1,418 stories from theatrecat.com
DEADLY DEBTS    The artistic love affair between August Strindberg's ghost, playwright Howard Brenton and director Tom Littler continues to bear strange fruit,…
ANOTHER KIND OF LOVE SONG       This is gorgeous. Funny, truthful, wise, and bravely original in form.  Anyone with a a family " past, present, re…
THE WORLD DONALD GREW UP IN…      It's a long transverse stage: at one end at a scruffy crowded steel desk sits Jorgy, Michael Brandon exuding down-home amiabil…
GUILT, GRIEFÂ AND PITY Â Â It is almost uncanny how an Arthur Miller play, treated respectfully, can in the most wrenchingly extreme story still catch the common rhythms and tides o…
(Published in Daily Mail on Friday, one must moonlight to support this website's unfunded free existence "  but here it is  for theatrecat regulars..)      The minu…
DOWNBEAT, DOWNCAST Â Â Â Â Some years ago, leaving a particularly slow and uninspiring Chekhov performance in Yorkshire (never mind which play, spare the blushes) Â I heard a …
REFLECTIONS ON A RICH SEA OF INK…     I saw 22 plays in two days, but it was hardly half a bite of what was on offer.  In three days there were 40 , each perform…
ANOTHER KIND OF HOUR Â Â Â Staggering back from holiday, I sentimentally booked this at the New Wolsey in Ipswich because 2019 is the 50th anniversary of my unremarkable student perf…
BEATRIX BEATS BREXIT WITH TOP BEAK-WORK    The Haymarket these spring mornings is dense with toddlers and their attendants (I'd say by the look of it 20% parents, 50% …
A FRESH WIND BLOWING THROUGH AN OLD TALE     Down on the Riverbank Club, teen DJ Rattie is bangin' it behind the deck, telling the shy diffident Mole  "There i…
THE OLDEST HAVE BORNE MOST… Â Jack is an ageing, terminally ill, scruffy, alcoholic remnant of an actor, with a grubby cardigan and Falstaff gut. He is muttering lines from King Lear in…
SECRETS AND MEMORIES IN A WASTE OF WATERS     You can't fault the atmosphere:  Jasmine Swan's set takes you straight to the wide skies and muddy, reedy mystery of Bre…
CRACKS IN THE LIBERAL VENEER    I adored the energy, cleverness and cheek of BAD JEWS so much I went twice, as the pitiless author set his characters kicking, twisting, prote…
A COSY NIGHTMARE LEGACY OF THE 1930'S   From the late 1930's for nearly forty years, Mary Barton and her husband Berthold Wiesner ran a pioneering fertility clinic: they were amo…
BRILLIANT, NECESSARY,   QUESTIONING     If we accept that people are widely diverse, we have to accept that paedophiles are too.  Not all the same identi-monster.…
WHAT THE BUTLER CAME TO KNOW…  From its premiere at the Royal & Derngate and on the first leg of its tour, here is the stage version of Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker-winning novel.Â…
WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD  What great timing! Just as the worried-well Health Secretary gets rubbished for taking a commercial DNA test, announcing that it has "saved his life" becaus…
I'M GONNA SIT RIGHT DOWN AND WRITE MYSELF A REVIEW… Â So dress up sassy, shake your chassis, get some mesh on your flesh like the ladies who sing with the band. Sell your vocals to the …
NOT AT ALL FLAT, SUFFOLK…     Exuberantly funny, elegant as a Deauville hotel balcony and sharp as the crack of a 78rpm record over a lover's head, Joanna C…
POISONED LOVE  I sometimes wish Harold Pinter had written more plays like this: decadent, agonized, helplessly sensitive to the nuances of friendship and treachery. More prai…
 MARTYRS OF THE MCCARTHY YEARS      Ideological hostilities across the world,  fake news and paranoia, a resurgent deep left, uneasy relations with Russia, anti…
NOT YET DEAD CAT BUT…  Since I stopped being The Times Chief Theatre Critic  it has been five years:  on this site there have been  930 posts, over half a million words…
A HOLLOW CROWN IN MUD AND BLOOD The clue is in the paper hat, worn by a dour-faced Simon Russell Beale on the programme cover.  This is not stately, sacred, shockingly regicid…
JAMAICA BREEZES UP WEST, WITH GRIEF AND GUSTO Â Â Â Â Jamaican mourning tradition, longer than the Irish wake and noisier than the Jewish shiva, involves –Â we lea…
PSYCHOPATHIC LIBERAL MEETS DINOSAUR PARENTS    Can we, I wonder, ever learn to deplore past attitudes without being vengeful about it? Hot on the heels of Mike Bartlett's…
