1,418 stories from theatrecat.com
BRUTAL, VIOLENT AND TENDER   Around a King's coffin surge personalities and politics , power plays and lineage . A royal bier is loaded with crown and jewelled cross, around …
 HEROIC STORY, NEAR MISS   It could hardly be a better theme and story for this terrific little theatre, which since its opening has explored the darkness of Nazism and the heroism…
A TROUSER-LEG TSUNAMI AND A COATHANGER DREAM     They came off the boats: a Windrush generation, wanting to work and live in cold strange Britain.  In an upper…
HEART AND HUMOUR, REALPOLITIK AND GOD     This is a wonderful play, all you could want: philosophy, history prefiguring the present moment, humour and character , …
A RAVE IN MESSINA Get da kids into Shakespeare! The world worries about it. So Jamie Lloyd hits a formula hard to beat with one of the sunniest comedies (only one pretend death). So …
MOTHERHOOD, FOR LIFE     Had there been trigger warnings they might add "extreme nursing" alongside the usual alerts about sickness, death, abortion and conflict. Believe …
A THREAT CALLED AGGIE . Good when the news feeds theatre-moments. This week, AI solved in two days a medical conundrum which had baffled humans for a decade. On the other hand,…
VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED ON SS ELSINORE Last time the ever-inventive Rupert Goold directed here it was the Merchant of Venice, set in a casino so we could all write "merchant of Vegas"…
RICHARD II     Bridge Theatre, SE1  A THRILLING DANCE AROUND A CROWN    This is one of the most lyrically lovely, metaphorically rich of Shakespeare's…
A TRICYCLE MADE FOR THREE?   After Mike Bartlett's COCK " where one of a gay male couple falls for a girl " I wrote that the poor sap of a hero thinks he he choosing a sexuality …
A BRITISH BASTARD STALKS THROUGH HISTORY   What's to be done about truly awful people: amoral, selfishly irresponsible, arrogant and greedy? A time-honoured British appr…
  A GREAT TURNING POINT, CAUGHT IN ASPIC  It is 1942.  Prime minister Churchill has travelled to Moscow to meet Stalin. Each side has a problem at home with voices wanting …
WILD SHORES IN WARTIME   Risk taking a gap between seeing David Greig plays and you forget how downright louche things are likely to turn out. (I had lately revelled in Prudencia…
A FEMALE EVOLUTION, FRANK AND FINE First salute the cast: Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindraand Harmony Rose-Bremner, for an unpretentiously powerful tour de force. Ea…
   ABSURDITY AND SUBLIMITY After the glorious Parisian detail of the revived Rigoletto here , Johannes Schutz' spare bland box with only four flat doors is an opposite take…
A FEMALE EVOLUTION, FRANK AND FINE First salute the cast: Deborah Findlay, Romola Garai, Gina McKee, Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner, for an unpretentiously powerful tour de …
FUNNY ABOUT THE UNFUNNY     Billy Bash,  rated the third most offensive comedian in Britain, was once the dominant partner in Biddle and Bash. He's still on tour,…
A DARKER THOMAS CROMWELL     Edward Bennett as Thomas Cromwell is a proper thug: everyone's memory of the HR-outplacement weasel who starts the sacking meeting wi…
 SUBURBAN ANGST IN THE NEW SA There's nothing like a tight, awkward comedy of neighbourhood strife, where neighbourly differences reveal unexpected fissures within the couples, and tiny p…
AT THE SUMMIT OF RAGE AND HOPE     Fear not, this isn't a Greta-gloom lecture but a lively, imaginative, borderline wild reconstruction of the years culminatin…
NO SINKING FEELINGS HERE, GIRLFRIEND Call it a jukebox musical if you like, but only if the jukebox came alive, went rogue and started tottering around the stage on rubber feet hurling insul…
SACRED MONSTERS IN THE UNDERWORLD Deep darkness within the U-shaped seating,: Â into it on wheels glides the dark gondola:Â Charon the ferryman, after millennia punting to and fro acro…
A HIGH-KICKING WOODEN WONDER     Serious fun, this. Never liked the Disney Pinocchio, or even in childhood the over-preachy Carlo Collodi book about the defiant wooden…
PRESENT MIRTH HATH PRESENT LAUGHTER. AND MELANCHOLY. AND FALSE NOSES   In a play as familiar as this it is small touches that spring fresh life. Like the moment when the fool Fes…
SPRINGTIME FOR…EVERYONE    Joyful, headlong and full-hearted, here comes sacred outrage. If director Patrick Marber and the Menier had been minded to issue wet 'trigger…
