Friday, 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…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:31AM[SHARE]Friday, 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 …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:03PM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:29AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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-so…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:01AM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PM[SHARE]Saturday, 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…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:40AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 27, 2019
GUEST CRITIC BEN DOWELL SHIVERS " ADMIRINGLY " AT A TROUBLED TALE Â In this hypersensitive age of MeToo accusations, anxieties about online pornography and even deeper-seated disquiet abo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:58AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 13, 2019
RANCID LILIES, GORGEOUS WORDS Â Â Â All the little Jermyn needs to complete this reimagination of Wildean epigrammatic decadence is to scent the auditorium overwhelmingly with lilie…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:02AM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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 …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:38PM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:44AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:46AM[SHARE]Thursday, May 16, 2019
SULTRY, SINFUL, SHOCKING, SHINING      Savagely observed absurdity, blinding flashes of insight, profound yearning, sudden poetry singing clear notes from the cru…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:31PM[SHARE]AN 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 …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:11PM[SHARE]Friday, 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 bes…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:33AM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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 c…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:07AM[SHARE]Monday, 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 le…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:15PM[SHARE]Friday, 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…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:10AM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 ec…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:51PM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:00PM[SHARE]ANOTHER KIND OF LOVE SONG       This is gorgeous. Funny, truthful, wise, and bravely original in form.  Anyone with a a family " past, present, re…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:32AM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 amiabil…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:44AM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 23, 2019
GUILT, GRIEFÂ AND PITY Â Â 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 o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:28PM[SHARE]Monday, 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 minu…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:35AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 17, 2019
DOWNBEAT, DOWNCAST Â Â Â Â Some years ago, leaving a particularly slow and uninspiring Chekhov performance in Yorkshire (never mind which play, spare the blushes) Â I heard a …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:56AM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 perform…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:19PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 11, 2019
ANOTHER KIND OF HOUR Â Â Â Staggering back from holiday, I sentimentally booked this at the New Wolsey in Ipswich because 2019 is the 50th anniversary of my unremarkable student perf…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:46AM[SHARE]BEATRIX 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% …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:54AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:29PM[SHARE]Friday, April 5, 2019
THE OLDEST HAVE BORNE MOST… Â 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…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:23AM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 Bre…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:26AM[SHARE]Saturday, 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, prote…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:53AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
