Sunday, March 19, 2023
FUTURE IMPERFECT Artificial intelligence and robotics have long been a boon to us ethical-scifi buffs, films like AI and I, Robot mercifully saving us from rocket ships and aliens …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:58PMWednesday, March 15, 2023
HYTNER ROLLS ANOTHER WINNING DICE Daniel Mays has played a lot of tough-guy roles but has by nature a rather innocent and worried-looking face. It is this quality that Nick Hytner sp…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:23AMTuesday, March 14, 2023
RIDE A WILD APP In a week when tech firms shuddered at the shock demise of their favourite bank, how better to spend 90 minutes withJoseph Charlton’s exhilarating, fast moving 3…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:28PMSunday, March 12, 2023
A RADIATING RESPONSIBILITY Since I watched Sizewell A going up as a child, live close to Sizewell B and dwell amid a forest of local posters furiously condemning Sizewell C, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:17PMTuesday, March 7, 2023
SUGAR RUSH I can never resist scribbling down rhymes in new musicals, whether in a spirit appalled or admiring. Take a bow Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary – writers of this extreme ca…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:00AMSunday, March 5, 2023
AN UN-SOLEMN WARNING FROM THE FUTURE H.G.Wells is the inspiration, with a larkily extrovert Dave Hearn from Mischief Theatre pretending to be his great-grandson, heir, and owner of th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:59PMFriday, March 3, 2023
MORE DETAILS, MORE DEVILRY An Afghan army officer flees the Taleban and finds safety on the 23rd floor of Grenfell Tower. His local nickhame is “Sabar”, meaning “pa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:48AMTuesday, February 14, 2023
HIGH ABOVE THE BRUTAL AND BELOVED CITY It’s an architectural moment. Within the stark brutalist NT is a set in homage to a brutalist landmark: the early 1960’s Park Hill Fl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:15AMFriday, February 10, 2023
COUGAR CHAOS The Greeks just go on giving. Writer-director Simon Stone’s play, set today amid the upper-middle classes of Holland Park and second-home Suffolk, credits itself m…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:53AMThursday, February 9, 2023
A MONETARY MORALITY PLAY Three hour-long plays, two intervals, three men in black frock-coats explain some financial history in a revolving glass box in front of a projected , m…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:05AMMonday, February 6, 2023
A TALE FOR TODAY FROM A PRUSSIAN PAST Here’s a love story, an idyll of 18c Prussia: Corporal Anastasius Linck, a Hanoverian musketeer in dashing white breeches and shiny buttons …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:25PMWednesday, February 1, 2023
SITCOMS MADE US, BUT CAN WE MAKE THEM? It’s a very good idea, bang on the money: David Cantor and Michael Kingsbury (TV sitcom writers with a pedigree) set their play in a bland pr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:51AMMonday, January 30, 2023
A BLAST OF DAFT JOY Zip-a-dee-doo-dah! Here’s a treat. Disney music, blasting out before this vigorous 65-minute one-man spree, sets the mood. It is carnivalesque, fantastical,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:52PMSunday, January 29, 2023
A PATIENT TO TRY PATIENCE It must be challenging to play a psychiatrist at work , maybe especially in Finsbury Park where there are bound to be a few in the audience. Yo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:11PMWednesday, January 25, 2023
Just a few new notes on this , as its completes its triumphant national tour with (amazingly) no stopping-injuries despite the heroically vigorous slapstick direction by Lindsay Posner (move…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:15PMThursday, January 19, 2023
HELLMAN’S LESSON IN HUMANITY Theatre can offer few more topical messages for a nation which might hesitate over Ukraine’s needs than this neglected one-set domestic play by Lilia…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:28AMPULLING THE WOOL Most dystopian visions set themselves quite far in the future. Misha Levkov, however, keeps us in 2025, specifying that productions should always be set a cou…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:22AMWednesday, January 18, 2023
AN OLD INJUSTICE REMEMBERED An old man steps onstage alone: upright, soldierly in khaki as a former US war hero who is, he says resignedly, “brought out every year on the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:37AMFriday, December 23, 2022
A TALE FOR ALL TIMES The story of Nelson Mandela has become almost a folktale: imprisoned for 27 years for campaigning against the hideous “apartheid” regime which kept the black ma…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:42AMSunday, December 18, 2022
THIS DAME HAS A WHOLE LOT BEHIND HIM I last saw Sir Ian McKellen onstage as Lear, missed him as the oldest Hamlet ever, but far longer ago saw him in a frock at the … Cont…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:15AMFriday, December 16, 2022
BREEZILY BLOWING IN FROM 1908, FRESH AS EVER In Mole End on Christmas Eve,in a burrow cosy with domestic detail they’re breaking out the beer and sardines and reminiscing about t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:34PMTuesday, December 13, 2022
A TRAGICOMIC BEAUTY Hard to express how much I loved Stephen Karam’s play. Maybe it just hit the right moment: yomped through freezing night, strikes and ‘severe delays” readi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:31AMSunday, December 11, 2022
THE MOST ENJOYABLE STRIKE YOU’LL SEE THIS CHRISTMAS I love it when the theatre perfectly fits the show. Artists can overcome a wrong space, but there’s gleeful concord when it su…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:16AMFriday, December 9, 2022
FREUDIAN ISUES IN FAIRYLAND Everyone’s got mental health issues in HEX: which is the Sleeping Beauty story extended to the troublesome folk-tale aftermath. The tousled Fairy…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:04AMMonday, December 5, 2022
A PACK OF WOOLFS PROWL ROUND THE GENDER-BEND One bespectacled, anxious-looking Virginia Woolf in a sensible brown skirt and dreary cardigan is never enough, so Michael Grandage’s prod…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:49PMFriday, December 2, 2022
A COLD ANGRY CRUSHING SYSTEM It’s a cold unadorned monochrome scene: courts, brawls and bedchamber all framed on three sides by vast looming tiered steps and a high flat parapet…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:59PMUP WEST, IT LOSES NOTHING…STILL A FIERCE TREAT Leaving the former Young Vic production a lad far too young to remember 1968 said sadly to me “It was the beginning of Now, wasn’t it?”…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:58PMWednesday, November 30, 2022
A GLORIOUS DOWNSTREAM WILLOWS FOR OUR AGE You won’t see a prettier, more refreshing or sustainable stage this Christmas: natural colours, riverbank rushes, a bare tree (which will have…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:02PMSunday, November 27, 2022
CELEBRATORY, MY DEAR WATSON I had come from the magnificent Old Vic Christmas Carol, where once again with mince pies, bells and lanterns and Dickensian cheer and a message about how poo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:47AMWednesday, November 23, 2022
CLEVER, CLOWNING, CLASSIC What could be more seasonal than Flaubert’s tale of wifely frustration, romantic illusions, disastrous adulteries and ruinous shopaholic debt? This adapt…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:57AMWednesday, November 16, 2022
A DAUGHTER OF DISREPUTE 1893, and here’s George Bernard Shaw passing the Bechdel Test with flying colours by centring the action on two women at odds , with surrounding men remarkably d…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:28PM 
