FAITH . FAILURE AND THE GENIUS OF FRIEL A veil of rain surrounds the stage where three narrators will appear, each with their own version of a shared life “shabby, bleak, de…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:56PMZELLER ZOOMS UP WEST, SHARP AS EVER The Menier, back in spring, brought grave delight and snorts of laughter with this zinger of a play by Florian Zeller; its rapid transfer up…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:41PMIN RANSOME’S WAKE, A NORTH SEA TALE OF TOUGHER DAYS Eastern Angles having a cleaner mind than BBC Films, Titty gets to keeps her name in this faithful, ingenious, charmin…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:53AMVACATION, EXPLOITATION, ACCUSATION… I caught up a few days late with this (cheap seats aloft, excitingly closer to the rock-face in Hildegard Bechtler’s Mediterranean-te…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 10:10AMREBELLION AND REALITY IN A SKEWED WORLD God bless a playwright you can’t predict. Mike Bartlett’s Charles III was founded on a pretty simple idea, and a frankly rather jej…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:25PMGUEST 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 03:38AMA 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 06:29AMSTRINGS, 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 05:59PMA 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 10:45AMA 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 01:11PMINNOCENCE, 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 06:30PMTHE 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 03:58AMADRIFT 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 03:08AMTHE 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 04:06AMKenneth 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 04:53AMHere’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 05:14PMA 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 06:06PMGUEST 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 12:44PMOf 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 07:23AMA 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 05:51PMDirector 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 04:22AMA 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 01:50PMAS 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 05:54PMSUPERNATURAL, 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 06:01PMSuppose 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 06:30PMA 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 06:56PMROLLING 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 07:54PMGRIME 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 01:52PMMISCHIEF 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 07:14PMLIGHTS! 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 06:31PMSIXTY 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 06:17PM
