Saturday, June 18, 2016
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CHILLED, THRILLED, DAZZLED Ralph Fiennes is a menace. An utter menace. Other actors beware. He will cheat, stab and simply out-act you right off th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:38AMThursday, June 16, 2016
A hairdo can be eloquent. When Bryan Dick as Willie Mossop first emerges quaking with humility from a trapdoor under old Hobson’s shop, above a flapping leather apron and ragged shirt his …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:29AMFriday, June 10, 2016
STRINGS, SWINGS, A SOPRANO SOARING In E.M.Forster’s HOWARD’S END, the dreamy Helen Schlegel can’t listen to Beethoven without imagining heroes, goblins, dancing elephant…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:59PMThursday, June 9, 2016
A CLASSIC OF THE DESPERATE HEART “We’re death to one another, you and I”. The great cry from trapped, degraded macho Freddie, struggling to leave the desperate demanding Hester …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:45AMWednesday, June 8, 2016
A DREAM AND A DISASTER: TRIBUTE WORTH PAYING Full disclosure: I really care about the Titanic story, love maritime history, have met one of the last living survivors of the 1…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:11PMTuesday, June 7, 2016
INNOCENCE, EXPERIENCE, MEMORY, TRAUMA Around a derelict room and abandoned trunk, Michael Crawford prowls, a tweedy, damaged old man at the heart of this low-key but unforgetta…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:30PMFriday, June 3, 2016
THE RSC IN ROMPING MOOD Credulity and the con-artist, blinding-with-science and the selling of snake-oil, belong to all human eras. Ben Jonson’s play is set in 1610, when a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:58AMThursday, June 2, 2016
ADRIFT ON ANOTHER DEEP, BLUE, LONELY SEA… The Deep Blue Sea is Terence Rattigan’s masterpiece (and about to play at the National Theatre). A young woman who has left her emine…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:08AMSaturday, May 28, 2016
THE LAST BLASPHEMY TRIAL..AND ECHOES FOR TODAY It is a thousand pities that John Osborne is predominantly famous for the spitting spoilt-brat misogyny of Jimmy Porter in Look Back In …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:06AMThursday, May 26, 2016
Kenneth Branagh’s entire season has been built on one universal truth. From star to stage-sweeper, pack the production with the best talent and glorious things will inevitably follow. Why …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:53AMTuesday, May 24, 2016
Here’s a sharp one, beautifully suited to what is not only a Referendum season but one in which both main political parties are more than likely to do mischief to their leaders. We can’t…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 05:14PMMonday, May 23, 2016
A HEART FOR BEAUTY, A ‘FIFTIES DREAM If Daniel Evans means to leave his acclaimed stewardship of Sheffield Theatre on a flood of tears, he’s chosen the right producti…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PMSaturday, May 21, 2016
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES ON THE MENTAL WARD... You’re clinically paranoid, you’re black and you’re bombarded on a daily basis with racism and when presented with an or…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:44PMThursday, May 19, 2016
Of Shakespeare’s plays this is one of the least done and loved: there’s disputed authorship of some sections, parts of the plot missing and replaced from another text. Sir Trevor Nunn ta…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:23AMWednesday, May 18, 2016
A CAUTIONARY TALE OF TRADE AND TERROR It is the modern terror that stalks our interconnected world. You’re shut in a stone cell, alone and far from home, and in a chaotic inc…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:51PMMonday, May 16, 2016
Director William Galinksy pays respect to the building’s normal life by recruiting Lost in Translation Circus to evoke Ariel’s magical powers: the stately Jane Leaney at ground level get…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 04:22AMFriday, May 13, 2016
A DESERT HERO AND THE ROOTS OF TROUBLE.. One glory of Howard Brenton as a playwright is his ability to tease out, in very specific history plays (55 Days, Ann Boleyn, Dr Scroggy’s W…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:50PMWednesday, May 11, 2016
AS FLIES TO WANTON CLOWNS… You don’t often see Queen Gertrude in Hamlet played by a short bearded Spaniard in a rainbow unitard with flamenco frills. But this is the Br…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:54PMTuesday, May 10, 2016
SUPERNATURAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, YET YORKSHIRE ALL THE WAY… Of all the lessons theatre has taught us about the backwash of WW1, some of the most fascinating are in 1930’s p…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:01PMWednesday, April 27, 2016
Suppose neuroscience could cure creeping brain deterioration by taking out whole networks of decaying neurons and replacing them with silicon, guaranteeing functionality, but wiping years of…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:30PMTuesday, April 26, 2016
A MODERN MASTERPIECE This is that finely balanced thing: a comedy built around a tragedy. Six summers ago, a newfledged critic for the Times, I wrote about its British premiere: “Br…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:56PMMonday, April 25, 2016
ROLLING ALONG, CARRYING ALL BEFORE IT Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly – you gotta laugh and you gotta cry. And believe me, you won’t help loving this stunning, flawless, cele…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:54PMFriday, April 22, 2016
GRIME AND GRACE IN THE URBAN JUNGLE You never know what you’ll get from Poppy Burton-Morgan’s Metta Theatre. I can’t claim to have spotted every venture of her ten years, but de…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:52PMThursday, April 21, 2016
MISCHIEF THEATRE STRIKES AGAIN. HURRAH! Years ago, a famous US television show called Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In hit on the strategy – as Ken Dodd had decades earlier,…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:14PMTuesday, April 19, 2016
LIGHTS! CAMERA! SLOW BUT FASCINATING ACTION! We sit as if we are the cinema screen of a run-down fleapit in Massachusetts: we confront the back wall at projector windo…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:31PMMonday, April 18, 2016
SIXTY YEARS, FOUR GENERATIONS: WHAT THE WOMEN DID Say, first of all, that Maureen Lipman was born to play Doris, the Lancashire matriarch at the heart of Charlotte Keatley’s …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:17PMELLE WOODS IS BACK, PINKER THAN EVER Full disclosure: transport , domesticity and a hacking cough meant that on this two-show day in the lovely Curve I had to skip out at the inter…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:38AMFriday, April 15, 2016
There are actually only about thirty, out of Craig Taylor’s rather wonderful collection of 94 first seen in The Guardian. But the sense of our millions is there, as Laura Keefe’s joyful,…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 07:36AMThursday, April 14, 2016
THE HEROES FROM THE EAST A hundred years ago, a Punjabi gunner in the 129th Baluchi regiment, Khudadad Khan, stayed at his post in the machine gun nest, injured and at bay , his comma…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:11PMTuesday, April 12, 2016
STREETS OF LONDON, SNAKING TO NOWHERE… The boy of the title is Liam: gormless and runty, lost and unnoticed , scion of a demographic much discussed right now. For he’s a whi…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:01PMSunday, April 10, 2016
This play is not about the American backwash from the slave era, but a shattering, important take on Colonial Africa, an unnamed country on the edge of revolution and independence. It is by …
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 10:56AM 
