Saturday, June 27, 2015
COMFORT YE! HANDEL AND THE FIRST MESSIAH Handel’s Messiah is a phenomenon: written in three weeks in the composer’s most disappointed phase, to this day it plays as sublimely as a chambe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:11AMFriday, June 26, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CONVEYED BY A DYSTOPIAN INJUSTICE The auditorium is a coliseum, with a tremendous conveyor belt slicing it in half, flappy black curtains at either end. K w…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:09PMCHEKHOV UNDER THE TREES Fortune favours the brave, and the meteorological riskiness of outdoor theatre sometimes pays handsomely. A great heron flew over, squawking doom, just as Irina screa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:59AMWednesday, June 24, 2015
BACK OF THE NET! Rejoice! In the midst of Fifa’s dismal doings musical theatre makes football beautiful again. Gurinder Chadha’s and Paul Mayeda Berges’ fable, of a …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:59PMSunday, June 21, 2015
Libby Purves: Open air theatre works brilliantly. In fact, it offers some of the most enjoyable drama of the summer
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 06:00AMWednesday, June 17, 2015
NOW HERE’S THE ONE TO SEE. DON’T MIND THE LANGUAGE… If you worry about language, the clue’s in the title. More f’s and assholes than you can shake a reproving finger …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:01PMTuesday, June 16, 2015
Monday, June 15, 2015
PORN AND PHYSICALITY We’re all on the same page here, right? Online pornography is increasingly violent, graphically displaying real, abusive sexual acts devoid of tenderness. Rapist s…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:54PMUNDER THE BRIDGE, MEN UNDER PRESSURE “You gonna have a revolution”: the last words of Arthur Miller’s angry “play for the screen”, echo here with an interrogati…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:36AMFriday, June 12, 2015
SPECIAL GUEST REVIEWER DARREN RAYMOND OF INTERMISSION THEATRE COMPANY TAKES ON RSC OTHELLO, SKYPE, RAP, BOXBEAT AND ALL….. The RSC made a bold statement by casting their first ever bla…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 02:39PMSHOCKING, SHAMING, MAYBE SALUTARY It is a cliché to say that over decades of TV fame, showy fundraising and hidden sexual crime Savile ‘groomed the nation”. There were indeed encomia &#…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:51AMThursday, June 11, 2015
SUNNY SUMMER KICKS AND SOARING SONGS Here’s a joyful thing: a confection of butterscotch and sunshine, a tale of turrets and twosomes and tap-breaks, friendship and chivalry and secret pas…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:42AMGUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES SAYS “BACK OF THE NET, MARBER!” “This isn’t a church, it’s a ‘business!” What a sentiment for a theatre crowd to hear – or indee…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:18AMTuesday, June 9, 2015
FROCK-COATS AND FLOODS, TUNNELS AND THE THAMES In the week that Crossrail tunnellers broke through beneath London, a city and river now criss-crossed with subterranean thoroughfares, h…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:03PMTHROW IT UP, KEEP IT MOVING, THAT’S LIFE… With August looming over the horizon, there comes a time when the critic needs to harden up, sit on some prickly astroturf leaning…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:56AMSaturday, June 6, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES TACKLES THE ROUGHAGE The Oresteia is probably one of those stories you don’t know. Until you start watching it again. Only then, piecing together fragments, d…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:52AMWednesday, June 3, 2015
BANKSY, SEX, AND STAGE DIRECTIONS In a tatty rehearsal-room, the title reflects the director’s frequent cry, stopping for new stage directions or rewrites from the un…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:24PMMonday, June 1, 2015
BROADWAY VICTORIANA DOESN’T QUITE GET THERE It was David Lynch’s 1980 film – monochrome, moody, with an unforgettable performance by John Hurt – which brought to modern a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:07PMFriday, May 29, 2015
AN AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE We’re in a World War I field hospital with iron beds and the corrugated-iron, battered detritus of trench warfare below. But young men will always leap and lark li…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:38AMWednesday, May 27, 2015
ALL FIVE MICE REJOICE (CHURCH MICE, CLEARLY) FOR A MODERN HISTORY-PLAY Above the table cluttered with last-night’s paper cups, high windows show St Paul’s dome; …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:58PMTuesday, May 26, 2015
SONGS, SCUFFLES, VILLAINS AND VIRTUE IN 1707 Towering staircases and sliding panels transform the big stage from tavern to genteel house, with a pleasingly inexplicable intermittent folk-ban…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:42PMMonday, May 25, 2015
DARK, STARK AND DANGEROUS: A MERCHANT FOR TODAY What an odd, stark, angry, intelligent Merchant this is! Wholly unlike the last RSC production, Rupert Goold’s spectacular Merchant-of-Veg…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:19PMFriday, May 22, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS STIRRED BY REMEMBRANCE In quiet England we stand in silence. In Australia, at least in this play, they shout it from the rooftops and down it from the…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:11AMThursday, May 21, 2015
A DESIGNER, A DREAM, A DANCE, A DREAD “What is it about men with watching eyes…?” asks the ghost of Isabella Blow, she of the troubled soul and hilariously witty hats. One such man w…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:43PMTuesday, May 19, 2015
BOYS IN BUSTLES: SWAGS AND SWAGGER IN VICTORIAN LONDON “The Unnatural History and Petticoat Mystery of Boulton and Park” cries the Victorian poster. “Men in Women’s Clothes –…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:20PMA DESIGNER, A DREAM, A DANCE “What is it about men with watching eyes…?” asks the ghost of Isabella Blow, she of the troubled soul and hilariously witty hats. One such man …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:49PMFriday, May 15, 2015
AN OLD ANGER, SPEAKING TO TODAY We are short of good political playwrights: they tend to hail from the left and be either depressingly prosey or brainlessly ‘bouffon’ (ISLANDS at this ve…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:04PMThursday, May 14, 2015
A SWELL PARTY… Joe Stilgoe the piano man holds the stage as we settle, receiving a fusillade of unhelpful audience requests (“Bolero! Summertime! Pink Panther! Prokoffiev’s…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:48PMWednesday, May 13, 2015
IN WHICH THE OLD LION OF SCARBOROUGH TACKLES A TIMELESS PHILOSOPHICAL CONUNDRUM… …Which is to say, the question of whether time-travel would enable you to change the past, hence …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:03PMA WILD AND WOLFISH WALK IN THE WOODS Last time I went a Norfolk and Norwich Festival outdoor event, I had to spend the night suspended in a nylon flower-petal up a tree and get hugged by tre…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:10AMTuesday, May 12, 2015
THE DARKNESS OF DEMENTIA Devastating. No other word for it. Without sentimentality, in Christopher Hampton’s powerfully simple translation, the French playwright Florian Zeller l…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:14PM 
