Monday, June 9, 2014
THE PIG TAKES ON THE PROVINCES, AND WINS I reviewed the West End premiere of this new Stiles-and-Drew musical, directed by Richard Eyre and passionately backed by Cameron Mac…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:55PMSaturday, June 7, 2014
POKER AND PATERNITY: A WOMAN QUIETLY DESPAIRS… Poker, like good drama, requires an ability to transmit or conceal “tells”: moments of facial or body language revealing or hi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:38AMGuest reviewer LUKE JONES appreciates our Dawnie… At the very beginning, with a large clock face ticking behind her, Dawn French describes what we are about to see as a slice of …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:38AMFriday, June 6, 2014
A HIGH PRESSURE TRIUMPH , AND A TRIBUTE It happened seventy years ago so we know the outcome. D-Day was the biggest amphibious invasion in history – 156,000 men, 6939 vessels, 11590 pl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:51AMThursday, June 5, 2014
GORDON CONTRA MUNDUM…A BLEAK IMAGINING The focus groups, mourns this briefest of Prime Ministers, always come up with the same words about him. “Strong” and “Solid” are …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:11AMWednesday, June 4, 2014
ONE GREAT PERFORMER’S TRIBUTE TO ANOTHER The main causes of crime, said the famous American defence lawyer Darrow, are “Poverty, ignorance, hard luck and, generally, youth”. A century …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:14PMTuesday, June 3, 2014
A WICKED WIT, WITH HEART ON SLEEVE : LIPPA TAKES LONDON Here is Summer Strallen as Cinderella, ripping off her rags and scorning the ballgown for a dominatrix PVC corset and whip. Her…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:52PMMonday, June 2, 2014
DEATH , TRUTH, TORMENT : THE REBIRTH OF A NATION “What” asks the calm academic , “should our attitude be to people who have committed atrocities?”. From Belfast to the Balka…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:45PMFriday, May 30, 2014
FRESHER THAN EVER, AN ANCIENT LOVE UNDER THE SKY Eve Best is an irresistible Cleopatra for today: no slinky seductive exoticism but a fresh, joyful, larky sensuality as well-expressed in w…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:27AMWednesday, May 28, 2014
KATHLEEN TURNER BLOWS INTO TOWN, AN AUTHENTIC HURRICANE Under a tangle of brushwood and a ratty telegraph pole, Maude’s trailer-park home is full of junk from dumpsters and charity …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:04PMTuesday, May 27, 2014
REDEMPTION OF A HOLLYWOOD HUNK… The tiny am-dram theatre is threatened with redevelopment: only celebrity casting can save it. Jefferson Steel – fading star of Ultimate Finality …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:01AMThursday, May 22, 2014
POWERFUL, EMOTIONAL, CHALLENGING - GUEST REVIEWER JOHN PETER WRITES: Do you remember Vietnam? How, in the sixties and seventies, we wondered whether the communist North would …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:00PMTuesday, May 20, 2014
WELL, SWIPE ME DOWN THE OLD KENT ROAD, ME OLD CHINA… Would you Adam and Eve it: the Joan Littlewood centenary restores to her sacred stage not only Oh What A Lovely War but this celebr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:53PMMonday, May 19, 2014
AN EXTRAORDINARY ALICE IN THE DARK HEART OF WAR In a cellar, sheltering from bombs in 1915, a wispily grey, middle-aged Alice Liddell roams through an Edwardian clutter of old chests,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:01AMThursday, May 15, 2014
INTIMATE, HUMBLE: THE BEST COMMEMORATION The title comes from Philip Larkin’s poem MCMXIV, evoking the rural England of 1914 as young men queued, as if at a football match, to enlis…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:45PMWednesday, May 14, 2014
POSTWAR, COLD-WAR, ANGRY AND RESTLESS Ever since our manufacturing and metal-bashing trades eroded, we have seen a sentimentality about old industrial Britain: the glory days when a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:58AMTuesday, May 13, 2014
SEW, STRUT, SWIRL AND SHAKE IT ! When this production ran at Chichester, I found myself forced to invent new words to describe Stephen Mear’s marvellously varied choreography as the SleepT…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:04PMSunday, May 11, 2014
IMBRUGLIA IN A FINE IMBROGLIO When two old schoolfriends meet after eleven years, naturally they sing the old school song. “Girls of St Gert’s! Pure in your body, healthy in mind..” Wh…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:30PMSaturday, May 10, 2014
AN HOUR OF SHOCKING BRILLIANCE AND ARTISAN OBSCENITY Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s extraordinary self-written monologue performance won awards in Edinburgh, the Offies, The Stage and the C…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:34AMThursday, May 8, 2014
SKITTERBANG ISLAND Little Angel, N1 Is three-to-five years old too young for opera? Not really. Small children sing their world all the time, chant their feelings freely. As for puppe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:17AMTuesday, May 6, 2014
MINXY MURDEROUSNESS AMID THE WAVING CATS.. Polly Findlay, who gave us the National Theatre’s tough Antigone and Derren Brown’s Svengali, has great fun with RSC directorial debut: …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:30PMIT’S TRUE! A FISH DOES NEED A BICYCLE! We’re in a cavernous Victorian swimming-pool, a dreamworld where the waterfall is made of bath-plug chains. Then we’re in a sea-green underwa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:18PMFriday, May 2, 2014
HOW SWEET THE BIRDS OF AVONDALE… The room where the poet Stevie Smith lived for over half a century lies before us: chintz, potted geranium, sherry-decanter and stained-glass do…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:41PMOUR FIRST GUEST REVIEWER! GALLANT LUKE JONES BRAVES THE BLOOD, SPIT AND RAIN. Oh how it poured. With the large strips of black, makeshift roofing not covering but neatly chann…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:15AMThursday, May 1, 2014
WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE? OH, THEY’RE BACK.. It is not every week the Hampstead audience gets to leap up and down with 1966 World Cup confetti in its hair, chanting “L-L…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:52PMTuesday, April 29, 2014
A MOTHER AND A MODERN MILE-HIGH NIGHTMARE Crop-haired, upright, an Aryan Alpha-female, she stands proud in flying-suit and straps. She’s a USAF fighter pilot, in love with her F16…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:16PMFriday, April 25, 2014
A FABULOUS LITTLE FRIGHTENER… What’s going on? you quaver, as four characters move and weave at impossible angles around a bare scaffolding of wall and door shapes. Are they gripped …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:10PMThursday, April 24, 2014
MIKE BARTLETT’S OTHER NEW PLAY… It’s played by a man – John Hollingworth – and a woman, Rachael Stirling. But it is not a love story, not that kind of love a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:09PMWednesday, April 23, 2014
WORLD WAR I: THE PITY, THE POETRY A tin whistle, a distant seagull, a ship hooting beyond grimy tenement windows. Indoors Sylvester and Simon bicker and cringe as a tight-lipped vir…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:59PMTuesday, April 22, 2014
IT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE. IT TELLS A LOT OF PEOPLE. An artful cloud of insecurity surrounds James Graham’s new, mainly verbatim, play about the reckless modern surrender of privacy…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:28PMTOP QUALITY NONSENSE Light as a feather, puffy and sweet as a puffed meringue, this is where complete nonsense meets consummate skill. Not surprising: it is an adaptation of an 1892 Feydeau …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:12PM 
