1,405 stories from theatrecat.com
A WILD YOUNG PRINCE OF DENMARK IN THE DUSK     Easy to forget, after decades of prestige-casting and its torrent of ringing, over-quoted lines, how much HAMLET is a play …
MUM-POLE OF THE BAILEY….?    I paused overnight before writing this, to see if a bout of two-star irritation might fade.  After all, lawyer-playwright  Suzie Miller g…
FAITH LOST, AND WAKENED Â Â Â This is a moody, cloudy production shot through with streaks of mad rage, deliberately unsettling. Â Autolycus, spirit of Time the thief and occasio…
WESTMINSTER , A WILL, A WICKED WRANGLE Â Â Â Â This excellent play is the first by Shaan Sahota, a doctor by profession:Â but goodness, she (and the NT Studio, and director Dan…
MEDIEVAL MODERNITY There's a nice irony in opening, this week, a tale of an aristocratically  bred heiress, seized first by evangelical Christian faith and then by a charismatic man,  …
SMOOTH AS VELVET, SHOT WITH GILT AND GUILT Ahhh I do love a well-made play from the 1920s (remember The Deep Blue Sea , just lately!). This one too deals with adultery and hidd…
GRACE PERVADES    Theatre Royal Bath   Theatre is fond of sending itself love letters, albeit " from Sheridan's The Critic to Frayn's Noises Off " often prudently…
A WILD NIGHT WITH COUNT TOLSTOY    Even those who haven't read Tolstoy's great novel know about the train under which the despairing Anna will die.  So it dominates f…
PHYSICAL, PIRATICAL, PLAYFUL    All aboard the Jolly Todger, where Long John Silver's parrot Alexa (she comes from the Amazon, get it?) keeps accidentally ordering unwanted C…
DREAM ON! Â Â Â Five years on, Â beyond Covid lockdowns and its magnificent Guys and Dolls, here again is the Bridge's irresistible multi-mouse take on Shakespeare's sunniest comed…
WHY RATTIGAN COUNTS Quite a rare outing for this very late Terence Rattigan play, written after his star had fallen under the assault of mouthy Osborne, Amis and the "angry young men" wh…
BROWN BRITISH LIVES, FROM ENOCH TO SUNAK  Sathnam Sanghera's novel drew on his own life, partly homage to Arnold Bennett and with some echoes of Priestley too, joined the fine chronic…
It is indeed PLUTO not Apollo who rules the Underworld. Was tired. Apologies to all classicists.
SONDHEIM AND THE STYX  I last saw this 405BC Greek classic in Spymonkey's version and found it " sorry " unfroggettable. Giant puppetry, a community chorus tap-dancing as frogs w…
DROWNING PASSION,  TIMELESS RESCUE Marvellous play, this: wrenches the heart out of you , patches it up and sets it back on the hard road of life and love. It wrenched Terence Rattig…
I said it all at the Royal Court " https://theatrecat.com/2024/11/09/giant-royal-court-theatre/ " and it is an event not to miss, especially the way the world is in 2025.   Ev…
WELL WORTH THE MONEYPENNY Â Â Â Â This is glorious: just what we all needed. Â In the company's spirit of never wasting a terrible joke, I absolutely Bond-ed to it. Â Follow…
HOME AND FAMILY, BEAUTY AND SADNESS Â Few days late to the party with this , poor old theatrecat having seemed to fall off the press list;Â but very well worth the ticket (Old Vic prici…
AFFLUENZA APOCALYPSE    As Aubrey de Mandeville puts it in the great Antrobus books, "God, here's a strange lozenge-shaped affair!"  Buñuel meets Monty Python,  cour…
 A MODERN CLASSIC DONE WITH VIGOUR  Michael Frayn's play-about-actors is always welcome: a comic masterpiece and loving study in theatre's own absurdity. The first act shows a final l…
   A SATIRICAL WARNING FROM OLD UKRAINE    Not long ago a rompingly funny version of Gogol's satire on official incompetence ran at Marylebone ( https://theatrecat.co…
MATHILDE AND THE BUILDER (can he fix it? Probably not)      The set is glassand towering, city-chic backed by reeds and seashore; the figures before us NYC glamorous, …
WINNERS, WAGS AND WRONGS Well, here's a summer romp.  Hot on the heels of Tom Hiddleston in a disco version up Drury Lane, here's the RSC take on one of the sunniest Shakespe…
TWO WOMEN, LONG YEARS ACROSS HALF A CONTINENT Â Â Â 1935: below projected headlines about Communists executed in Shanghai and the war between Japan and Red China comes an audition c…
A HAMLET THAT STANDS ALONE "is it not monstrous that this player here,But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,Could force his soul so to his own conceitThat from her working all his visage w…
