BLUEBIRDS OVER DOVER, RATTIGAN ON A ROLL Yesterday , on her hundredth birthday, Dame Vera Lynn had her face projected on the white cliffs of Dover and a flight of Spitfires was due ov…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:50PMBREXIT MEANS… A BIT OF A DOG’S BREAKFAST Rufus Norris of the National Theatre is to be applauded for taking on the post-referendum mood, and making an honest stab at under…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:44AMTOP HATS AND TALES A nice gag in Richard Harris’ 1983 play comes in some desultory chat between the ladies of the tap-dancing class. Referring to a play one of them has recommended …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:33PMWEDNAPPED: THE HELL BEFORE THE CALM I really fell for this 2014 comedy by Chris Chibnall, writer of such dark telly stuff as Broadchurch. Not just because it is a hoot, a wickedly joy…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:16PMTHE DARK HEART OF MARRIAGE One audience tweeter emerged calling James Macdonald’s fine production “exhilarating”. A wet rag after three hours’ exposure to it, I wouldn…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:29PMLET COWARDS FLINCH AND TRAITORS SNEER…WE’LL KEEP THE LAFITE FLOWING HERE Some moments of modern history deserve reimagining by honest playwrights: we need to rememb…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:20PMLUKE JONES, FRESH FROM HAMLET, SPINS WITH ECSTASY AT THE NEW R & G I first and last saw this play whilst at school. It was slowly and quite unforgivingly murdered by fellow si…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:58AMCLEESE MEETS FEYDEAU. DOES IT WORK? Farce. French farce. Feydeau farce. Fin-de-siecle farce with curly cornices and ladies in corsets. Feelings about the genre are always, for me, m…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:27AMNEVER TOO OLD TO GO ROUND AGAIN… In Arthur Schnitzler ’s LA RONDE was a scandal: a chain of sketched sexual encounters in which one of each couple moved on to a new seducti…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:47PMLUKE JONES EXULTS: A TACTILE MORIARTY PULLS IT OFF FOR A NEW GENERATION We’ve had so many ‘great’ Hamlets it’s hard to either keep track or care. Cumbe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:02AMSWEET AS A NUT, SHARP AS A TACK Helpless, really: I was putty in its hands. And I caught it a few days late, so no risk that the ecstatic giggles in the stalls or the standing ovation…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:03PMGUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES GROPES FOR DIAMONDS IN THE MUD Timothy Spall tells a good story – bear with me – about performing a Midsummer Night’s Dream at the National.…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:33AMTHE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME AND BENDING OF GENDERS.. It’s a grand thing to be seduced and succumb. To suspect a director of vainly messing about with a Shakespeare play too close to your …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:59PMBACK TO FAUST PRINCIPLES “I hope nobody misses / The moral in a show as short as this is..” . Marie Corelli, whose 1895 bestseller on the Faust theme inspired Luke Bateman and Mic…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:17PMFIVE GO ROARING UP WEST… This is a transfer, and well deserved. My Menier review is below…and I stand proudly by every star of it. Five playful mice. But below you will find a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:19PMAN AGED ELEGANCE Beau Brummel is back in Jermyn Street, a century on from his decline, bankruptcy, royal disfavour and exile to a Calais convent madhouse. Down the road from his statu…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:53AMYOUNG, CONFLICTED AND GAY: VOICES FROM 1968 It feels dated now: the shrieking queenery, the preening Jules-and Sandy camp, the insider camaraderie. Oh and the angs: the misery of self…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:44AMTHE WATERS RISE ROUND TOKSVIG ISLAND… There’s a bit of conflicted-critic syndrome here. Sandi Toksvig is one of the most amiable wits of today: fun, sharp, humane, sensible,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:48PMMORTIFICATION AND MERRIMENT ON TOUR It was a young Jane Austen who wrote this wonderful squib of a novel, and its delight is in the absurdities and agonies of youth: credulous e…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:33PMTHE LITERARY LIFE, AS SHAGFEST Those still wondering why on earth 42% of women voted for Donald Trump may feel enlightened by the way in which – in this successful American t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:09PMCORPSES BY CANDLELIGHT “Dost thou imagine thou canst slide on blood, and not be tainted in a shameful fall?” asks Cardinal Monticello of the murderous Lodovico, a man who t…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:59AMA DAFT DETECTIVE DOUBLE-ACT Retro clutter round a piano: files, a hatstand, model house, gun, notebook, handcuffs. We are in the territory of smalltown detective fiction, a touch of the Poir…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:47AMDAFT, DIRTY, BUT GREAT I remember it at Edinburgh a few years ago : a sly, elegant witty refreshment on an arid Fringe day. Poet-actors Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna deployed “…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:52PMRIBBIT! RIBBIT! FROGS, FOOLS, FABULOUS Here’s a tonic for theis flat , glum season! Divinely tasteless, bracingly cynical , hootingly funny (jokes from subtle to silly) and directed with p…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:55PMMOCK TUDOR, RIOTOUS BUT NOT RUFF It’s described by its creator Pat Whymark as “a sort of Tudor/Muppets mash-up with a respectful nod to Blackadder and DIY SOS”. To which I would…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:56AMAN AFGHAN EPIC TO REMEMBER Khaled Hosseini’s novel is an intimate epic: a flawed, damaged, remorseful man’s journey through thirty years of turbulent history. Amir is the privileg…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:17PMWhen Yasmina Reza won an Olivier for best comedy, she joked “I thought I had written a tragedy”. She did both: the French actor-novelist-playwright sees far enough into the cracks in hum…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:15PMTHE MAID OF ORLEANS AND HER TORMENTORS For fifteen minutes as the audience troops in Gemma Arterton, in chainmail and breastplate, kneels on a dais in rapt contemplation: mouthing pra…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PMFRESH AS PAINT, THE OLD STORY “Marley was dead…”. Oh how we need Dickens’ story every year. You can do it panto or earnest, screen or stage, Tommy Steele or Alistair …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:20PMOH YES IT IS, IT REALLY IS… Want to see Julian Clary in a feather headdress and spangles, looping the loop on a flying Vespa over the front stalls.? Course you do! Hungry for pumpki…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:41PMLIVES IN LIMBO At the Connection at St Martin’s they say that none of us is more than two bad decisions away from the pavement. The street homeless we know, a little. Less plainly l…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:50PM
