Saturday, 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 05:39AMThursday, February 4, 2016
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS OLD IDEAS COMING BACK TO HAUNT THEIR CREATOR The Master Builder, Halvard Solness, is universally acknowledged by his townsfolk as a lucky man: self-made…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:21AMTuesday, February 2, 2016
RED VELVET: DEEP AND RICH AS EVER This (I sneaked in to an early preview , because I am on holiday) was my third visit to Lolita Chakrabarti’s play, starring her husband the matchless …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:17PMThursday, January 28, 2016
MARTY FELDMAN: A GREAT COMIC’S ENDGAME Next week at the Jermyn there opens a play which is a memorial to a late-life friendship with Lucille Ball; already on the far side of the Char…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:53PMTuesday, January 26, 2016
THE EMPTY NEST, THE TROUBLED MIND Hold tight. It’s the French genius litterateur Florian Zeller messing with our heads again. We are confused, wary, deceived and unsettled by the tr…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:56PMSaturday, January 23, 2016
A MEMORIAL IN MUSIC This is a solo show, a memorial to a mother and to a generation. It is performed not by an actor but by the American concert pianist, Mona Golabek. Yet as a pie…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:23AMFriday, January 22, 2016
ANOTHER CHICHESTER SMASH COMES WEST This is a revisit, to a partly recast Chichester show: and I must admit I had qualms about losing that generosity, that overflowing vigour you get with th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:01PMWednesday, January 20, 2016
MORE POIGNANT THAN POISONOUS: A 125TH ANNIVERSARY MARKED One wit called it ‘the first French novel in English’, with its seductive evocation of exotic decadence and corrupting wic…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:52PMTuesday, January 19, 2016
AMNESIA AS A NEW START? In a hospital bed lies Michael: Alistair McGowan, motionless in a coma, we learn, for three weeks. His mother Carol (Maggie Ollerenshaw) holds his hand, has be…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 05:39PMWednesday, January 13, 2016
The playtext of Rob Hayes’ monologue austerely insists that performance “should not exceed 60 minutes in duration”. This author doesn’t want it larded with significant pauses or drea…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 06:10PMTuesday, January 12, 2016
A CENTURY ON, THEY WALK BEFORE US It was gruesome, politically problematic, tragic and heroic and wasteful; it was a turning-point in history. I have written before about how l…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 01:43PMThursday, January 7, 2016
THE BOHO BOUVIERS: REBELLIOUS RECLUSES Hot on the heels of THE DAZZLE (about the New York Collyer brothers living in hoarderly squalid isolation) this is about Edith Bouvier Beale a…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:34PMSunday, December 27, 2015
A HALF-FORGOTTEN QUEEN RISES… School history was terrible. Terrible! We got the Tudors, and a bore-in about the Thirty Years War, but a fog of confusion and a sense of 1066 And …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:48AMSaturday, December 19, 2015
DARK DOINGS IN THE BURROW I hope that the great Beatrix Potter, out of copyright just last year, would be pleased at the pointing, bouncing, giggling and gasping in Red Rose Ch…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 03:35PMThursday, December 17, 2015
A WHIFF OF SULPHUR UNDER THE BROCADE… There are certainly crinolines, but Quality Street it ain’t. How smart of Josie Rourke to offer adults, worn down by fairylights and pant…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:49PMWednesday, December 16, 2015
THNEEDS MUST WHEN CONSUMERISM DRIVES… It’s a heartfelt welcome. The Old Vic, for a long while fiercely grownup, throws its arms open to children under Matthew Warchus’ leade…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:20PMTuesday, December 15, 2015
SUICIDE BY THINGS... We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin’s School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-ish iron l…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 08:32PMSUICIDE BY THINGS… We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin’s School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:06PMMonday, December 14, 2015
A LORDLY FOGG WITH UNDERSTAGE COGS AND A FAITHFUL FROG… If you can’t face another panto (oh no you can’t) but want to share a treat with the young, this is one to h…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:54AMFriday, December 11, 2015
BROADBENT & BARLOW BRING BACK THE BIG BAD BANKER… Tom Pye’s design of Victorian découpage creates a toy paper-theatre within the stark stage area: the scenes revolve l…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:00AMWednesday, December 9, 2015
UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLES AND UNPRINCIPLED CERTAINTIES It is a mildly shaming reflection that Tom Stoppard plays generally dismissed by his cadre of scholarly admirers as “not…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:01PMALL IS FORGIVEN (UNLESS YOU’RE DEAD, AND DON’T DESERVE IT) This is part of Dominic Dromgoole’s candlelit farewell to his tenure at the Globe: a set of late Shakesp…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:48PMTuesday, December 8, 2015
SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL…GET OUT OF BED AND PULL HIMSELF TOGETHER… It is almost comically calculated to stir up timid traditionalists. The enchanted sleeper is a bloke – David Emming…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 12:05PMSunday, December 6, 2015
WHO NEEDS CHARLTON HESTON? I have a weakness for schlock-historical movie epics, due to a regular childhood treat when I was at school in France and my Dad and I would sneak down th…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 11:04AMWednesday, December 2, 2015
THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE OF ALL… For half a generation there has been a truism in the musical theatre world that nobody can do Jule Style and Bob Merrill’s FUNNY GIRL, because S…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:58PMTuesday, December 1, 2015
YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL! SURE YOU WANT IT? Revolving sleek as a spaceship is Es Devlin’s multi-layered set: the office and neon slogans of Swan cosmetics: bottles and jars, sed…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:44PMSaturday, November 28, 2015
THE BELLS! THE BELLS! THE BOOMING! “Where else” says an exasperated Sir Henry Irving , asked at the gates of Heaven to justify the profession which estranged him from his religious m…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 09:32AMThursday, November 26, 2015
SUNRISE TO STARLIGHT, A NORTHERN TRAGEDY Under a bleak black mountain panorama, this is a shattering play about selfishness, mismatched love, and how grief and guilt can make you mons…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 06:41PMWednesday, November 25, 2015
SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE… Another flickering evening in the candlelight of the Globe’s Jacobean theatre: engrossing, melodramatic, comic, epic. Ben Jonson was disparaging about Pe…
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 07:51PMThe last American import Rufus Norris brought to the National – The Motherf—-er with the Hat – was a five-mouse delight, a bold choice which rightly just won a Best Play award. Less we…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 01:53AMTuesday, November 24, 2015
STILL SHOCKING, STILL SEXIST ! GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES SMACKS HIS LIPS OVER A VINTAGE PINTER… I get the itching feeling that if anyone else had written this play …
SOURCE: theatrecat.com at 04:23AM 
