Tuesday, July 23, 2019
COWBOYS WITHOUT INDIANS I suppose it’s perverse to start at the end, but of all the aspects of Jeremy Sams’ handsome production of the Rodgers & Hammerstein crowd-pleaser…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 11:34AMWednesday, July 17, 2019
FALLEN ANGELS ENDURING THE STORM You can feel the heat in Rae Smith’s design, Mexican sun on the rock overhead, and the corrugated iron roofs of the rundown hotel. Somewher…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 05:30AMFriday, July 12, 2019
IT’S BACK, YOUNGER THAN EVER… We love a starry debut, especially on opening night in a huge theatre: a 21-year-old not yet through drama school making a stonking, belting …
Linked From theatrecat.com at 10:31AMFriday, July 5, 2019
DEVOTION , DISGUISE, DECADENCE What a strange and stirring play this is! Set in convent, court and condemned-cell, it is spiked with moral ambiguities and fuelled equally by s…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 01:03PMThursday, July 4, 2019
BLAIR TO BREXIT – A FAMILY TALE Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany, are the Harry Potter team. They know how not to bore. But they’ve been here before too in a R…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 05:29AMWednesday, July 3, 2019
FARCE AS LIFE, LIFE AS FARCE, FRAYN AGAIN TRIUMPHANS It felt like a pilgrimage, homage to pay. 37 years ago Michael Frayn’s greatest of comedies, a wicked love-song to the …
Linked From theatrecat.com at 06:01AMSunday, June 30, 2019
COMEDY SHADING TO MELANCHOLY: WHAT’S TO COME IS STILL UNSURE… First of all let’s say that Andrew Scott is a marvel, a 21st century Ur-Coward hero, who manages to do it with…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 06:06PMSaturday, June 29, 2019
A SHILLING SHOCKER IS A JOY FOREVER To come clean: one reason I dashed to catch this fresh back from holiday is not only that the Finborough is always interesting, but that fa…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 03:40AMThursday, June 27, 2019
GUEST CRITIC BEN DOWELL SHIVERS – ADMIRINGLY – AT A TROUBLED TALE In this hypersensitive age of MeToo accusations, anxieties about online pornography and even deeper-seated disquiet a…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 09:58AMThursday, June 13, 2019
RANCID LILIES, GORGEOUS WORDS All the little Jermyn needs to complete this reimagination of Wildean epigrammatic decadence is to scent the auditorium overwhelmingly with lilies and …
Linked From theatrecat.com at 08:02AMTuesday, June 11, 2019
FLYING, FUNNY, FABULOUS This is a dream of a Dream. One expected fun from the combination of Nicholas Hytner, a roiling mass of promenaders in the pit and a Bunny Christie…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 04:38PMSunday, June 2, 2019
A NOTE ON A TREAT, MOUSELESS BUT MELLOW The film based on Scott Fitzgerald’s story of a life lived backwards, born old and ending in babyhood, was pretty awful. So I did not le…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 03:44AMWednesday, May 29, 2019
BULLYING, BOMBAST, BETRAYAL The rediscovery of Githa Sowerby in the 1990s is very satisfying. At its premiere in 1913 critics saw the quality of this one but were dismayed …
Linked From theatrecat.com at 06:46AMThursday, May 16, 2019
SULTRY, SINFUL, SHOCKING, SHINING Savagely observed absurdity, blinding flashes of insight, profound yearning, sudden poetry singing clear notes from the cruel swamp of …
Linked From theatrecat.com at 12:31PMAN INTIMATE EPIC IN A FADING EMPIRE Hard to overstate what an absolute treat this is , and on how many levels. It is a terrific yarn, both romantic and tough, about history and Empi…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 12:11PMFriday, May 10, 2019
There’s something special about fin-de-siecle anger in any century: this is from 1697, years later than Wycherley and the mellower Sheridan, and best described as a…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 10:33AMTuesday, May 7, 2019
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL, SHORT CAN BE SHARP There is something stimulating about ultra-short plays: five to twenty minutes but directed and performed with all the care and concen…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 06:07AMMonday, May 6, 2019
LOVE AND LOSS AND ‘THAT’S THE DEAL’ Jack is a middle-aged Oxford English don of the ’50’s , a bachelor and apologist for Christianity. Graceful, witty books and lect…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 12:15PMFriday, May 3, 2019
ECHOES OF ANTIQUITY , FRESHNESS OF YOUTH It’s a storming performance. Young Isabella Nefar as Judith erupts upon us: adolescent, exuberant, afire with defiance and…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 05:10AMThursday, May 2, 2019
GUILT, GRIEF, POLITICAL ANGUISH Handy timing , to open on what is local Election Day for us ruralists and at a time when everything has a Brexity echo too. Ibse…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 05:51PMTuesday, April 30, 2019
DEADLY DEBTS The artistic love affair between August Strindberg’s ghost, playwright Howard Brenton and director Tom Littler continues to bear strange fruit, surprisingl…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 05:00PMANOTHER KIND OF LOVE SONG This is gorgeous. Funny, truthful, wise, and bravely original in form. Anyone with a a family – past, present, remembered, or merely …
Linked From theatrecat.com at 04:32AMThursday, April 25, 2019
THE WORLD DONALD GREW UP IN… It’s a long transverse stage: at one end at a scruffy crowded steel desk sits Jorgy, Michael Brandon exuding down-home amiability as the l…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 04:44AMTuesday, April 23, 2019
GUILT, GRIEF AND PITY It is almost uncanny how an Arthur Miller play, treated respectfully, can in the most wrenchingly extreme story still catch the common rhythms and tides of fami…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 08:28PMMonday, April 22, 2019
(Published in Daily Mail on Friday, one must moonlight to support this website’s unfunded free existence – but here it is for theatrecat regulars..) The minute you wal…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 03:35AMWednesday, April 17, 2019
DOWNBEAT, DOWNCAST Some years ago, leaving a particularly slow and uninspiring Chekhov performance in Yorkshire (never mind which play, spare the blushes) I heard a weary man …
Linked From theatrecat.com at 03:56AMSunday, April 14, 2019
REFLECTIONS ON A RICH SEA OF INK… I saw 22 plays in two days, but it was hardly half a bite of what was on offer. In three days there were 40 , each performed several ……
Linked From theatrecat.com at 05:19PMThursday, April 11, 2019
ANOTHER KIND OF HOUR Staggering back from holiday, I sentimentally booked this at the New Wolsey in Ipswich because 2019 is the 50th anniversary of my unremarkable student performanc…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 11:46AMBEATRIX BEATS BREXIT WITH TOP BEAK-WORK The Haymarket these spring mornings is dense with toddlers and their attendants (I’d say by the look of it 20% parents, 50% grandparen…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 07:54AMWednesday, April 10, 2019
A FRESH WIND BLOWING THROUGH AN OLD TALE Down on the Riverbank Club, teen DJ Rattie is bangin’ it behind the deck, telling the shy diffident Mole “There is nothing–…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 01:29PMFriday, April 5, 2019
THE OLDEST HAVE BORNE MOST… Jack is an ageing, terminally ill, scruffy, alcoholic remnant of an actor, with a grubby cardigan and Falstaff gut. He is muttering lines from King Lear in h…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 09:23AM 
