1,405 stories from theatrecat.com
A DANGEROUS PASTORAL You wait months for a violently emotional taboo-smashing play by Edward Albee and two come along at once. After the bitter razor-sharp humanity of Who's Afraid of…
THE HOME LIVES OF OUR OWN DEAR LAWYERS… When a topic is painfully current and theatre plunges in, the heart does not always sing with optimism. But Nina Raine is an old hand , a…
TWO CULTURES, ONE TRICKY DEAL David Henry Hwang's play as a hit in the US, and as it premiered at this enterprising little theatre under diretor Andrew Keates, I took an appropriate f…
MOLIERE , MOZART, MARBER AND A MORAL.. Something for everyone here. I like the assonance, alliteration and rhetorical flourishes in Patrick Marber’s reworking of the old Don Juan myth …
A HANDBAG FROM THE PAST.. This is a joyful thing, and it needn't have been. There is always peril in a play you know too well from schooldays and through a score of performance…
AN AMPHIBIOUS SONDHEIM ROMP Here's the god Dionysius, deprived of his Noel-Coward smoking jacket and unconvincingly disguised as Heracles in a lion skin. He's having a panic attack on…
ETERNITY WAS IN OUR LIPS AND EYES…. ..and also, frankly, in the stalls. Some evenings, often here at the RSC, three and a half hours pass in a flash leaving you dazed, affected and tearful…
SPQR: THE ROMAN SEASON STRIKES HOME WITH COLD STEEL The trumpet sounds for the RSC's Roman season, the mob is rowdily onstage, and the turbulent politics of 44 BC are reflected thr…
MOTHER COURAGE WITH A CRIMINAL TWIST Yetta Solomon survived the Ukrainian pogroms when Cossacks raped and murdered her family. But they didn't get her. Ten years old in 1919 sh…
THEY GOT RHYTHM..OH YES This is the big one, the Broadway spectacular, the one where rom-com meets top-flight ballets in more costumes than you can blink at; where dream-sequen…
BLUEBIRDS OVER DOVER, RATTIGAN ON A ROLL Yesterday , on her hundredth birthday, Dame Vera Lynn had her face projected on the white cliffs of Dover and a flight of Spitfires was due ov…
BREXIT MEANS… A BIT OF A DOG’S BREAKFAST Rufus Norris of the National Theatre is to be applauded for taking on the post-referendum mood, and making an honest stab at under…
TOP HATS AND TALES A nice gag in Richard Harris' 1983 play comes in some desultory chat between the ladies of the tap-dancing class. Referring to a play one of them has recommended to…
WEDNAPPED: THE HELL BEFORE THE CALM I really fell for this 2014 comedy by Chris Chibnall, writer of such dark telly stuff as Broadchurch. Not just because it is a hoot, a wickedly joy…
THE DARK HEART OF MARRIAGE One audience tweeter emerged calling James Macdonald's fine production “exhilarating”. A wet rag after three hours' exposure to it, I wouldn't e…
LET COWARDS FLINCH AND TRAITORS SNEER…WE’LL KEEP THE LAFITE FLOWING HERE Some moments of modern history deserve reimagining by honest playwrights: we need to rememb…
LUKE JONES, FRESH FROM HAMLET,  SPINS WITH ECSTASY AT THE NEW R & G I first and last saw this play whilst at school. It was slowly and quite unforgivingly murdered by fello…
CLEESE MEETS FEYDEAU. DOES IT WORK? Farce. French farce. Feydeau farce. Fin-de-siecle farce with curly cornices and ladies in corsets. Feelings about the genre are always, for me, …
NEVER TOO OLD TO GO ROUND AGAIN… In Arthur Schnitzler 's LA RONDE was a scandal: a chain of sketched sexual encounters in which one of each couple moved on to a new seduction…
LUKE JONES EXULTS: A TACTILE MORIARTY PULLS IT OFF FOR A NEW GENERATION We’ve had so many ‘great’ Hamlets it’s hard to either keep track or care. Cum…
SWEET AS A NUT, SHARP AS A TACK Helpless, really: I was putty in its hands. And I caught it a few days late, so no risk that the ecstatic giggles in the stalls or the standing ovation…
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES GROPES FOR DIAMONDS IN THE MUD Timothy Spall tells a good story – bear with me – about performing a Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Nationa…
THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME AND BENDING OF GENDERS.. It's a grand thing to be seduced and succumb. To suspect a director of vainly messing about with a Shakespeare play too close to your he…
BACK TO FAUST PRINCIPLES "I hope nobody misses / The moral in a show as short as this is.." . Marie Corelli, whose 1895 bestseller on the Faust theme inspired Luke Bateman and Michael…
FIVE GO ROARING UP WEST… This is a transfer, and well deserved. My Menier review is below…and I stand proudly by every star of it. Five playful mice. But below you will find a…
