1,418 stories from theatrecat.com
  REDEFINING FEELINGS IN AN AGE OF ANGRY ANGST "We are three people trying to redefine feeling" they say. They do this between Paris, Munich, Salzburg and Greek islands, and eith…
BLAZING MUSIC HOLDS THE HOUSE TOGETHER     After 1930's Donegal at the NT the day before,  Dancing at Lughnasa portraying a group of women meeting  stress and poverty…
A SAD LOST WORLD . A HUMAN BEAUTY There is particular genius in creating a play which doesn't build to a showy debacle but grips you with the possibility of an unnamed crisis, and so…
​ABBASOLUTELY A DELIGHT  ​​  ​​   If there is a formula for a cheerful touring play in our frazzled and disputatious times, it woul…
NEVER FLAT, COWARD There 's always a slight frisson when Noel Coward's rueful, dark-streaked romantic comedy is revived in our censorious age. We are nine decades on from the night i…
LOVE, DEATH, GRIEF    It's a joy to have the intimate Swan auditorium open again, refurbished after going dark in the first sudden Covid closure, and to see once again a stro…
SEA FRETÂ Â Â Â I'll give it one thing: over an hour into this infuriating two- hour play there's a brief but wonderful part for the veteran June Watson. She stumps in with octog…
  BEAUTIFUL SCIENCE. UGLY WORLD    Unexpectedly enthralled, I spent an hour and a half eavesdropping on six nuclear physicists, and couldn't be more glad to have caught…
BLISS WITH THE BLISSES I don't always make it through the Oxfordshire lanes to the gorgeous, eccentric, water-wheeled Mill, but the thought of Issy van Randwyck as Judith Bliss lured me . Ca…
FUTURE IMPERFECT    Artificial intelligence and robotics have long been a boon to us ethical-scifi buffs, films like AI and I, Robot mercifully saving us from rocket ships and…
HYTNER ROLLS ANOTHER WINNING DICE   Daniel Mays has played a lot of tough-guy roles but has by nature a rather innocent and worried-looking face. It is this quality that Nick Hyt…
RIDE A WILD APP   In a week when tech firms shuddered at the shock demise of their favourite bank, how better to spend 90 minutes withJoseph Charlton's exhilarating, fast …
A RADIATING RESPONSIBILITY      Since I watched Sizewell A going up as a child, live close to Sizewell B and dwell amid a forest of local posters furiously condemning …
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…
