Tuesday, 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 08:28PMMonday, April 22, 2019
(Published in Daily Mail on Friday, one must moonlight to support this website’s unfunded free existence – but here it is for theatrecat regulars..) The minute you wal…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:35AMWednesday, April 17, 2019
DOWNBEAT, DOWNCAST Some years ago, leaving a particularly slow and uninspiring Chekhov performance in Yorkshire (never mind which play, spare the blushes) I heard a weary man …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:56AMSunday, April 14, 2019
REFLECTIONS ON A RICH SEA OF INK… I saw 22 plays in two days, but it was hardly half a bite of what was on offer. In three days there were 40 , each performed several ……
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:19PMThursday, April 11, 2019
ANOTHER KIND OF HOUR Staggering back from holiday, I sentimentally booked this at the New Wolsey in Ipswich because 2019 is the 50th anniversary of my unremarkable student performanc…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:46AMBEATRIX BEATS BREXIT WITH TOP BEAK-WORK The Haymarket these spring mornings is dense with toddlers and their attendants (I’d say by the look of it 20% parents, 50% grandparen…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:54AMWednesday, April 10, 2019
A FRESH WIND BLOWING THROUGH AN OLD TALE Down on the Riverbank Club, teen DJ Rattie is bangin’ it behind the deck, telling the shy diffident Mole “There is nothing–…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:29PMFriday, April 5, 2019
THE OLDEST HAVE BORNE MOST… Jack is an ageing, terminally ill, scruffy, alcoholic remnant of an actor, with a grubby cardigan and Falstaff gut. He is muttering lines from King Lear in h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:23AMWednesday, April 3, 2019
SECRETS AND MEMORIES IN A WASTE OF WATERS You can’t fault the atmosphere: Jasmine Swan’s set takes you straight to the wide skies and muddy, reedy mystery of Breydon Wat…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:26AMSaturday, March 30, 2019
CRACKS IN THE LIBERAL VENEER I adored the energy, cleverness and cheek of BAD JEWS so much I went twice, as the pitiless author set his characters kicking, twisting, protesting an…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:53AMA COSY NIGHTMARE LEGACY OF THE 1930’S From the late 1930’s for nearly forty years, Mary Barton and her husband Berthold Wiesner ran a pioneering fertility clinic: they were among…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:50AMFriday, March 29, 2019
BRILLIANT, NECESSARY, QUESTIONING If we accept that people are widely diverse, we have to accept that paedophiles are too. Not all the same identi-monster. Moreover,�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:05AMThursday, March 28, 2019
WHAT THE BUTLER CAME TO KNOW… From its premiere at the Royal & Derngate and on the first leg of its tour, here is the stage version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-winning novel. I…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:45PMMonday, March 25, 2019
WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD What great timing! Just as the worried-well Health Secretary gets rubbished for taking a commercial DNA test, announcing that it has “saved his life” because …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:50PMSunday, March 24, 2019
I’M GONNA SIT RIGHT DOWN AND WRITE MYSELF A REVIEW… So dress up sassy, shake your chassis, get some mesh on your flesh like the ladies who sing with the band. Sell your vocals to the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:01PMFriday, March 22, 2019
NOT AT ALL FLAT, SUFFOLK… Exuberantly funny, elegant as a Deauville hotel balcony and sharp as the crack of a 78rpm record over a lover’s head, Joanna Carrick’s wit…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:39AMThursday, March 21, 2019
POISONED LOVE I sometimes wish Harold Pinter had written more plays like this: decadent, agonized, helplessly sensitive to the nuances of friendship and treachery. More praise has a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:00AMWednesday, March 20, 2019
MARTYRS OF THE MCCARTHY YEARS Ideological hostilities across the world, fake news and paranoia, a resurgent deep left, uneasy relations with Russia, antisemites question…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:58AMCouldn’t miss Nicholas Hytner’s bit of mischief: after his years of being being alternately feted and rubbished in print, he displays directorial glee in sending up the noisome denizens …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:00AMThursday, December 27, 2018
NOT YET DEAD CAT BUT… Since I stopped being The Times Chief Theatre Critic it has been five years: on this site there have been 930 posts, over half a million words, all stil…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:22PMFriday, December 21, 2018
A HOLLOW CROWN IN MUD AND BLOOD The clue is in the paper hat, worn by a dour-faced Simon Russell Beale on the programme cover. This is not stately, sacred, shockingly regicidal S…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:32AMJAMAICA BREEZES UP WEST, WITH GRIEF AND GUSTO Jamaican mourning tradition, longer than the Irish wake and noisier than the Jewish shiva, involves – we learn ̵…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:43AMFriday, December 14, 2018
PSYCHOPATHIC LIBERAL MEETS DINOSAUR PARENTS Can we, I wonder, ever learn to deplore past attitudes without being vengeful about it? Hot on the heels of Mike Bartlett’s heartfe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:22AMThursday, December 13, 2018
ONE MORE TIME, WITH FEELING . After two other full cast renderings in a fortnight -David Edgar’s socially angry take at the RSC and Jack Thorne’s warm spectacular at the…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:46PMWednesday, December 12, 2018
A GOTHIC EYEFUL In this troublous nation, 2018 seems to be the Christmas of Aaargh! and Eughhh! and hahahahaaa! , as a gross-out gigglefest sweeps London theatre. There’s the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:40PMENERGY, ANGER, HOPE It is 1842: young Charles Dickens, thirty years old and with five novels under his belt, is ranting. The Industrial Revolution is revving up nicely,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:37AMMonday, December 10, 2018
CHRISTMAS, BREXIT, GRIEF, HOPE A few hours after Theresa May postponed the parliamentary vote and spun us down into another layer of Brexi-hell , the little OFS –…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:52PM I WENT TO THE PANTO. O YES I DID. The great thing about the proud tradition of Oxford Playhouse panto is that while cannily aware of the audience’s likely cultural uplift, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:42PMSunday, December 9, 2018
A WONDERLAND WINNER “Posh panto”, for wincing parents fleeing the rackety showbiz ’n smut of the season, can be a bit chilly – neither one thing nor the other…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:18AMFriday, December 7, 2018
, GEESE CACKLE, LIFE GOES ON I have a friend of Russian heritage who boycotts any Chekhov production which lacks scabby birch-trees, a samovar and some parasols. She’ll do …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:17AMThursday, December 6, 2018
L’CHAIM – TO LIFE! A SPECIAL NIGHT We are there, over a century ago, beyond the Caucasus. Designer Robert Jones has wrapped us around in rustic planks and …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:33AM 
