Thursday, June 22, 2017
MILLENIAL LUKE JONES TIRES OF THIS GENDER AGENDA There aren’t many issues in life that haven’t been solved, rationalised or helpfully knocked about by plays. &#…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:33AMWednesday, June 21, 2017
WHEN SHOCK BECOMES A SALES PITCH There are three acts: the first long, expressing an enervatingly pointless world and ending in a sharp shock. The second is competitively cynic…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:59PMTuesday, June 20, 2017
WHERE ROCK ‘ N ROLL DREAMS COME TRUE “On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?” Or in this case, a red carpet lined with …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:21PMFriday, June 16, 2017
FOLLICLES, FOLLY, FATHERHOOD It’s fun down in the Dorfman pit. Under exuberant African barbershop posters from Lagos, Harare, Accra – and London – a cast of barbers and …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:48AMThursday, June 15, 2017
WHAT BECOMES OF THE BROKEN-HEARTED? This is a famously significant piece of theatre: created in 2003 in a Cornish field , it was one of the first successes of Emma Rice’s Kne…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:17AMTuesday, June 13, 2017
ANOTHER KIND OF ETERNAL TRIANGLE I have a taste for plays about the years between the wars. The WW1 anniversary saw some fascinating contemporaneous ones, often at the J…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:20AMTuesday, June 6, 2017
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS HERSELF REACHING FOR HER PITCHFORK “You are blight and darkness and sin…” Lost village girl Mary comes home to her beloved Laura after a lifetime …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:49PMMonday, June 5, 2017
BET YOUR BOTTOM DOLLAR ON IT… If Nikolai Foster’s production of Annie came in a tin, it would prove to be exactly what the label promised. Feelgood, joyful, corny, gorgeous. Ruby …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:13PMMOLTO SPLENDIDO From caravans in little greens and fields, Velasquez figures emerge into the hastily erected big Top in silks and plackets, ruffs and feathers and frilled pantaloons a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:25AMSaturday, June 3, 2017
PITY, TERROR, TRIUMPH For the first fifteen of the hundred minutes no word is spoken by the two men in ragged prison cottons: Edward Dede as the younger Winston, Mark Springer …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:16AMThursday, June 1, 2017
THE PERILS OF PC, THE TERROR OF TWITTER This little theatre is on a roll, catching topicalities as they fly. After David Henry Hwang’s wonderful CHINGLISH. about trade with China,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:03PMThursday, May 25, 2017
GUEST REVIEWER MICHAEL ADAIR ROCKS ALONG WITH RICE AT THE GLOBE… “In Love We Trust” – is the motto of the SS Unity, the ship that swiftly sinks moments into Emma Rice�…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:31AMTuesday, May 23, 2017
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS LOVE, PITY AND HORROR IN EQUAL MEASURE AT THE OLD VIC Jack Thorne’s explosive new Woyzeck brings Büchner’s unfinished working class tragedy …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:33PMMonday, May 22, 2017
LOOK INTO THE DARK AND SMILE ALL TOUR LONG This cheerfully macabre celebration of Charles Addams’ famous 1930’s cartoon is off on tour: link below. I saw one of the last shows in i…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:47PMFriday, May 19, 2017
TWISTEDLY IRRESISTIBLE I would not like you to think that I stalk Greg Hicks (though obviously I do: aaah, that odd strong Caesar, that agonized Leontes, that bonkers newspaper edit…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:10AMWednesday, May 17, 2017
ENLARGE, ENLIGHTEN , ENLIVEN…ENTERTAIN! Expatiating on the Grand Staircase of a dreary Tudor stately home (built with ironic love by designer Robert Jones) our tour guide Let…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:00PMTuesday, May 16, 2017
LET THERE BE LIGHT! The year 1632 : we are halfway through the epic conflict between Galileo Galilei and the Holy Roman Church, an authority in its day quite as ruthless as Stalin and…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:47PMIN WHICH MICHAEL ADAIR LOSES HIS THEATRE-CRITIC VIRGINITY TO A PACK OF SCOTTISH MINXES A few years ago, when High School Musical and Glee were in their pomp, we were forever se…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:11AMFriday, May 12, 2017
BLEACH, BLUES, AND BLACK AMERICA RISING Here’s a pocket musical with huge themes, a blues opera of historic seriousness but with a singing washing-machine in a bubbled minidress. A …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:39PMWednesday, May 10, 2017
FRESH AS A (VIOLENT) DAISY AFTER 376 YEARS What wonders, sir, are these? How beauteous fringe theatre is! We Tuesday matinee-goers, paying peanuts for the smaller space in an �…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:05AMTuesday, May 9, 2017
A CRIME, A CARDINAL, A CONFLICT It is Twelfth Night, the feast of the Epiphany, 1941. In the Jermyn’s tight intimacy we are sitting in the clinical director’s office of a home…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:18PMMonday, May 8, 2017
AFTER SADDAM: WHAT’S LEFT WHEN YOU TAKE AWAY A TYRANT? An electrifying moment in this sharp, riveting play sees two bitter rivals, in a moment of stillness between blood-feud …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:20PMThursday, May 4, 2017
REAGAN, RELIGION, AND REMEMBERING… Direct comparisons are dangerous, even when – as this week – two consecutive days see major works opening in London, both set in the 1…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:10PMWednesday, May 3, 2017
IRELAND OF THE SORROWS: THE KIDS, THE CRAIC AND THE KILLING It is 1982 in County Armagh. Not a good time to be Irish, not there. Not with internees still in the H blocks and ten r…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:48PMNOBILITY AND THE NOSE on tour You’ve hardly sat down before there’s a jolly mass drinking-song in pantaloons, leather breastplates and hat-feathers being romped through in fr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:32AMGUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS THE DONMAR’S NEW VERSION OF BRECHT CRIMINALLY IRRESISTIBLE How do you get, keep and wield power? What do you use it for, and why? And, if you will sto…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:56AMSaturday, April 29, 2017
BILIOUS BUT BRACING: THE METROPOLIS AND THE MOVIES Simon may be from the wrong side of New York, a roughneck who ties his wife Anne to a chair and tapes her mouth for being “critical&…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:53AMThursday, April 27, 2017
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI SEES ANCIENT GRUDGE BREAK TO NEW MUTINY AT THE GLOBE The recent spats at the Globe, between the now outgoing Artistic Director Emma Rice and The Powers That B…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:40PM1918..1968..AND NOW.. ALAN BENNETT’S ENGLAND In his 1994 diaries Alan Bennett described the funeral of a Dunkirk veteran in a village church. “crammed with the men who won the war…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:43AMTuesday, April 25, 2017
VAN HOVE, VISCONTI, AND OUR JUDE London is getting used to Ivo van Hove of Toneelgroep Amsterdam. But his tremendous A View from The Bridge (in a bleak arena) and his striking NT …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:26PMThursday, April 20, 2017
A WINDOW ON AN IVORY TOWER… Full disclosure: I bought a ticket for an early preview, because press night was my husband’s birthday but I couldn’t resist checking out Chr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39PM 
