1,401 stories from theatrecat.com
LIKE A BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED DECADES….  If you're my age, it's a time machine. Songs like The Sound Of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Water (bestselling album 1970,71 and 72…
THE SAVAGE BEAUTY OF THE FIRST AIR WAR   Britain did not stand alone in WW1.  As our hero sings in John MacLachlan Gray's 1982 play: "South Africa and Canada and Austr…
GUEST CRITIC MICHAEL ADAIR LISTENS, AS WE SHOULD A glass box filled with smoke encapsulates the Royal Court stage. Shadowy figures patrol its perimeter, sometimes staring out a…
LOVE’S PRECEDENCE AND CRUELTY    George is a journalist-intellectual, award-winner, amiably vain and sixtyish.. He twinkles for England, with much black-…
NOT SO VERY   A wooden box swings, pendulum-regular, in a peerlessly spooky attic of Halloween horror, designed with glee by Anna Fleischle .  It is inhabited. Difficult, …
LOVE,  LIES AND THE PAIN OF TRUTH   Is it better to live in a lie, a happy story, or to admit the messy sinful truth? Should you assume that every person you…
ALONE ON A WIDE, WIDE SEA      The Rime of the Ancient Mariner may be studded with overfamiliar quotations, but taken in its entirely, has power to disturb .Â…
LECHERY AND TREACHERY, MACHISMO AND METAL…  'I had forgotten" said a companion as we staggered out, deafened by the final outbreak of crazed metallic drumming, "how syph…
ROMPING FABLE OF A GREASEPAINT CENTURY        Twins, three sets of them, in a dynasty of performers from the 1880s onward: a theatrical boarding-house with a h…
FOR BETTER FOR WORSE? FOR FIVE MICE ANYWAY    If you're going to mess about with a classic but slightly dated Sondheim musical, be sure to do it brilliantly. Do it …
CONCEPTION AND THE CREATIVES   It's a sign of the sparky credibility of Nina Raine's play about a woman desperate for a sperm donor – having broken with her younger, …
THE HEIGHTS OF LIFE    Theatre sometimes gives films – and books – a remarkable translation, making stories deeper ,stranger , more tense.  …
THE YOUNG DARWIN RISES AGAIN     The Jerwood Gallery is for the first time a theatre: in the small excitement of a new space dark shapes loom ahead of us, angular, …
LUKE JONES TAKES THE MEASURE.. This is a made for measure Measure-For-Measure. Its greatest achievement is hacking the flabby old Jacobian down to the right side of 90 minutes. It rol…
A MASTERPIECE OF LOVE AND LOSS   I saw this on tour in Cambridge, and heroically held of telling you until the West End embargo lifted. It's wonderful: puzzling, moving, c…
A DOSE HARD TO SWALLOW David Hare has chronicled Labour politics – and the state of the nation -for nearly half a century,  brilliantly catching truths and tensions. …
THE EXTINCTION OF ENGLAND'S EASTERNMOST VILLAGE         There is no Grit fishing-village now on the Lowestoft shore, but in 1900 there were homes, shops,…
DIVORCED BEHEADED DIED – REVIVED! Took me a shameful while to catch up on this clever little riot of a feminist musical, down from an Edinburgh triumph and packing the Ar…
TALES OF A CITY    "I see a beautiful city" says a spotlit actor, and the rest take it up in styles from Radio 4 to rap, then group and regroup, changing with the shrug o…
WARM HEARTS,  COLD WAR After the Salisbury-Novichok affair there is a sour laugh when Stewart, the MI5 official, reassures the nervous Jackson family that the coming arres…
GUEST CRITIC BEN BLACKMORE MUSES ON CHEESE-KNIVES AND TELETUBBY HOUSES PINTER 2 announces itself in bold, Sex And The City-type projections, in the Sex And The City font as though it …
STEEL CELLS AND SADISM    Settling in, you'd think you were at the Cenotaph or the Tattoo.  A military soundtrack booms out Imperial Echoes and Jupiter (I Vow To Thee M…
A GLORIOUS SERPENT OF OLD NILE    This can be a beast of a play: epic, three and a half hours, scenes spread across the Mediterranean from Rome to Cairo by land and sea.Â…
MOLIERE IN THE MODERN MIDLANDS     It says something good about our arts establishment that this sharp caper comes from the Royal Shakespeare Company, not some …
PARENTHOOD, PRAYER , PROSECCO The renamed Tricycle (no, I am not taking sides)  Is open: its leader Indhu Rubasingham launches her sprauncy new theatre with Alexis Zegerman's …
