Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

I caught up with an old friend to go to a comedy podcast recording of @TonsilHockey with Olga Koch and Catherine Bohart. It was lovely to see my friend again, and the show, which was a watch-a-long for an episode of Heated Rivalry was a lot of fun.  There’s something great about being in a room full of people who are locked into the same thing, whether that’s a tv show, a theatre production, comedy show, gig, or even (I imagine, though I have no direct experience of this) for sport. The shared highs and lows, laughter, cheers and groans are so much more fun when shared, and it’s a good reminder of what pack animals we still are any time we get an opportunity.   Anyway, I laughed a lot, with Phil Wang as the novice tribute being inducted into the cult, having not seen the show, with the rest of the room the experts on every scene.  So far so good... but I'd like to know what is it about me that means I am the person that always gets picked on to talk?  Particular...

Dirty Business  - I think we all know that we were sold down the river when Thatcher privatised the water companies, and how badly we have been swindled, but I defy anyone to watch this docudrama and not be horrified and seething with fury about just how badly this basic human and environmental need has been managed by everyone involved.  The three part series takes a good look at some tragic human stories of how contaminated water has caused death, illness, and ongoing ecological disaster.  Alongside these, we see the real life data and sleuthing heroes Ashley Smith (David Thewlis) and Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins) digging up the dirt, doing analysis that no-one else was, to show what the companies and regulators had been up to.  Shocking - watch it then write to your MP at the very least, although I feel like getting out the pitchforks and marching down to Thames Water HQ.  Doing a similar job as Mr Bates vs The Post Office last year, this is important telly....

Man and Boy at the Dorfman I knew very little about this rarely performed Rattigan play beforehand but, for me at least, this one was a hit.  I last saw Ben Daniels being amazing in Medea a couple of years ago.  This time he plays Gregor Antonescu, a successful financier in 1934, with all sorts of financial interests including loans to the fascist movements in Italy and Germany, clearly moving in those circles.  We meet him at the moment his dodgy dealing has caught up with him and he seeks sanctuary in his estranged son’s basement apartment in Manhattan.  The murky world of the rich hits pretty hard in the light of the Epstein scandal, showing how disposable people are in this world, including his son, as he offers him up without his consent, to a closeted gay corporate boss.  In this world, people are no more than commodities and Antonesco states 'Love is a commodity I can't afford' .  What matters instead is how anyone or thing can help with the deal....

Unusually, this was on at my local multiplex.  There is still something rotten in Elsinore, but this time Elsinore is a dodgy property company in London.  This is a new and pretty stark reworking of Hamlet, with Riz Ahmed as the prince, the heir to a modern shady business empire with hints of Succession. Loads of the language is ditched, and many characters and scenes are condensed or thrown out.  This could be bad, and it took me a few minutes to get my bearings, but actually this is really good.   Stripped back, but with gorgeous cinematography, a lot of this is set at night and with fast cars in the city with glamour and seediness next to each other.  Riz Ahmed is a convincing Hamlet, struggling with what is the right thing to do. Polonius (Timothy Spall) is simply nasty in this and Ophelia (Morfydd Clark) is still important but the mad scene is missing, something I am pretty pleased about as I always struggle with it. I really enjoyed the way that the 'To be...

Heated Rivalry - This is an enjoyable slow-burn romance between ice hockey players, developing over a 10 year period. Is it any good? ‘I mean, yes, I think so, probably’. There's a lot of snobbery about the romance genre, but this is interesting, not just because of the work itself,  but also the way it has captured the zeitgeist* and pulled together lots of live debates into one place. So, this is a slightly longer essay than usual, feel free to skip past. Firstly, what is this about? This is a Canadian word of mouth success that blew up in the US and Canada before Christmas and left networks around the world  scrambling to get in on the action, arriving in the UK in January. Most of the early noise was about the spicy sex scenes but it settles down into a proper old school yearning romance.  In addition to the character development and recognition of self, which is always central to a solid romance, there are the external pressures of being rival sports personalities in...

Written a hundred years ago and rarely performed, it was interesting to see this first Noel Coward work, written when he was 18 years old,  performed at the Park Theatre in a revised version by Bill Rosenfield.  It opens as we might expect, in a genteel drawing room and Sheila (Lily Nichol) and Keld (Ewan Miller), who are both aspiring writers about to get married the next day, meet with Sheila’s friend Olive and another 'bohemian' couple, Naomi and Edmund.  Naomi and Edmund have never married, and Naomi explains that marriage is a 'rat trap' that would destroy their relationship, and predicts that Sheila will end up sacrificing her career for Keld.  Sheila and Keld laugh it off, pointing out they are too clever and too in love to make the mistakes they see in others.  After this slightly clunky foreshadowing, no surprise then to see that after a giddy honeymoon period, the pair find themselves bickering all the time, and then, later still, Sheila is no longer w...

I don’t know this play at all so went in with no preconceptions and just the knowledge that Nicola Coughlan was leading as Pegeen, a young woman trapped in a miserable life surrounded by drunken and foolish men.  In this iteration at least, it's a weird play tonally, lurching from drama to comedy and then into melodrama.  To add to the challenge, there was a definite choice to have the cast speaking in rich Irish accents, so the main conversation I heard on the way out to get an icecream in the interval was people discussing how much they had (or hadn’t) understood.   The main plot is that a stranger arrives in this tough, wet, tight knit rural community, telling tall tales of heroism. When he arrives it stops raining and the sun comes out and Pegeen, the local widow  Quin (a tough Siobhán McSweeney), along with all of the local womenfolk are very smitten with this young man. However, the local men are not so impressed with Christy (Éanna Hardwicke), this newcom...