Thursday, March 2, 2017
NEVER 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 01:47PMWednesday, March 1, 2017
LUKE 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 02:02AMTuesday, February 28, 2017
SWEET 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 06:03PMSaturday, February 25, 2017
GUEST 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 02:33AMWednesday, February 22, 2017
THE 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 05:59PMTuesday, February 21, 2017
BACK 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 05:17PMWednesday, February 15, 2017
FIVE 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 07:53AMFriday, February 10, 2017
YOUNG, 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 07:44AMWednesday, February 8, 2017
THE 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 05:48PMTuesday, February 7, 2017
MORTIFICATION 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 06:33PMThursday, February 2, 2017
THE 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 04:59AMTuesday, January 31, 2017
A 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 03:47AMWednesday, January 25, 2017
DAFT, 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 05:52PMTuesday, January 17, 2017
RIBBIT! 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 05:55PMSaturday, January 14, 2017
MOCK 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 07:56AMTuesday, January 10, 2017
AN 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 06:17PMTuesday, December 20, 2016
When 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 05:15PMMonday, December 19, 2016
THE 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 06:06PMSaturday, December 17, 2016
FRESH 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 12:20PMWednesday, December 14, 2016
OH 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 08:41PMTuesday, December 13, 2016
LIVES 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 04:50PMMonday, December 12, 2016
A COLD-BURNING BRILLIANCE A century ago Henrik Ibsen saw, with more clarity than the strait bourgeois world around him, that it wouldn’t do. Not the hypocrisies, not the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:17PMSunday, December 11, 2016
BETTER TO RANT IN HELL.. Magnificent in military jacket as he lectures the College of Tempters, then at ease in his study in fine brocade against a marvellous backdrop of skulls and b…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:04AMFriday, December 9, 2016
All the Angels is a fascinating, moving examination of the power of music to inspire, to challenge, and to regenerate souls, as well as an unnerving glance at the strange intimacy between co…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 09:30AMLUKE JONES BUZZES HAPPILY ROUND THE HONEY Where Ivanov, The Seagull and Uncle Vanya mull, the youthfully fresh and fashionably unfinished Platonov rattles along like the TGV. Michael …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:10AMThursday, December 8, 2016
O THE PRETTINESS, O THE JOKES… Our heroine gets a job as sales clerk in Maraczek’s perfumery by selling a customer ia gorgeous hand-painted musical candy box. Which sum…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:29AMTuesday, December 6, 2016
HURRAH FOR HOLLYWOOD, AND LONG LIVE FOOLS ’Tis the season to be silly, and the Young Vic’s revival of a screwball 1930’s Hollywood satire hit the spot triumphantly with this the…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:48PMSaturday, December 3, 2016
PULLING THE FAIRY STRINGS IN AN URBAN NEVERLAND Wendy is grown up now, earthbound , with her own child to tell about the wonder and danger of Neverland and Pan. She can’t leave the …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:27AMThursday, December 1, 2016
IN WHICH LUKE JONES TRIES AND FAILS TO DISINTER DEEP TRUTHS As in all slow-burning plays there moments where you tune out for a second and ask yourself ‘is this a masterpiece or …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:06PM 
