1,418 stories from theatrecat.com
SCRAMBLE!  CHOCKS AWAY!   Who knew that Caroline Quentin could achieve (almost) the splits, while strumming a ukulele? Or that that Richard Bean and Chris Oliver " who a de…
DECK-LICIOUS, DELOVELY, SAILING BACK IN STYLE A year on, and after a partly recast tour, SS America drops anchor back in the Barbican and in style. Actually feels even better than before…
 MOTHER RUSSIA AND ITS MEN   Here's a fresh history play: confrontational , shocking, classic in its focus on vast flawed characters and pretty close to documented " and very…
MOB JUSTICE, NO JUSTICE    There are women who, seeing a friend in an almost-good outfit, cannot help reaching out: adjusting a belt , removing an ill-judged frill, suggesting…
STEP BACK TO THE SIXTIES SIMPLICITIES…  Once again , off to this most enticing dinner-theatre embedded in a historic treasure, its big real watermill whirling away in the bar and t…
The review below is from its Chichester opening a couple of weeks back. So just a note on seeing it again: something that could well become a habit, because it really is rich snd fine. It wo…
THE BOTTLED SPIDER, HEDGEHOG, ABORTIVE ROOTING HOG, IS BACK…MAGNIFICENTLY Â Â Â Â Â The winter of discontent made glorious summer is ushered in with a wild conga round the s…
ALL GREEK TO US, AND TOPICAL WITH IT Fascinating to see how, despite many light tempting fatuities and sentimentalities onscreen and onstage, and the countercurrents of self conscious experi…
IT HAS COME TO FRUITION. REJOICE! Â Â In a spirit of joyful pastiche, it's a Sweeney-Todd sound that opens the show:Â "`Prepare! To be made Aware! Of the most successful Labour Premi…
OF MAN'S FIRST DISOBEDIENCE….  Thorington is a new outdoor theatre, a beautiful bomb-crater amid tall sighing pine trees and beneath a great oak in Suffolk. It runs only one-night,�…
VIA MEDIA ANGLICANA IN A NEW JERUSALEM    We're in a vicarage kitchen in a small West Country town, its incumbent dealing with parishioners, a resentful, weary wife and t…
WOOLFING ROUND THE GENDER BEND A bit of a conversion experience for me, this. Disliked Woolf for years, Lighthouse and Waves and all, and therefore never read Orlando. Thought of it as a bit…
A DARKER HAZE ON AMERICA'SÂ MEADOW Traditionally, audiences don't go to Oklahoma to be unsettled . On the other hand you don't go to the Young Vic to have your expectations cosily met by …
TEENS FALLING, UNPROTECTED   An empty basement in a working class Kentucky neighbourhood in the mid 70s. An offstage adult world is preoccupied with unemployment, the main…
A SCRUTABLE TAKE ON CHINA   This is a beguiling 70-minute solo show from the actor, writer, wandering maverick entrepreneur and China pundit Mark Kitto. He plays three pa…
VOICES FROM THE VALLEYS Â Â Â Â It is a curious feeling to be half charmed and half irritated by a production: one moment absorbed in a confrontation and engaged with a character, …
NURSING ACROSS CONTINENTS    Kayla Meikle, stalwart in Victorian dignity and Caribbean matriarchy, addresses us firmly at the start of Jackie Sibblies Drury's manic, sometimes�…
IN THE MIDDLE OF LIFE'S JOURNEY..THROW A PLATE OR TWO    Ah, middle age! Waists spreading outwards, options contracting, marriage all too familiar, parents getting older fast …
SEXUAL ASSAULT , HARD LAW, AND AN ASTONING WEST END DEBUT   Forget the cold sadistic clotheshorse Vilanelle from Killing Eve. Actually, forget all Jodie Comer's screen awards. …
HALF A CENTURY OF HAPPY MISCHIEF Full disclosure: I have been following this man around for the best part of 50 years. Went with my brother Mike to his first show, Housewife Superstar, at th…
NOW THE TWO PLAYS TOGETHER HENRY VI: REBELLION.    ENGLAND IN FERMENT, AND SOME DANGEROUS WOMEN    We are in the 1450s, in a dangerous doldrum: Henry V of Agincou…
ENGLAND IN FERMENT, AND SOME DANGEROUS WOMEN    We are in the 1450s, in a dangerous doldrum: Henry V of Agincourt is long dead, his stripling son married to pretty French…
DO WE STILL LOVE ROOSTER?   So it's back, another St George's day before a west country village fair.  Twelve years on from Jez Butterworth's glorious shock-troop assault on…
THE ORANGE MONSTER RIDES AGAIN  The first thing to say is what everyone has said: that Bertie Carvel as Donald Trump is magnificent. Eerily so, capturing not only the ex-Presiden…
THE LOST BOYS OF THEATRE…   The tiny Actors' Centre is reborn under its new name, and since this play is set in what was a traditionally febrile, theatrical, subversively ar…
