1,418 stories from theatrecat.com
A CENTURY ON, THEY WALK BEFORE US It was gruesome, politically problematic, tragic and heroic and wasteful; it was a turning-point in history. I have written before about how l…
THE BOHO BOUVIERS: Â REBELLIOUS RECLUSES Hot on the heels of THE DAZZLE (about the New York Collyer brothers living in hoarderly squalid isolation) this is about Edith Bouvier Beale…
A HALF-FORGOTTEN QUEEN RISES… School history was terrible. Terrible! We got the Tudors, and a bore-in about the Thirty Years War, but a fog of confusion and a sense of 1066 And …
DARK DOINGS IN THE BURROW I hope that the great Beatrix Potter, out of copyright just last year, would be pleased at the pointing, bouncing, giggling and gasping in Red Rose Ch…
A WHIFF OF SULPHUR UNDER THE BROCADE… There are certainly crinolines, but Quality Street it ain't. How smart of Josie Rourke to offer adults, worn down by fairylights and panto …
THNEEDS MUST WHEN CONSUMERISM DRIVES… It's a heartfelt welcome. The Old Vic, for a long while fiercely grownup, throws its arms open to children under Matthew Warchus' leadershi…
SUICIDE BY THINGS... We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin's School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-ish iron lif…
SUICIDE BY THINGS… We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin's School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-i…
A LORDLY FOGGÂ Â WITHÂ Â UNDERSTAGE COGS AND A Â FAITHFULÂ FROG… If you can't face another panto (oh no you can't) but want to share a treat with the young, this is …
BROADBENT & BARLOW BRING BACKÂ THE BIG BAD BANKER…Â Tom Pye's design of Victorian découpage creates a toy paper-theatre within the stark stage area: the scenes revolve…
UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLES AND UNPRINCIPLED CERTAINTIES It is a mildly shaming reflection that  Tom Stoppard plays generally dismissed by his cadre of scholarly admirers as "not…
ALL IS FORGIVEN Â (UNLESS YOU’RE DEAD, AND DON’TÂ DESERVE IT)Â This is part of Dominic Dromgoole's candlelit farewell to his tenure at the Globe: a set of late Sha…
SOMEDAY MY PRINCE WILL…GET OUT OF BED AND PULL HIMSELF TOGETHER… It is almost comically calculated to stir up timid traditionalists. The enchanted sleeper is a bloke – David Emming…
WHO NEEDS CHARLTON HESTON? I have a weakness for schlock-historical movie epics, due to a regular childhood treat when I was at school in France and my Dad and I would sneak down …
THE HAPPIEST PEOPLEÂ Â OF ALL… For half a generation there has been a truism in the musical theatre world that nobody can do Jule Style and Bob Merrill's FUNNY GIRL, because…
 YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL! SURE YOU WANT IT? Revolving sleek as a spaceship is Es Devlin's multi-layered set: the office and neon slogans of Swan cosmetics: bottles and jars, sed…
THE BELLS! Â THE BELLS! Â THE BOOMING! "Where else" says an exasperated Sir Henry Irving , asked at the gates of Heaven to justify the profession which estranged him from his religious m…
SUNRISE TO STARLIGHT, A NORTHERN TRAGEDY Under a bleak black mountain panorama, this is a shattering play about selfishness, mismatched love, and how grief and guilt can make you mons…
SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE… Another flickering evening in the candlelight of the Globe's Jacobean theatre: engrossing, melodramatic, comic, epic. Ben Jonson was disparaging about Pe…
STILL SHOCKING, Â STILL SEXISTÂ ! Â Â GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES SMACKS HIS LIPS OVER A VINTAGE PINTER… I get the itching feeling that if anyone else had written th…
OH YES IT IS! Â Â CHIPPY , HOME OF PANTO, STRIKES AGAIN It is, famously, the local panto for the Cameron family, though the paterfamilias PM himself might want to avoid swivelling head…
DOWN WITHÂ PAN AND CINDERELLA! After the high-priced saccharine vapidity of ELF , it felt like time to check out something both classier, and more affordable. Always perilous for th…
OPERA’S THE THING!  YOUR LIFE IS BUT A SIDESHOW!  HURRAH! A play about the foundation of Glyndebourne Opera – "Snobs on the grass" as some cruel postwar journali…
POLITICS AND SCANDAL; IT WAS EVER THUS.. You're an MP, a clever lawyer with cross-party popularity, newly invited into Cabinet to steer through a Bill to disestablish the Anglican Church and…
A DOUBLE BILL: RATTIGAN AT PLAY AND IN GRIEF There may be voices which jibe at Kenneth Branagh for being producer, deviser and co-director of a year-long season, finding starry casting like …
