Robert Tanitch, Author at Catholic Herald

Robert Tanitch

Theatre: Karl Marx: boozer, sponger and roué

November 16, 2017

London has a new commercial theatre, and everybody in the theatrical profession, as well as regular theatregoers, will be wishing it well. The Bridge Theatre, co-founded by Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr, who ran the National Theatre so successfully, is on the South Bank between Tower Bridge and County Hall. The repertoire will be mostly

Theatre: When Oscar Wilde took the Puritans’ side

November 02, 2017

Dominic Dromgoole’s first season at Vaudeville Theatre is devoted entirely to the plays of Oscar Wilde and opens with A Woman of No Importance, a satire on Victorian society and its lax morality, its hypocrisy and its double standards of one law for men and another for women. The play has always had a bad

Theatre: This is a great play – and I’m not lying

October 19, 2017

Florian Zeller, the multi-award-winning French novelist and playwright, is having as big a success on the London stage as he is having in Paris. In The Lie, Zeller argues there are times when it is better to lie than to tell the truth; and especially so if you are cheating on your husband, wife or

Theatre: The thrilling story of a historic handshake

October 05, 2017

Oslo is JT Rogers’s award-winning Middle East politics drama at the Harold Pinter Theatre. It records the clandestine peace process which led to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn in 1993, in front of a beaming President Clinton. The play, big yet intimate, wittily

Theatre: A cut-price chorus line that’s not to be missed

September 21, 2017

Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies, one of the great American musicals, looks back to the golden age of vaudeville and the glamour of the famously beautiful Ziegfeld Follies, with their long legs, furs, feathers and fantastic headgears. The musical is so expensive to stage that revivals have usually been concert performances. Dominic Cooke’s thrilling

Theatre: Three characters in search of an audience

September 07, 2017

David Harrower’s haunting Knives in Hens at Donmar Warehouse, which lasts 90 minutes and is acted without interval, is strictly for serious theatregoers who are prepared to make an effort. There are just three characters, all medieval peasants: an ignorant ploughman, his superstitious wife and a widowed miller, who can read and write. The language

Theatre: Actors make the most of unhappy families

August 24, 2017

American actor Stockard Channing makes a welcome return to London in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Apologia at Trafalgar Studios, playing a Marxist art historian and absent mother who was active politically in the 1960s. Her two sons arrive to celebrate her birthday and the publication of her memoir, in which they are not even mentioned. Channing

Theatre: Williams classic gets a dubious update

August 10, 2017

Tennessee Williams, who was never afraid to be big and theatrical, always thought Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was his best play. The big surprise of Benedict Andrews’s radical production at Apollo Theatre is Magda Willi’s artificial set. The second surprise is the amount of nudity. The updating is a mistake. It spoils the

Theatre: Kids Company faces the music

July 27, 2017

The full title of Committee, the verbatim musical at Donmar Warehouse, is The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee Takes Oral Evidence on Whitehall’s Relationship with Kids Company. The music is by Tom Deering. The book and lyrics by Hadley Fraser and Josie Rourke and edited from the parliamentary transcript. Kids Company was founded by

Theatre: Holiday’s fall leaves the audience gasping

July 13, 2017

Audra McDonald won a great many awards in New York for her solo performance in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill – a tribute to the singer Billie Holiday – and I have no doubt that her reception in London will match New York’s. Lanie Robertson’s script is billed as a musical play. It

Theatre: An English historical epic with no character

June 29, 2017

DC Moore’s Common at the National Theatre is described as an epic tale of England’s lost land. The revolving stage is covered in earth and the background is a huge cyclorama of sky. Jeremy Herrin’s production, designed by Richard Hudson and lit by Paule Constable, looks good on the vast, wide-open space which is the

Theatre: Give this bonkers Cold War Woyzeck a miss

June 15, 2017

Georg Büchner wrote Woyzeck in 1837, the year he died, aged 23. There was no definitive text, just fragments of paper. It wasn’t performed for more than 70 years. It is widely regarded as the first modern play and a forerunner of the social dramas of the 19th century. Alban Berg’s 1925 adaptation memorably converted

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