1,406 stories from theatrecat.com
COULD YOU? WOULD YOU? FOR A MILLION BUCKS? Here's a struggling young couple (well, not that young, Â both on second marriages and he has a daughter going to college). Along comes a billion…
UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED TO BE A HOOT      It had to happen: someone had to notice that in the comfortable upper-middle and aristocratic worlds of Jane Austen's novel, …
NOT A REVIEW BUT SOME JOLLY NEWS Not a review, because this was the first performance of a modest weekend testing the water: a script-in-hand, moustaches-falling-off, fresh-o…
 THE HEART STILL FEELS THE BEAT     Everything Bob Marley sings lifts the heart, instructing it to rise and triumph and unite in joy: lively-up yourself!  …
THE DEVIL IN THE DETAIL: scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry  There was a spate of criticism when Richard Norton Taylor's dramatisation of the Grenfell Inquiry was announced, despite it…
 THE RACE WHERE NOBODY WINS    This feels like a howl of baffled frustration, from a millennial generation ( writer and director, and all four characters) unable to deal wi…
THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH.    Almeida, N1 THE SCOTTISH PLAY WE NEEDED  Say what you like about star-casting and auteur-ish directors messing with Shakespeare, but sometimes …
AN OLD STORY OF YOUNG MEN Â Â Balliol College Oxford, 1910. Confident young Etonians are hurling crockery downstairs, yelling "I'm a bastard, I'm a bastard, rather be a bastard than a …
EAST IS EAST, IN EAST ANGLIAÂ Â Â Â Shamser Sinha " who is on the National Theatre Connections project " relished the idea of writing a play about a South-Asian working-class fami…
AN EVER-MORPHING PROTEAN TEXT…RENEWS AGAIN BEFORE OUR EYES    Every Hamlet should give us something new. The play is a philosophical and psychological labyrinth, its jew…
 FOUR WIVES LATER, MANTEL AND MILES COMPLETE THE JOURNEY It was rising eight years ago that the first two parts of Hilary Mantel's majestic Wolf Hall trilogy came to the stage…
NOT QUITE A REVIEW, MORE A TRIP DOWN A SIDE ALLEY I was on the early train up when news came that poor old Southwark had ,for the second time, been forced by illness to cancel two performanc…
WHO NEEDS PANTO? A CLASSY FLIGHT OF FANCY ON THE ROAD    This show, which I had the joy of seeing in a packed Theatre Royal Norwich alongside many small thrilled children, …
THE LAST GREAT PLAGUE Â Â Â Â If you lived as an adult alongside the onset of AIDS forty years ago you don't forget it: the lost friends and workmates , the rumours of ignorance w…
A POCKET JEWEL    We always knew that among the first sproutings of recovery would be a few Alan Ayckbourns, popping up as welcome as snowdrops. I am always fond of this early…
AN ARCATI MORE THAN MEDIUM I once took a student nephew to this Coward masterpiece, and the thrill for me was that he didn't know there was a g"". Until there was. Therefore for a rising gen…
A SHAGGY-DOG TALE IN CRUMBLING SPLENDOUR     Sometimes the building upstages the play. I had not explored the late-Victorian, half-restored glory of the Coronet before,Â�…
AN EPIC OF PASSION AND PERFORMANCE     Here is life, history, theatrical passion, great migrations and lyrical romance in the rain. Here's anger and humour and…
A HISTORIC HIT BACK, BETTER THAN EVER   This portrait of three bickering sisters, trading memories and revelations in the days before a mother's funeral in a snowy Yorkshire …
LOVE, GRIEF, AND A BRAD PITT ALBATROSS  With loving detail, right down a glimpse of coat-racks beyond the far door, the downstairs studio serving Tom Wells' new play has become a…
ICE WORK IF YOU GET IT…     Phew. The Broadway-rooted, Disneylicious, long-awaited red-carpet premiere night featured (of course) an ice -blue carpet. And the th…
ARTHUR SMITH CONJURES UP HIS DAD   These days our Arfur comes complete with an overture! It takes the form of Kirsty Newton at the piano (artfully disguised as an upright 1940's …
THEATRE'S FAIRY GODFATHER DOES IT AGAIN We needed this. The return of the big classic shows to packed houses  in the Barbican, Chichester and Sadlers Wells has been invigorating, but Lloy…
   Occupied France, 1944. Two teenagers newly in love meet in an empty house.  Elodie is French, Otto a German soldier. They are both endearing and annoying, as b…
NOT A REVIEW BUT MIGHT SEND YOU THERE… Take this as a report not a review, because actual work commitments made me skip at the interval. But I was persuaded to the long 70 minute first…
