Friday, March 4, 2016
THE DAWN OF WAR, 1914 World War I and its aftermath are being well served by theatre (my last year’s reflections, http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p). But Jeremy James’ play is the firs…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:11PMTuesday, March 1, 2016
LONG ISLAND, THE WIGS AND THE WARDROBE… The Jean Anouilh plays I devoured as a neurotic sixth-former always had Antigone, Joan of Arc or Thomas a Becket heroically refusing comp…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:43PMMonday, February 29, 2016
GETTING THEM OFF FOR VICTORY, UP WEST I loved this show at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and – especially given a couple of rather snotty lukewarm reviews – thought I should ch…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:07PMSunday, February 28, 2016
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI GETS UNEXPECTEDLY CASUAL ABOUT HIGH CULTURE Some people get terribly, passionately serious about Wagner. This shouldn’t be a problem: truly great mus…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:16PMFriday, February 26, 2016
BANG THE DRUM FOR THIS ONE: AN INTIMATE EPIC OF WAR AND FRIENDSHIP This premiere for the Park is a cracker: a serious, grownup, constantly entertaining light on history with fine-dr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:17PMWednesday, February 24, 2016
A FAREWELL TEMPEST, RICH AND STRANGE For a departing artistic director, especially here, Shakespeare’s last plays are a natural choice: great poetic anthems of reconciliation and re…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:34PMThursday, February 18, 2016
A RESTORATION OF HIGH SPIRITS.. Looking back at this play’s first outing – in the outdoor, summery, rackety pleasure that is Shakespeare’s Globe – I remember actually liking …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:33PMWednesday, February 17, 2016
THEY CAME, THEY CONQUERED Call me a patsy and a soft touch, but you won’t find me sneezing at anything which – within twenty minutes of a deafening, blinding opening – o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:53PMTuesday, February 16, 2016
McBURNEY ON, AND IN, THE BRAIN If there is any theatre artist reliably able to draw you into a world of disorientation, time-slip, near-death and a sense of licking hallucinogenic frogs in a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:21PMGUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI DISCOVERS SOMETHING GREEN AND FRESH BEHIND A LOT OF DEAD WOOD Robert Icke’s new adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is best summarised as an update – an…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:30AMMonday, February 15, 2016
AND THEY CALL IT PUPPET LOVE…. “Avenue Q meets The Exorcist” claim posters for Robert Askins’ Broadway hit, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Or “The Muppets play The …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:11PMThursday, February 11, 2016
IN THE END, AN HONOURABLE PLAY Its fame rolls before it: a debut play, premiered in London by Matthew Perry. To a generation of young adults (and to many far younger, thanks to ceasel…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:48PMWednesday, February 10, 2016
SHAKESPEARE’S TOWN LAID BEFORE US The year 1613: somewhere offstage old Shakespeare is dying, and in her husband’s physic-garden, competent and dignified, his daughter Susanna…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:11AMSaturday, February 6, 2016
THE DEEPEST GRIEF OBSERVED Pretty much everyone agreed – here and on its West End transfer- that the American David Lindsay-Abaire’s GOOD PEOPLE was a masterpiece, with its de…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39AMThursday, February 4, 2016
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS OLD IDEAS COMING BACK TO HAUNT THEIR CREATOR The Master Builder, Halvard Solness, is universally acknowledged by his townsfolk as a lucky man: self-made…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:21AMTuesday, February 2, 2016
RED VELVET: DEEP AND RICH AS EVER This (I sneaked in to an early preview , because I am on holiday) was my third visit to Lolita Chakrabarti’s play, starring her husband the matchless …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:17PMThursday, January 28, 2016
MARTY FELDMAN: A GREAT COMIC’S ENDGAME Next week at the Jermyn there opens a play which is a memorial to a late-life friendship with Lucille Ball; already on the far side of the Char…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:53PMTuesday, January 26, 2016
THE EMPTY NEST, THE TROUBLED MIND Hold tight. It’s the French genius litterateur Florian Zeller messing with our heads again. We are confused, wary, deceived and unsettled by the tr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:56PMSaturday, January 23, 2016
A MEMORIAL IN MUSIC This is a solo show, a memorial to a mother and to a generation. It is performed not by an actor but by the American concert pianist, Mona Golabek. Yet as a pie…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:23AMFriday, January 22, 2016
ANOTHER CHICHESTER SMASH COMES WEST This is a revisit, to a partly recast Chichester show: and I must admit I had qualms about losing that generosity, that overflowing vigour you get with th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:01PMWednesday, January 20, 2016
MORE POIGNANT THAN POISONOUS: A 125TH ANNIVERSARY MARKED One wit called it ‘the first French novel in English’, with its seductive evocation of exotic decadence and corrupting wic…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:52PMTuesday, January 19, 2016
AMNESIA AS A NEW START? In a hospital bed lies Michael: Alistair McGowan, motionless in a coma, we learn, for three weeks. His mother Carol (Maggie Ollerenshaw) holds his hand, has be…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39PMWednesday, January 13, 2016
The playtext of Rob Hayes’ monologue austerely insists that performance “should not exceed 60 minutes in duration”. This author doesn’t want it larded with significant pauses or drea…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:10PMTuesday, January 12, 2016
A CENTURY ON, THEY WALK BEFORE US It was gruesome, politically problematic, tragic and heroic and wasteful; it was a turning-point in history. I have written before about how l…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:43PMThursday, January 7, 2016
THE BOHO BOUVIERS: REBELLIOUS RECLUSES Hot on the heels of THE DAZZLE (about the New York Collyer brothers living in hoarderly squalid isolation) this is about Edith Bouvier Beale a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:34PMSunday, December 27, 2015
A HALF-FORGOTTEN QUEEN RISES… School history was terrible. Terrible! We got the Tudors, and a bore-in about the Thirty Years War, but a fog of confusion and a sense of 1066 And …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:48AMSaturday, December 19, 2015
DARK DOINGS IN THE BURROW I hope that the great Beatrix Potter, out of copyright just last year, would be pleased at the pointing, bouncing, giggling and gasping in Red Rose Ch…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:35PMThursday, December 17, 2015
A WHIFF OF SULPHUR UNDER THE BROCADE… There are certainly crinolines, but Quality Street it ain’t. How smart of Josie Rourke to offer adults, worn down by fairylights and pant…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:49PMWednesday, December 16, 2015
THNEEDS MUST WHEN CONSUMERISM DRIVES… It’s a heartfelt welcome. The Old Vic, for a long while fiercely grownup, throws its arms open to children under Matthew Warchus’ leade…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:20PMTuesday, December 15, 2015
SUICIDE BY THINGS... We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin’s School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-ish iron l…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:32PMSUICIDE BY THINGS… We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin’s School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PM 
