Friday, July 12, 2019
IT’S BACK, YOUNGER THAN EVER… We love a starry debut, especially on opening night in a huge theatre: a 21-year-old not yet through drama school making a stonking, belting …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:31AMWednesday, July 10, 2019
David Hare has made as much sense of Ibsen’s sprawling masterpiece Peer Gynt as seems possible.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMFriday, July 5, 2019
DEVOTION , DISGUISE, DECADENCE What a strange and stirring play this is! Set in convent, court and condemned-cell, it is spiked with moral ambiguities and fuelled equally by s…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:03PMThursday, July 4, 2019
BLAIR TO BREXIT – A FAMILY TALE Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany, are the Harry Potter team. They know how not to bore. But they’ve been here before too in a R…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:29AMWednesday, July 3, 2019
FARCE AS LIFE, LIFE AS FARCE, FRAYN AGAIN TRIUMPHANS It felt like a pilgrimage, homage to pay. 37 years ago Michael Frayn’s greatest of comedies, a wicked love-song to the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:01AMThe Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ The Musical is the result of Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary badgering the late Sue Townsend to be allowed to do it, and with poppy tunes and a high-s…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMSunday, June 30, 2019
COMEDY SHADING TO MELANCHOLY: WHAT’S TO COME IS STILL UNSURE… First of all let’s say that Andrew Scott is a marvel, a 21st century Ur-Coward hero, who manages to do it with…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PMSaturday, June 29, 2019
This 25th anniversary revival of David Greig’s play Europe is, for the most part, a long chin scratch about home, belonging and division.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMA SHILLING SHOCKER IS A JOY FOREVER To come clean: one reason I dashed to catch this fresh back from holiday is not only that the Finborough is always interesting, but that fa…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:40AMThursday, June 27, 2019
GUEST CRITIC BEN DOWELL SHIVERS – ADMIRINGLY – AT A TROUBLED TALE In this hypersensitive age of MeToo accusations, anxieties about online pornography and even deeper-seated disquiet a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:58AMThursday, June 13, 2019
RANCID LILIES, GORGEOUS WORDS All the little Jermyn needs to complete this reimagination of Wildean epigrammatic decadence is to scent the auditorium overwhelmingly with lilies and …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:02AMTuesday, June 11, 2019
FLYING, FUNNY, FABULOUS This is a dream of a Dream. One expected fun from the combination of Nicholas Hytner, a roiling mass of promenaders in the pit and a Bunny Christie…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:38PMSunday, June 2, 2019
A NOTE ON A TREAT, MOUSELESS BUT MELLOW The film based on Scott Fitzgerald’s story of a life lived backwards, born old and ending in babyhood, was pretty awful. So I did not le…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:44AMThursday, May 30, 2019
When I left I thought I was disappointed in The Starry Messenger, but this morning I can’t help thinking about Matthew Broderick’s character Mark, and his wife, and the sadness of all ou…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 08:00AMWednesday, May 29, 2019
BULLYING, BOMBAST, BETRAYAL The rediscovery of Githa Sowerby in the 1990s is very satisfying. At its premiere in 1913 critics saw the quality of this one but were dismayed …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:46AMThursday, May 23, 2019
Musically Dido is okay, especially Eyra Norman’s Belinda and the spirited chorales. But it could have been a piece of theatre magic, and wasn’t.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMWednesday, May 22, 2019
After the querulous, inward-looking tedium of her feminist polemic The Writer, Ella Hickson returns to interesting form with this curiosity, Anna.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 03:53AMSaturday, May 18, 2019
Five mice for White Pearl at the Royal Court Theatre because it’s different and clever and useful, and horribly good fun.
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:00AMThursday, May 16, 2019
SULTRY, SINFUL, SHOCKING, SHINING Savagely observed absurdity, blinding flashes of insight, profound yearning, sudden poetry singing clear notes from the cruel swamp of …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:31PMAN INTIMATE EPIC IN A FADING EMPIRE Hard to overstate what an absolute treat this is , and on how many levels. It is a terrific yarn, both romantic and tough, about history and Empi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:11PMTuesday, May 14, 2019
Hopes for The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson couldn’t be higher: it is again built around truth – a 2016 dinner party where Boris and Marina Johnson entertained the Goves and Yevgeny L…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:00AMFriday, May 10, 2019
There’s something special about fin-de-siecle anger in any century: this is from 1697, years later than Wycherley and the mellower Sheridan, and best described as a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:33AMTuesday, May 7, 2019
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL, SHORT CAN BE SHARP There is something stimulating about ultra-short plays: five to twenty minutes but directed and performed with all the care and concen…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:07AMMonday, May 6, 2019
LOVE AND LOSS AND ‘THAT’S THE DEAL’ Jack is a middle-aged Oxford English don of the ’50’s , a bachelor and apologist for Christianity. Graceful, witty books and lect…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:15PMFriday, May 3, 2019
ECHOES OF ANTIQUITY , FRESHNESS OF YOUTH It’s a storming performance. Young Isabella Nefar as Judith erupts upon us: adolescent, exuberant, afire with defiance and…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:10AMThursday, May 2, 2019
GUILT, GRIEF, POLITICAL ANGUISH Handy timing , to open on what is local Election Day for us ruralists and at a time when everything has a Brexity echo too. Ibse…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:51PMTuesday, April 30, 2019
DEADLY DEBTS The artistic love affair between August Strindberg’s ghost, playwright Howard Brenton and director Tom Littler continues to bear strange fruit, surprisingl…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:00PMANOTHER KIND OF LOVE SONG This is gorgeous. Funny, truthful, wise, and bravely original in form. Anyone with a a family – past, present, remembered, or merely …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:32AMSaturday, April 27, 2019
A CLEANSING FURY FROM THE 1880s Wipes you out every time, Ibsen’s furious, shocking, violent assault on the cruel decayed conventions of his century’s end. Its indec…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:00AMThursday, April 25, 2019
THE WORLD DONALD GREW UP IN… It’s a long transverse stage: at one end at a scruffy crowded steel desk sits Jorgy, Michael Brandon exuding down-home amiability as the l…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:44AMTuesday, April 23, 2019
GUILT, GRIEF AND PITY It is almost uncanny how an Arthur Miller play, treated respectfully, can in the most wrenchingly extreme story still catch the common rhythms and tides of fami…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:28PM 
