMWHEN LARRY MET ORSON AND KEN AND IT DIDN’T GO WELL… Sir Larry spreads his arms wide in the rehearsal room and moans “I am a giant in chains!” His director rolls his e…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:12PMTHE BIG HAIRY ONE RIDES AGAIN… Stage Hero of the week is Owen Guerin, aka The Gruffalo in the larky children’s play based on Julia Donaldson’s immortal book. On the hottest…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:17PMDOWN THE RABBIT HOLE Fifty minutes in, we got a 30ft yodelling falsetto caterpillar with flashing saucer eyes, and I cheered up. It also, as it happens, sang the central message of Damon…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:14PMA HANDBAG? A WHOLE TRUNKFUL OF TREATS The heart sinks beforehand: Oscar Wilde’s sunny comedy melodrama is too familiar: skipping from one well-worn epigram to the next, from handbag to m…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:14PMCOMFORT YE! HANDEL AND THE FIRST MESSIAH Handel’s Messiah is a phenomenon: written in three weeks in the composer’s most disappointed phase, to this day it plays as sublimely as a chambe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:11AMGUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CONVEYED BY A DYSTOPIAN INJUSTICE The auditorium is a coliseum, with a tremendous conveyor belt slicing it in half, flappy black curtains at either end. K w…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:09PMCHEKHOV UNDER THE TREES Fortune favours the brave, and the meteorological riskiness of outdoor theatre sometimes pays handsomely. A great heron flew over, squawking doom, just as Irina screa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:59AMBACK OF THE NET! Rejoice! In the midst of Fifa’s dismal doings musical theatre makes football beautiful again. Gurinder Chadha’s and Paul Mayeda Berges’ fable, of a …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:59PMLibby Purves: Open air theatre works brilliantly. In fact, it offers some of the most enjoyable drama of the summer
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 06:00AMNOW HERE’S THE ONE TO SEE. DON’T MIND THE LANGUAGE… If you worry about language, the clue’s in the title. More f’s and assholes than you can shake a reproving finger …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:01PMPORN AND PHYSICALITY We’re all on the same page here, right? Online pornography is increasingly violent, graphically displaying real, abusive sexual acts devoid of tenderness. Rapist s…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:54PMUNDER THE BRIDGE, MEN UNDER PRESSURE “You gonna have a revolution”: the last words of Arthur Miller’s angry “play for the screen”, echo here with an interrogati…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:36AMSPECIAL GUEST REVIEWER DARREN RAYMOND OF INTERMISSION THEATRE COMPANY TAKES ON RSC OTHELLO, SKYPE, RAP, BOXBEAT AND ALL….. The RSC made a bold statement by casting their first ever bla…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:39PMSHOCKING, SHAMING, MAYBE SALUTARY It is a cliché to say that over decades of TV fame, showy fundraising and hidden sexual crime Savile ‘groomed the nation”. There were indeed encomia &#…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:51AMSUNNY SUMMER KICKS AND SOARING SONGS Here’s a joyful thing: a confection of butterscotch and sunshine, a tale of turrets and twosomes and tap-breaks, friendship and chivalry and secret pas…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:42AMGUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES SAYS “BACK OF THE NET, MARBER!” “This isn’t a church, it’s a ‘business!” What a sentiment for a theatre crowd to hear – or indee…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:18AMFROCK-COATS AND FLOODS, TUNNELS AND THE THAMES In the week that Crossrail tunnellers broke through beneath London, a city and river now criss-crossed with subterranean thoroughfares, h…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:03PMTHROW IT UP, KEEP IT MOVING, THAT’S LIFE… With August looming over the horizon, there comes a time when the critic needs to harden up, sit on some prickly astroturf leaning…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:56AMGUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES TACKLES THE ROUGHAGE The Oresteia is probably one of those stories you don’t know. Until you start watching it again. Only then, piecing together fragments, d…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:52AMBANKSY, SEX, AND STAGE DIRECTIONS In a tatty rehearsal-room, the title reflects the director’s frequent cry, stopping for new stage directions or rewrites from the un…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:24PMBROADWAY VICTORIANA DOESN’T QUITE GET THERE It was David Lynch’s 1980 film – monochrome, moody, with an unforgettable performance by John Hurt – which brought to modern a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:07PMAN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE We’re in a World War I field hospital with iron beds and the corrugated-iron, battered detritus of trench warfare below. But young men will always leap and lark li…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:38AMALL FIVE MICE REJOICE (CHURCH MICE, CLEARLY) FOR A MODERN HISTORY-PLAY Above the table cluttered with last-night’s paper cups, high windows show St Paul’s dome; …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:58PMSONGS, SCUFFLES, VILLAINS AND VIRTUE IN 1707 Towering staircases and sliding panels transform the big stage from tavern to genteel house, with a pleasingly inexplicable intermittent folk-ban…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:42PMDARK, STARK AND DANGEROUS: A MERCHANT FOR TODAY What an odd, stark, angry, intelligent Merchant this is! Wholly unlike the last RSC production, Rupert Goold’s spectacular Merchant-of-Veg…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:19PMGUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS STIRRED BY REMEMBRANCE In quiet England we stand in silence. In Australia, at least in this play, they shout it from the rooftops and down it from the…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:11AMA DESIGNER, A DREAM, A DANCE, A DREAD “What is it about men with watching eyes…?” asks the ghost of Isabella Blow, she of the troubled soul and hilariously witty hats. One such man w…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:43PMBOYS IN BUSTLES: SWAGS AND SWAGGER IN VICTORIAN LONDON “The Unnatural History and Petticoat Mystery of Boulton and Park” cries the Victorian poster. “Men in Women’s Clothes –…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:20PMA DESIGNER, A DREAM, A DANCE “What is it about men with watching eyes…?” asks the ghost of Isabella Blow, she of the troubled soul and hilariously witty hats. One such man …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:49PM
