Thursday, October 15, 2015
SINS OF A PREACHER-MAN Admit it, ladies. Within the most modestly-clothed and lipstickless of us pale white matrons, there lurks a sneaky wish to be – just for an hour or two –…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:40AMMonday, October 12, 2015
EUGENE O’NEILL, EARLY AND IMPASSIONED… Well, God bless the little Jermyn. Director and AD Antony Biggs, an unwearying ferret of lost drama, has dug up another barnstorming earl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:50PMThursday, October 8, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FEELS THE NEED FOR A SCRUB Sex is at this play’s core. But it’s not sexy in the slightest. It’s a means of leverage, abuse, it’s a crime, a threat. Each of …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:43PMWednesday, October 7, 2015
QUEER ON CAMPUS, THE 21c BLUES Welcome to our college! Meet the students, America’s future. Or, as depicted in Christopher Shinn’s new play, a selection of the most sexuall…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:50PMMonday, October 5, 2015
A FROLIC… This is an artful wheeze. Take the story from the sunniest of films, a 1957 cheer-up British Lion starring Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford and Bernard Miles. Bolt on some …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:12PMFriday, October 2, 2015
THE GREATNESS OF SMALL LIVES We are in a pub garden in rural Hampshire, where landlord John is gathering logs for the fire (in high summer, “it’s part of what people come fo…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:57AMThursday, October 1, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS ANCIENT TRUTH IN A GLORIOUSLY DARK DIVORCE “I can unmake you the same way I made you. I write the story, remember?” Rachel Cusk’s brilliant vis…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:53PMMONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO SOUR The setting is excellent . Terrible flashing screens of numbers, alerts, currencies; sometimes becoming a glass window onto a London scene made of banknot…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:19PMJOLLY HOCKEYSTICKS! “Put on your navy knicks, pick up your hockey sticks – and bully-up, bully-up..” Jeepers. I had completely forgotten that ritual “bul…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:40PMWednesday, September 30, 2015
UNIMPROVABLE IMPROV… You won’t see this show again, nor the other Showstoppers’ evenings I have loved in Edinburgh. If you weren’t there tonight you’ve missed a…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:19PMMonday, September 28, 2015
A SMILE, A SONG, AND SAPPHIC SOCIALISM At last. The question tormenting many a fretful middle-aged man – what do lesbians actually DO? – is answered. Aerialism! When the giddy mo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:56PMSaturday, September 26, 2015
THE PROTESTANT WHORE RETURNS IN TRIUMPH Charles II came to the throne (in a fabulous wig, surrounded by fabulous spaniels), with England in a mood to throw aside Puritanism and party. The th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:25PMFriday, September 25, 2015
A KIND OF HORRIFIC GRACE.. We are having a spate of grisly classicana at the moment, brutal old tales of curses and murders and doom spinning down the unforgiving generations. A brace of sta…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:08AMThursday, September 24, 2015
THE HOLLOW CROWN : A CIRCLE COMPLETED This is the crown, the final flourish of Gregory Doran’s magnificently rendered history cycle. We have seen preening emotional Richard…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:55PMTuesday, September 22, 2015
THE WORST GUEST EVER…FARCE AND FEAR It’s the least likely setting imaginable for a farce, even a black one. We are in Baghdad, in the Alawai family’s kitchen and dinin…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:58PMMonday, September 21, 2015
A FINE PLUM-PUDDING OF ACTS AND IDEAS “Sex and the 18th century” said Brigid Brophy, quoted by the playwright Sam Kelly, “are the two most interesting things in the world”. The fiery…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:47PMFriday, September 18, 2015
EXECUTION STREET… Grotesque. Morbid. Hilarious. Dark, absurd, evocative. Start with the last one. This is a period-conscious piece, even more than Martin McDonagh’s Irish-set wor…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:55PMYOUTHFUL YEARNINGS A CONTAINER PORT CAN’T CONTAIN… You grow up with your mates in a dead-end town, and you’re a solid gang – five a side footie team, in and out of each o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:43AMThursday, September 17, 2015
A WINNER AND A LOSER Human beings sometimes – disastrously – get erotically fixated on one phase of their sexual history. In the case of Patrick (Nick Sidi) it is a teenage momen…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:33AMWednesday, September 16, 2015
SMALL BUDGET, BIG HEART, WELCOME UP WEST I had been wanting for a while to catch up on this fringe squib about the lives of front-of-house theatre workers, and with devilish cunning Max Reyn…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:55AMTuesday, September 15, 2015
THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR DANCING. IF YOU DARE. Sequins, feathers, glitter, two and a half hours of hurtling from one noisy shining set-piece to another, this is more of a gig than a dram…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:49PMMonday, September 14, 2015
SCIENTISTS, SEXISM, THE SCR AND THE SECRET OF LIFE Nicole Kidman, an Oscars star descending again on the West End, is the “story” here; so begin by saying that as the half-forgotten 1950…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:35PMSaturday, September 12, 2015
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES (genuine 21st century school leaver..) ENJOYS THE MENTAL MUMS RATING THREE With the news we’ve been having this week, a play about educat…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:59PMHuxley and Orwell tapped into an enduring theme - the innate, unconquerable desire to be left alone
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 11:00AMWednesday, September 9, 2015
VISIONS FROM 1931 OF A TEST TUBE FUTURE… Hot on the heels of Headlong’s obliquely brilliant treatment of 1984 comes a rival dystopia: Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, eig…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:58AMTuesday, September 8, 2015
79 NOT OUT – AYCKBOURN, AT IT AGAIN Suns decline, new stars rise. This is Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s 79th play – not among his best, but when did genius ever run leve…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:20PMSaturday, September 5, 2015
LOAD UP THE TWO-SEATER, JEEVES, WE’RE ON TOUR It always seems unfair when particular delights, best-comedy Olivier winners like this, are reserved for the West End, even if they …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:14PMWednesday, September 2, 2015
In 1941 young Terence Rattigan was creatively blocked, gloomy after an early success then a relative failure. He joined the wartime RAF as a tail-gunner in a Wellington bomber, and in a crip…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:56PMTuesday, September 1, 2015
PRIORY PEOPLE… Acting is a useful metaphor (one man in his life plays many parts, etc), and in this portrait of addiction, therapy and recovery author Duncan Macmillan squarely –…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:52PMMonday, August 31, 2015
GETTING ‘EM OFF FOR VICTORY Never in the field of TR Bath’s excellent endeavours has so much flesh been displayed with such nerve to so many. Some were, in the interval queue for…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:54PMFriday, August 28, 2015
DRAMA AS REDEMPTION From the first moments Nadia Fall’s production sets brutal, bullying humanity against a hot, strange, majestic Australian dawn. A lone aborigine watches, sile…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:15AM 
