Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

I don’t know Henry IV pts 1 and 2 very well, so don't really know what they lopped off to squeeze the two plays into 3hrs 40 minutes including interval.  But whatever was lost, the remaining bits produced an engaging few hours.   Ian McKellen’s Falstaff, who was the original big draw for me, was as good as I hoped, playing a big bluff character with subtlety underneath the coarseness.  His Falstaff is older of course, but with richness and depth even in part one, and the relationship with the prince develops beautifully during the play.  My big takeaway though was that Toheeb Jimoh as Hal was really impressive and a talent to watch I think. He plays the prince as a high energy and wild fun seeker at the start.  He holds himself tight, with a sense of danger and anger just below the surface and this comes out not just against his father the King (Richard Coyle), but with Falstaff as his other father figure.  And I loved the way the relationships are played in that triangle.   I foun

We were a bit late to the party booking tickets to An Enemy of the People, so it was almost sold out on the cheaper seats  and we ended up standing.  We did a bit of horse trading so that we could stand together, but I quite like standing; there’s often a touch more camaraderie with the plebs standing at the back so as usual there were a few interesting chats to be had before and afterwards. As for the play, I found the opening scenes a bit dry with loads of exposition and struggled to get into it a bit, and the earnestly hip gang on stage were also quite annoying. But by about half an hour in, I had bought into the narrative and was interested to see what happened next.  Centred around a water pollution scandal in a small town, it reminded me a bit of The Inquiry at Chichester last year.   This reworking of the Ibsen play makes us think about our own complicity in the situation we find ourselves in not just in a theoretical way, but bringing it to life with current ethical and politi

The Hills of California A Jez Butterworth play comes with high expectations.  As usual I deliberately hadn’t looked at reviews although I did see a lot of 4 stars so I was seated and ready, as was the youngish (good) but quite noisy (bad) audience. The play is set completely in the Seaview Guesthouse (previously Seaview Guesthouse and Spa - but with no view of the sea).  And we open in the public lounge - a seventies classic with broken jukebox and a tropical themed bar.  Three of the family’s four daughters are assembling as their mother Veronica lies dying upstairs.  It’s Blackpool in the midst of the drought of 1976 and everybody is very very hot. This first scene tells us a lot about the family dynamics (mother upstairs is still keeping up appearances wearing her wig) and the women are arguing about whether Joan, who moved to California 20 years ago and has never been back, will show. So, a family drama about grief and loss mixed in with a lot of family dynamics.  And the heat give

I had a good afternoon at a matinee of this musical on the last day of the run.  The play is framed through a contemporary lense via a grumpy Bob Geldof dealing with questions from a sceptical Gen-Z-er about this event that she learnt about in her history lessons.  The production obviously knows its audience because it gave us a moment to be horrified that our youth was someone else’s history lesson.  It was true though that the vast majority of heads bobbing along to the music were grey.    A juke box musical in many ways I really enjoyed the reworking of hits so that we never got impersonations, instead reimagining of the music.  That’s obviously for the best when you are dealing with Bohemian Rhapsody - it’s a brave singer that takes that on (we had a really powerful version actually from the company) but possibly my favourites were Message in a Bottle and Blowin’ in the Wind, both reimagined for maximum emotional punch.   The cast and live band were all really impressive, pretty mu

This play, For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy is inspired by Ntozake Shange’s For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide /When the Rainbow is Enuf.   It was a moving but also uplifting piece of theatre that I was properly glad to join in a standing ovation for.   Using the framework of a therapy session, the few hours on the stage are filled with dance, poetry, song and, most importantly, stories from Black boys lives.  Exploring what it means to be Black British and male, it journeys through love, school, racism, colourism, what language does, and the stereotypes and expectations these young men face. ‘What age were you when you found out you were scary?’.  This is a sometimes affectionate, but often brutal summary of what Black masculinity is, what it isn’t, but also what it could be. Properly funny and with well chosen song and dance to change our mood as well as being beautifully woven into the stories.  Great performances by all of the ensem

My evening started with a mad dash to get out of work and into town in time for this week’s theatre at the NT, this time for a revival of Dodie Smith’s 1930’s family drama.  It was lovely to bump into an old friend outside - that moment of confusion when you hear your name and can't see where it is coming from and wonder if you have misheard, then that sudden recognition!   In the theatre, the seats were the cheap ones third row from the front which are usually fine, but with two tall men in front of us, we knew we were in for some ducking and diving - one of them had the grace to apologise for being tall, although he didn't offer to swap seats unfortunately.  As usual I knew little about this play beforehand and so I was on the lookout in the first half for the twist, or hidden secret or grudge that was going to turn it around* and then I realised that actually, there wasn’t going to be any sharp edge or clever reveal.  Instead this is a slow but detailed examination of a fami

This is a really long post, but just a memory of some of the highlights of our trip.   When we planned our first ever trip to NYC it was still winter and the forecasts for March were for cold, cold and more cold.  For once we got lucky and it was sunny, dry and warm for most of our trip.  We scheduled ourselves a fair pace with our 'don't miss' and touristy things, plus a long list of  'if we have time' - sadly the latter will have to wait for another trip.   Monday March 11th  We flew out from Heathrow at 11.20 and landed in JFK at around 3.30pm.  And even an enormous school trip on our flight didn't dampen things too much.  I did get to watch Dune and Wonka (Timothée Chamalet overload!) on the way out, both films I had been putting off seeing, so I didn't feel it was a complete waste of time.  Immigration was surprisingly smooth given the stories we had heard.  So, once we had checked in we set out to explore the Times Square area and have some dinner befo