THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN? Tanika Gupta’s play is a sprawling, angrily intimate epic about Indians in Britain during the height of empire, thirteen years running up to old Queen V…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:49AMA FEW OF OUR FAVOURITE THINGS… Let it be said first of all that Gina Beck is a glorious gamine Maria: sings like a bird and is satisfyingly able to convey in her voice her gr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:43PMTHE WAY IT WAS Ah, the forgotten plays of the 30s and 40s, how they lure me to basements and pub rooms and tunnels: Jermyn and Finborough and Southwark in particular! Like co…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:15PMBIRTH, DEATH, SCIENCE , ANGER “The smell – the smell – the sheets…” Curtain up, he is gripped by urgency, past or present. . Now a successful doctor home in Hungary…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:24AMCOME ON MY SONS… At the end of the first half of this exhilarating play, England is through to the World Cup quarter-finals in Russia after several bracing straight wins and an ago…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:56PM1926 AND ALL THAT, ON THE AIR Fresh from doing cartwheels in the Bake Off musical up the road, Haydn Gwynne is now a strangely convincing Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin , in pinstripe. Oh,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:58PMQUIET DESPERATION, NOISY GUNSHOTS “Everybody tell the story Everybody sing the song, Every now and then a country Goes a little wrong…” Hard for it not to feel topical, S…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:47AMHIGH NOTES AND KNOBBLY KNEES I am a relative newcomer to Gilbert & Sullivan, having long thought I hated them (heard too many gammony fans in my childhood wrecking the songs…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:43PMWELCOME BACK TO PUNXATAWNEY Seven years after its premiere at the Old Vic earned a flurry of Oliviers, by way of a pandemic and a disappointingly short Broadway run , here it…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:42AMA TIME CAPSULE OF OPEN MARRIAGE I am pleased to find out about Miles Malleson: an Edwardian student joker, WW1 conscientious objector, Bolshevist, founder of Left drama groups and the…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:53PMMOTHER RUSSIA’s WARRING SONS At the Almeida this shook and delighted us last year: a fresh history play: confrontational , shocking, classic in its focus on vast flawed cha…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:38AMBIG SHOW, BIG HEART, SMALL SPACE This, I urgently must tell you, is rather wonderful: an example of the way that sometimes a big show in a small theatre can be a revelation…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:39AMBACK TO THE OFFICE, EVERYONE! There is, by chance a bit of a Thing going on in theatre right now: women playing a particularly alpha type of men, with glee and an unnerving s…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:04AMWHEN DIVORCE WAS DISASTER It’s 1921. Thirty years ago Lady Kitty ran out on her MP husband Clive and small son with his friend and colleague Hughie, exploding a public scandal…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:08AMBORN TO LEAD.. This is a joy, quirky and full-hearted, musically adroit and fast-moving and witty. Moreover, I suspect its self-mocking variety-show humour would be more to t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:43AMTHE ROARING TWENTIES, ROLLING OVER THE EDGE When Noel Coward shocked and enthralled the 1920s with this most bitter and intense of his plays, he was meanwhile hastily finishing the farcical …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:15PMGATHER ROUND AND HEAR AN OLD, OLD STORY… Deep breath, concentrate at the back: there’s this Ancient Briton King, who once banished a chap who vengefully stole his baby sons, leaving…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:22AMA THEATRICAL ECHO, SEVENTY YEARS AGO A theatrical tease opens both halves: the voice of Noel Coward singing “There’s a right way and a wrong way, an old way and a new way” for the…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:34PMHARRY HILL TAKES ON TONY BLAIR. FIIIIIIIGHHHT!!!! I couldn’t be more delighted that it’s touring, this splendidly rude show. We need this kind of merrily offensive burlesque, in t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:15PMTHE POWER OF NO, IN 1950S AMERICA If we think we suffer from a paranoid cancel-culture , we should note this reminder of mid-1950s America – notably Hollywood – in the McCarth…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:09AMBLACK, BOYISH, BEAUTIFUL It’s not all musicals and movie-spinoffs that put bill-paying bums on seats. The best producers trust their nerve and instinct ,rake through the fringe …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:30AMREDEFINING FEELINGS IN AN AGE OF ANGRY ANGST “We are three people trying to redefine feeling” they say. They do this between Paris, Munich, Salzburg and Greek islands, and either…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:58AMBLAZING MUSIC HOLDS THE HOUSE TOGETHER After 1930’s Donegal at the NT the day before, Dancing at Lughnasa portraying a group of women meeting stress and poverty with danci…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:26AMA SAD LOST WORLD . A HUMAN BEAUTY There is particular genius in creating a play which doesn’t build to a showy debacle but grips you with the possibility of an unnamed crisis, and so f…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:11AMABBASOLUTELY A DELIGHT If there is a formula for a cheerful touring play in our frazzled and disputatious times, it would go like this: warm but a bit rude…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:09AMNEVER FLAT, COWARD There ’s always a slight frisson when Noel Coward’s rueful, dark-streaked romantic comedy is revived in our censorious age. We are nine decades on from the night i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:06AMLOVE, DEATH, GRIEF It’s a joy to have the intimate Swan auditorium open again, refurbished after going dark in the first sudden Covid closure, and to see once again a strong, ni…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:32AMSEA FRET I’ll give it one thing: over an hour into this infuriating two- hour play there’s a brief but wonderful part for the veteran June Watson. She stumps in with octogenar…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:57AMBEAUTIFUL SCIENCE. UGLY WORLD Unexpectedly enthralled, I spent an hour and a half eavesdropping on six nuclear physicists, and couldn’t be more glad to have caught up on thi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:04AMBLISS WITH THE BLISSES I don’t always make it through the Oxfordshire lanes to the gorgeous, eccentric, water-wheeled Mill, but the thought of Issy van Randwyck as Judith Bliss lured me . …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:30AMFUTURE 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 12:58PM
