1,418 stories from theatrecat.com
GLIMPSES OF ETERNITY (Review first published on D.Mail, in shorter form)     This is wonderful. Sometimes a simple short performance can shake, rouse, even change you.…
worth going again I say.. Just thought I should mention to theatrecat readers how wonderful this show it. Saw it twice before the pandemic, nipped back to a matinee a week or so back…
2021 BRITAIN IN A STATELY STORMY NUTSHELL   Just what we needed, I thought! A good old state-of-the-nation black comedy with a semi-derelict Manor in a howling storm, the sea …
SIX CENTURIES ON, IT'S GEOFFREY CHAUCER'S ROUND     Zadie Smith humbly refers to her first play as more like "homework" than the novelist's usual dread of a blank page. Ch…
A CHEKHQUERED RESPONSEÂ Â Â Â Â Vanya and Sonia are siblings " though she is adopted " and have led dull dutiful lives in a remote country house surrounded by cherry trees and…
      ROLL UP! IT'S BACK! Ah, Christmastime!   There's nothing like a buff chap in spike-heeled patent thigh-boots somersaulting in the air to make you feel festive.…
A HUMAN ZOO OF ALPHA MEN There are good plays to be written about white male privilege, and about modern capitalism and its relentless expectation of self-promotion and constant advancement …
THEY DO NOT GROW OLD AS WE IN THE STALLS GROW OLD    May as well tell you, last week I had the ultimate pensioner experience, and it was a blast.  A midweek, senior-price…
TWENTY YEARS AGO, ANOTHER HEALTH CRISIS CHANGED LIVES   Just before the pandemic closed everything down, Emily Jenkins' deft two-hander won a top Edinburgh Fringe award and many p…
FACE THE MUSIC, AND DANCE!     This was a new outing for me.  I have long loved the Watermill some miles west, but I hadn't really registered the Mill at Sonning w…
Reprise: they're still at it, as good as ever    If I were a PR for the Society of London Theatres, I would get these six performers together for a photocall with the five fro…
 THE MYTH AND TERROR THAT CHILDREN KNOW      Sometimes a violent rip occurs in the thin veil of materialism ,commonsense, morality and law.  Children kn…
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, …
