1,406 stories from theatrecat.com
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…
 QUEER AS FOLK BY THE INFINITY POOL Jeremy O Harris is a much feted American playwright (a Tony for Slave Play) adept at drilling in to the moment: BLM, fashionable white guilt, sh…
SCIENCE, SIBLINGS, SOUND AND FURY   This is a satisfying play. To take a painting analogy, it satisfies not in the way that a perfect still-life vase might, but more like a Ka…
CAMPING ON THE PLANKING At the Coliseum last autumn Gilbert and Sullivan's seagoing Savoy Opera was immense, with a huge revolving ship, Les Dennis as the first sea lord, a massive chorus an…
THE SHADOW OF A BEGINNING, ALABAMA 1936Â Â Â Â Forget, for the moment, both the fame and the the arguments over Harper Lee's classic novel:Â Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation is …
WELCOME BACK, BITING SHARP AS EVER   In 2010 Bruce Norris' play wowed the Royal Court: this is a ten-year anniversary (well, plus two years lost to Covid) so forgive me for quotin…
THE ROUGH TOUGH BIRTH OF A CITY Â Â It is not often I resort to drawing in the notebook, but there it is: half an hour into the first part of David Hare's play about the city planner Ro…
A PLAY IS A PLAY IS A PLAY IS A WEDDING   With typical wit, the doughty little Jermyn has captured an intellectual-farcical oddity from New York complete with author-director …
BRACING, BELTING, BENIGN    At the end of the evening the great diva, director and muse informs us that we too must sing. In a packed house, on the far side of a pandemic whi…
 LEARNING TO LIVE     Sometimes judging others harshly is a relishable guilty pleasure. In Ruby Thomas' wonderful 80-minute sequence of snapshots of family therapy,…
NOT A FINE ROMANCE Â Â Mamet plays are Marmite plays. You can applaud Speed the Plow, adore Wag the Dog on screen, and have a pleasurable argument with the opposite sex after a particu…
LOVE AS AN UNCOURTLY CONTESTÂ Â Â In 2009 " and again in Chichester 2018 " I missed Mike Bartlett's mischievous, half-earnest play about a gay man wrestling with his identity (and h…
A VIGOROUS, HEARTSHAKING BRUSH OF OPPOSITES    Two artists in a studio:  the older one pale and floppily blond, languidly self-protective, drawling, preaching a cool…
