…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 03:35AMWIKILEAKS 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 04:31AMIMAGINING 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 04:35AMVALHALLA 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 04:10AMA 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 07:05PMA 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 06:06PMDAFT 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 07:00PMGUEST 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 04:02AMGUEST 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 02:46AMTHE 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 06:34AMNOT 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 04:47AMBLISS? 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 06:42PMESSEX 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 06:32PMA 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 02:14PMORWELL 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 10:17AMA 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 07:48PMWARM, 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 07:42PMOUT 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 10:02AMGUEST 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 12:34PMBUCKSKINS, 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 05:58AMGUEST CRITIC PHILIP FISHER IS AWED BY GEORGIAN ORWELL.. Anyone expecting a children’s show from Guy Masterson’s adaptation of Orwell could be in for a shock. This deepl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:02AMWHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF? I thought it was a children’s walk-through amusement, something to keep the little bleeders willing to accompany parents to the serious Traverse pla…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:32PMA CREEPY GENTLENESS I found this maverick pair, “Box Tale Soup” out in the boondocks last fringe: Antonia Christophers and noel Byrne, creating a wonderful Northanger Abbey …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:32PMTHE BONUS BOYS UNMASKED… Jamie Griffiths is not a quantitative analyst in the City. He’s an actor and playwright. Not a “quant”, a risk-taking star of the city bett…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:35AMTHE GRUMPY OLD ROMAN RETURNS… Terrible times we live in. A decadent civilization, a crumbling empire, hypocrites in power, toadies fawning on the rich, women strangers to chastity and …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:37AMFRANKIE GOES TO EXTREMES… Good to know (and I mean this seriously) that Edinburgh comedy is not cowed by squeamish PC seriousness. If you can’t laugh at everything, you probab…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:36AMWHO SAYS THE ROM-COM IS DEAD? IT JUST GOT WITTY.. Last year I purred over Richard Marsh’s “Dirty Great Love Story”, a blissfully clever, likeable, honest miniature rom-…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:48AM
