Sunday, 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 10:56AMFriday, April 8, 2016
THE STATE OF ENGLAND: FUNNY, BEAUTIFUL, SAD AND TOURING! Some issues do best as satirical or farcical comedies: English class division, illicit sex, misunderstanding. Othe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:40AMWednesday, April 6, 2016
SPALL, SQUALOR, AND 1960 I do not routinely worship at the shrine of Harold Pinter. I can study, appreciate and accept the menace, the unspoken, the rhythmic near-poetry of dialogu…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:31PMTuesday, April 5, 2016
TO BOLDLY GO OFF YOUR HEAD, IN SPACE We are in the melamine mess-room of a space pod on the dead, black planet Pluto, with a crew of five. Unless one of them is a delusion of the nervy seco…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:23PMThursday, March 31, 2016
THE CLASSIC COMEDY OF CLASS AND CONFUSION We’re back in the 1960’s, and how! Beyond the jolly geometric curtain a bygone world revives. Shiny pink plastic boots, a rid…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:16PMTuesday, March 29, 2016
A CREEPY BRILLIANCE FROM QUEBEC What’s going on? Who are the people in the next flat, why are they so friendly and yet so odd? Are they commonplace swingers, murderers, or a delus…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:14PMMonday, March 28, 2016
HEAD, HEART, AND HOPEFULNESS “God” says Christopher Riley, donnishly, “has a severely limited intellect”. Jack Lewis, his Magdalen colleague, demurs with affectionate impatien…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:33PMThursday, March 24, 2016
REASONS TO BE UNREASONABLE… I had almost forgotten seeing the first in this Neil laBute trilogy – Reasons to be Pretty – until the looming, hapless figure of Tom Bur…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:16PMThursday, March 17, 2016
BRANAGH AND BRYDON GO BANG Well, you’ll never see our Kenneth Branagh more exuberantly violent, nor tumbling into more compromising positions; nor so crazedly drugged, veering f…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:50PMWednesday, March 16, 2016
THE TRUTH GAME. OR NOT. Its’ a while since so many shrieks, barks and snorts of laughter shook the seats around me: don’t take your drink in, you’ll risk doing the nose trick in …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:21PMNOTAHIT On the banks of the Nile, the princess of Egypt lifts a Jewish baby from the Nile waters, but changes her mind, chucks him back and chooses a prettier one. The reject survives…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:42AMGUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI WATCHES MOZART WIPE THE FLOOR WITH THE COMPETITION – AS USUAL Pairing a copper-bottomed opera classic (Mozart’s Così fan tutte) with an imported Aus…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:19AMMonday, March 14, 2016
PLENTY OF ACTIVITY, NOT QUITE ENOUGH RADIANCE This theatre is certainly fearless about potentially tasteless names – Bad Jews, Urinetown, now Miss Atomic Bomb: the first two of those, …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:10PMSunday, March 13, 2016
“OVERPAID, OVERSEXED, OVER HERE”…AND NOT AT EASE... In 1942 the Americans came to rural Britain: the US Eighth Air Force, its members often outnumbering local villagers 50 …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:33PMThursday, March 10, 2016
THE ANGRY YOUNG MAN RANTS AGAIN, THEN CHANGES SEX This is a sharp bit of work by Derby, marking 60 years since John Osborne’s splenetic debut blew the lid – so theatre legen…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:55PMWednesday, March 9, 2016
A TWO-WHEELED CHARIOT OF FIRE I suppose there must be some lazy, vacillating, unfocused Yorkshirewomen, but I’ve not met one yet. And of that tribe of gritty, unselfpitying, f…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:42PMTuesday, March 8, 2016
IT GLITTERS! IT SINGS! IT MAKES SENSE. EVEN IN MAD TROUSERS! I expected a big splashy jukebox musical, a-glitter with tearful Broadway sentiment and popster pizzazz. And indeed …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:39PMFriday, March 4, 2016
THE DAWN OF WAR, 1914 World War I and its aftermath are being well served by theatre (my last year’s reflections, http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p). But Jeremy James’ play is the firs…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:11PMTuesday, March 1, 2016
LONG ISLAND, THE WIGS AND THE WARDROBE… The Jean Anouilh plays I devoured as a neurotic sixth-former always had Antigone, Joan of Arc or Thomas a Becket heroically refusing comp…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:43PMMonday, February 29, 2016
GETTING THEM OFF FOR VICTORY, UP WEST I loved this show at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and – especially given a couple of rather snotty lukewarm reviews – thought I should ch…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:07PMSunday, February 28, 2016
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI GETS UNEXPECTEDLY CASUAL ABOUT HIGH CULTURE Some people get terribly, passionately serious about Wagner. This shouldn’t be a problem: truly great mus…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:16PMFriday, February 26, 2016
BANG THE DRUM FOR THIS ONE: AN INTIMATE EPIC OF WAR AND FRIENDSHIP This premiere for the Park is a cracker: a serious, grownup, constantly entertaining light on history with fine-dr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 02:17PMWednesday, February 24, 2016
A FAREWELL TEMPEST, RICH AND STRANGE For a departing artistic director, especially here, Shakespeare’s last plays are a natural choice: great poetic anthems of reconciliation and re…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:34PMThursday, February 18, 2016
A RESTORATION OF HIGH SPIRITS.. Looking back at this play’s first outing – in the outdoor, summery, rackety pleasure that is Shakespeare’s Globe – I remember actually liking …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:33PMWednesday, February 17, 2016
THEY CAME, THEY CONQUERED Call me a patsy and a soft touch, but you won’t find me sneezing at anything which – within twenty minutes of a deafening, blinding opening – o…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:53PMTuesday, February 16, 2016
McBURNEY ON, AND IN, THE BRAIN If there is any theatre artist reliably able to draw you into a world of disorientation, time-slip, near-death and a sense of licking hallucinogenic frogs in a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:21PMGUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI DISCOVERS SOMETHING GREEN AND FRESH BEHIND A LOT OF DEAD WOOD Robert Icke’s new adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is best summarised as an update – an…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:30AMMonday, February 15, 2016
AND THEY CALL IT PUPPET LOVE…. “Avenue Q meets The Exorcist” claim posters for Robert Askins’ Broadway hit, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Or “The Muppets play The …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:11PMThursday, February 11, 2016
IN THE END, AN HONOURABLE PLAY Its fame rolls before it: a debut play, premiered in London by Matthew Perry. To a generation of young adults (and to many far younger, thanks to ceasel…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:48PMWednesday, February 10, 2016
SHAKESPEARE’S TOWN LAID BEFORE US The year 1613: somewhere offstage old Shakespeare is dying, and in her husband’s physic-garden, competent and dignified, his daughter Susanna…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:11AMSaturday, February 6, 2016
THE DEEPEST GRIEF OBSERVED Pretty much everyone agreed – here and on its West End transfer- that the American David Lindsay-Abaire’s GOOD PEOPLE was a masterpiece, with its de…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39AM 
