Thursday, 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 07:12PMThursday, 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 06:32PM 
