Saturday, May 31, 2025
BROWN BRITISH LIVES, FROM ENOCH TO SUNAK Sathnam Sanghera’s novel drew on his own life, partly homage to Arnold Bennett and with some echoes of Priestley too, joined the fine chronicle…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:23AMThursday, May 29, 2025
It is indeed PLUTO not Apollo who rules the Underworld. Was tired. Apologies to all classicists.
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:53AMSONDHEIM AND THE STYX I last saw this 405BC Greek classic in Spymonkey’s version and found it – sorry – unfroggettable. Giant puppetry, a community chorus tap-dancing as frogs w…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:19AMThursday, May 15, 2025
DROWNING PASSION, TIMELESS RESCUE Marvellous play, this: wrenches the heart out of you , patches it up and sets it back on the hard road of life and love. It wrenched Terence Rattigan h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:13AMI said it all at the Royal Court – https://theatrecat.com/2024/11/09/giant-royal-court-theatre/ – and it is an event not to miss, especially the way the world is in 2025. Everythi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:19AMWednesday, May 14, 2025
WELL WORTH THE MONEYPENNY This is glorious: just what we all needed. In the company’s spirit of never wasting a terrible joke, I absolutely Bond-ed to it. Following Mischi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:36AMTuesday, May 13, 2025
HOME AND FAMILY, BEAUTY AND SADNESS Few days late to the party with this , poor old theatrecat having seemed to fall off the press list; but very well worth the ticket (Old Vic pricing i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:59AMFriday, May 9, 2025
AFFLUENZA APOCALYPSE As Aubrey de Mandeville puts it in the great Antrobus books, “God, here’s a strange lozenge-shaped affair!” Buñuel meets Monty Python, courtesy of …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:57AMThursday, May 8, 2025
A MODERN CLASSIC DONE WITH VIGOUR Michael Frayn’s play-about-actors is always welcome: a comic masterpiece and loving study in theatre’s own absurdity. The first act shows a final l…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:03AMFriday, May 2, 2025
A SATIRICAL WARNING FROM OLD UKRAINE Not long ago a rompingly funny version of Gogol’s satire on official incompetence ran at Marylebone ( https://theatrecat.com/2024/05/…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:23AMWednesday, April 30, 2025
MATHILDE AND THE BUILDER (can he fix it? Probably not) The set is glassand towering, city-chic backed by reeds and seashore; the figures before us NYC glamorous, even when th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:53AMTuesday, April 22, 2025
WINNERS, WAGS AND WRONGS Well, here’s a summer romp. Hot on the heels of Tom Hiddleston in a disco version up Drury Lane, here’s the RSC take on one of the sunniest Shakespeare …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:17PMFriday, April 11, 2025
TWO WOMEN, LONG YEARS ACROSS HALF A CONTINENT 1935: below projected headlines about Communists executed in Shanghai and the war between Japan and Red China comes an audition call fo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:18AMThursday, April 10, 2025
A HAMLET THAT STANDS ALONE “is it not monstrous that this player here,But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,Could force his soul so to his own conceitThat from her working all his visage…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:38AMRIEN TO REGRET! This is a terrific, impassioned production: not only does Kimberley Sykes’ direction and Michele Meazza’ s movement work keep it watchably, startlingly vigorous, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:25AMWednesday, April 9, 2025
TRAGEDY WITHOUT A MORAL Raoul Moat used steroids and bulking-powder to armour himself in muscle, nourished a bottomless well of grievance and self-pity , and imposed his needy will…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:08AMSaturday, April 5, 2025
THE DEPTHS BELOW THE WIT The plays, ever revived, we know well; the wit is often cited, the old injustice of his downfall recreated in plays and films: most recently we’ve seen…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:30AMThursday, April 3, 2025
VENEZIANA ! Buongiorno to Venice 1730, a city stage topped with the golden winged lion of St Mark, arched and curtained and lit with candelabras . Overhead a twelve-piece orchest…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:43AMTuesday, April 1, 2025
DARK FANGTASY IN A SCAFFOLDING CITY For this compact and creepy little atmospheric treat, John Donnelly turns to vampires. That’s not a spoiler: the programme is full of learned stuf…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:59AMThursday, March 27, 2025
BEYOND QATAR… Two years ago this show was a pleasure – (https://theatrecat.com/2023/06/21/dear-england-olivier-se1/) , and now, on the far side of more efforts and…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:14PMWednesday, March 26, 2025
POWER, MAJESTY AND JUSTICE Very good to see this intense three-hander by Ryan Calais Cameron (who gave us “For Black Boys..” ) migrating to Shaftesbury Avenue with increa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:46PMFriday, March 21, 2025
THE 1660’s AND ALL THAT: THEATRE REBORN Oddly, for theatrecat it’s the second day running of enliveningly energetic female history. After six women told the story of Mary…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:03PMA ROUSING RACKET TO HONOUR A LIFE Mary Wollstonecraft was a pearl of the 18c Age of Reason, even more treasurable for having – as a woman – a harder time of it than all the Locke…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:19AMTuesday, March 18, 2025
THE UNSERIOUS UNDEAD “You will be horrified!” The five players announce, “- one way or another”. And with a flourish they hurl Bram Stoker’s book behind them into Tijana Bjela…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:27AMThursday, March 13, 2025
A STRANGE WARTIME FABLE OF LIFE, BIRTH AND JEWELLERY In a little Jeweller’s shop in 1942 Paris Joseph Haffmann is making a deal with his young assistant Pierre. He is Jewish, and h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:41PMSaturday, March 8, 2025
AN ANCIENT BRUTALITY, RIGHT HERE Five women from the past mount the stage, candlelit, to enact theterrible story of the 17c Suffolk witch-trials. First there’s young Mar…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:25AMWednesday, March 5, 2025
BRUTAL, VIOLENT AND TENDER Around a King’s coffin surge personalities and politics , power plays and lineage . A royal bier is loaded with crown and jewelled cross, around it cou…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:30PM HEROIC STORY, NEAR MISS It could hardly be a better theme and story for this terrific little theatre, which since its opening has explored the darkness of Nazism and the heroism of th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:44AMSaturday, March 1, 2025
A TROUSER-LEG TSUNAMI AND A COATHANGER DREAM They came off the boats: a Windrush generation, wanting to work and live in cold strange Britain. In an upper room Walker doe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:47AMThursday, February 27, 2025
HEART AND HUMOUR, REALPOLITIK AND GOD This is a wonderful play, all you could want: philosophy, history prefiguring the present moment, humour and character , stunning cent…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:04PMA RAVE IN MESSINA Get da kids into Shakespeare! The world worries about it. So Jamie Lloyd hits a formula hard to beat with one of the sunniest comedies (only one pretend death). So 1)…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:28PM 
