Tuesday, October 28, 2014
DARKNESS VISIBLE: CANDLELIT HORRORS, ANCIENT SORROWS By the end of three hours the gilt-reflecting candlelight of this little jewel-box playhouse is flickering over a birthda…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:13PMMonday, October 27, 2014
RADIO FOUR THE MUSICAL? ABOUT TIME TOO Radio 4 announcers tend to have a dry, contained sense of humour, honed by years in their lonely hutches listening to that most literate of n…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:11PMFriday, October 24, 2014
FLINTLOCK STRIKES A SPARK – IN A LIBRARY, TOO… Cervantes’ story gave us a word: quixotic. From politics to artistic enterprises, it defines all extravagantly roma…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:21PMThursday, October 23, 2014
“LIKE A SAD OLD MELODY, TEARS YOU UP AND SETS YOU FREE, THAT’S HOW MEMPHIS SEEMS TO ME’ “Ain’t no daytime on Beale Street, only nighttime!’ Delroy’s joint …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:50PMMonday, October 20, 2014
A STUNNING SIMPLICITY, A HUMAN HEART Only the dead see life clearly. In the last strange simple minutes of this undramatic drama, half of Thornton Wilder’s citizens bec…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:00PMFriday, October 17, 2014
A NEW EYE ON AN OLD SADNESS: THE WILDE TRIAL RECREATED This is fascinating: the playwright John O’Connor and Oscar Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland mark the centenary of the great …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:33AMCOMEDY, BRUTALITY, UNCERTAINTY IN A BYGONE SALFORD There is a telling moment at the end of Sam Yates’ production of Ayub Khan Din’s portrait of a Pakistani Muslim famil…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:26AMThursday, October 16, 2014
IN WHICH YOUR CRITIC FALLS IN LOVE WITH A BENEDICK AND A DOG-BOWL This is actually the one we know as Much Ado About Nothing – though some nifty Shakespeareology suggest…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:47AMWednesday, October 15, 2014
BEFORE THE DAWN OF WAR…THE LAST LARKS This is the young Shakespeare: making his way, dazzling with wordplay, confecting improbable japes and charades, laughing at absurd elder…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:44PMTuesday, October 14, 2014
EVERYTHING COMES UP ROSES FOR THIS ONE. OH YES. It is not often in a big musical that you remember the silences: the pin-drop, tense waits. But then, Gypsy was no run-of-the-mill musi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:18PMMonday, October 13, 2014
DORFMAN DOES DISCO, HURRAH Oh, fabulous! Nicholas Hytner could have done lots of traditional things to launch the recreated third auditorium, the jewel of “NT Future” with …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:45PMThursday, October 9, 2014
BACK TO PRISON: WOMEN WIN THE HOLLOW CROWN This is epic and intimate, mischievous and macho, truthful and painful and bleak. A two-hour condensation of the Henry IV plays, set in th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:39PMWednesday, October 8, 2014
THE INTERIORITY OF EXTERIORITY EXAMINED..ER.. Theresa Rebeck’s play about a creative-writing seminar in New York, directed with pace and flair by Terry Johnson, has met some sniffy …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:58PMTuesday, October 7, 2014
DORIAN GRAY IS BACK. AND THIS TIME SHE’S A GIRL. I am usually too humble about my exiguous visual gift to dare remonstrate with designers, but in this case would plead, t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:33PMFriday, October 3, 2014
SWEET SEDUCTION, OLD CORRUPTION In 1978 as a Today reporter the day editor hustled me off to the Prince Edward theatre where this chap Lloyd-Webber (“He did that Joseph thi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:12PMThursday, October 2, 2014
LINDSAY, LINDSAY AND LINDSAY. TWO OUT OF THREE DO FINE. David Mamet’s angostura sharpness is not everyone’s taste , but few playwrights have such rat-a-tat rhythm and economic…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:16PMWednesday, October 1, 2014
PITY AND TERROR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST There’s a great tall door, portal of the ancient house of Atreus; a blighted tree, a votive lantern, a dusty arena. Like Greeks two tho…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:12PMTuesday, September 30, 2014
THE SADNESS OF THE SINGLE SPY…BENNETTIAN COMIC MELANCHOLY These two short plays are vintage, premier-cru Alan Bennett: funny, melancholic, sparking with ideas about Bri…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:02PMSaturday, September 27, 2014
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES ENJOYS THE GRANS AND GANGSTERS The heyday, the heyday. Everyone’s Gran loves to chew over the heyday with anyone they can pin in a chair. But wh…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:46AMThursday, September 25, 2014
Well, what a day that was. There is still in October one chance to see, in one day, all three of Rona Munro’s immense trilogy about the first three King Jameses of Scotland in the wild 15t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:02PMTHE JAMES PLAYS GET OFF TO A TERRIFIC START… This one’s a stormer: thrilling, funny, vigorous, beguiling, accessible, a gripping and entertaining blend of the epic and …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:01PM…AND IT GROWS DARKER James I is dead. His small son, defaced by a birthmark, puny and afraid, in surreal nightmare sequences constantly relives the bloodshed and concealm…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:01PM…AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT If the first play began with a ragged brawl and taunt, the second with a tenebrous nightmare of childhood, this one starts with a rom…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:00PMPOETS AND PACIFISTS, LOVERS AND LOSS: A ‘THIRTIES TALE Modern historical recreations are valuable in this WW1 centenary year, but there is something thrilling, a frisson of…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:35AMTuesday, September 23, 2014
WIKILEAKS MEETS JUST WILLIAM Serious? Not always, it’s not. “Everything is funny all the time!” screams one of our heroes. “Epic Lulz! Nothing is to be taken seriously!…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:09PMTWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD AND FRESH AS A DAISY Two centuries before Oscar Wilde there was another eloquent, satirical, socially subversive, intermittently disreputable Irishman at work: O…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:31AMMonday, September 22, 2014
IMAGINING HOW HE WAS…. Simon Callow’s solo shows have become a landmark: his impassioned Dickens, his Marigold and Chips characters and his Christmas Carol. In Edinburgh I…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:55AMGHOST GUEST REVIEWER EDNA WELTHORPE TAKES ON ORTON, AGAIN by A.N.Onymous (The Critic Who Knows) Calling all ordinary, decent folk. Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) here! I am on a brie…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:35AMSaturday, September 20, 2014
VALHALLA IN A VALHANGAR Deep in the bleak Cold War desolation of the old US Air Base in Suffolk stands a shed where once jet engines were tested. Inside, the old Norse gods gather to bicker,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:10AMWednesday, September 17, 2014
A GALLANT SADNESS : FACES OF WAR “We don’t do glum here. Glum just doesn’t work”. Clipped, officerly with an edge of confident eccentricity, cradling his Cambr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:05PMTuesday, September 16, 2014
A PSYCHOTIC PUCKOON Watching Enda Walsh’s surreal new 90-minuter, late star of the Galway festival, one reflection kept intruding: that there is, God save us, a dangerously fine…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PM 
