1,418 stories from theatrecat.com
A TREMENDOUS TRINITY Â Â This trilogy, transferred from Chichester is an epic: a thrilling voyage through time to the earliest days of Anton Chekhov. And, if it is not too philis…
A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR ALL TIMES AND NATIONS… "Allow for a three-gin recovery period" advised a tweeter, during the previews of Simon Stone's take on this perennial theme of baby…
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES LIKES LOTT A LOT… It's easy to get worked up by celebrities and big names crowding out the talented-but-unknown usuals. 'They're just there to get…
FLASH BANG WALLOP.. This 1963 show – based loosely on H.G.Wells' semiautobiographical KIPPS – was originally a vehicle for Tommy Steele. And there were moments, as …
 JUST WHAT WE WAND-ED? It's not only Henry IV who gets two plays. Cry God for Harry, Hogwarts and St Joanne: the woman who (whether you love the tales or not) admirably got a tell…
THE NEW F-WORD (AND A FAIR FEW OF THE OLD ONE) You can trust Alistair Beaton to keep a cast learning last-minute lines. Here, just as grace-notes alongside the main theme, are jokes a…
ONCE UPON A TIME, WHICH COULD BE NOW… What a marvel is this Sondheim / Lapine classic musical: playful and deep, absurd and earthy, mocking and wise. And what a piece of luck…
AYCKBOURN AT IT AGAIN..OR IS IT There's tennis without a ball (audience requested to do plock-plock sound effects on drums), a mini-farce, thriller and horror story also supported by …
EIGHTY YEARS ON: Â MEN BEWARE WOMEN At a moment when both female leaders and would-be leaders are rampaging across the news – May, Merkel, Leadsom, Eagle – it is pleasan…
FAITH . FAILURE AND THE GENIUS OF FRIEL A veil of rain surrounds the stage where three narrators will appear, each with their own version of a shared life "shabby, bleak, de…
ZELLER ZOOMS UP WEST, SHARP AS EVER The Menier, back in spring, brought grave delight and snorts of laughter with this zinger of a play by Florian Zeller; its rapid transfer up…
IN RANSOME’S WAKE, A NORTH SEA TALE OF TOUGHER DAYS Eastern Angles having a cleaner mind than BBC Films, Titty gets to keeps her name in this faithful, ingenious, charmin…
 VACATION,  EXPLOITATION,  ACCUSATION… I caught up a few days late with this (cheap seats aloft, excitingly closer to the rock-face in Hildegard Bechtler's Mediterranea…
REBELLION AND REALITY IN A SKEWEDÂ WORLD God bless a playwright you can't predict. Mike Bartlett's Charles III was founded on a pretty simple idea, and a frankly rather jejun…
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CHILLED, THRILLED, DAZZLED Ralph Fiennes is a menace. An utter menace. Other actors beware. He will cheat, stab and simply out-act you right off th…
STRINGS, SWINGS, A SOPRANOÂ SOARING In E.M.Forster's HOWARD'S END, the dreamy Helen Schlegel can't listen to Beethoven without imagining heroes, goblins, dancing elephants an…
A CLASSIC OF THE DESPERATE HEART "We're death to one another, you and I". The great cry from trapped, degraded macho Freddie, struggling to leave the desperate demanding Hester Collye…
A DREAM AND A DISASTER: Â TRIBUTE WORTH PAYING Full disclosure: I really care about the Titanic story, love maritime history, have met one of the last living survivors of the…
INNOCENCE, EXPERIENCE, MEMORY, TRAUMA Around a derelict room and abandoned trunk, Michael Crawford prowls, a tweedy, damaged old man at the heart of this low-key but unforgetta…
THE RSC IN ROMPING MOODÂ Credulity and the con-artist, blinding-with-science and the selling of snake-oil, belong to all human eras. Ben Jonson's play is set in 1610, when a…
ADRIFT ON ANOTHER DEEP, BLUE, LONELY SEA… The Deep Blue Sea is Terence Rattigan's masterpiece (and about to play at the National Theatre). A young woman who has left her eminent…
THE LAST BLASPHEMY TRIAL..AND ECHOES FOR TODAY It is a thousand pities that John Osborne is predominantly famous for the spitting spoilt-brat misogyny of Jimmy Porter in Look Back In …
A HEART FOR BEAUTY, Â A ‘FIFTIES DREAM If Daniel Evans means to leave his acclaimed stewardship of Sheffield Theatre on a flood of tears, he's chosen the right producti…
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES Â ON THE MENTAL Â WARD... You're clinically paranoid, you're black and you're bombarded on a daily basis with racism and when presented with an oran…
A CAUTIONARY TALE OF TRADE AND TERROR It is the modern terror that stalks our interconnected world. You're shut in a stone cell, alone and far from home, and in a chaotic incre…
