Monday, January 29, 2018
TWO QUEENS, TWO FATES Who shall be whom? In Robert Icke's arresting adaptation of Schiller's play, the scene opens with a sober-suited group of men watching two women in identical bla…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:06PM[SHARE]Friday, January 26, 2018
A WILDE RIDE WITH A BOLTER Beneath the artful fan-shapes of the set, gloriously coloured bustles and ruffles flit between black tailcoats and epigrams ping around the room like…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:06AM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 23, 2018
CLAMBERING TOWARDS LOVE You don't often, in romances, get lines like "Tomato ketchup's always been my Achilles heel". Or indeed proper consideration being given to the erotic p…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:29PM[SHARE]Monday, January 22, 2018
PEGGY GUGGENHEIM WALKS AGAIN You cross the stage floor to the toilets and a warning sign on the little set alerts you to the danger of tripping over a "solid stone" bench. So I…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:30AM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 17, 2018
SULTRY HEAT AND SEXUAL DREAD… Our age is beginning, once more, to appreciate E.M.Forster properly: the recent TV Howards's End caught his wit as well as the social indignatio…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:52AM[SHARE]My principal review from the Old Vic is here (http://tinyurl.com/y8u2na24) . But now it transfers (with glorious irony to the Noel Coward Theatre..it’s the least Cowardy of all plays e…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:30AM[SHARE]Monday, January 15, 2018
VILLAIN VAUDEVILLEÂ Everyone loves the film. Something in the nostalgic British psyche likes to think of a gang of ruthless desperadoes lodging with a dear old lady, pretend…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:51AM[SHARE]Friday, January 12, 2018
TOP FOLK ON THE ROADÂ There are boxes , planks, a rope; around and upon them, singly and severally, still or moving, the aristocracy of modern folk music. Strings, accordion, guita…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:54AM[SHARE]Thursday, January 11, 2018
GIRLS ON THE EDGE Honour to the Royal Court for two things. First for the initial wobble, then  for executing a rapid u-turn over Andrea Dunbar' s rather wonderful play . So after …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:24PM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 3, 2018
AT LAST…AND FINE TO THE LAST After snowbound frustration in December drove me onto the road after part I, I saw the first again and  that evening reached the second play in o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:01PM[SHARE]Thursday, December 21, 2017
IT IS JUST AS WONDERFUL AS THEY SAID IT WAS. It could have been just a novelty: the biography of a half-forgotten Founding Father of the USA, an orphaned immigrant who rose to be …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:15PM[SHARE]Wednesday, December 20, 2017
THE OTHER OSCAR, Â A DELIGHT What delight, in the midst of Michael Grandage’s Oscar Wilde season at this theatre, that daytimes this month (11 pm and 2pm) t should see the sta…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:24AM[SHARE]Friday, December 15, 2017
SWEET YOUNG LOVE IN PARIS: Â NOT. "We're not going the full Mousetrap here" said the press desk, "but there is a moment at the end…we're asking.." . Fine, no spoilers. Plen…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:19AM[SHARE]Thursday, December 14, 2017
DISNEY ECHOES AT THE NT: YOU WOODN'T BELIEVE IT The first glimpse of old Geppetto does make you gasp. He is immense, a huge benevolent head bowed attentively as great arms operate the…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:10PM[SHARE]OLD DOG NEW TRICKS After a couple of challenging takes on Strindberg, the little theatre's new AD Mr Littler (one presumes with a "whoooff!" of relief) has booked in, and jazze…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:04PM[SHARE]ESPIONAGE, ESCAPE, AND THE WORLD'S WORST FLATSHARE This is the one that got away. Simon Gray's 1995 play, set largely in Moscow, is about the Cold War '60s spy George Blake and the Ir…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:27AM[SHARE]Tuesday, December 12, 2017
TO BOLDLY DREAM.. MAINLY OF PLYWOOD AND PROPS THE TWILIGHT ZONE was , long before the phrase was coined, "appointment-to-view television". In the US in the 50s and 60s families gather…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:46PM[SHARE]Monday, December 11, 2017
LARKING Â WITHIN TENT As an old radio hack, who started a career over forty years ago in the days when "spot effects" in drama studios were one of the more amusing jobs, I ha…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:51AM[SHARE]Sunday, December 10, 2017
CICERO, CAESAR, CATILINE: ELOQUENCE, AMBITION , HORROR It begins with a corpse: a horrid human-sacrifice, as we shall learn, as a set of libertines and plotters swear a blood-o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:06PM[SHARE]Friday, December 8, 2017
A SPANGLED ANGLESEY ARISTOCRAT WALKS AGAIN One way to win, if your own era rejects you, is to be so spectacularly odd that two centuries later a musical theatremaker gets obses…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:23AM[SHARE]Tuesday, December 5, 2017
A MINI-CIRCUS AND A MISCASTING A nice irony that this revival of this Mark Bramble / Cy Coleman / Michael Stewart musical about Phineas T.Barnum should open now, just as David Attenbo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:04PM[SHARE]Â NEW GENERATION CRITIC MICHAEL ADAIR WONDERS WHO IT'S FOR…. When The Woman in White debuted at the Palace Theatre in 2004, much of the commentary focused on it being a tec…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:36PM[SHARE]Saturday, December 2, 2017
EROTICROBATICS, BANANAS, HIGH JINKS Relief flooded in with the first act, Cabaret Decadanse from Montreal. Here was a larger-than-life lip-synching puppet diva made of glitteri…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:14AM[SHARE]LUKE JONES WANTED TO CARE, BUT SOMEHOW.. Running again through the plot of this play l in my head, I think 'surely it's gripping'.? Coffins of martyrs are continuing to stack u…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:53AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 29, 2017
DICKENS UNCHAINED Good to see the Old Vic auditorium in the round again (a Spacey innovation). Though this time, there's a long transverse thrust stage enabling Marley's ghost …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:42PM[SHARE]RUFF WORK: AN ELIZABETHAN MORALITY FOR TODAY This is a devilish cunning ploy from Anders Lustgarten – an impassioned critic of state and social policies, sometimes a bit …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:36PM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 22, 2017
A GLORIOUS, GANGLING, GRACEFUL PRESENT FROM SHEFFIELD This is glorious. Hits the bullseye. It's about kids – the boiling mass of hormones that is a year 11 class grappling with GCSEs a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:58PM[SHARE]Friday, November 17, 2017
MANTRAS AND MONEY There is a useful play to be written about the lure of fashionable Western Buddhist retreats, and the way discontented rat-racers can transfer their competitive ambi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:29PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 16, 2017
AN ANCIENT CRY, A TIMELESS THRILL Across 25 centuries comes a harsh cry: not of war, Â not from savage male throats but from a swaying, chanting, defiant chorus of young women deman…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39PM[SHARE]GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI MEETS MINDFULNESS IN THE MIDST OF TOLKIEN'S TIMEWASTING J.R.R. Tolkien, among many other things, is famous for two: his unending ability to procrastinate, and…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:42AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 15, 2017
SEX, SHAME , THE STROP OF THE RAZOR I rashly confessed on Twitter that I spent the afternoon before this astringent production of a Strindberg play revelling in the happy furry…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39PM[SHARE] 
