1,418 stories from theatrecat.com
A DESERT HERO AND THE ROOTS OF TROUBLE.. One glory of Howard Brenton as a playwright is his ability to tease out, in very specific history plays (55 Days, Ann Boleyn, Dr Scroggy's War…
AS FLIES TO WANTON CLOWNS… You don't often see Queen Gertrude in Hamlet played by a short bearded Spaniard in a rainbow unitard with flamenco frills. But this is the Brig…
SUPERNATURAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, YET YORKSHIRE ALL THE WAY… Of all the lessons theatre has taught us about the backwash of WW1, some of the most fascinating are in 1930's pla…
A MODERN MASTERPIECE This is that finely balanced thing: a comedy built around a tragedy. Six summers ago, a newfledged critic for the Times, I wrote about its British premiere: "Bruc…
ROLLING ALONG, CARRYING ALL BEFORE IT Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly – you gotta laugh and you gotta cry. And believe me, you won't help loving this stunning, flawless, celebr…
GRIME AND GRACE IN THE URBAN JUNGLE You never know what you'll get from Poppy Burton-Morgan's Metta Theatre. I can't claim to have spotted every venture of her ten years, but definite…
MISCHIEF THEATRE STRIKES AGAIN. HURRAH! Years ago, a famous US television show called Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In hit on the strategy – as Ken Dodd had decades earlier, a…
LIGHTS! CAMERA!  SLOW BUT FASCINATING ACTION!  We sit as if we are the cinema screen of a run-down fleapit in Massachusetts: we confront the back wall at pro…
SIXTY YEARS, FOUR GENERATIONS: WHAT THE WOMEN DID Say, first of all, that Maureen Lipman was born to play Doris, the Lancashire matriarch at the heart of Charlotte Keatley's mo…
ELLE WOODS IS BACK,  PINKER THAN EVER Full disclosure: transport , domesticity and a hacking cough meant that on this two-show day in the lovely Curve I had to skip out at the i…
THE HEROES FROM THE EAST A hundred years ago, a Punjabi gunner in the 129th Baluchi regiment, Khudadad Khan, stayed at his post in the machine gun nest, injured and at bay , his comma…
STREETS OF LONDON, SNAKING TO NOWHERE… The boy of the title  is Liam: gormless and runty, lost and unnoticed , scion of a demographic much discussed right now. For he's a whi…
THE STATE OF ENGLAND:  FUNNY, BEAUTIFUL, SAD    AND TOURING! Some issues do best as satirical or farcical comedies: English class division, illicit sex, misunderstan…
SPALL, SQUALOR, AND 1960 Â I do not routinely worship at the shrine of Harold Pinter. I can study, appreciate and accept the menace, the unspoken, the rhythmic near-poetry of dialo…
TO BOLDLY GOÂ OFF YOUR HEAD, IN SPACE We are in the melamine mess-room of a space pod on the dead, black planet Pluto, with a crew of five. Unless one of them is a delusion of the nervy se…
THE CLASSIC COMEDY OF CLASSÂ ANDÂ CONFUSION Â We're back in the 1960's, and how! Beyond the jolly geometric curtain a bygone world revives. Shiny pink plastic boots, a r…
A CREEPY BRILLIANCE Â FROM QUEBEC What's going on? Who are the people in the next flat, why are they so friendly and yet so odd? Are they commonplace swingers, murderers, or a delus…
HEAD, HEART, AND HOPEFULNESS "God" says Christopher Riley, donnishly, "has a severely limited intellect". Jack Lewis, his Magdalen colleague, demurs with affectionate impatience, secu…
REASONS TO BE UNREASONABLE… I had almost forgotten seeing the first in this Neil laBute trilogy – Reasons to be Pretty – until the looming, hapless figure of Tom Bur…
BRANAGH AND BRYDON GO BANG Well, you’ll never see our Kenneth Branagh more exuberantly violent, nor tumbling into more compromising positions; nor so crazedly drugged, veering f…
THE TRUTH GAME. OR NOT. Its' a while since so many shrieks, barks and snorts of laughter shook the seats around me: don't take your drink in, you’ll risk doing the nose trick in th…
NOTAHIT On the banks of the Nile, the princess of Egypt lifts a Jewish baby from the Nile waters, but changes her mind, chucks him back and chooses a prettier one. The reject survives…
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI WATCHES MOZART WIPE THE FLOOR WITH THE COMPETITION – AS USUAL Pairing a copper-bottomed opera classic (Mozart's Così fan tutte) with an imported A…
PLENTY OF ACTIVITY, NOT QUITE ENOUGH RADIANCE This theatre is certainly fearless about potentially tasteless names – Bad Jews, Urinetown, now Miss Atomic Bomb: the first two of those, …
“OVERPAID, OVERSEXED, OVER HERE”…AND NOT AT EASE... In 1942 the Americans came to rural Britain: the US Eighth Air Force, its members often outnumbering local villagers 50 …
