Monday, May 9, 2022
VOICES FROM THE VALLEYS It is a curious feeling to be half charmed and half irritated by a production: one moment absorbed in a confrontation and engaged with a character, the next…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:21AMFriday, May 6, 2022
NURSING ACROSS CONTINENTS Kayla Meikle, stalwart in Victorian dignity and Caribbean matriarchy, addresses us firmly at the start of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s manic, sometimes chao…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:01AMWednesday, May 4, 2022
IN THE MIDDLE OF LIFE’S JOURNEY..THROW A PLATE OR TWO Ah, middle age! Waists spreading outwards, options contracting, marriage all too familiar, parents getting older fast and ch…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:21PMThursday, April 28, 2022
SEXUAL ASSAULT , HARD LAW, AND AN ASTONING WEST END DEBUT Forget the cold sadistic clotheshorse Vilanelle from Killing Eve. Actually, forget all Jodie Comer’s screen awards. This …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:09AMTuesday, April 26, 2022
HALF A CENTURY OF HAPPY MISCHIEF Full disclosure: I have been following this man around for the best part of 50 years. Went with my brother Mike to his first show, Housewife Superstar, at th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:48AMFriday, April 22, 2022
NOW THE TWO PLAYS TOGETHER HENRY VI: REBELLION. ENGLAND IN FERMENT, AND SOME DANGEROUS WOMEN We are in the 1450s, in a dangerous doldrum: Henry V of Agincourt is long dea…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:52AMWednesday, April 20, 2022
ENGLAND IN FERMENT, AND SOME DANGEROUS WOMEN We are in the 1450s, in a dangerous doldrum: Henry V of Agincourt is long dead, his stripling son married to pretty French Margaret …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:22PMTuesday, April 19, 2022
DO WE STILL LOVE ROOSTER? So it’s back, another St George’s day before a west country village fair. Twelve years on from Jez Butterworth’s glorious shock-troop assault on me…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:11AMSunday, April 17, 2022
THE ORANGE MONSTER RIDES AGAIN The first thing to say is what everyone has said: that Bertie Carvel as Donald Trump is magnificent. Eerily so, capturing not only the ex-President’s …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:04PMSunday, April 10, 2022
THE LOST BOYS OF THEATRE… The tiny Actors’ Centre is reborn under its new name, and since this play is set in what was a traditionally febrile, theatrical, subversively arty qua…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:08AMThursday, April 7, 2022
QUEER AS FOLK BY THE INFINITY POOL Jeremy O Harris is a much feted American playwright (a Tony for Slave Play) adept at drilling in to the moment: BLM, fashionable white guilt, showy t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:03AMWednesday, April 6, 2022
SCIENCE, SIBLINGS, SOUND AND FURY This is a satisfying play. To take a painting analogy, it satisfies not in the way that a perfect still-life vase might, but more like a Kandinsky …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:35AMMonday, April 4, 2022
CAMPING ON THE PLANKING At the Coliseum last autumn Gilbert and Sullivan’s seagoing Savoy Opera was immense, with a huge revolving ship, Les Dennis as the first sea lord, a massive chorus …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:46PMFriday, April 1, 2022
THE SHADOW OF A BEGINNING, ALABAMA 1936 Forget, for the moment, both the fame and the the arguments over Harper Lee’s classic novel: Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation is a free…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:33AMThursday, March 24, 2022
WELCOME BACK, BITING SHARP AS EVER In 2010 Bruce Norris’ play wowed the Royal Court: this is a ten-year anniversary (well, plus two years lost to Covid) so forgive me for quoting wh…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:01PMTHE ROUGH TOUGH BIRTH OF A CITY It is not often I resort to drawing in the notebook, but there it is: half an hour into the first part of David Hare’s play about the city planner Robe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:40AMWednesday, March 23, 2022
A PLAY IS A PLAY IS A PLAY IS A WEDDING With typical wit, the doughty little Jermyn has captured an intellectual-farcical oddity from New York complete with author-director and star…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:51AMSaturday, March 19, 2022
BRACING, BELTING, BENIGN At the end of the evening the great diva, director and muse informs us that we too must sing. In a packed house, on the far side of a pandemic which made …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:41AMThursday, March 17, 2022
LEARNING TO LIVE Sometimes judging others harshly is a relishable guilty pleasure. In Ruby Thomas’ wonderful 80-minute sequence of snapshots of family therapy, the write…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:17PMWednesday, March 16, 2022
NOT A FINE ROMANCE Mamet plays are Marmite plays. You can applaud Speed the Plow, adore Wag the Dog on screen, and have a pleasurable argument with the opposite sex after a particularl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:49AMTuesday, March 15, 2022
LOVE AS AN UNCOURTLY CONTEST In 2009 – and again in Chichester 2018 – I missed Mike Bartlett’s mischievous, half-earnest play about a gay man wrestling with his identity (and h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:59PMFriday, February 25, 2022
A VIGOROUS, HEARTSHAKING BRUSH OF OPPOSITES Two artists in a studio: the older one pale and floppily blond, languidly self-protective, drawling, preaching a cool gospel of u…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:30AMTuesday, February 15, 2022
AN ORDINARY TRIANGLE TWISTS INTO NIGHTMARE The French novelist-turned-playwright Florian Zeller hit the British theatre scene a few years ago with two comedies: The Lie and The …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:58AMFriday, February 11, 2022
HOMAGE TO A HEALING CHAOS If – like Prince Charles – you grew up with the Goons in the background (“Ying Tong! Bluebottle! He’s fallen in da water!” etc) this will ring …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:31PMFriday, January 14, 2022
MIDDLECLASS MOUNTAIN MISERIES Inspired programming here. You’d find a decent overlap in any January Venn diagram of regular Donmar audiences and people who wish they were ski-i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:29AMThursday, January 13, 2022
Puppets move the heart… It was a third attempt ( like so many, it has had cancellations and suspensions), and I missed it in Sheffield 2019 through illness. So I bought any tick…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:14AMWednesday, January 5, 2022
SONGS FROM THE LAND There’s a lovely serendipity here. The main theatre is running PEGGY FOR YOU (till 29th) while the little downstairs space has Neil Leyshon’s rather lo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:18AMFriday, December 31, 2021
PLAGUE YEAR Part 2 – 2021 Below, if you care to scroll , I chronicled the shows that met my return from chemo-then-lockdown in 2020. An enfeebled theatrical year. Today a lo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:55PMThursday, December 30, 2021
PART 1: THE ONSET I set out, in this eerie Twixtmas gap, to chronicle and celebrate the return of live theatre since May 2021. And this will follow. But when I totted up the 20…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:49AMSaturday, December 18, 2021
A SHARP , SERPENTINE, SUPERB PERFORMANCE Lounging in the small hours on her office couch, under a wall of posters for her many clients’ shows – both famous and forgotten �…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:57AMFriday, December 10, 2021
A PRIMA DONNY JOINS THE FEARLESS FOUR Last year as a family we came to see the doughty quartet doing this variety show, an adult-joking non-panto to fill the fearful gap. It was th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:31AM 
