Thursday, June 30, 2022
THE BOTTLED SPIDER, HEDGEHOG, ABORTIVE ROOTING HOG, IS BACK…MAGNIFICENTLY The winter of discontent made glorious summer is ushered in with a wild conga round the stage under…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:00PMWednesday, June 29, 2022
ALL GREEK TO US, AND TOPICAL WITH IT Fascinating to see how, despite many light tempting fatuities and sentimentalities onscreen and onstage, and the countercurrents of self conscious experi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:37AMTuesday, June 28, 2022
IT HAS COME TO FRUITION. REJOICE! In a spirit of joyful pastiche, it’s a Sweeney-Todd sound that opens the show: “`Prepare! To be made Aware! Of the most successful Labour Premier…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:31AMSunday, June 26, 2022
OF MAN’S FIRST DISOBEDIENCE…. Thorington is a new outdoor theatre, a beautiful bomb-crater amid tall sighing pine trees and beneath a great oak in Suffolk. It runs only one-night, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:08PMSaturday, June 18, 2022
VIA MEDIA ANGLICANA IN A NEW JERUSALEM We’re in a vicarage kitchen in a small West Country town, its incumbent dealing with parishioners, a resentful, weary wife and two daugh…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:00AMSunday, May 15, 2022
WOOLFING ROUND THE GENDER BEND A bit of a conversion experience for me, this. Disliked Woolf for years, Lighthouse and Waves and all, and therefore never read Orlando. Thought of it as a bit…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:14AMA DARKER HAZE ON AMERICA’S MEADOW Traditionally, audiences don’t go to Oklahoma to be unsettled . On the other hand you don’t go to the Young Vic to have your expectations cosily met…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:18AMFriday, May 13, 2022
TEENS FALLING, UNPROTECTED An empty basement in a working class Kentucky neighbourhood in the mid 70s. An offstage adult world is preoccupied with unemployment, the mained young c…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:34AMThursday, May 12, 2022
A SCRUTABLE TAKE ON CHINA This is a beguiling 70-minute solo show from the actor, writer, wandering maverick entrepreneur and China pundit Mark Kitto. He plays three parts in seq…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:24AMMonday, 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 05:30AM 
