Thursday, June 27, 2019
GUEST CRITIC BEN DOWELL SHIVERS – ADMIRINGLY – AT A TROUBLED TALE  In this hypersensitive age of MeToo accusations, anxieties about online pornography and even deeper-seate…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:58AMThursday, June 13, 2019
RANCID LILIES, GORGEOUS WORDS Â Â Â All the little Jermyn needs to complete this reimagination of Wildean epigrammatic decadence is to scent the auditorium overwhelmingly with lilie…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:02AMTuesday, June 11, 2019
FLYING,  FUNNY, FABULOUS   This is a dream of a Dream. One expected fun from the combination of Nicholas Hytner, a roiling mass of promenaders in the pit and …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:38PMSunday, June 2, 2019
A NOTE ON A TREAT, MOUSELESS BUT MELLOW  The film based on Scott Fitzgerald's story of a life lived backwards, born old and ending in babyhood,  was pretty awful.  So I …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:44AMWednesday, May 29, 2019
BULLYING, BOMBAST,  BETRAYAL    The rediscovery of Githa Sowerby in the 1990s is very satisfying.   At its premiere in 1913 critics saw the quality of this one but …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:46AMThursday, May 16, 2019
SULTRY, SINFUL, SHOCKING, SHINING      Savagely observed absurdity, blinding flashes of insight, profound yearning, sudden poetry singing clear notes from the cru…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:31PMAN INTIMATE EPIC IN A FADING  EMPIRE  Hard to overstate what an absolute treat this is , and on how many levels. It is a terrific yarn, both romantic and tough, about history …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:11PMFriday, May 10, 2019
      There's something special about fin-de-siecle anger in any century: this is from 1697, years later than Wycherley and the mellower Sheridan, and bes…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:33AMTuesday, May 7, 2019
SMALL IS  BEAUTIFUL, SHORT CAN BE SHARP     There is something stimulating about ultra-short plays: five to twenty minutes but directed and performed with all the c…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:07AMMonday, May 6, 2019
LOVE  AND LOSS AND 'THAT'S THE DEAL'     Jack is a middle-aged Oxford English don of the '50's , a bachelor and apologist for Christianity. Graceful, witty books and le…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:15PMFriday, May 3, 2019
ECHOES OF ANTIQUITY , FRESHNESS OF YOUTH      It's a storming performance. Young Isabella Nefar as Judith erupts upon us:  adolescent, exuberant, afire…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:10AMThursday, May 2, 2019
GUILT, GRIEF,  POLITICAL ANGUISH       Handy timing ,  to open on what is  local Election Day for us ruralists and at a time when everything has a Brexity ec…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:51PMTuesday, April 30, 2019
DEADLY DEBTS    The artistic love affair between August Strindberg's ghost, playwright Howard Brenton and director Tom Littler continues to bear strange fruit,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:00PMANOTHER KIND OF LOVE SONG       This is gorgeous. Funny, truthful, wise, and bravely original in form.  Anyone with a a family – past, pres…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:32AMThursday, April 25, 2019
THE WORLD DONALD GREW UP IN…      It's a long transverse stage: at one end at a scruffy crowded steel desk sits Jorgy, Michael Brandon exuding down-home amiabil…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:44AMTuesday, April 23, 2019
GUILT, GRIEFÂ AND PITY Â Â It is almost uncanny how an Arthur Miller play, treated respectfully, can in the most wrenchingly extreme story still catch the common rhythms and tides o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:28PMMonday, April 22, 2019
(Published in Daily Mail on Friday, one must moonlight to support this website's unfunded free existence –  but here it is  for theatrecat regulars..)      T…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:35AMWednesday, April 17, 2019
DOWNBEAT, DOWNCAST Â Â Â Â Some years ago, leaving a particularly slow and uninspiring Chekhov performance in Yorkshire (never mind which play, spare the blushes) Â I heard a …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:56AMSunday, April 14, 2019
REFLECTIONS ON A RICH SEA OF INK…     I saw 22 plays in two days, but it was hardly half a bite of what was on offer.  In three days there were 40 , each perform…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:19PMThursday, April 11, 2019
ANOTHER KIND OF HOUR Â Â Â Staggering back from holiday, I sentimentally booked this at the New Wolsey in Ipswich because 2019 is the 50th anniversary of my unremarkable student perf…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:46AMBEATRIX BEATS BREXIT WITH TOP BEAK-WORK    The Haymarket these spring mornings is dense with toddlers and their attendants (I'd say by the look of it 20% parents, 50% …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:54AMWednesday, April 10, 2019
A FRESH WIND BLOWING THROUGH AN OLD TALE     Down on the Riverbank Club, teen DJ Rattie is bangin' it behind the deck, telling the shy diffident Mole  "There i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:29PMFriday, April 5, 2019
THE OLDEST HAVE BORNE MOST… Â Jack is an ageing, terminally ill, scruffy, alcoholic remnant of an actor, with a grubby cardigan and Falstaff gut. He is muttering lines from King Lear in…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:23AMWednesday, April 3, 2019
SECRETS AND MEMORIES IN A WASTE OF WATERS     You can't fault the atmosphere:  Jasmine Swan's set takes you straight to the wide skies and muddy, reedy mystery of Bre…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:26AMSaturday, March 30, 2019
CRACKS IN THE LIBERAL VENEER    I adored the energy, cleverness and cheek of BAD JEWS so much I went twice, as the pitiless author set his characters kicking, twisting, prote…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:53AMA COSY NIGHTMARE LEGACY OF THE 1930'S   From the late 1930's for nearly forty years, Mary Barton and her husband Berthold Wiesner ran a pioneering fertility clinic: they were amo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:50AMFriday, March 29, 2019
BRILLIANT, NECESSARY,   QUESTIONING     If we accept that people are widely diverse, we have to accept that paedophiles are too.  Not all the same identi-monster.…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:05AMThursday, March 28, 2019
WHAT THE BUTLER CAME TO KNOW…  From its premiere at the Royal & Derngate and on the first leg of its tour, here is the stage version of Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker-winning novel.Â…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:45PMMonday, March 25, 2019
WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD  What great timing! Just as the worried-well Health Secretary gets rubbished for taking a commercial DNA test, announcing that it has "saved his life†…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:50PMSunday, March 24, 2019
I'M GONNA SIT RIGHT DOWN AND WRITE MYSELF A REVIEW… Â So dress up sassy, shake your chassis, get some mesh on your flesh like the ladies who sing with the band. Sell your vocals to the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:01PMFriday, March 22, 2019
NOT AT ALL FLAT, SUFFOLK…     Exuberantly funny, elegant as a Deauville hotel balcony and sharp as the crack of a 78rpm record over a lover's head, Joanna C…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:39AM 
