Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

Theatre first - Oedipus at the Old Vic This production with Rami Malek as Oedipus and Indira Varma as Jocasta is loud, looks fabulous and is full of dancers…  This is a very spare version of the classic Greek story, a bare script and a narrative that I am guessing took up less than half of the allotted 1 hour and 40 minutes without interval.  The set and production design was spare and beautifully lit. Malik’s Oedipus is smartly dressed, stiff and pretty sure of himself at the start, which makes his unravelling more obvious.  Indira Vardy though is passionate in her portrayal of Jocasta and her moment of revelation was, for me, one of the best moments in the play.   Overall the production didn’t fully hit the spot for me, mainly because of the way that the short emotional scenes which moved the story along were split between the extended dance sequences, taking the edge off what I felt should be more of a driving inevitability of the tragedy.  Don’t get me ...

 Film Grand Theft Hamlet     I have never played a video game properly but I do love Hamlet and the idea of a mashup grabbed me.  This film is ridiculous and often had me laughing out loud, but it is somehow beautiful and even moving in places.  During lockdown, actors Sam and Mark had been playing Grand Theft Auto and came up with the idea of staging Hamlet within the GTA world.  The result of the 16th century smashed into the 21st century virtual world is full of shocking violence but also great intelligence, wit and charm.  The film documents the process using only footage from the game; they hold auditions, rehearse and then finally run a live performance.  Moments of sublime beauty play out, whilst in the background, (or sometimes in the foreground) people are shot, or fight, or crash a blimp or a car.  In the same way as  Staged  seemed sometimes to capture something profound in amongst the messiness and stupidity of huma...

Backstroke, a new play by Anna Mackmin at the Donmar is a bit of a mixed bag but the cast including Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig was a very good reason to take a look. The play opens with Beth (Celia Imrie) in a hospital bed and Bo (Tamsin Grieg) her middle aged and flustered daughter trying to deal with hospital staff whilst following her mother’s wishes and at the same time, manage, long distance, a crisis with her own daughter.  At first I thought this might be a dementia and death play, and to a certain extent it is, but very quickly the play starts to jump backwards and forwards in time, seeming randomly, each scene exploring more of the difficult relationship between the two women. In the first half we have learnt that Beth is not an ideal mother. In the second half though it becomes clear that this is a more nuanced story about mothers and daughters.  We begin to see a more rounded picture, and that Beth and Bo have had moments of joy, closeness and mutual support mixed...

A two and a half hour play about climate conferences doesn’t sound like the most appealing of evenings but this was edge of the seat stuff from start to finish.  Documenting the 10 years of delay from the first serious UN climate conferences, we first see the role of the oil companies and their partners in obfuscating and demonising the science, setting parties against each other and forming unholy allowances.  Then it moves on to focus on the conference which finally got agreement.   The set is a circular conference table and all audience members are given their lanyard and pass as they enter (I was the Norwegian delegate) with some of the front row actually sitting at the table.  In a clever move, it is a charming villain who is our guide here, in the form of Don Perlman (Stephen Kunken) who was a climate sceptic, oil lobbyist lawyer and an active disrupter of agreements, and who weaponises the specific interests of each country against each other.  He al...

I had a visit to Tate Modern with a friend with a membership, something of a treat to be able to wander into all of the exhibitions without scrabbling for a booking or a discount with my Art Pass.   First up was Mira Lee's Open Wound in the Turbine Hall, an industrialised process turning out creepy decaying flesh like objects.  I watched with fascination for a while, but eventually it made me quite sad. Next up was Anthony McCall's Solid Light which was lovely, an interactive light show, apparently simple but which had all of the people in there, whether children or adult, walking into or just running their hands into the light sculptures that appeared to be solid, but just aren't.  Not sure what it means but I really enjoyed it. Last was Helen Chadwick, with her extraordinarily visceral work focusing on the body and flesh in general.  Somehow it reminded me of some of Gunther von Hagen's work with plasticised flesh.  But my favourite in this exhibition wer...

I am spotting a bit of a theme in my January telly. Fellow Travellers:  this lush and steamy romance between two men over decades from the 50's to the 90s, is hidden away a bit at the moment on Paramount+ and I watched this on a free trial (which I then forgot to cancel of course!).  Whilst the romance creates the heart of the story, it is a vehicle for looking at civil rights abuses and battles over the years.  Hawk (Matt Bomer) is a war hero and a State department official, whilst Tim (Jonathan Bailey) is a congressional staffer working for Senator McCarthy.  The story spends a fair chunk of its time on the McCarthy years, focusing on the persecution of LGBTQ+ people alongside anyone with slightly leftish tendencies as 'fellow travelers' of communism. The accompanying racism and sexism and bigotry of the time in general is brought to life through the secondary characters - what must it have been like to be gay and Black, and maybe also a woman?  The kafkaesque...

I've tidied up my notes on some of the films I saw in January. Bird:  Strange,and pretty brutal fantasy/realism coming of age film with Barry Keoghan as an apparently deadbeat dad to Bailey who is 12, views the world through a phone camera and doesn’t want to wear a bridesmaids outfit to their dads wedding.   Set in Gravesend, with a scruffy urban landscape but also capturing the wild beauty of the marshes too where Bailey spends a lot of time watching and photographing the birds, and where they also meet a man called Bird looking for his family. Bailey's mum and siblings are living with a pretty unpleasant man, and there are some gruelling scenes, but there is also kindness and community amongst the brutality.  I really enjoyed Keoghan's layered performance, and I did chuckle at what did appear to be a reference to Saltburn in the middle there.  This isn't at all flashy, a quietly classy film despite the bravado we see throughout, and has a good heart which sh...