Friday, 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 07:12PMThursday, October 2, 2014
LINDSAY, LINDSAY AND LINDSAY. TWO OUT OF THREE DO FINE. David Mamet’s angostura sharpness is not everyone’s taste , but few playwrights have such rat-a-tat rhythm and economic…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:16PMWednesday, October 1, 2014
PITY AND TERROR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST There’s a great tall door, portal of the ancient house of Atreus; a blighted tree, a votive lantern, a dusty arena. Like Greeks two tho…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:12PMTuesday, September 30, 2014
THE SADNESS OF THE SINGLE SPY…BENNETTIAN COMIC MELANCHOLY These two short plays are vintage, premier-cru Alan Bennett: funny, melancholic, sparking with ideas about Bri…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:02PMSaturday, September 27, 2014
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES ENJOYS THE GRANS AND GANGSTERS The heyday, the heyday. Everyone’s Gran loves to chew over the heyday with anyone they can pin in a chair. But wh…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:46AMThursday, September 25, 2014
Well, what a day that was. There is still in October one chance to see, in one day, all three of Rona Munro’s immense trilogy about the first three King Jameses of Scotland in the wild 15t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:02PMTHE JAMES PLAYS GET OFF TO A TERRIFIC START… This one’s a stormer: thrilling, funny, vigorous, beguiling, accessible, a gripping and entertaining blend of the epic and …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:01PM…AND IT GROWS DARKER James I is dead. His small son, defaced by a birthmark, puny and afraid, in surreal nightmare sequences constantly relives the bloodshed and concealm…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:01PM…AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT If the first play began with a ragged brawl and taunt, the second with a tenebrous nightmare of childhood, this one starts with a rom…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:00PMPOETS AND PACIFISTS, LOVERS AND LOSS: A ‘THIRTIES TALE Modern historical recreations are valuable in this WW1 centenary year, but there is something thrilling, a frisson of…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:35AMTuesday, September 23, 2014
WIKILEAKS MEETS JUST WILLIAM Serious? Not always, it’s not. “Everything is funny all the time!” screams one of our heroes. “Epic Lulz! Nothing is to be taken seriously!…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:09PMTWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD AND FRESH AS A DAISY Two centuries before Oscar Wilde there was another eloquent, satirical, socially subversive, intermittently disreputable Irishman at work: O…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:31AMMonday, September 22, 2014
IMAGINING HOW HE WAS…. Simon Callow’s solo shows have become a landmark: his impassioned Dickens, his Marigold and Chips characters and his Christmas Carol. In Edinburgh I…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:55AMGHOST GUEST REVIEWER EDNA WELTHORPE TAKES ON ORTON, AGAIN by A.N.Onymous (The Critic Who Knows) Calling all ordinary, decent folk. Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) here! I am on a brie…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:35AMSaturday, September 20, 2014
VALHALLA IN A VALHANGAR Deep in the bleak Cold War desolation of the old US Air Base in Suffolk stands a shed where once jet engines were tested. Inside, the old Norse gods gather to bicker,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:10AMWednesday, September 17, 2014
A GALLANT SADNESS : FACES OF WAR “We don’t do glum here. Glum just doesn’t work”. Clipped, officerly with an edge of confident eccentricity, cradling his Cambr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:05PMTuesday, September 16, 2014
A PSYCHOTIC PUCKOON Watching Enda Walsh’s surreal new 90-minuter, late star of the Galway festival, one reflection kept intruding: that there is, God save us, a dangerously fine…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PMMonday, September 15, 2014
DAFT AND DARING, WITTY AND WHOOPEE Onstage a suave Robert Lindsay preens and pirouettes, a matinée idol sick of self-love, pivot of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels running just across the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:00PMWednesday, September 10, 2014
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES WATCHES A GOOD IDEA STUMBLE AWAY INTO THE DESERT This is a drunk play. It rambles a great tale at you, mildly hooks you, then fluffs the end as it totters off for…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:02AMMonday, September 8, 2014
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS AS MUCH TO KEEP AS TO THROW AWAY Uneven, but with big laughs, confused but not entirely to fault; this production nestled itself almost perfectly between bril…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:46AMMonday, September 1, 2014
THE STAFF OF LIFE: ORDINARY LIVES. A shift in a Yorkshire mass-production bread factory in the 1970’s: Richard Bean , at eighteen, was there. In that perceptive, new-fledged moment …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:34AMFriday, August 29, 2014
NOT SO PEACEFUL IN THE PACIFIC It is not often that the Chichester front-row is questioned about its sexual practices by merry brown girls extolling carefree Tahitian sex. “O…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:47AMWednesday, August 27, 2014
BLISS? OH YES IT IS Here’s a 1924 creation: swooping and frivolously asymmetric as a drop-waisted flapper-dress, flashily well-crafted as a Deco windowpane. Its first criti…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:42PMTuesday, August 26, 2014
ESSEX GIRL COMES OF AGE I rather like Denise van Outen. A trouper, a trained musical-theatre talent who had to make it (and she did, triumphing in CHICAGO here and on Broadway)…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:32PMSunday, August 24, 2014
A NEW BLONDE BOMBSHELL STORMS THE STAGE Summer seaside rep is not dead. Frinton Summer Theatre is marking its 75th year, and it’s worth celebrating , even though I caught the…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:14PMSaturday, August 23, 2014
ORWELL GOES GANGLAND Far out in DLR-land, in the wilderness of Urban Regeneration that is the new East-of-East End, Newham City Farm has been since 1977 a place where you can, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:17AMThursday, August 21, 2014
A WINNING ROLL OF THE DICE FOR CHICHESTER There is a sort of generosity, an overflowing vigour, when Chichester’s great three-sided arena does the classic musicals. They can�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:48PMWednesday, August 20, 2014
WARM, WONDERFUL, WISE..THE YEAR’S BEST NEW MUSICAL Strewth! What a wonderful show. In this trade we are cautious of superlatives, lest omething even better comes alon…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:42PMSaturday, August 16, 2014
OUT IN THE FOREST, SOMETHING STIRS… The slope beneath the great chestnut trees makes a perfect arena: on tiered seating or below it on chairs, the audience are held bre…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:02AMThursday, August 14, 2014
GUEST REVIEWER PHILIP FISHER ON RAVENHILL’S EXTENDED HIT It is amazing how quickly contemporary events become history, and recent history becomes the distant past. Mark R…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:34PMWednesday, August 13, 2014
BUCKSKINS, BURLESQUERS, BLISS Yee-ha! Calamity Jane strides in, beefy in buckskins, more beltingly, braggingly alive than any man in the room. Or, indeed, any room. She’s been ridin…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:58AM 
