1,401 stories from theatrecat.com
BULLYING, BOMBAST,  BETRAYAL    The rediscovery of Githa Sowerby in the 1990s is very satisfying.   At its premiere in 1913 critics saw the quality of this one but …
SULTRY, SINFUL, SHOCKING, SHINING      Savagely observed absurdity, blinding flashes of insight, profound yearning, sudden poetry singing clear notes from the cru…
AN INTIMATE EPIC IN A FADING  EMPIRE  Hard to overstate what an absolute treat this is , and on how many levels. It is a terrific yarn, both romantic and tough, about history …
      There's something special about fin-de-siecle anger in any century: this is from 1697, years later than Wycherley and the mellower Sheridan, and bes…
SMALL IS  BEAUTIFUL, SHORT CAN BE SHARP     There is something stimulating about ultra-short plays: five to twenty minutes but directed and performed with all the c…
LOVE  AND LOSS AND 'THAT'S THE DEAL'     Jack is a middle-aged Oxford English don of the '50's , a bachelor and apologist for Christianity. Graceful, witty books and le…
ECHOES OF ANTIQUITY , FRESHNESS OF YOUTH      It's a storming performance. Young Isabella Nefar as Judith erupts upon us:  adolescent, exuberant, afire…
GUILT, GRIEF,  POLITICAL ANGUISH       Handy timing ,  to open on what is  local Election Day for us ruralists and at a time when everything has a Brexity ec…
DEADLY DEBTS    The artistic love affair between August Strindberg's ghost, playwright Howard Brenton and director Tom Littler continues to bear strange fruit,…
ANOTHER KIND OF LOVE SONG       This is gorgeous. Funny, truthful, wise, and bravely original in form.  Anyone with a a family " past, present, re…
THE WORLD DONALD GREW UP IN…      It's a long transverse stage: at one end at a scruffy crowded steel desk sits Jorgy, Michael Brandon exuding down-home amiabil…
GUILT, GRIEFÂ AND PITY Â Â It is almost uncanny how an Arthur Miller play, treated respectfully, can in the most wrenchingly extreme story still catch the common rhythms and tides o…
(Published in Daily Mail on Friday, one must moonlight to support this website's unfunded free existence "  but here it is  for theatrecat regulars..)      The minu…
DOWNBEAT, DOWNCAST Â Â Â Â Some years ago, leaving a particularly slow and uninspiring Chekhov performance in Yorkshire (never mind which play, spare the blushes) Â I heard a …
REFLECTIONS ON A RICH SEA OF INK…     I saw 22 plays in two days, but it was hardly half a bite of what was on offer.  In three days there were 40 , each perform…
ANOTHER KIND OF HOUR Â Â Â Staggering back from holiday, I sentimentally booked this at the New Wolsey in Ipswich because 2019 is the 50th anniversary of my unremarkable student perf…
BEATRIX BEATS BREXIT WITH TOP BEAK-WORK    The Haymarket these spring mornings is dense with toddlers and their attendants (I'd say by the look of it 20% parents, 50% …
A FRESH WIND BLOWING THROUGH AN OLD TALE     Down on the Riverbank Club, teen DJ Rattie is bangin' it behind the deck, telling the shy diffident Mole  "There i…
THE OLDEST HAVE BORNE MOST… Â Jack is an ageing, terminally ill, scruffy, alcoholic remnant of an actor, with a grubby cardigan and Falstaff gut. He is muttering lines from King Lear in…
SECRETS AND MEMORIES IN A WASTE OF WATERS     You can't fault the atmosphere:  Jasmine Swan's set takes you straight to the wide skies and muddy, reedy mystery of Bre…
CRACKS IN THE LIBERAL VENEER    I adored the energy, cleverness and cheek of BAD JEWS so much I went twice, as the pitiless author set his characters kicking, twisting, prote…
A COSY NIGHTMARE LEGACY OF THE 1930'S   From the late 1930's for nearly forty years, Mary Barton and her husband Berthold Wiesner ran a pioneering fertility clinic: they were amo…
BRILLIANT, NECESSARY,   QUESTIONING     If we accept that people are widely diverse, we have to accept that paedophiles are too.  Not all the same identi-monster.…
WHAT THE BUTLER CAME TO KNOW…  From its premiere at the Royal & Derngate and on the first leg of its tour, here is the stage version of Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker-winning novel.Â…
WRITTEN IN THE BLOOD  What great timing! Just as the worried-well Health Secretary gets rubbished for taking a commercial DNA test, announcing that it has "saved his life" becaus…
