Wednesday, November 17, 2021
ROLL UP! IT’S BACK! Ah, Christmastime! There’s nothing like a buff chap in spike-heeled patent thigh-boots somersaulting in the air to make you feel festive. Unless it�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:56PMA HUMAN ZOO OF ALPHA MEN There are good plays to be written about white male privilege, and about modern capitalism and its relentless expectation of self-promotion and constant advancement …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:37AMSunday, November 14, 2021
THEY DO NOT GROW OLD AS WE IN THE STALLS GROW OLD May as well tell you, last week I had the ultimate pensioner experience, and it was a blast. A midweek, senior-price matinee i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:07PMFriday, November 12, 2021
TWENTY YEARS AGO, ANOTHER HEALTH CRISIS CHANGED LIVES Just before the pandemic closed everything down, Emily Jenkins’ deft two-hander won a top Edinburgh Fringe award and many plaud…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:55AMThursday, November 11, 2021
FACE THE MUSIC, AND DANCE! This was a new outing for me. I have long loved the Watermill some miles west, but I hadn’t really registered the Mill at Sonning with it’s e…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:01AMWednesday, November 10, 2021
Reprise: they’re still at it, as good as ever If I were a PR for the Society of London Theatres, I would get these six performers together for a photocall with the five from Prid…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:15AMMonday, November 8, 2021
THE MYTH AND TERROR THAT CHILDREN KNOW Sometimes a violent rip occurs in the thin veil of materialism ,commonsense, morality and law. Children know this: a bereaveme…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:28AMThursday, November 4, 2021
COULD YOU? WOULD YOU? FOR A MILLION BUCKS? Here’s a struggling young couple (well, not that young, both on second marriages and he has a daughter going to college). Along comes a billion…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:18AMWednesday, November 3, 2021
UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED TO BE A HOOT It had to happen: someone had to notice that in the comfortable upper-middle and aristocratic worlds of Jane Austen’s novel, nothing c…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:43PMSaturday, October 23, 2021
NOT A REVIEW BUT SOME JOLLY NEWS Not a review, because this was the first performance of a modest weekend testing the water: a script-in-hand, moustaches-falling-off, fresh-outta-wor…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:49AMTuesday, October 19, 2021
THE HEART STILL FEELS THE BEAT Everything Bob Marley sings lifts the heart, instructing it to rise and triumph and unite in joy: lively-up yourself! Let’s get toget…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:08PMTHE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL: scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry There was a spate of criticism when Richard Norton Taylor’s dramatisation of the Grenfell Inquiry was announced, despite it b…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:42AMSaturday, October 16, 2021
THE RACE WHERE NOBODY WINS This feels like a howl of baffled frustration, from a millennial generation ( writer and director, and all four characters) unable to deal with the emo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:59AMThursday, October 14, 2021
THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. Almeida, N1 THE SCOTTISH PLAY WE NEEDED Say what you like about star-casting and auteur-ish directors messing with Shakespeare, but sometimes a multiple…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:59PMAN OLD STORY OF YOUNG MEN Balliol College Oxford, 1910. Confident young Etonians are hurling crockery downstairs, yelling “I’m a bastard, I’m a bastard, rather be a bastard than …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:30AMSunday, October 10, 2021
EAST IS EAST, IN EAST ANGLIA Shamser Sinha – who is on the National Theatre Connections project – relished the idea of writing a play about a South-Asian working-class family i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:32PMFriday, October 8, 2021
AN EVER-MORPHING PROTEAN TEXT…RENEWS AGAIN BEFORE OUR EYES Every Hamlet should give us something new. The play is a philosophical and psychological labyrinth, its jewels and se…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:12AMWednesday, October 6, 2021
FOUR WIVES LATER, MANTEL AND MILES COMPLETE THE JOURNEY It was rising eight years ago that the first two parts of Hilary Mantel’s majestic Wolf Hall trilogy came to the stage, adap…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:20PMNOT QUITE A REVIEW, MORE A TRIP DOWN A SIDE ALLEY I was on the early train up when news came that poor old Southwark had ,for the second time, been forced by illness to cancel two performanc…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:13AMSunday, October 3, 2021
WHO NEEDS PANTO? A CLASSY FLIGHT OF FANCY ON THE ROAD This show, which I had the joy of seeing in a packed Theatre Royal Norwich alongside many small thrilled children, knows exa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:59AMThursday, September 30, 2021
THE LAST GREAT PLAGUE If you lived as an adult alongside the onset of AIDS forty years ago you don’t forget it: the lost friends and workmates , the rumours of ignorance which h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:13PMWednesday, September 22, 2021
A POCKET JEWEL We always knew that among the first sproutings of recovery would be a few Alan Ayckbourns, popping up as welcome as snowdrops. I am always fond of this early one, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:40AMTuesday, September 21, 2021
AN ARCATI MORE THAN MEDIUM I once took a student nephew to this Coward masterpiece, and the thrill for me was that he didn’t know there was a g—–. Until there was. Therefore for a risi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:34PMThursday, September 16, 2021
A SHAGGY-DOG TALE IN CRUMBLING SPLENDOUR Sometimes the building upstages the play. I had not explored the late-Victorian, half-restored glory of the Coronet before, and my fir…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:15AMWednesday, September 15, 2021
AN EPIC OF PASSION AND PERFORMANCE Here is life, history, theatrical passion, great migrations and lyrical romance in the rain. Here’s anger and humour and love and desp…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:22AMFriday, September 10, 2021
A HISTORIC HIT BACK, BETTER THAN EVER This portrait of three bickering sisters, trading memories and revelations in the days before a mother’s funeral in a snowy Yorkshire winter…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:34AMThursday, September 9, 2021
LOVE, GRIEF, AND A BRAD PITT ALBATROSS With loving detail, right down a glimpse of coat-racks beyond the far door, the downstairs studio serving Tom Wells’ new play has become a rem…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:28PMWednesday, September 8, 2021
ICE WORK IF YOU GET IT… Phew. The Broadway-rooted, Disneylicious, long-awaited red-carpet premiere night featured (of course) an ice -blue carpet. And the throng bursting …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:30PMMonday, August 30, 2021
ARTHUR SMITH CONJURES UP HIS DAD These days our Arfur comes complete with an overture! It takes the form of Kirsty Newton at the piano (artfully disguised as an upright 1940’s pub-…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:30PMThursday, August 26, 2021
THEATRE’S FAIRY GODFATHER DOES IT AGAIN We needed this. The return of the big classic shows to packed houses in the Barbican, Chichester and Sadlers Wells has been invigorating, but Lloy…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:52AMWednesday, August 25, 2021
Occupied France, 1944. Two teenagers newly in love meet in an empty house. Elodie is French, Otto a German soldier. They are both endearing and annoying, as befits their ag…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:00AM 
