Theatre review: Cats

T.S. Eliot is probably best known for The Waste Land, but for a true vision of apocalyptic despair you need only look at the stage version of his book of children's poetry Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. It is of course his famous collaboration with His Exalted Britannic Excellency, Master of all he Surveys, The Right Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, KC, MD, P.I, Mother of Dragons, FSB, which Eliot agreed to primarily because he was much too dead at the time to say no. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Richard Stilgoe was in Countdown's Dictionary Corner quite a lot so he was the next obvious choice to provide additional lyrics for the show's opening, with "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats" giving a framework.The result is Cats, just one of the C words closely associated with Lloyd Webber, which follows the story of the Jellicle Cats, a group of London felines who gather once a year to party, describe themselves to each other, arrange…