1,405 stories from theatrecat.com
SUGAR RUSH  I can never resist scribbling down rhymes in new musicals, whether in a spirit appalled or admiring.  Take a bow Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary " writers of this extrem…
AN UN-SOLEMN WARNING FROM THE FUTURE   H.G.Wells is the inspiration, with a larkily extrovert Dave Hearn from Mischief Theatre pretending to be his great-grandson, heir, and owner…
MORE DETAILS, MORE DEVILRY      An Afghan army officer flees the Taleban and finds safety on the 23rd floor of Grenfell Tower. His local nickhame is "Sabar", m…
 HIGH ABOVE THE BRUTAL AND BELOVED CITY    It's an architectural moment. Within the stark brutalist NT is a set in homage to a brutalist landmark: the early 1960's Park…
COUGAR CHAOS   The Greeks just go on giving. Writer-director Simon Stone's play, set today amid the upper-middle classes of Holland Park and second-home Suffolk, credits …
A MONETARY MORALITY PLAYÂ Â Â Â Â Three hour-long plays, two intervals, three men in black frock-coats explain some financial history in a revolving glass box in front of a pro…
A TALE FOR TODAY FROM A PRUSSIAN PASTÂ Â Â Here's a love story, an idyll of 18c Prussia:Â Corporal Anastasius Linck, a Hanoverian musketeer in dashing white breeches and shiny bu…
SITCOMS MADE US, BUT CAN WE MAKE THEM? Â Â It's a very good idea, bang on the money:Â David Cantor and Michael Kingsbury (TV sitcom writers with a pedigree) set their play in a blan…
A BLAST OF DAFT JOY   Zip-a-dee-doo-dah! Here's a treat.  Disney music, blasting out before this vigorous 65-minute one-man spree, sets the mood. It is carnivalesque, fant…
 A PATIENT TO TRY PATIENCE      It must be challenging to play a psychiatrist at work , maybe especially in Finsbury Park  where there are bound to be a few in the …
Just a few new notes on this , as its completes its triumphant national tour with (amazingly) no stopping-injuries despite the heroically vigorous slapstick direction by Lindsay Posner (move…
HELLMAN'S LESSON IN HUMANITY Â Â Â Theatre can offer few more topical messages for a nation which might hesitate over Ukraine's needs than this neglected one-set domestic play by Lil…
PULLING THE WOOL     Most dystopian visions set themselves quite far in the future. Misha Levkov, however, keeps us in 2025, specifying that productions should always …
AN OLD INJUSTICE REMEMBERED    An old man steps onstage alone: upright, soldierly in khaki as a former US war hero who is, he says resignedly, "brought out every …
A TALE FOR ALL TIMES  The story of Nelson Mandela has become almost a folktale: imprisoned for 27 years for campaigning against the hideous "apartheid" regime which kept the black ma…
THIS DAME HAS A WHOLE LOT BEHIND HIM    I last saw Sir Ian McKellen onstage as Lear,  missed him as the oldest Hamlet ever,  but far longer ago saw him in a frock at …
BREEZILY BLOWING IN FROM 1908, FRESH AS EVER    In Mole End on Christmas Eve,in a burrow cosy with domestic detail they're breaking out the beer and sardines and reminiscing a…
A TRAGICOMIC BEAUTYÂ Â Â Hard to express how much I loved Stephen Karam's play. Maybe it just hit the right moment:Â yomped through freezing night, strikes and 'severe delays" rea…
THE MOST ENJOYABLE STRIKE YOU'LL SEE THIS CHRISTMAS   I love it when the theatre perfectly fits the show. Artists can overcome a wrong space, but there's gleeful concord when it …
FREUDIAN ISUES IN FAIRYLAND    Everyone's got mental health issues in HEX: which is the Sleeping Beauty story extended to the troublesome folk-tale aftermath.  The tou…
A PACK OF WOOLFS PROWL ROUND THE GENDER-BEND  One bespectacled, anxious-looking Virginia Woolf in a sensible brown skirt and dreary cardigan is never enough, so Michael Grandage's pr…
A COLD ANGRY CRUSHING SYSTEM Â Â Â Â It's a cold unadorned monochrome scene: courts, brawls and bedchamber all framed on three sides by vast looming tiered steps and a high flat p…
UP WEST, IT LOSES NOTHING…STILL A FIERCE TREAT Leaving the former Young Vic production a lad far too young to remember 1968 said sadly to me "It was the beginning of Now, wasn't it?"Â H…
A GLORIOUS DOWNSTREAM WILLOWS FOR OUR AGE You won't see a prettier, more refreshing or sustainable stage this Christmas: natural colours, riverbank rushes, a bare tree (which will ha…
CELEBRATORY, MY DEAR WATSON I had come from the magnificent Old Vic Christmas Carol, where once again with mince pies, bells and lanterns and Dickensian cheer and a message about how…
