DARK BEFORE THE DAWN To emerge with any redemptive sense from Joe Hill-Gibbins’ spare, scorching rather brilliant production, it helps to remember that Henrik Ibsen, after…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:21AMANY TOIL AND TROUBLE WAS WELL WORTH IT Everything a child could want is here: the dark thrill of imagined orphanhood, a quest, baddies , jeopardy and jokes, bouncy musical spectacle, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:30AMGOLDSMITH BEATEN LIGHT AS AIR Nice symmetry in Tom Littler’s decision to set Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy in the Wodehousian Jazz Age: the Georgians, with their boozy monarch…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:43PMFLAT WHITE AND WOEFUL If you’re going to splash out on a visually arresting finale of assassination, a vivId fire destroying a Norman tower and a lyrical monologue about Lenin,�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:10AMECHOES OF DARKNESS Jews gather, laughing and chattering, offering a toast as they run down the aisles to settle downstage for a Passover meal with candles, prayers and the ancient ques…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:55AMFAR MORE THAN A SNACK Caught this late, and it’s much reviewed and almost sold out. But it’s worth saying in a brief word here that if you buy a return as I did, you are in luck.…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:58PMA QUEEN WHO NEEDED QUEENS The curtain rises on the Clarence House garden room in 1979, where the Queen Mother held her eccentric little court. Much gilding, unreasonably many oil …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:58PMWHEN WE THAT ARE LEFT GROW OLD…. Sometimes you have to rely on a team with multiple comedy awards to hold a mirror to society and move your heart. This is by Richard …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:13AMDIANA AND THE DECEIVER Jonathan Maitland did a superb play for this theatre about Thatcher and Howe, “Dead Sheep”, and one on Jimmy Savile which was far more telling and cathartic than t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:42PMSCIENCE FANTASY AND HONEST EMOTION I don’t normally indulge in first-night anecdotes, but feel I should mention that in the big wedding scene Joanna Woodward tossed her bouque…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:23PMAGATHA STRIKES AGAIN This is Extreme Agatha Christie, her most preposterous (and bestselling) plot and one of the most murderously morbid (NB the final moments of the staging are no…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:59PMMEMORIES OF A MAVERICK It’s an immersive show, in that you buy a drink in the cramped saloon of the old pub on Greek Street, find a corner, and ideally fall into conversation with anoth…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:20PMWHILE THE REAL ONE RUNS…. With the Covid Inquiry surging along in a froth of accusations and curses and scandalous Whatsappery, it was hard to resist a hasty day-return to Harry Davies’ …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:12PMTHE FIRST WITCHFINDER, NOT WITHOUT LESSONS FOR TODAY This is remarkable, Joanna Carrick’s best and deepest play yet, following her acclaimed Reformation trilogy. In its sm…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:44AMA MOTHER’S LIFE, A SON’S PERSPECTIVE Sometimes it is almost useful to be a day late (sorry, tied up yesterday) because it gives a chance to read other people’s take on the play you s…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:25AMGENIUS, REALPOLITIK, RELIGION In days of horrifying conflict there was quite a jolt in a confrontation between Stephen Hagan’s resplendently silver-suited Frederick the Great a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:16AMPROPERTY RAGE FROM ANOTHER AGE Here’s a curiosity from 1972; an early , rarely-seen Caryl Churchill play revived with dashing elegance under the Jermyn’s Artistic director Stella Pow…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:18PMGRIM AND PURE BY THE DOCKS, PITY AND POETRY The lawyer Alfieri, prowling in memory round Arthur Miller’s stark tale of immigrant longshoremen on the 1940’s Brooklyn docks, speak…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:12PMA LEARNED FRIEND REMEMBERED Rumpole of the Bailey is occasional comfort-viewing in our house, thanks to Talkingpicturestv repeats. John Mortimer’s portrait of the old barrister a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:12AMITS THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL? Not if Lloyd can help it. It felt strange to see this in the bowels of a gala-night Savoy, only a week or two after our local arts centre showed the 1950…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:16AMIT’S BACK, THROUGH THE NURSERY WINDOW, STILL FLYING Just to reassure you: this offshoot from Mischief, the team who brought you the perennial Play-goes-wrong, is still a lot o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:50AMTHE TWIG WHO BRANCHED OUT We get up to speed on the period, with irresistible tracks from the golden age of pop: Beatles, Stones, Animals. Onstage is a photographer’s white…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:33PMA TANKFUL OF EMOTIONAL TENTACLES Where better than Hampstead to watch the interplay of cutting-edge science with emotional intensity and philosophical unanswerables? Upstairs we h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:38AMPHONETICALLY PHABULOUS Last time Bertie Carvel was on this stage it was as Donald Trump. Now our best shapeshifter is Henry Higgins: capering, swearing, somewhere on the far side of …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:17AMTHE INFECTION OF WICKEDNESS The history of the Lodz ghetto in Poland is a part of the Holocaust story worth foxusing on, ot least because the Jewish population there were made …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:04PMLAST NIGHT I DREAMT I WENT TO MANDERLEY YET AGAIN… Daphne Du Maurier’s story is almost a national myth, what with the grand house on the towering cliffs, the terrifying housek…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:18AMLOSS AND GRIEF IN A SILICON WORLD In a bleak grey minimalist space Merril (a restlessly gamine Myanna Buring) is grieving her much younger sister Angie, who has vanished, pre…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:55AMINDIA 1948 , LESSONS FOR ALL TIME This show is a happy return, especially if like me you missed it last summer: the National at its best, a modern epic and warning directed with fl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:56AMSHOOT, SCORE, SPARK! This is the year of football plays. First Dear England at the Olivier, now the women’s turn on another stage, out East a bit. Here’s another neon strip lig…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:58AMA SCANDALOUS WOMAN IN A STORMY WORLD A distant thunder of naval artillery: against elegant panelled walls in Naples a bundled matron in a bonnet watches her flighty daughter toss…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:22AMFOUR MORE AWFUL PEOPLE, HURRAH Two four-handers about awful middle class behaviour in a week: just what the irritable heatwave needed. This, which I caught in a late previ…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:50AM
