Friday, August 5, 2016
A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR ALL TIMES AND NATIONS… “Allow for a three-gin recovery period” advised a tweeter, during the previews of Simon Stone’s take on this perennial theme o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:13PMFriday, July 29, 2016
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES LIKES LOTT A LOT… It’s easy to get worked up by celebrities and big names crowding out the talented-but-unknown usuals. ‘They’re just there …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:01AMTuesday, July 26, 2016
FLASH BANG WALLOP.. This 1963 show – based loosely on H.G.Wells’ semiautobiographical KIPPS – was originally a vehicle for Tommy Steele. And there were moments, a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:51PMMonday, July 25, 2016
JUST WHAT WE WAND-ED? It’s not only Henry IV who gets two plays. Cry God for Harry, Hogwarts and St Joanne: the woman who (whether you love the tales or not) admirably got a tell…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:50PMSaturday, July 16, 2016
THE NEW F-WORD (AND A FAIR FEW OF THE OLD ONE) You can trust Alistair Beaton to keep a cast learning last-minute lines. Here, just as grace-notes alongside the main theme, are jokes a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:58AMWednesday, July 13, 2016
ONCE UPON A TIME, WHICH COULD BE NOW… What a marvel is this Sondheim / Lapine classic musical: playful and deep, absurd and earthy, mocking and wise. And what a piece of luck…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:51PMAYCKBOURN AT IT AGAIN..OR IS IT There’s tennis without a ball (audience requested to do plock-plock sound effects on drums), a mini-farce, thriller and horror story also supported b…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:59AMThursday, July 7, 2016
EIGHTY YEARS ON: MEN BEWARE WOMEN At a moment when both female leaders and would-be leaders are rampaging across the news – May, Merkel, Leadsom, Eagle – it is pleasantl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:37PMTuesday, June 28, 2016
FAITH . FAILURE AND THE GENIUS OF FRIEL A veil of rain surrounds the stage where three narrators will appear, each with their own version of a shared life “shabby, bleak, de…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:56PMMonday, June 27, 2016
ZELLER ZOOMS UP WEST, SHARP AS EVER The Menier, back in spring, brought grave delight and snorts of laughter with this zinger of a play by Florian Zeller; its rapid transfer up…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:41PMSunday, June 26, 2016
IN RANSOME’S WAKE, A NORTH SEA TALE OF TOUGHER DAYS Eastern Angles having a cleaner mind than BBC Films, Titty gets to keeps her name in this faithful, ingenious, charmin…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:53AMWednesday, June 22, 2016
VACATION, EXPLOITATION, ACCUSATION… I caught up a few days late with this (cheap seats aloft, excitingly closer to the rock-face in Hildegard Bechtler’s Mediterranean-te…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:10AMMonday, June 20, 2016
REBELLION AND REALITY IN A SKEWED WORLD God bless a playwright you can’t predict. Mike Bartlett’s Charles III was founded on a pretty simple idea, and a frankly rather jej…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:25PMSaturday, June 18, 2016
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CHILLED, THRILLED, DAZZLED Ralph Fiennes is a menace. An utter menace. Other actors beware. He will cheat, stab and simply out-act you right off th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:38AMThursday, June 16, 2016
A hairdo can be eloquent. When Bryan Dick as Willie Mossop first emerges quaking with humility from a trapdoor under old Hobson’s shop, above a flapping leather apron and ragged shirt his …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:29AMFriday, June 10, 2016
STRINGS, SWINGS, A SOPRANO SOARING In E.M.Forster’s HOWARD’S END, the dreamy Helen Schlegel can’t listen to Beethoven without imagining heroes, goblins, dancing elephant…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:59PMThursday, June 9, 2016
A CLASSIC OF THE DESPERATE HEART “We’re death to one another, you and I”. The great cry from trapped, degraded macho Freddie, struggling to leave the desperate demanding Hester …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:45AMWednesday, June 8, 2016
A DREAM AND A DISASTER: TRIBUTE WORTH PAYING Full disclosure: I really care about the Titanic story, love maritime history, have met one of the last living survivors of the 1…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:11PMTuesday, June 7, 2016
INNOCENCE, EXPERIENCE, MEMORY, TRAUMA Around a derelict room and abandoned trunk, Michael Crawford prowls, a tweedy, damaged old man at the heart of this low-key but unforgetta…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:30PMFriday, June 3, 2016
THE RSC IN ROMPING MOOD Credulity and the con-artist, blinding-with-science and the selling of snake-oil, belong to all human eras. Ben Jonson’s play is set in 1610, when a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:58AMThursday, June 2, 2016
ADRIFT ON ANOTHER DEEP, BLUE, LONELY SEA… The Deep Blue Sea is Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece (and about to play at the National Theatre). A young woman who has left her emine…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:08AMSaturday, May 28, 2016
THE LAST BLASPHEMY TRIAL..AND ECHOES FOR TODAY It is a thousand pities that John Osborne is predominantly famous for the spitting spoilt-brat misogyny of Jimmy Porter in Look Back In …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:06AMThursday, May 26, 2016
Kenneth Branagh’s entire season has been built on one universal truth. From star to stage-sweeper, pack the production with the best talent and glorious things will inevitably follow. Why …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:53AMTuesday, May 24, 2016
Here’s a sharp one, beautifully suited to what is not only a Referendum season but one in which both main political parties are more than likely to do mischief to their leaders. We can’t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:14PMMonday, May 23, 2016
A HEART FOR BEAUTY, A ‘FIFTIES DREAM If Daniel Evans means to leave his acclaimed stewardship of Sheffield Theatre on a flood of tears, he’s chosen the right producti…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PMSaturday, May 21, 2016
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES ON THE MENTAL WARD... You’re clinically paranoid, you’re black and you’re bombarded on a daily basis with racism and when presented with an or…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:44PMThursday, May 19, 2016
Of Shakespeare’s plays this is one of the least done and loved: there’s disputed authorship of some sections, parts of the plot missing and replaced from another text. Sir Trevor Nunn ta…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:23AMWednesday, May 18, 2016
A CAUTIONARY TALE OF TRADE AND TERROR It is the modern terror that stalks our interconnected world. You’re shut in a stone cell, alone and far from home, and in a chaotic inc…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:51PMMonday, May 16, 2016
Director William Galinksy pays respect to the building’s normal life by recruiting Lost in Translation Circus to evoke Ariel’s magical powers: the stately Jane Leaney at ground level get…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:22AMFriday, May 13, 2016
A DESERT HERO AND THE ROOTS OF TROUBLE.. One glory of Howard Brenton as a playwright is his ability to tease out, in very specific history plays (55 Days, Ann Boleyn, Dr Scroggy’s W…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:50PMWednesday, May 11, 2016
AS FLIES TO WANTON CLOWNS… You don’t often see Queen Gertrude in Hamlet played by a short bearded Spaniard in a rainbow unitard with flamenco frills. But this is the Br…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:54PM 
