Monday, January 29, 2018
TWO QUEENS, TWO FATES Who shall be whom? In Robert Icke’s arresting adaptation of Schiller’s play, the scene opens with a sober-suited group of men watching two women in identical…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:06PMFriday, January 26, 2018
A WILDE RIDE WITH A BOLTER Beneath the artful fan-shapes of the set, gloriously coloured bustles and ruffles flit between black tailcoats and epigrams ping around the room like…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:06AMTuesday, January 23, 2018
CLAMBERING TOWARDS LOVE You don’t often, in romances, get lines like “Tomato ketchup’s always been my Achilles heel”. Or indeed proper consideration being given to the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:29PMMonday, January 22, 2018
PEGGY GUGGENHEIM WALKS AGAIN You cross the stage floor to the toilets and a warning sign on the little set alerts you to the danger of tripping over a “solid stone” bench. …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:30AMWednesday, January 17, 2018
SULTRY HEAT AND SEXUAL DREAD… Our age is beginning, once more, to appreciate E.M.Forster properly: the recent TV Howards’s End caught his wit as well as the social indignat…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:52AMMy principal review from the Old Vic is here (http://tinyurl.com/y8u2na24) . But now it transfers (with glorious irony to the Noel Coward Theatre..it’s the least Cowardy of all plays e…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:30AMMonday, January 15, 2018
VILLAIN VAUDEVILLE Everyone loves the film. Something in the nostalgic British psyche likes to think of a gang of ruthless desperadoes lodging with a dear old lady, pretendin…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:51AMFriday, January 12, 2018
TOP FOLK ON THE ROAD There are boxes , planks, a rope; around and upon them, singly and severally, still or moving, the aristocracy of modern folk music. Strings, accordion, guitars…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:54AMThursday, January 11, 2018
GIRLS ON THE EDGE Honour to the Royal Court for two things. First for the initial wobble, then for executing a rapid u-turn over Andrea Dunbar’ s rather wonderful play . So after …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:24PMWednesday, January 3, 2018
AT LAST…AND FINE TO THE LAST After snowbound frustration in December drove me onto the road after part I, I saw the first again and that evening reached the second play in one…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:01PMThursday, December 21, 2017
IT IS JUST AS WONDERFUL AS THEY SAID IT WAS. It could have been just a novelty: the biography of a half-forgotten Founding Father of the USA, an orphaned immigrant who rose to be Ge…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:15PMWednesday, December 20, 2017
THE OTHER OSCAR, A DELIGHT What delight, in the midst of Michael Grandage’s Oscar Wilde season at this theatre, that daytimes this month (11 pm and 2pm) t should see the stage…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:24AMFriday, December 15, 2017
SWEET YOUNG LOVE IN PARIS: NOT. “We’re not going the full Mousetrap here” said the press desk, “but there is a moment at the end…we’re asking..” . Fine, no spoi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:19AMThursday, December 14, 2017
DISNEY ECHOES AT THE NT: YOU WOODN’T BELIEVE IT The first glimpse of old Geppetto does make you gasp. He is immense, a huge benevolent head bowed attentively as great arms operate t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:10PMOLD DOG NEW TRICKS After a couple of challenging takes on Strindberg, the little theatre’s new AD Mr Littler (one presumes with a “whoooff!” of relief) has booked in, and…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:04PMESPIONAGE, ESCAPE, AND THE WORLD’S WORST FLATSHARE This is the one that got away. Simon Gray’s 1995 play, set largely in Moscow, is about the Cold War ‘60s spy George Blake and …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:27AMTuesday, December 12, 2017
TO BOLDLY DREAM.. MAINLY OF PLYWOOD AND PROPS THE TWILIGHT ZONE was , long before the phrase was coined, “appointment-to-view television”. In the US in the 50s and 60s families ga…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:46PMMonday, December 11, 2017
LARKING WITHIN TENT As an old radio hack, who started a career over forty years ago in the days when “spot effects” in drama studios were one of the more amusing jobs, I …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:51AMSunday, December 10, 2017
CICERO, CAESAR, CATILINE: ELOQUENCE, AMBITION , HORROR It begins with a corpse: a horrid human-sacrifice, as we shall learn, as a set of libertines and plotters swear a blood-o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:06PMFriday, December 8, 2017
A SPANGLED ANGLESEY ARISTOCRAT WALKS AGAIN One way to win, if your own era rejects you, is to be so spectacularly odd that two centuries later a musical theatremaker gets obses…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:23AMTuesday, December 5, 2017
A MINI-CIRCUS AND A MISCASTING A nice irony that this revival of this Mark Bramble / Cy Coleman / Michael Stewart musical about Phineas T.Barnum should open now, just as David Attenbo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:04PM NEW GENERATION CRITIC MICHAEL ADAIR WONDERS WHO IT’S FOR…. When The Woman in White debuted at the Palace Theatre in 2004, much of the commentary focused on it being a tec…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:36PMSaturday, December 2, 2017
EROTICROBATICS, BANANAS, HIGH JINKS Relief flooded in with the first act, Cabaret Decadanse from Montreal. Here was a larger-than-life lip-synching puppet diva made of glitteri…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:14AMLUKE JONES WANTED TO CARE, BUT SOMEHOW.. Running again through the plot of this play l in my head, I think ‘surely it’s gripping’.? Coffins of martyrs are continuing to s…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:53AMWednesday, November 29, 2017
DICKENS UNCHAINED Good to see the Old Vic auditorium in the round again (a Spacey innovation). Though this time, there’s a long transverse thrust stage enabling Marley’s gh…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:42PMRUFF WORK: AN ELIZABETHAN MORALITY FOR TODAY This is a devilish cunning ploy from Anders Lustgarten – an impassioned critic of state and social policies, sometimes a bit …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:36PMWednesday, November 22, 2017
A GLORIOUS, GANGLING, GRACEFUL PRESENT FROM SHEFFIELD This is glorious. Hits the bullseye. It’s about kids – the boiling mass of hormones that is a year 11 class grappling with GCSEs…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:58PMFriday, November 17, 2017
MANTRAS AND MONEY There is a useful play to be written about the lure of fashionable Western Buddhist retreats, and the way discontented rat-racers can transfer their competitive ambi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:29PMThursday, November 16, 2017
AN ANCIENT CRY, A TIMELESS THRILL Across 25 centuries comes a harsh cry: not of war, not from savage male throats but from a swaying, chanting, defiant chorus of young women demandi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39PMGUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI MEETS MINDFULNESS IN THE MIDST OF TOLKIEN’S TIMEWASTING J.R.R. Tolkien, among many other things, is famous for two: his unending ability to procrastinate, a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:42AMWednesday, November 15, 2017
SEX, SHAME , THE STROP OF THE RAZOR I rashly confessed on Twitter that I spent the afternoon before this astringent production of a Strindberg play revelling in the happy furry…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39PM 
