Thursday, 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 10:56AMFriday, 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 12:33PM 
