DICKENS EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS Putting great literary masterpieces onstage is an erratic business. Within the same week we see the Artistic Director of the National Theatre b…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:41AMSACRED AND PROFANE LOVE Is love a Gothic Cathedral, a yearning for a permanent, holy, respectful connection to the best in our nature? Or is it lust and fun, animal attraction,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:19PMTHE SCOTTISH PLAY, DARK AND DANK You don’t expect robes and battlements these days. This is a shaven-head-and-machete Macbeth, its theme an indeterminate, timeless squalor: p…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:32PMLOVE AND THE NOT-FOR-MARRYING MAN Love stories take many forms. Here – electric, understated, unmistakeable and timeless – the erotic connection is between Ben Batt’s Ge…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:06PMMA’AM , THE MINION AND THE MACHO MAN “I never boasted an education. I learned tricks” says Princess Margaret, bitterly, at a late point in Richard Stirling’s interestin…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:03AMSIN OR SYMPTOM? A HUMAN TURNED TO A HORROR Last time I encountered a monologue written for a paedophile abuser, it was by Alan Bennett in a remarkable – and I think unrep…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:48AMFAIRY DUST AND PHYSICAL COMEDY I am happy to say that in the second act there is some inappropriate sexual harassment. By garishly clad fairies, deploying weaponized soprano trills an…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:08AMA CITY’S MEMORY Two girls on the Downs in 1940 giggle over a spot of rabbit-poaching on Lady Cooper’s land. A roar, Junkers overhead. Figures emerge from smoke and darkness as a c…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:25AMA WATCHFUL SORROW There are some evenings when, as the cast take their bow with that half-relaxed half-smile, you are shocked: you feel you have not been watching a performance…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:08AMCELEBRATION FOR A CITY Right place, right time, a last flurry of fireworks by the Humber. The hottest of young playwrights, James Graham, lovingly teases the city where he was a stude…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:47AMBANKERS AS LIBERATORS The first recitative line in this one-act musical, as the little band sounds curfew, is chilling: a Town Crier from the 1760’s : “Jews and aliens of…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:36PMYOU HAVE TO LAUGH OR YOU WOULD WEEP.. The most arresting new character I’ve met this year is the magnificent Hayley Atwell as Jenny; star of a New York private equity investm…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39PMAVE HYTNER IMPERATOR! THE BRIDGE AS ARENA Before the start, singing along with Eye of the Tiger in the melée and enjoying the red flags, baseball hats and beercans, we …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:47AMAVE HYTNER IMPERATOR! THE BRIDGE AS ARENA Before the start, singing along with Eye of the Tiger in the melée and enjoying the red flags, baseball hats and beercans, we …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:50PMTWO 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 08:06PMA 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 04:06AMCLAMBERING 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 05:29PMPEGGY 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 07:30AMSULTRY 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 03:30AMVILLAIN 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 08:51AMTOP 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 09:54AMGIRLS 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 05:24PMAT 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 07:01PMIT 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 05:15PMTHE 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 04:24AMSWEET 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 07:19AMDISNEY 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 04:27AMTO 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 05:46PM
