Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

It’s always interesting to see the ways that Greek tragedies are reworked for a modern audience.  The Bacchae are a bunch of women, followers of the god Dionysos who serve as the chorus but are the main characters this time.  They are back in Thebes to help Dionysos take revenge for his abandonment by his aunt Agave (Sharon Small) after the death of his mother.  The Bacchae are led by Vida (a fantastic Claire Perkins) who introduces the Bacchae to the audience as individual independent women who have all joined for different reasons, and are all living for pleasure without being ruled by men (except Dionysos that is - to be fair, they do call out for themselves!). When the women of Thebes hear about this, they all begin to join the Bacchae too.  Whilst Dionysos sneaks into Thebes and entraps his half brother King Pentheus (an absolutely fabulous James McArdle) the Bacchae take Agave hostage but she soon becomes the most fanatical of the group and blood thirsty in a w...

This latest play at the Donmar is a funny family drama but it is also full of knotty debates about how to live well.  Juniper Blood by Mike Bartlett opens on a family farm that needs renovating; Ruth (Hattie Morahan) and Lip (Sam Troughton) have just inherited and are full of ideas of how to be more sustainable.   With definite Chekovian undertones with the family farm under pressure and fraught family relationships I thought that might be where this goes, but alongside the entertaining family dramas this turns into a energetic and gripping debate  about what is a good and ethical way to live in a capitalist world gone bad.  Throw science at it or carry on regardless, make pragmatic changes around organic and sustainability, or go full survivalist and return to basics?   The characters represent and advocate the different approaches. Ruth is full of middle class guilt and compromise, so advocates organic farming and a few pigs, whilst Millie (Nadia Par...

At a puppet show in a town square, a deaf boy is shot dead by a soldier for not responding to his commands.  The next day the whole town wakes up deaf or pretending to be.  This play at the Royal Court is based on the 2019 book length poem by Ukranian poet Ilya Kaminsky.  Using signing, spoken and written word, it's also a multimedia work, making use of cameras and projection, puppetry and even a drone hovering intimidatingly over the audience at one point.   The set is deceptively simple in design, with the puppet stage staying central whilst other elements and the cast move around it. The sound design is excellent too, with white noise and low rumbling sounds, sometimes blurred speech, evoking a tiny bit of the deaf experience.  It sounds as if it will be bitty, but it does come together in something of a poetic tapestry.   This is a complicated play, a fable, with layer upon layer of metaphor and allegory, and despite light and moving moments, ...

Fisk - Series 3  - I loved the first two series and have been waiting eagerly for its return.  Fisk is now a Partner which means she gets to bring in the nice biscuits and a fancy coffee machine,  but she still has her badly fitting brown suits and continues to be the fall guy as she spends her day fending off mendacious fools.  Fabulous scripts with great dialogue, the characters are well-meaning but also self absorbed and mildly incompetent. Both petty and banal, the comedy is always underplayed but it's dry, warm and quietly very funny. Recommended (Series, streaming on Netflix) Platonic -Series 1 - Late to the party on this one and for the first few episodes I wasn’t getting it at all. The point of this is to take the premise of When Harry Met Sally and show that a man and a woman can be ‘just friends’ and it definitely does that. Despite my misgivings, I did keep going with it (to be fair it was sometimes on in the background) and by episode 6 it grew on me a ...

The Merry Wives of Windsor is playing at Shakespeare’s Globe and we grabbed a £5 standing ticket.  This is one of Shakespeare’s sitcom plays with short, silly episodes of mucking about.  The Globe is good at this stuff, and fairly quickly had us all laughing along.  This is the one where Falstaff decides to seduce two married women to get himself some cash, but they decide to trick him back.  Lots of over the top characters squeezing every laugh and double entendre they can out of every line, it was a lot of fun.  The treatment of Falstaff (played with cheeky charm by George Fouracres) at the end was perhaps a bit much for a modern audience so although it’s made light of there was also some uncomfortable shuffling of feet around me.  And I liked the way that they brought out the unpleasantness of Mistress Ford’s husband, which stays unresolved and leaves a bit of a sour taste.  But just under 3 hours of good quality entertainment for a fiver is an abso...

A play about morality, hypocrisy and women’s place in a capitalist world, despite being well over a century old  and in Victorian dress (written in 1893 and banned from performance until 1925)  many of the arguments being made in this play could be happening today. Vivie (Bessie Carter) is a modern young woman and has just graduated from Cambridge, with plans for a professional career.  Her mother (Imelda Staunton) has been largely absent due to travel and business affairs but today she pays a visit, expecting her daughter to conform to becoming a genteel young woman and marry well. Staunton as Kitty is as impressive as you would expect.  I loved the mix of grand airs all being undercut slightly by the London twang underlying her accent.  The four men appearing in the play are a mix of entitled, arrogant, selfish, immoral, venal or just plain unpleasant.  Robert Glenister (excellent as Sir George Crofts)is the embodiment of grasping bullying capitalism, we ...

Adeel Akhtar is continuing to carve out a line in morally ambiguous roles after his performance last year in Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard  and his angsty Prime Minister in Black Doves.  This time he plays Anghad Singh who is a mid ranking shadow minister when we meet him, eyeing party leadership after a sex scandal.   He believes he represents change, as he tells and retells his story as the son of a Sikh baggage handler, gradually sharpening it at each retelling.  What he is less explicit about but becomes clear over time, is that  he went to the same elite schools as his white British colleagues, his dad made good (giving shades of Sunak) and eventually became a property magnate and a slum landlord too.  Just as he makes his move to become the leader of the party, his father dies, leaving all his estate to Anghad and none to his two sisters.  Anghad thinks he deserves the money and the position and fights for it.   With multiple themes,...