Robert Tanitch, Author at Catholic Herald

Robert Tanitch

Theatre: Reboot turns Anouilh tragedy into farce

March 17, 2016

Jean Anouilh, the most popular French playwright of the mid-20th century, was equally successful in Paris and London. Since then he has been shamefully ignored in our capital. So I was thrilled to learn the Donmar Warehouse was to stage Le Voyageur sans baggage. Sadly, Welcome Home, Captain Fox! is not a translation but an

Theatre: A man caught on the wrong side of history

March 10, 2016

The Patriotic Traitor in Jonathan Lynn’s play at Park Theatre is the 84-year-old Marshal Pétain, the great French commander and acclaimed national hero for his defence of Verdun in 1914. In World War II he surrendered to the Germans and set up a puppet government in Vichy. When the war ended he was arrested and

Theatre: Eight women cannot do justice to Cyrano

March 03, 2016

Actresses have, quite rightly, been complaining that there are more roles for men than there are for women. One way to address the problem in classic plays is to change the sex of the character. Another way, not so successful, is to have all-female casts with the women pretending to be men. We have seen

Theatre: Why August Wilson rivals Arthur Miller

February 25, 2016

August Wilson is one of the great American playwrights of the 20th century, up there with Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, set in the 1920s, is part of his “Pittsburgh” cycle, consisting of 10 plays, one for each decade, charting the black experience in 20th-century America. Ma Rainey and

Theatre: Fabulous Fiennes does Ibsen proud

February 18, 2016

Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder is open to many psychological interpretations and is not the easiest of plays. The critics at its British premiere in 1893 were quick to dismiss it as “three acts of gibberish … incoherent and absolutely silly … a feast of dull dialogue and acute dementia … the most dreary and

Theatre: Mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown

February 11, 2016

The Mother at the Tricycle Theatre is by Florian Zeller, a French novelist and playwright in his mid-30s who has won many awards in France and been regularly produced in Europe. He writes about a middle-aged woman suffering from acute depression. As with Zeller’s companion piece, The Father, there is no certainty, only ambiguity, when

Theatre: Inner-city youth are upstaged by wildlife

February 04, 2016

Simon Stephens’s Herons had a critical success when it premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2001. Memories of the trial of two 10-year-old boys who abducted, tortured and murdered a two-year-old boy were still fresh then. Fifteen years on, children are still killing each other; but the play, in Sean Holmes’s revival at Lyric,

Theatre: Bourne cranks up the volume on a classic

January 28, 2016

Matthew Bourne, who was awarded a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours list, has been reinventing the classic ballets for close on 30 years. His great achievement, ever since his unforgettable all-male Swan Lake, is that he has been able to win over audiences who don’t know about dance and wouldn’t normally go and see

Theatre: High kicks among the Broadway low life

January 21, 2016

Guys and Dolls, a landmark in American music theatre, premiered in New York in 1950, when it ran for 1,200 performances. It has first-rate songs by Frank Loesser and a first-rate book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. The script, sentimental and witty, is based on Damon Runyon’s The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown and

Theatre: When professional seducers go to war

January 14, 2016

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803) wrote only one novel, an erotic and psychological masterpiece. It’s a brilliant study of sexual intrigue, and when Les Liaisons Dangereuses was first published in Paris in 1782, it was an immediate succès de scandale and sold out within a few days. Its heartless immorality both shocked and thrilled. Christopher

Theatre: Dazzled by brothers’ 140 tons of junk

January 07, 2016

The American playwright Richard Greenberg says his play The Dazzle is based on the lives of the Colyer Brothers, about whom he knows almost nothing. Homer and Langley Colyer were two eccentric American recluses who became famous when they died in 1947. They were found in their barricaded house in Harlem, buried beneath 140 tons of

Theatre: Christmas Carol gets the panto treatment

December 22, 2015

At the funeral service of Charles Dickens in Westminster Abbey in 1888 the Very Rev Arthur P Stanley pronounced A Christmas Carol to be the finest charity sermon in the English language. The present adaptation at Noël Coward Theatre is written by Patrick Barlow. The director is Phelim McDermott. Their Pollock’s Toy Theatre pantomime approach, with its cut-out

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