Wednesday, April 8, 2015
RHETORICAL ROMANCE… Ah, Cyrano! Fighter, scholar, poet, maverick: ever since Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, set in an imagined musketeer-y 17c, he has been an archetype of reckless gen…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:43AMFriday, April 3, 2015
THE GENTLEMANLY ASSASSIN RIDES AGAIN. AND HOWE… Klaxon alert! Outrage merchants , boots on, scramble! In an election season here are theatre types in North London doing a play about To…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:56AMThursday, April 2, 2015
GREATER THAN GREEK: ATTENTION MUST BE PAID The greatest plays keep their truth but strike you differently every time. I saw Arthur Miller’s masterpiece at twenty, then ten years ago was …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:40AMTuesday, March 31, 2015
A SNORTER? OR A SMOKED POSSUM? It was in 1865, on the stage line “You sockdolagizing old mantrap!” that John Wilkes Booth took advantage of a guaranteed laugh to shoot dead President A…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:01PMMonday, March 30, 2015
The National Theatre paid tribute to the phenomenally successful artistic director. Libby Purves was there
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 01:00AMFriday, March 27, 2015
THE BOUQUET! IT WAS POISONED! We are supposed to be thinking about the history of European antisemitism, tracking back to the 16th century when Christopher Marlowe wrote this play ,and the 1…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:33AMThursday, March 26, 2015
THREE MEN IN A (PROBABLY RIGGED) VOTE… In 2010, three men came to a Zurich hotel to present (to a scandal-ridden FIFA) Britain’s case for hosting the 2018 World Cup. David Cameron the ch…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:19PMTuesday, March 24, 2015
SITCOM DOESN’T QUITE STAND UP First the good news. If there is an award for best-choreographed food-fight, it’s just been won (take a bow, fight director Kate Waters). Stephen Mang…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:05PMThursday, March 19, 2015
SUBTERRANEAN STREISAND: SILLY AND SUBLIME It’s a heady cocktail, the Hollywood Heartbreaker: tartness and syrup, firewater and froth ,l served in the campest crystal with diamond spa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:03PMWednesday, March 18, 2015
A GRAVE GRANDEUR, AN UNFORGOTTEN HORROR Hard to overstate the impact, the sense of event, commemoration and bleak grandeur in this extraordinary evening. There is, in this 70th anniversary o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:14PMMANDERLEY AGAIN, AND VERY WELCOME TOO “Last night, I dreamed I went to Manderley again…” The famous opening is spoken from the sea-bed: a dim otherworld where a jointed lifeless bo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:33AMTuesday, March 17, 2015
POST COALITION TRISTIS… The best line in this rather overstuffed play comes from Keith Parry as Bob, a magnificently slow-thinking lummox. In the corner of a scruffy Norfolk kitchen Bo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:48AMMonday, March 16, 2015
MEMORIES OF A MADHOUSE Hard on the heels of her admirable PROGRESS, Joanna Carrick of Red Rose Chain revives (in this elegant new studio theatre) an earlier piece devised as site-specific th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:01AMSaturday, March 14, 2015
A BESPOKE PREMIERE, TRIBUTE TO A TRADE 1953, a tailors’ basement workshop under Dover Street. Five people work eighty hours a week or longer. Out front, unseen, the smooth cutters and meas…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:14PMThursday, March 12, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI IS CHARMED TWICE OVER Miss Dee arrives. She’s from the newly-created DSRCDH: “Department for Social Regeneration through the Creation of Dream Homes.” S…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:01AMFriday, March 6, 2015
ANCIENT GRIEF, A TERRIBLE BEAUTY There are some trademarks here: shaven heads, bare feet, bleak staging, immense and timeless dooms and subtle, insistent soundscape. Ivo van Hove, the Belgia…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:21PMONE HOTEL, 150 YEARS, THREE PLAYS Plays in hotel rooms are in vogue: there’s a voyeuristic intimacy and a pleasing sense of dislocation about them. And a grand hotel – the Langham wa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:50AMWednesday, March 4, 2015
GAMES WE NEARLY PLAY It’s the Almeida, Jim, but not as we know it. Hunched on benches in four uneasily intimate soundproofed zones padded with camouflage-print, summoned by a robotic voice…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:03PMSunday, March 1, 2015
MOTHERHOOD, SECRETS AND LIES Neatly in time for International Women’s Day and the celebratory WOW-ings on the South Bank, John Terry has had Chipping Norton’s gorgeous galleried interior…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:33AMWednesday, February 25, 2015
BRAVADO, BRIGANDS, FABIANS, LIFE-FORCES….. It is a truth universally acknowledged that George Bernard Shaw was a bit of a windbag. At no point did the words “Less is more”, or “S…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:23PMTuesday, February 24, 2015
GRIMLY COMIC, NOBLY TOUGH For a young actor to play a severely disabled, facially twisted, speech-impaired young man in an electric wheelchair cannot – in this week of Eddie Redmayne�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:43PMKI YIP I YAY It’s back. Again. But worth the buggy-ride: brightly directed by Rachel Kavanaugh and choreographed by Drew McOnie with athleticism, wit and inventiveness: ballet, ragtime and…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:29AMNEW-GENERATION GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES UNIMPRESSED BY MARBER REVIVAL There were a lot of jokes about strippers’ arseholes. Almost entirely for the joy of saying ‘strippers’ arsehol…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:11AMSunday, February 22, 2015
MONARCHY, MADNESS, MUSIC Philip of Spain, grandson of Louise XIV and captive of 18c monarchic rigidity, is lying on his bed , fishing in a goldfish-bowl and announcing that it is all a dream…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:16PMFriday, February 20, 2015
FIFTY SHADES OF FANNY A crane, giant crates. Foggy docklands, two hundred years ago. Foppishly approving Britain’s mercantile culture, Voltaire coos “You are so moderne!” Up pops Carol…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:37AMWednesday, February 18, 2015
MERRIMENT , MUSIC HALL, AND WAR A while ago I wrote – see http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p – about how well and honestly fringe and mainstream theatre had evoked the popular first worl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:47AMTuesday, February 17, 2015
DOWN WITH REALITY! UP WITH THE RABBIT! “I’ve wrestled with reality for all of my life” says our hero roundly “and I’m happy to say that I’ve finally won out over it”. It says a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:16PMThursday, February 12, 2015
INDEPENDENCE AND SLAVERY: A TALE WORTH RETELLING Christian is a Maryland Quaker, shoemaker son of immigrants who came to the New World for freedom to worship in peaceable ‘quietude’. But…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:32AMTuesday, February 10, 2015
EUROPE COLLAPSES, DEMONS ROAM FREE, WHO CARES? Capitalism, consumerism, the banking system, the transactional heartlessness of modern relationships, the illusory comfort of a deluded Europe.…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:20PMTHE GIRLS ARE BACK… There are not many all-woman plays around, nor many about female friendship; nor do many reflect the particular, unique long-term comradeship which begins in the ch…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:35AMMonday, February 9, 2015
THIRTY YEARS OF TURBULENCE: A MARRIAGE There is no snake. It’s a nickname for “Belinda”, the female half of Clara Brennan’s new two-hander, a 90-minute portrait of an 30-year marriag…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:04PM 
