Tuesday, February 11, 2025
WILD SHORES IN WARTIME Risk taking a gap between seeing David Greig plays and you forget how downright louche things are likely to turn out. (I had lately revelled in Prudencia Hart …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:36PMMonday, February 10, 2025
A FEMALE EVOLUTION, FRANK AND FINE First salute the cast: Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindraand Harmony Rose-Bremner, for an unpretentiously powerful tour de force. Ea…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:41AMThursday, February 6, 2025
ABSURDITY AND SUBLIMITY After the glorious Parisian detail of the revived Rigoletto here , Johannes Schutz’ spare bland box with only four flat doors is an opposite take on how …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:56AMTuesday, February 4, 2025
A FEMALE EVOLUTION, FRANK AND FINE First salute the cast: Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner, for an unpretentiously powerful tour de forc…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:42PMTuesday, January 28, 2025
FUNNY ABOUT THE UNFUNNY Billy Bash, rated the third most offensive comedian in Britain, was once the dominant partner in Biddle and Bash. He’s still on tour, God help us…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:36PMThursday, January 23, 2025
A DARKER THOMAS CROMWELL Edward Bennett as Thomas Cromwell is a proper thug: everyone’s memory of the HR-outplacement weasel who starts the sacking meeting with soft-soap…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:05AMSaturday, January 18, 2025
SUBURBAN ANGST IN THE NEW SA There’s nothing like a tight, awkward comedy of neighbourhood strife, where neighbourly differences reveal unexpected fissures within the couples, and tiny p…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:46AMFriday, January 17, 2025
AT THE SUMMIT OF RAGE AND HOPE Fear not, this isn’t a Greta-gloom lecture but a lively, imaginative, borderline wild reconstruction of the years culminating in COP3 clim…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:28AMFriday, January 10, 2025
NO SINKING FEELINGS HERE, GIRLFRIEND Call it a jukebox musical if you like, but only if the jukebox came alive, went rogue and started tottering around the stage on rubber feet hurling insul…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:15AMTuesday, December 17, 2024
SACRED MONSTERS IN THE UNDERWORLD Deep darkness within the U-shaped seating,: into it on wheels glides the dark gondola: Charon the ferryman, after millennia punting to and fro across t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:32AMSaturday, December 14, 2024
A HIGH-KICKING WOODEN WONDER Serious fun, this. Never liked the Disney Pinocchio, or even in childhood the over-preachy Carlo Collodi book about the defiant wooden puppet who …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:57AMThursday, December 12, 2024
PRESENT MIRTH HATH PRESENT LAUGHTER. AND MELANCHOLY. AND FALSE NOSES In a play as familiar as this it is small touches that spring fresh life. Like the moment when the fool Feste def…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:48PMWednesday, December 11, 2024
SPRINGTIME FOR…EVERYONE Joyful, headlong and full-hearted, here comes sacred outrage. If director Patrick Marber and the Menier had been minded to issue wet ‘trigger warning…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:23AMMAZELTOV! JEWISH PANTO STRIKES AGAIN Goldie Frocks, rightful heiress to an East End schmutter workshop, has been enslaved by the evil Calvin Brine, whose behemoth of too-small c…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:45AMSunday, December 8, 2024
FEARED IT MIGHT BE TUTU MUCH, BUT NO… I immediately fell for Frankie Bradshaw’s set: a two- storey house lined with fossil skeletons in cases, and a spirited opening in which th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:05AMThursday, December 5, 2024
LOOK BEYOND THE LETTUCE It is a tribute to Greg Wilkinson’s monologue play that I had not previously seen the rise and fall of Liz Truss as having a gripping dramatic line. It h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:31PMHIGH SPIRITS, HIGH COMEDY, EVEN HIGHER HEELS Elton John, who jumped at the idea of writing the music, calls the 2006 film a favourite; many of us nod in blissful agreement. B…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:55PMWednesday, December 4, 2024
C’EST MAGNIFIQUE ! Napoleon, defeated at Trafalgar, vows revenge on Britain and its “bootlicking monoglot monarchists”. Stalking around in breeches and bicorn hat, Ma…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:26AMTuesday, December 3, 2024
TA-RAN-TA-RA ! Mike Leigh, a veteran better known for films, Abigail’s Party and theatrical experiments with scriptless rehearsal, is also a dedicated devotee of the utterly scripte…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:55AMSunday, December 1, 2024
THE COOLEST CAT IN LONDON. AND SOME RATS. Here’s your traditional Christmas outing, proper panto. No rackety popstar hype or tedious suggestive jokes from worn-out comicS…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:27PMFriday, November 15, 2024
GALSWORTHY ? WELL WORTH SEEING With late Victorians, there’s plenty to bite on: a rising bourgeoisie aflame with parvenu ambition, piety , pannier skirts ,patriarchs, an empi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:05PMThursday, November 14, 2024
WISDOM IN A LIFE BACKWARDS Forget the awful fim made from Scott Fitzgerald’s story about a life lived backwards – a man born in old age, working towards youth and infancy in reve…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:44AMTuesday, November 12, 2024
A JOURNEY OF JOURNEYS A map is a lovely thing, but sometimes practically speaking a diagram is better. And can also be lovely: especially when its useful elegance has become a fam…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:04PMSaturday, November 9, 2024
THE BIG RATHER UNFRIENDLY GIANT Tom Maschler, legendary publisher and once a Kindertransport child, summed up the appeal of Roald Dahl: his stories offer “A glorious p…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:55AMFriday, November 1, 2024
1648, Agra: marble and murder, a terrible beauty One of the worst photo-ops of Princess Diana’s collapsing marriage was that shot at the Taj Mahal, billed by romantics as “eternal …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:24AMThursday, October 31, 2024
LOOK BACK IN COMPASSION The Rattigan renaissance of the last few years is more than welcome: ever since Flare Path hit the West End fourteen years ago there seems to have bee…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:45PMTHE GRANDEST OF GRIEFS Not Renaissance Mantua but New York a century past: smart bars and low dives, gangsters in fedoras. Why not ? In any world might be a lonely jokester, missing his …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:11AMWednesday, October 30, 2024
A short catch-up on one of the season’s greats (was away..) Mark Strong is made to play great tragedy: a long powerful body, controlled bleak intelligent features.A figure from any age…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:37PMTuesday, October 29, 2024
“…HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB” That was the subtitle, when exactly sixty years ago a shower of Oscars fell on Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly tasteless,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:26PMFriday, October 25, 2024
A HARD AND ICY WORLD A 1970’s Hull folksong chorus: “Next time you see a trawlerman on Hessle Road half tight – remember, o remember, the perils of that night”. It was a trib…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:27AMThursday, October 24, 2024
BROTHER, CHRISTIAN, WITCHFINDER I reviewed this play about the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins last year, in Ipswich: I write only to add thoughts, now that it has deservedly…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:54PM 
