Monthly Archives: August 2026

THEY’RE BACK. SO AM I.

Well, you know by now how it is with me and Mischief Theatre.  All the way from 2013’s first west end outing to the new Thespians (https://theatrecat.com/2026/05/14/thespians-mercury-colchester-and-touring/) . I am a devotee.  To borrow a trope from espionage-fiction ,  I am but a fluffy white cat lying devotedly on their Blofeld lap.

         For a full and OTT rave in detail about this 2025 manifestation of Mischief Theatre I refer you down the scroll:  https://theatrecat.com/2025/05/14/the-comedy-about-spies/  . This offers my own terrible jokes and some of theirs. 

       But the show was worth revisiting, literally and criticslly, as all excellent theatre always is.  Besides, a year on and the far side of alternate casts, I was curious as to how the early Mischief Theatre founders would feel about returning to the core of this blissfully ridiculous show a year on.  Might they be…a bit tired, a bit jaded?     The company is, after all internationally successful now, and its leaders must be too grand to be in urgent need of  6 shows a week with fast-patter,  pratfalls,  and the trademark physical peril of Mischief  stunts.  Or maybe the jokes might sour a bit in these Putinesque days? (it is set in the 1950s cold war era of Bond and Smiley) 

      Well, not a bit of it.  Mischief haven’t tired us, or themselves.  It is clear that writer Henry Lewis still enters with glee the role of hopeless yet pompous old-thesp Douglas Woodbead, trying to audition for James Bond but falling out of windows backwards, half-dangling through a broken floor in the hotel set,  and suffering a serious grapple on the rooftop. Clear too that the other Henry, co-author Shields, is content to return to the role of hapless and much-abused Bernard;  that NAncy Zamit is personally nourished by entering the role of CIA-Janet,  domineering mother of another founder Dave Hearn, and that Chris Leask has no reluctance to return to the role of Ivanov the spy, who struggles so bitterly with his cover story as a spleen-consultant raised in the Channel Isles. 

     Greg Tannahill, another veteran of Mischief, is not only the hotel proprietor but fight-director and captain; and believe me,  if these people are to survive the run,  razor-sharp fight direction is their only chance.

      So I just wanted to refer you back to my five-star review last year – here it is again – https://theatrecat.com/2025/05/14/the-comedy-about-spies/ . But also to go again and pay them , and new recruit Bryony Corrigan, a fresh tribute because they really are national treasures, and do glory to LAMDA where they first met.  And astonishingly, though I had retained all year a vivid memory picture of the Battenberg-cake hotel rooms set and of Lewis trapped in a washing machine,  I had entirely forgotten the thrill of the lift-shaft scene,  and the brilliance of the fight-and-freeze lighting in the rooftop confrontation. Bravissimo!

www.lwtheatres.co.uk.  to. 19. September

Or mischiefcomedy.com 

WHEN THE SAGE OF SCARBOROUGH SAW THROUGH THE SWINGING ‘SIXTIES

      1969: nearly half a century ago, and this was Alan Ayckbourn’s breakthrough.   Philip Breen’s direction respects the author’s taste for in-the-round production (which the Old Vic can do, since Spacey insisted on that reinvention).   It achieves the famous immersion without loss (especially since Roger Allam can act expressively with his shoulderblades even if you’re sitting ten feet away behind him).  It  also beautifully respects both the period and the middle-age  tastes of the older couple,  Allam;s Frank and Dorothy Atkinson’s Fiona: there are  a few bars of Sarstedt and Elvis between scenes,  and a prim tea-tray and madam’s lounging pyjamas (Atkinson is the perfect ‘60s wife, her wardrobe pleasingly hilarious throughout, especially the final dirndl). 

         The younger pair, Bob and Teresa, have a nicely messier living-room,  though of course in the clever, tricksy Ayckbourn convention both are the same space,  the pairs passing one another unseen like ghosts.   And the extraordinary dinner-party scene,  two separate events staged simultaneously,  has the tables set crosswise:  so Fiona’s more decorous pass-ag hospitality runs simultaneous, alternate lines even,  with the later gathering  which ends in soup-flinging chaos.   That all this timeshift and omnipresence is perfectly clear even to first-time audiences is almost the most remarkable thing about Sir Alan’s contrivance.

          Anyway, it’s glorious.  I sneaked into a matinee preview, without a press ticket, but all six players were perfectly attuned to every absurdity and farcical moment.   From the opening entry of Frank, a lumbering Roger Allam in running shorts preparing to skip and knees-bend,  the struggle of flawed and confused humanity is all there.  Old Frank is a bit pompous, a bit of a gull,  but Allam gives him decency and puzzled innocent dignity:  Fiona was out till the small hours and left him to drink his surprise anniversary bottle of wine alone. 

    In the other living room Bob – Fiona’s adulterous paranour – is less admirable and far from innocent,  enraging and belittling his wife Teresa.  Rowan Polonski catches Bob’s yobbish sexiness bang-on:  as the story moves complicatedly on, he evokes a genuine nastiness,  the darkness only compensated for by the steel in  Ayesha Antoine as his resentful homebody  wife (it’s  fascinating to be back in the age of  non-earning tradwives:  pure nostalgia).  The sextet is completed – still with pin-sharp casting – by Adam Gillen as the nerdy  Featherstone and a wonderfully mouselike Laura Elsworthy as his wife:  innocents used as inefficient alibis by the misbehaving Fiona and Bob.

      It’s a classic play, but no spoilers.  Say only that it’s delivered with perfectionist energy and the streak of sad humanity behind the jokes that is a perennial mark of Ayckbourn.  Gillen and Elsworthy,  a shade of middleclass below Frank and Fiona and knowing it, are given little but helpless bewilderment in the first half, but  each rise to glory in the second. He funs furious with a mole-wrench, as outraged nerds always might. She – Elsworthy giving poor Mary a delicate ferocity –  has three remarkable moments as a mouse that suddenly, unpredictably yet inevitably, roars. Perfect. All the way to the cheese.  

oldvictheatre.com.  to. 19 September

A LEGEND REBORN

      On a sweltering opening night under the trees, what more can you ask than fresh life and passion flung into a famous show which had become, frankly,   a bit of an eye-roll?   And suddenly to find that it’s a 19-year-old understudy playing the crucial leading-lady role and doing the big (and often hackneyed) number Memories with such intensity, soaring purity and breaking emotion that a reputation is made while you watch.  It was a terrific night for Taziva-Faye Katsande, and us.   And we got a great deal else from director-choreographer Drew McOnie’s vigorous, eerily beautiful revival.

          I last saw CATS at the end of it’s 21-year London run,  still with the Gillian Lynne choreography and Nunn’s determination to have the cats roaming the stalls.   It felt, somehow,  wincingly tired despite the familiar scatter of memorable numbers: hard to believe that it won an Oscar and a Tony and kicked off the global-British-musical phenomenon.  Some songs were good, but who cared any more? Then  came the  creepy horror of the 2019 film with its illjudged digital abuse of a human cast: wittily, the composer himself took to claiming  “Cats movie” to airline officials as the explanation of why he needed an emotional support puppy.  

      But Drew McOnie, dancer-choreographer  as well as director, was in Cats years ago and loves it.  So he decided,  as leader of the Open Air Theatre, to make it anew. His passion shows, and pays off.  I have loved the TS Eliot Practical Cats poems since nursery (and was intrigued at the way fragments of the Four Quartets and Preludes got snuck in alongside their whimsy) . But the sketchy plot about cats choosing who gets reborn  wasn’t ever much to my taste.  I wasn’t all that optimistic,   but McOnie has done something properly beautiful. 

       It really is: sung-through, danced-through with frenetic energy and sharp physical wit, under and on a Sami Fendall curving set around a great moving moon, with fabulous costumes (non-furry but inventively catsuited, free and fine and varied as street-cats themselves) .  Any old weariness is gone. The first half feels almost like a meditation, a choreo-poem as McOnie puts it;  the vast Jellicle-cat ensemble (not furry, but in ingeniously beautiful stretch catsuits of pronounced indiviual charater) surge around exuberant. They are gangs and loners, feral and wild, striding, leaping, bending, hissing,  moving in eerie unity for a moment then suddenly ragged individuals on the prowl.  It’s mesmerizing.  Gradually characters emerge: Jaydon Vijn a rocking tomcat Rum Tum Tugger spitting rebellion in leather and fringes, Charlotte Riby a Gumbie Cat of dignity, Elliott Broadfoot in spats and white gloves a broad smug grandee Bustopher Jones; Katsande’s Grizabella’s  lonely, silvery figure drifting through the chaos.   Macavity cartwheels crazily, celebrating depravity and battered Old Deuteronomy gives  a gentler moment,  rising to a moving chorale in the smoke as the  wise ancient stoops and blesses. 

    It works because it’s not just jolly pop-rock dance: McOnie masters the emotional depths of choreography,  understands the expressions melancholy and hopeful that a body can show,   and as cats so eloquently do but we not often enough after infancy. At three points in the show there is a moment when the whole huge cast lean upon one another in a long row,  suddenly saying something about human community which took my breath away.   

       I felt for a while that the first half was lacking in big dramatic moments – it really isn’t much of a plot – but the second, 50-minute part was breathtaking, rich in character and story.  Gary Wilmot in massive patchwork robe is wonderful as Gus the Theatre Cat,  reminiscing about past glories and the way they don’t train kittens any more, perfectly delivering the Eliot wit ( I really do want the part taken over for a night by Ian McKellen.  Or him to do it as a solo).   The saga of Growltiger and the Siamese pirates sees proper sails appear, and junk-sail banners, and a grand fight:  it’s directed with pin-sharp wit and detail.   Skimbleshanks has a proper train,  Jet Yau’s Mistoffelees is a street-dance phenomenon,   and Macavity sets a ring of fire round the stage.  

        But again,  one of those sudden movingly beautiful moments of a long , leaning line of unity: cats, telling us much we need to know about being human. Lovely.  

openairtheatre.com. to 19 September