Thursday, April 18, 2024
MUD, MARSH, MONEY Now here’s a bracing new way to do Dickens: avoid sets full of Victoriana by keeping the stage pretty much empty beneath a set of uneasily moving lighting-bars …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:20AMTuesday, April 16, 2024
REFLECTIONS ON A FAT KNIGHT Due to train disruption – speak not of overhead wires and wind – I had to bail out at the interval, from Robert Icke’s epic three and a half hour modern…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:47AMMonday, April 15, 2024
WHY HALESWORTH MATTERS TO THE NATIONAL DRAMATIC ECOSYSTEM The other day I did an overview-preview from some dress rehearsals at the INK short play festival in Suffolk (scroll below), …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:51AMSunday, April 14, 2024
CROOKBACK DICK REIMAGINED Saving Richard III from Shakespeare’s calumny seems to have a particular appeal to women: probably because around his accession in the 1480…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:41AMSaturday, April 13, 2024
DIVING ABOUT IN A UNIQUE SHORT-PLAY FESTIVAL Join me on a parked Hoppa minibus where Henry VIII is chatting up a new Jane. She is not impressed by the Tudor-Tinder qualificat…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:27AMFriday, April 12, 2024
HOLINESS IN THE WHALE It pretty much had me harpooned at the words “Call me Ishmael”. As Mark Arends’ earnestly naive schoolteacher speaks the opening lines and begins…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:26AMThursday, April 4, 2024
WUTHERING SIBLINGS Grace Smart the designer sets the scene as we settle in with a sweet miniature moor, all harebells and heather and cloddy bits of earth. But it rises in the air …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:55PMTHE GAME’S AFOOT. EVENTUALLY. Nick Lane’s adaptation of Conan Doyle’s late, broodingly complicated novel has met many huzzahs from Sherlock Holmes fans, previously here, on tour and …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:56AMWednesday, April 3, 2024
DOSTOYEVSKY IN DALTON
“These days” says the man on the empty stage, “people are precious to me, even when they insult me. I have woken up”. His stark features do no…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:17PMSaturday, March 30, 2024
CAMPUS RITES AND WRONGS Sometimes, I do like a stage set you could cosily move right into. Paul Farnsworth’s is a nice evocation of a Harvard professor’s study: shelves and panelling…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:22PMFriday, March 29, 2024
HOMAGE TO THE FIRST CELEBRITY DIVA Last time theatre’s pre-Victorian glory days – silk breeches, rowdy audiences and Garrickian hamming – were celebrated on this stage w…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:35AMWednesday, March 27, 2024
HOW TO WASTE A STELLAR CAST Sheridan Smith is not only a box-office draw but a rare and genuine talent: two decades a star on screen and stage, musicals and drama: phenomena…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:27AMSunday, March 24, 2024
MAGIC . ALWAYS BETTER WHEN DISASTROUS. God bless Mischief Theatre. Eleven years ago this coming May I saw THE PLAY THAT GOES WRONG in the tiny downstairs space at Trafalgar S…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:01PMFriday, March 22, 2024
KIDS WITH A KICK IN THEM There’s been an interlockof themes in theatre lately: DEAR ENGLAND at the NT displaying Gareth Southgate’s work in fostering the openness and emotiona…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:31AMThursday, March 21, 2024
HOPE, HEART, HARDSHIP Brian Friel’s 1979 remarkable play stands on its own, offering a kind of depressive beauty: beneath the story of one ramshackle troubled couple it is a meditatio…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:44AMRO$$INI BONANZA! Guest reviewer Dean Thompson finds much in a small space… Opera lovers or new to opera will love this! So, get on your horse and gallop over to see Charles Court Opera…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:23AMMonday, March 18, 2024
A CELLULOID INVASION This was at first a startling choice: Eastern Angles’ tradition is generally, as it heroically tours night-by-night across the eastern counties, to programme…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:52PMWednesday, March 13, 2024
BOARDROOM BEASTS This may break all records for the smartest costumes ever at the Southwark’s smallest space: six irreproachable business suits, including two sets of tweed-chic fema…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:26AMTuesday, March 12, 2024
A FRESH CAST, ONE YEAR ON Can it really be a whole year since, with theatre still gallantly recovering from Covid, Nicholas Hytner rolled the dice and opted to offer us some razzle dazzle?…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:40AMFriday, March 8, 2024
PLANT FOOD PEOPLE FROM THE PAST I missed this first time round, due to the babysitting years, so it was grand to catch up. It’s a 1980’s revival, a spoof on 1960’s sci…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:15AMThursday, March 7, 2024
A MAVERICK MINISTER There’s another play to be written about Aneurin Bevan, stubborn founder of the National Health Service: perhaps a more contentious one, or a fantasy in w…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:44AMWednesday, March 6, 2024
ONCE BRITTEN TWICE SHY? The late David Hemmings, one of Britten’s mentored, worshipped boy sopranos, was unforgettable aged 12 as the original MIles in the composer’s terrifying…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:45PMTHE WINDRUSH WARRIORS Moses’ crowded bedsit is where the new ones turn up off the boat train, wanting to know how to do London; he can tell them names like Clapham -“not C…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:49AMMonday, March 4, 2024
GUEST REVIEWER AND OPERABUFF DEAN THOMPSON LOVES ENO’S LATEST Ingenious – Dazzling – Hilarious! If you haven’t seen The Magic Flute before, then this is the one to see; if you have…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:46AMFriday, March 1, 2024
CORONATION, COMMISSION, COLLABORATION You need not be a selfish pig to be an artist of genius, but there’s no question that it often helps. Occurs, anyway. In Mark R…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:10AMThursday, February 29, 2024
AN ATTIC WARNING Fasten your seat belts for a bracingly odd German play by Marius von Mayenburg; hold on tight as it veers in a switchback weirdness, which I for one ended up tho…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:47PMWednesday, February 28, 2024
THEY SHALL NOT PASS Given the current swell of antisemitism there was a heartstopping moment from Jez Unwin as Yitzhak Scheinberg, patriarch of a hardworking East End Jewish family wh…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:26PM1948 AND ALL THAT Right now, the birth of the NHS in 1948 is more than appropriate to write about (there’s another play about Nye Bevan next week). For as the most jaded doctor pred…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:16AMTuesday, February 20, 2024
WANNA BE IN MOVIES? REALLY? BRRRR! We open in a chilly Suffolk cottage in the rain (I am tonight probably the only person here to have come direct from a chilly Suffolk cottage, in rain. C…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:31AMFriday, February 16, 2024
TENTACLES STRETCHING INTO PAST AND FUTURE Electricity is coming to the village but the elderly Randolphs wont bother, preferring the paraffin lamplight of their forebears. Their ho…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:46PMThursday, February 15, 2024
WHEN THE BOOMERS WERE ROCKIN’ ALL OVER THE WORLD... “We were there!” cry the cast of John O’Farrell’s jukebox tribute to the 1985 Live Aid concert. Memories undimmed nearly f…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:14PM 
