NOT A REVIEW BUT SOME JOLLY NEWS Not a review, because this was the first performance of a modest weekend testing the water: a script-in-hand, moustaches-falling-off, fresh-outta-wor…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:49AMTHE HEART STILL FEELS THE BEAT Everything Bob Marley sings lifts the heart, instructing it to rise and triumph and unite in joy: lively-up yourself! Let’s get toget…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:08PMTHE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL: scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry There was a spate of criticism when Richard Norton Taylor’s dramatisation of the Grenfell Inquiry was announced, despite it b…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:42AMTHE RACE WHERE NOBODY WINS This feels like a howl of baffled frustration, from a millennial generation ( writer and director, and all four characters) unable to deal with the emo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:59AMTHE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. Almeida, N1 THE SCOTTISH PLAY WE NEEDED Say what you like about star-casting and auteur-ish directors messing with Shakespeare, but sometimes a multiple…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:59PMAN OLD STORY OF YOUNG MEN Balliol College Oxford, 1910. Confident young Etonians are hurling crockery downstairs, yelling “I’m a bastard, I’m a bastard, rather be a bastard than …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:30AMEAST IS EAST, IN EAST ANGLIA Shamser Sinha – who is on the National Theatre Connections project – relished the idea of writing a play about a South-Asian working-class family i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:32PMAN EVER-MORPHING PROTEAN TEXT…RENEWS AGAIN BEFORE OUR EYES Every Hamlet should give us something new. The play is a philosophical and psychological labyrinth, its jewels and se…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:12AMFOUR WIVES LATER, MANTEL AND MILES COMPLETE THE JOURNEY It was rising eight years ago that the first two parts of Hilary Mantel’s majestic Wolf Hall trilogy came to the stage, adap…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:20PMNOT QUITE A REVIEW, MORE A TRIP DOWN A SIDE ALLEY I was on the early train up when news came that poor old Southwark had ,for the second time, been forced by illness to cancel two performanc…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:13AMWHO NEEDS PANTO? A CLASSY FLIGHT OF FANCY ON THE ROAD This show, which I had the joy of seeing in a packed Theatre Royal Norwich alongside many small thrilled children, knows exa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:59AMTHE LAST GREAT PLAGUE If you lived as an adult alongside the onset of AIDS forty years ago you don’t forget it: the lost friends and workmates , the rumours of ignorance which h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:13PMA POCKET JEWEL We always knew that among the first sproutings of recovery would be a few Alan Ayckbourns, popping up as welcome as snowdrops. I am always fond of this early one, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:40AMAN ARCATI MORE THAN MEDIUM I once took a student nephew to this Coward masterpiece, and the thrill for me was that he didn’t know there was a g—–. Until there was. Therefore for a risi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:34PMA SHAGGY-DOG TALE IN CRUMBLING SPLENDOUR Sometimes the building upstages the play. I had not explored the late-Victorian, half-restored glory of the Coronet before, and my fir…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:15AMAN EPIC OF PASSION AND PERFORMANCE Here is life, history, theatrical passion, great migrations and lyrical romance in the rain. Here’s anger and humour and love and desp…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:22AMA HISTORIC HIT BACK, BETTER THAN EVER This portrait of three bickering sisters, trading memories and revelations in the days before a mother’s funeral in a snowy Yorkshire winter…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:34AMLOVE, GRIEF, AND A BRAD PITT ALBATROSS With loving detail, right down a glimpse of coat-racks beyond the far door, the downstairs studio serving Tom Wells’ new play has become a rem…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:28PMICE WORK IF YOU GET IT… Phew. The Broadway-rooted, Disneylicious, long-awaited red-carpet premiere night featured (of course) an ice -blue carpet. And the throng bursting …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:30PMARTHUR SMITH CONJURES UP HIS DAD These days our Arfur comes complete with an overture! It takes the form of Kirsty Newton at the piano (artfully disguised as an upright 1940’s pub-…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:30PMTHEATRE’S FAIRY GODFATHER DOES IT AGAIN We needed this. The return of the big classic shows to packed houses in the Barbican, Chichester and Sadlers Wells has been invigorating, but Lloy…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:52AMOccupied France, 1944. Two teenagers newly in love meet in an empty house. Elodie is French, Otto a German soldier. They are both endearing and annoying, as befits their ag…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:00AMNOT A REVIEW BUT MIGHT SEND YOU THERE… Take this as a report not a review, because actual work commitments made me skip at the interval. But I was persuaded to the long 70 minute first h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:12AMThis is the Mercury rising, rebuilt over two years with a cool café and dance studio, modern eco-glazing and, to respect the town’s history, a solemn archaeological dis…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:29PMWONDERFUL OLD COBBLERS ON ABDICATION STREET (longer version of review done for Mail) You know you’re in safe hands when a stagestruck Prince Edward, diffident and excitable, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:04AMFLOODS OF RELIEF Ten years have passed since, in a Times Chief Theatre Critic hat, I last saw a former principal of the Royal Ballet leaping in puddles , singing his great heart out, and…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:07AMA VOICE FROM THE 90’s PREFIGURES THE FUTURE… This is a grand intellectual teaser of a show, and under Lucy Bailey’s almost mischievous direction does a good job of shaking up fas…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:49PMGUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS MORE SMOKE THAN FIRE ON THE HACKNEY STAGE Grimeborn are following up their fantastic 2019 Das Rheingold (see my previous review) with Die Walküre this …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:57AMVICARIOUS TRAVEL, JUST WHAT WE NEED The big musicals are back: two dark-edged, South Pacific at Chichester and Carousel imminent at Regent’s Park, while halfway between them flowers…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:55AMTHE DARK SIDE OF THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT. DON’T TELL JACOB REES-MOGG Hats off to James Dacre’s Royal & Derngate for bravely slapping on a brand new musical in the ver…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:41AMROARING BACK TO LIFE Almost the most magnificent part of Daniel Evans’ production is that it’s happening at all: despite the distanced glimmer of blue paper masks, Chichester …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:40AM
