Saturday, August 8, 2015
HOLMES AND HOKUM, FRIENDSHIP AND GRIEF Good to start the Fringe-blitz with a winner . (Not that it was the first one that hit me as I lurched off the Caledonian Sleeper, but more of that lat…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:42AMFriday, August 7, 2015
A LOST LADY RETURNS, SAD AND BEGUILING Theatre loves to eat its own history, and fair enough: if you want intensity, volatile emotion, hope and heartbreak and impossible yet irresistible cha…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:16AMThursday, August 6, 2015
A PIG TALE TROTS ITS STUFF Strike day in a hot pedestrian London, and a surreal opening matinee for Stiles and Drew’s new family musical (fresh from the…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 12:44PMTuesday, August 4, 2015
BEHIND THE PALACE WALLS: A CHILLING MODERNITY Peter McKintosh designs cold, skilful dictator chic: above a shining marble floor, the majestic Mittel-Europa chandelier dims to a blood-r…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:19PMMonday, August 3, 2015
A FATHER AND A SON, WHEN THE TIMES WERE A-CHANGING… Old army jokes get readopted by every generation. I suspect that one of the most slyly placed laughs in this ultimately charming e…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:12PMSaturday, August 1, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI GOES HAPPILY DEMENTED AT THE ALMEIDA “Cleverness is not wisdom,” warn the Maenad chorus, as king Pentheus determinedly resists the rise of new god…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:11AMWednesday, July 29, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI GLIMPSES A RUSSIAN SUMMER WITH PATRICK MARBER Patrick Marber has taken Turgenev’s A Month in the Country and strengthened it in all directions, rather like…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:17AMThursday, July 23, 2015
GLORIOUS BRIDES AND BROTHERS… LP NIPS BACK MID-HOL TO CATCH THEM ALL Innocent virgins abducted from their family hearth, carried off to wild territory by lawless bearded gunmen a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:32PMWednesday, July 22, 2015
This is a tale of romance and of the lure of cinema: tricky on the stage. Mack Sennet, a clownish film director, is losing his beloved star, Mabel Normand, to the dreaded, meatier features. …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:36AMFriday, July 17, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS AN EMPTY FAMILY DRAMA WITH GOOD GAGS TO KEEP IT AFLOAT After 17 years away, the grown-up daughter returns with the illegitimate child which got her thrown out…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:58AMTuesday, July 14, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS THINGS GET MUCH BETTER AFTER THE INTERVAL The jokes bought this play some time. Richard Bean, a former standup, is hot property at the moment after a slew of …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:09AMWednesday, July 8, 2015
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI LEARNS ABOUT LASPO*… “When I was growing up the poor were seen as unfortunates. Now they’re seen as manipulative. Grasping. Scroungers. It’s ver…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:49PMMonday, July 6, 2015
WHEN LARRY MET ORSON AND KEN AND IT DIDN’T GO WELL… Sir Larry spreads his arms wide in the rehearsal room and moans “I am a giant in chains!” His director rolls his e…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:12PMSaturday, July 4, 2015
THE BIG HAIRY ONE RIDES AGAIN… Stage Hero of the week is Owen Guerin, aka The Gruffalo in the larky children’s play based on Julia Donaldson’s immortal book. On the hottest…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:17PMThursday, July 2, 2015
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE Fifty minutes in, we got a 30ft yodelling falsetto caterpillar with flashing saucer eyes, and I cheered up. It also, as it happens, sang the central message of Damon…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:14PMWednesday, July 1, 2015
A HANDBAG? A WHOLE TRUNKFUL OF TREATS The heart sinks beforehand: Oscar Wilde’s sunny comedy melodrama is too familiar: skipping from one well-worn epigram to the next, from handbag to m…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:14PMSaturday, 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 03:56AM 
