Thursday, 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 09:23AMWednesday, April 3, 2019
SECRETS AND MEMORIES IN A WASTE OF WATERS You can’t fault the atmosphere: Jasmine Swan’s set takes you straight to the wide skies and muddy, reedy mystery of Breydon Wat…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 10:26AMSaturday, March 30, 2019
CRACKS IN THE LIBERAL VENEER I adored the energy, cleverness and cheek of BAD JEWS so much I went twice, as the pitiless author set his characters kicking, twisting, protesting an…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 03:53AMA COSY NIGHTMARE LEGACY OF THE 1930’S From the late 1930’s for nearly forty years, Mary Barton and her husband Berthold Wiesner ran a pioneering fertility clinic: they were among…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 03:50AMFriday, March 29, 2019
BRILLIANT, NECESSARY, QUESTIONING If we accept that people are widely diverse, we have to accept that paedophiles are too. Not all the same identi-monster. Moreover,…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 11:05AMThursday, March 28, 2019
WHAT THE BUTLER CAME TO KNOW… From its premiere at the Royal & Derngate and on the first leg of its tour, here is the stage version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-winning novel. I…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 01:45PMMonday, March 25, 2019
WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD What great timing! Just as the worried-well Health Secretary gets rubbished for taking a commercial DNA test, announcing that it has “saved his life” because …
Linked From theatrecat.com at 06:50PMSunday, March 24, 2019
I’M GONNA SIT RIGHT DOWN AND WRITE MYSELF A REVIEW… So dress up sassy, shake your chassis, get some mesh on your flesh like the ladies who sing with the band. Sell your vocals to the …
Linked From theatrecat.com at 02:01PMFriday, March 22, 2019
NOT AT ALL FLAT, SUFFOLK… Exuberantly funny, elegant as a Deauville hotel balcony and sharp as the crack of a 78rpm record over a lover’s head, Joanna Carrick’s wit…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 10:39AMThursday, March 21, 2019
POISONED LOVE I sometimes wish Harold Pinter had written more plays like this: decadent, agonized, helplessly sensitive to the nuances of friendship and treachery. More praise has a…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 08:00AMWednesday, March 20, 2019
MARTYRS OF THE MCCARTHY YEARS Ideological hostilities across the world, fake news and paranoia, a resurgent deep left, uneasy relations with Russia, antisemites question…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 09:58AMThursday, December 27, 2018
NOT YET DEAD CAT BUT… Since I stopped being The Times Chief Theatre Critic it has been five years: on this site there have been 930 posts, over half a million words, all stil…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 12:22PMFriday, December 21, 2018
A HOLLOW CROWN IN MUD AND BLOOD The clue is in the paper hat, worn by a dour-faced Simon Russell Beale on the programme cover. This is not stately, sacred, shockingly regicidal S…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 09:32AMJAMAICA BREEZES UP WEST, WITH GRIEF AND GUSTO Jamaican mourning tradition, longer than the Irish wake and noisier than the Jewish shiva, involves – we learn ̵…
Linked From theatrecat.com at 08:43AM 
