1,418 stories from theatrecat.com
THREE GENERATIONS UNDER SMARTPHONE RULEÂ Bit late to this one, and it had mixed reviews " largely I suspect because Michael Wynne's play, a two hour four-hander all-woman slice of life in…
NEVER MIND THE MOUNTAIN, OVER THE ROAD CHICHESTER ROCKS   Now here's a perfect gig for us 1970's leftovers, though I suspect today's young rockers will also love the shiny le…
OLD SOHO SPEAKS AGAIN, AND WISELY  Of all the places you'd expect to see Quentin Crisp " even as a ghost or tribute " one of the least likely is a wooded amphitheatre in Suffolk at d…
TRAGEDY,  JOKES, ORACLES, SINGING SHEEP AND A BEAR    After last year's storming Macbeth, Red Rose Chain returns to the wooded site at Sutton Hoo for its secon…
THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN?   Tanika Gupta's play is a sprawling, angrily intimate epic about Indians in Britain during the height of empire, thirteen years running up to old Que…
A FEW OF OUR FAVOURITE THINGS… Â Â Â Â Let it be said first of all that Gina Beck is a glorious gamine Maria:Â sings like a bird and is satisfyingly able to convey in her vo…
THE WAY IT WAS Â Â Â Ah, the forgotten plays of the 30s and 40s, how they lure me to basements and pub rooms and tunnels:Â Jermyn and Finborough and Southwark in particular! Â …
BIRTH, DEATH, SCIENCE , ANGER     "The smell " the smell " the sheets…"  Curtain up, he is gripped by urgency, past or present. . Now a successful doctor home in Hun…
COME ON MY SONS…   At the end of the first half of this exhilarating play, England is through to the World Cup quarter-finals in Russia after several bracing straight wins and …
1926 AND ALL THAT, ON THE AIR Fresh from doing cartwheels in the Bake Off musical up the road, Haydn Gwynne is now a strangely convincing Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin , in pinstripe. O…
QUIET DESPERATION, NOISY GUNSHOTS "Everybody tell the story Everybody sing the song, Every now and then a country Goes a little wrong…" Â Â Â Â Hard for it not to feel topical,…
HIGH NOTES AND KNOBBLY KNEES     I am a relative newcomer to Gilbert & Sullivan, having long thought I hated them (heard too many gammony fans in my childhood wrecking…
WELCOME BACK TO PUNXATAWNEY     Seven years after its premiere at the Old Vic earned a flurry of Oliviers, by way of a pandemic and a disappointingly short Broadway run , …
A TIME CAPSULE OF OPEN MARRIAGE  I am pleased to find out about Miles Malleson: an Edwardian student joker, WW1 conscientious objector, Bolshevist, founder of Left drama groups a…
MOTHER RUSSIA's WARRING SONS Â Â Â Â Â At the Almeida this shook and delighted us last year:Â a fresh history play: confrontational , shocking, classic in its focus on vast …
BIG SHOW, BIG HEART, SMALL SPACE     This, I urgently must tell you, is rather wonderful:  an example of the way that sometimes a big show in a small theatre can b…
  BACK TO THE OFFICE, EVERYONE!    There is, by chance a bit of a Thing going on in theatre right now: women playing a particularly alpha type of men, with glee and an…
WHEN DIVORCE WAS DISASTER   It's 1921.   Thirty years ago Lady Kitty ran out on her MP husband Clive and small son with his friend and colleague Hughie, exploding a public…
BORN TO LEAD..    This is a joy, quirky and full-hearted, musically adroit and fast-moving and witty.  Moreover, I suspect its self-mocking variety-show humour would …
THE ROARING TWENTIES, ROLLING OVER THE EDGE When Noel Coward shocked and enthralled the 1920s with this most bitter and intense of his plays, he was meanwhile hastily finishing the farcical …
GATHER ROUND AND HEAR AN OLD, OLD STORY… Â Deep breath, concentrate at the back:Â there's this Ancient Briton King, who once banished a chap who vengefully stole his baby sons, leavi…
A THEATRICAL ECHO, SEVENTY YEARS AGO Â Â A theatrical tease opens both halves: the voice of Noel Coward singing "There's a right way and a wrong way, an old way and a new way" for the o…
HARRY HILL TAKES ON TONY BLAIR. FIIIIIIIGHHHT!!!!  I couldn't be more delighted that it's touring, this splendidly rude show. We need this kind of merrily offensive burlesque, in…
THE POWER OF NO, IN 1950S AMERICA  If we think we suffer from a paranoid cancel-culture , we should note this reminder of mid-1950s America " notably Hollywood " in the M…
BLACK, BOYISH, BEAUTIFUL    It's not all musicals and movie-spinoffs that put bill-paying bums on seats. The best producers trust their nerve and instinct ,rake through the f…
