Monday, March 3, 2014
PIES, PRATFALLS AND POLE-DANCING: SATURDAYS AND THE SEVENTIES (NOT A CHILDREN’S SHOW…BEWARE..) Oh, the wicked 1970’s! Sexist, racist, rapist: gropey DJs in the Bee…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:34PMSunday, March 2, 2014
LET THE BAND PLAY ON Billy Elliott, The Full Monty, now Brassed Off - thirty years on from the loss of pits and steelworks, we seem to need a national rite of mourning and expiation, a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:23AMThursday, February 27, 2014
1919: A GENERATION CAST ADRIFT BY WAR After the Armistice, in spring 1919 the Treaty of Versailles drew lines on the map and enforced reparations. Its decisions cast long shadows even toda…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:33PMFIGHTS, FLIGHTS, PANTALOONS AND PRENTICES: BUT THE GROCER’S WIFE IS THE STAR. Imagine three hours on a bench watching a cross between Spamalot and The Real Inspector Hound, perform…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:21AMTuesday, February 25, 2014
MORE THAN A MOVIE: SOMETHING SPECIAL FROM SHEFFIELD The opening is dramatic: a small gap in the rusty corrugated curtain reveals showers of sparks, a glimpse of steelworks magnificence. …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:25PMMonday, February 24, 2014
WALKING THE STREETS, A FAR FROM LOST SOUL Phyllis Pearsall became one of London’s great urban legends, through her own barnstorming memories and a fictionalized biography. A young wife, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:11PMSaturday, February 22, 2014
PASSIONATE, INTENSE AND WILD: JANE EYRE REBORN “I am no bird, and no net ensnares me!”. As if in answer to Jane’s cry of defiance Sally Cookson’s spare, th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:56PMThursday, February 20, 2014
OLD IRELAND: PLAYFUL, POWERFUL, INTENSE AND TRAGIC A hot summer at harvest’s end, 1836. Outside a stone barn in County Donegal old Jimmy-Jack is chortling naughtily over the Iliad.…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:30AMWednesday, February 19, 2014
SONYA AND ANDREY: A BRIEF ENCOUNTER BY FRIEL Two lonely middle-aged people meet in a cheap Moscow café in 1920: she frowning over accounts and mortgages, he in frayed evening clothes …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:51PMTuesday, February 18, 2014
A BLAST OF FRESH AIR FROM THE FIFTIES “Cinema is as bad as the theatre these days” says Jo’s mother Helen disdainfully. “All mauling and muttering”. Written in 1958 by th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:47PMSINGING ALL THE WAY DOWNHILL “Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey and I ache in the places where I used to play..” Ah, Leonard Cohen! Nothing like it when you need it. Which…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:37AMMonday, February 17, 2014
Quite a few people have asked about the theatre cat logo for theatrecat. Even more are curious about the mice. They are all created by Roger Hardy. Who is really a painter and creator of…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:49AMSaturday, February 15, 2014
O RAPTURE UNFORESEEN. A G & S REFUSENIK RECANTS Right. Shoot your cuffs, hammer that piano, rum-ti-tum and off we go: When I was young I must confess I’d run a mile from seei…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:48PMFriday, February 14, 2014
IN WHICH A GOOD PLAY MOVES TOWARDS SOMETHING GREATER Sometimes, memories need to be revisited. It was in autumn 2012 that I reviewed Lolita Chakrabarti’s play starring her husband Adri…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:40PMThursday, February 13, 2014
A TERRIFYING, TRIUMPHANT HEADLONG TAKE ON ORWELL I think George Orwell would be sourly pleased at the way Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan of Headlong and Nottingham Playhouse have trea…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PMWednesday, February 12, 2014
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR! A FAVE FRAYN FARCE RETURNS Those who love a good farce – lost trousers, sock-suspenders, nifty door-work, ridiculous fights and punctured dignity - sometimes fe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:58PMTuesday, February 11, 2014
A THEATRE LEGEND RECREATED: AND RIPE FOR RE-EVALUATION Sometime in the first hour, while far from unhappy, I realized that there are two things to keep in mind about Terry Johnson’…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:57PMMonday, February 10, 2014
A DREAM OF PLANKS AND PUPPETS, AND AN UPTURNED ASS… “Gentles, perhaps you wonder at this show. But wonder on…” says Peter Quince, lanky and earnest in a fairisle swea…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:08PMSaturday, February 8, 2014
SEX, STRIFE, AND HOT THEOLOGY: ABELARD AND HELOISE RISE AGAIN “Theology in Paris these days” says tubby, jocose King Louis VI of France, “is more interesting than wrestling m…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:32PMFriday, February 7, 2014
PORN: THE NASTIEST COTTAGE INDUSTRY Julie is alone, reminiscing with a cup of tea, calling her cat. She’s a geriatric nursing auxiliary, gentle and cheerful, fond of a laug…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:17AMWednesday, February 5, 2014
NEUROTIC OLD LOONS OR GENDER PIONEERS? There’s a central metaphor: staring through the glass walls of her elegant West California apartment a woman says “It’s a desert …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:52PMTuesday, February 4, 2014
THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD TO THE WISDOM OF FANDOM “Sometimes” says the author-heroine of this extraordinary piece, “things can be richer if they don’t add up”. Take that on b…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:09PMSunday, February 2, 2014
MISCHIEF GOES ON THE ROAD Sometimes it pays to be a brave gang of friends, fresh out of LAMDA, putting on your own show rather than waiting for auditions. Early last year I sp…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:01AMFriday, January 31, 2014
TIM PIGOTT-SMITH SHOWS HOW IT’S DONE Few better fates can befall a new playwright than to have Tim Pigott-Smith cast – perfectly – at the heart of your premiere. One of t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:12PMThursday, January 30, 2014
BURIED BUT BRILLIANT: JULIET STEVENSON BRAVES BECKETT “One does not appear to be asking a great deal” says Winnie of her husband Willie, who is mostly invisible behind a rock, grun…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:46PMTuesday, January 28, 2014
SMALL LIVES IN THE GREAT WAR: FORGOTTEN VOICES HEARD AND HONOURED Get seated ten minutes early. In Alex Marker’s humbly clever set, a bricky terraced house, the cast sing casua…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:20PMMonday, January 27, 2014
Just a note to say that I reviewed this when it first aired at the Tricycle in 2012, and was pleased to be one of those who voted its awards at the Critics’ Circle. My review (Times …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:46PMSaturday, January 25, 2014
AN ERA RECREATED: THE REAL 1968 IN AN UNREAL WORLD The opening, in a student room correct down to the battered stack of albums, took me aback. Friends, I was there in 1968: …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:18AMThursday, January 23, 2014
A LEAR TO REMEMBER: SIMON RUSSELL BEALE We are in a crumbling modern gerontocracy: a conference chamber lined with soldiers, Lear white-bearded and gratingly impatient in dict…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:54PMWednesday, January 22, 2014
FEMINISM? NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE IT! Eight women, on a great flight of pale stairs which light and flash, introduce themselves politely. “Single Mum, White” “Brittle First Wife�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:17PMWOMEN ARE REVOLTING! BUT AGAINST WHAT??? The world is changing. “Women are standing for President, men are exfoliating” Don, an amiable klutz who used to teach but fell back on a q…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:15PM 
