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 12:58PMHYTNER 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 06:23AMRIDE 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 02:28PMA 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 12:17PMSUGAR 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 11:00AMAN 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 12:59PMMORE 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 02:48AMHIGH 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 06:15AMCOUGAR 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 02:53AMA 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 07:05AMA 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 06:25PMSITCOMS 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 06:51AMA 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 12:52PMA 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 01:11PMJust 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 06:15PMHELLMAN’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 05:22AMAN 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 04:37AMA 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 07:42AMTHIS 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 07:15AMBREEZILY 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 06:34PMA 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 06:31AMTHE 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 05:16AMFREUDIAN 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 09:04AMA 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 05:49PMA 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 12:58PMA 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 07:02PMCELEBRATORY, 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 08:47AMCLEVER, 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 03:57AMA 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