Tuesday, November 25, 2014
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES AGAIN – BAFFLED BY MODERN BIRTHWAYS, SOLDIERS BRAVELY ON AND WISHES IT HAD WORKED Immediately this play had the whiff of a concept. This is a …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:49AMFriday, November 21, 2014
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES LURKS HAPPILY AT THE BACK OF THE CLASSROOM There is nothing funnier in the world than kids swearing. This play gets us as close to that as possible wi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:25AMWednesday, November 19, 2014
TWO LONELY LIARS IN A BIG SAD CITY… Here’s a curiosity worth catching: the only full play by Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer (who greatly admired it). It was born…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:32PMTuesday, November 18, 2014
ALL HUMAN LIFE: A TERRIBLE BEAUTY ON A RUBBISH TIP In the interval of this headlong, crowded kaleidoscope of a play it was hard to know where the second part of David Hare’s s…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:52PMMonday, November 17, 2014
THE PRICE OF VICE… The accolade is a knighthood: services to literature for the debonair Will Trenting, already a Nobel for his novels on the seamy side of life. The play is set…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:52PMSunday, November 16, 2014
BURLESQUE BLISS (AND BOON…) There’s a towering, assertive giant gay blue rabbit in skintight Spandex, a stripping trapeze artiste hurling garments at the front row, a sadfaced clown …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:01PMThursday, November 13, 2014
ALED AND TOM DO THE SHOW RIGHT HERE… Aled Jones is wonderful. Honestly. He is. Won’t ever hear a word against him. This contentedly hokey stage revival of Irving Berlin’s 1954 seas…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:55PMWednesday, November 12, 2014
A LONG WAY FROM DOCK GREEN… Gail Wilde earned her nickname at Hendon. A firecracker, an enthusiastic gym-bunny aglow with desire to be a good copper in the Met. She turns up early f…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:43PMTuesday, November 11, 2014
THE POETRY AND THE PITY On this evening of Armistice day a hundred years on, no more fitting place to be than at this finely drawn revival of Stephen MacDonald’s two-hander about th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:15PMSunday, November 9, 2014
NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS: 600 YEAR OLD SEX CRIME COMES TO TRIAL It is the year 1399. In dim light, great John of Gaunt lies on his funeral bier awaiting burial in St Paul�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:46PMFriday, November 7, 2014
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI SINKS INTO HER SEAT UNDER THE WEIGHT OF SCIENCE It so happened that, on my way to 2071, I had been listening (repeatedly) to Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene:…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:55AMThursday, November 6, 2014
IN WHICH GUEST CRITIC AND TOP THEATREKITTEN LUKE JONES IS SADLY UNDERWHELMED This – created by Lloyd Newson of DV8 physical company – wasn’t quite the piece o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:06AMWednesday, November 5, 2014
UP THE WOMEN, UP THE WORKERS…AND A JIG FROM HAROLD WILSON It was not until the second-act opener that I thought it might fulfil the hope. That hope has been considerable: …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:35PMTuesday, November 4, 2014
BRAM AT THE BBC: A FRIVOLOUS FORTIES FRIGHTENER Ah, happy memories! As an unfledged BBC techie in the ‘70s, my favourite job was “Spot Effects” in radio drama studios: a …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:25PMFriday, October 31, 2014
THE WOMEN AND THE BOYS: YOUNG RATTIGAN BEGINS… There’s a rugby ball and a bottle of Oxford Ale, clothbound law books, pipes, a cricket bat, 1930’s clutter. There are …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:41PMThursday, October 30, 2014
DORAN CALLS UP DEMONS Devils! Not Hallowe’enily cosy at all. Obscenely beguiling, tenebrous creatures of evil, they lurk inside all human nature and they know it. Mother Sa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:40AMTuesday, October 28, 2014
DARKNESS VISIBLE: CANDLELIT HORRORS, ANCIENT SORROWS By the end of three hours the gilt-reflecting candlelight of this little jewel-box playhouse is flickering over a birthda…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:13PMMonday, October 27, 2014
RADIO FOUR THE MUSICAL? ABOUT TIME TOO Radio 4 announcers tend to have a dry, contained sense of humour, honed by years in their lonely hutches listening to that most literate of n…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:11PMFriday, October 24, 2014
FLINTLOCK STRIKES A SPARK – IN A LIBRARY, TOO… Cervantes’ story gave us a word: quixotic. From politics to artistic enterprises, it defines all extravagantly roma…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:21PMThursday, October 23, 2014
“LIKE A SAD OLD MELODY, TEARS YOU UP AND SETS YOU FREE, THAT’S HOW MEMPHIS SEEMS TO ME’ “Ain’t no daytime on Beale Street, only nighttime!’ Delroy’s joint …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:50PMMonday, October 20, 2014
A STUNNING SIMPLICITY, A HUMAN HEART Only the dead see life clearly. In the last strange simple minutes of this undramatic drama, half of Thornton Wilder’s citizens bec…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:00PMFriday, October 17, 2014
A NEW EYE ON AN OLD SADNESS: THE WILDE TRIAL RECREATED This is fascinating: the playwright John O’Connor and Oscar Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland mark the centenary of the great …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:33AMCOMEDY, BRUTALITY, UNCERTAINTY IN A BYGONE SALFORD There is a telling moment at the end of Sam Yates’ production of Ayub Khan Din’s portrait of a Pakistani Muslim famil…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:26AMThursday, October 16, 2014
IN WHICH YOUR CRITIC FALLS IN LOVE WITH A BENEDICK AND A DOG-BOWL This is actually the one we know as Much Ado About Nothing – though some nifty Shakespeareology suggest…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:47AMWednesday, October 15, 2014
BEFORE THE DAWN OF WAR…THE LAST LARKS This is the young Shakespeare: making his way, dazzling with wordplay, confecting improbable japes and charades, laughing at absurd elder…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:44PMTuesday, October 14, 2014
EVERYTHING COMES UP ROSES FOR THIS ONE. OH YES. It is not often in a big musical that you remember the silences: the pin-drop, tense waits. But then, Gypsy was no run-of-the-mill musi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:18PMMonday, October 13, 2014
DORFMAN DOES DISCO, HURRAH Oh, fabulous! Nicholas Hytner could have done lots of traditional things to launch the recreated third auditorium, the jewel of “NT Future” with …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:45PMThursday, October 9, 2014
BACK TO PRISON: WOMEN WIN THE HOLLOW CROWN This is epic and intimate, mischievous and macho, truthful and painful and bleak. A two-hour condensation of the Henry IV plays, set in th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:39PMWednesday, October 8, 2014
THE INTERIORITY OF EXTERIORITY EXAMINED..ER.. Theresa Rebeck’s play about a creative-writing seminar in New York, directed with pace and flair by Terry Johnson, has met some sniffy …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:58PMTuesday, October 7, 2014
DORIAN GRAY IS BACK. AND THIS TIME SHE’S A GIRL. I am usually too humble about my exiguous visual gift to dare remonstrate with designers, but in this case would plead, t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:33PMFriday, October 3, 2014
SWEET SEDUCTION, OLD CORRUPTION In 1978 as a Today reporter the day editor hustled me off to the Prince Edward theatre where this chap Lloyd-Webber (“He did that Joseph thi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:12PM 
