Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

I have already written about quite a few films I watched this year, and so this isn't an inclusive list by any means, more of a brain dump of the recent movies that made an impression on me.   Saltburn Lush and stylish with fabulous actors giving great performances.  Just love Rosamund Pike in particular as the rich mother, and Jacob Elordi absolutely nails the effortlessly beautiful rich boy.  The intended and actual star though is Barry Keoghan as Oliver and he is excellent throughout, keeping us on our toes with his motives, and deserves credit for keeping a straight face in some of his scenes! Giving Brideshead and Ripley vibes, despite a criminal underuse of Carey Mulligan I enjoyed this even though it’s not as clever or as deep as it thinks it is.  It made me laugh quite a lot, mostly when I was supposed to, particularly with the couple of gratuitous scenes which anyone who has seen it will be able to identify immediately.  I have never seen a bathtub...

This isn't everything I watched last year, but I wanted to call out some of the things that have stuck with me in different ways.  There might be minor spoilers but I have tried to avoid giving away any big plot secrets  The Woman in the Wall A gripping thriller with Ruth Wilson and Daryl McCormack set in Ireland and digging into the horrors of the Irish laundries scandal and the ongoing impact.  I will watch pretty much anything with Ruth Wilson and as Lorna she plays a woman who has lost a child in the system and has never recovered.  The layers of secrets still being held in the community, and the tensions and secret kindnesses are beautifully drawn. The blurring of the lines between delusion and reality are played so cleverly, partly for keeping us on our toes about what is really happening, and then also to mirror the delusions vs reality that still exist within families, friends and the wider community. Makes for an addictive narrative too.  And there is a...

  I popped into town on a last minute whim and got a great £20 ticket right by the stage for this new play by Annie Baker.  The journey by train was a bit painful so I rushed in to the auditorium out of breath just as they were closing the doors, wriggling out of my coat as the lights went down. This play was an immediate change of pace.  Sofi (Christina Kirk) arrives first, with her book, to sit in one of the many sun loungers, eventually joined by Eileen (Marylouise Burke) and one of those desultory conversations follows that might happen by a pool or in a hotel garden. But it becomes clear that Sofi, Eileen and the other residents are actually at some kind of strange clinic (which used to be a motel and where the patio overlooks a car park and a bakery) and all are undergoing strict cleansing regimes.   Over the next hour and 45 minutes there are snippets of conversation with long pauses and then jumps in time called out by Sofi ...'5 hours later’ ...‘22 hours lat...

  Before we went off to the theatre this week we dropped into the new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection.   Taking a fairly fragmented look at the changing cultural ideas of beauty, the beauty industry and the strange and sometimes wonderful things people do and have done to their bodies for the sake of it, it was an interesting hour or so.   I was particularly taken by the exhibits looking at how we learn what is beautiful, and particularly how to do makeup, which nowadays seems to be through Tiktok or Youtube, but in the dark ages when I was young was probably through Jackie and Cosmopolitan.   And the relationship between personal conceptions of beauty and how they are intertwined with our identities gave me quite a lot of food for thought. My favourite of all though was (Almost) all of my dead mother's beautiful things  by Narcissister.  I dread to think of what my treasures would look like if displayed in a similar way.  

The laughter as people made their way out of the auditorium could have led you to believe that we had come out from a comedy, but instead it was that laughter of relief you get after surviving a traumatic experience.  We didn’t get off to a great start as a couple of big guys with big heads sat down in front of us, so our view was a bit punctuated by shuffling about to see properly.  I was sort of hoping they wouldn’t come back for the second half but they did.  Actually the second half was so gripping I hardly noticed it any more. After the death of her husband, Bernarda locks her daughters and her own mother in the house for an eight year period of mourning.   I gather the original version was written during the Spanish Civil War and whatever way you look at it this is a pretty effective play about tyranny, but making this a female cast (except for the dancing and wordless Pepe El Romano, played by a muscular James McHugh*) added an additional layer.   The wom...

I love this intimate space at Park Theatre. This time we had a simple set of a living room decorated for Diwali with the audience on two sides; it was almost sold out for this performance so there was a great buzz in the room.   Rachel Singh (Amy Leigh Hickman) has an Indian dad (Bhasker Patel) and a British mum (Catherine Cusak) and she is having an identity crisis triggered by the failing health of her Indian grandad..  The family has never celebrated Diwali before and Rachel is determined to get it right.  Rachel is learning to put on her sari using a YouTube video and she has a checklist and instructions (including outfits)for the whole family, supported by her eager and very British boyfriend, Matt (Jack Flammiger).  Meanwhile,  Rachels’s brother David (Kisha Walker) is baffled by this determination to create something they never had.  Mum keeps getting it wrong though, despite trying hard with shopping and food and navigating and negotiating between t...

I haven’t seen any of the previous plays in the series so had my fingers crossed that wouldn’t matter.  I don’t think it did as I enjoyed it anyway, although I suspect knowing the backstory might have added an additional layer.  On a stage which consists of a huge red England cross, Carly (Hayley Squires) and Denise (Sharon Duncan- Brewster) are packing up their shop ready to hand the keys of their failed businesses to the new owners.  Over the next couple of hours we find out that they are mother and daughter ‘in sin’ and that everything has fallen apart because of something Carly did.  The play takes a good hard look at race and identity, racism, English working class culture and colonialism and Black experience today, touching on government failures and mishandling of immigration. Covid and with a background of Windrush.  But at its heart this is  a family drama.  It was both a lot of fun and brought together a lot of different current cultural stra...

I may have just seen one of my contenders for best play of 2023. This is a feminist history told through the biography of one woman, beginning in the midst of the Second World War in Australia and ending up in London in the present day.  I understand the play was inspired by conversations the playwright, Alexander Zeldin, had with his mother and her peers during lockdown.  Alice has an ordinary life in many ways but this is also a really effective illustration of the development in women’s lived experiences over the past 60 years. Despite the potential for it to become a dry and clinical or theoretical narrative, its episodic nature gave the opportunity to show what felt like real family and friendship moments.  The constant setbacks in so many different ways each time she thought she had got free were really effective and I liked the interweaving of art too.  I’d love to know how many of the incidents happened and how many are a version of the truth for dramatic eff...

I watched the new film Passages this week.  It's been released on streaming via Mubi as well as having a limited cinema release.  The main attraction for me was Ben Whishaw, but there were wonderful performances by all three main actors.   What a sad movie though.  Passages takes its name from the film that Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is directing at the start of the film and we learn from this that he is self absorbed and insensitive, but is clearly feted as a genius.  The film takes a look at how Tomas's husband Martin (Whishaw) and new girlfriend Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) respond as he flails around causing chaos in all their lives.    I understand there was a bit of a flurry about the sex scenes (it has been released unrated in the US and on Mubi and as X for UK cinemas), but they do provide a shortcut for understanding these relationships.  And the inclusion of that main scene is also a bit of a political act too, as it raises the question...

We trekked down to Chichester this week to see a matinee of this play which takes a critical look at how a fictional public inquiry gets blown off course by a mix of personal and political intrigues.  The issue being investigated is an environmental disaster of a polluted water supply, but the focus of the politician in question, Lord Chancellor Arthur Gill (John Hefferman) is on damage limitation of his own career  because of a potential leadership opportunity coming up.  The judge leading the inquiry, Lord Justice Deborah Wingate (played beautifully by Deborah Findlay) is not too interested in the politics or retribution, she just wants to get the report out, without it being stuck in 'Maxwellisation'.  I hadn't heard the term before, but a useful essay in the programme (you can find the full article  here ) explains that this is the opportunity for people criticised in a report to respond before it is issued.  I am used to the step where the report is di...

There’s so much in the world to be sad and worried about at the moment, I have been watching some films which are a bit escapist.  Mostly offbeat but all giving me a bit of hope for humanity in their different ways.  Pretty Red Dress  A warm funny drama stuffed full of music, all about a family given a proper shake up by a red dress. Travis (Natey Jones) is just out of prison, Candice (Alexandra Burke) is trying to get her big break as Tina Turner in a West End show, and Kenisha their daughter is having loads of trouble at school.  When Travis buys the red dress, it changes things for everyone in the family as they all work out they are all a bit 'off key' in their own ways  Very sweet but with a defiant core and a lovely sense of a proper family.   Days of the Bagnold Summer  Apparently this is an adaptation of a graphic novel so another one to add to the list!  Directed by Simon Bird, this is the story of a single mum (Monica Dolan)  a...

 Chichester Festival Theatre has a great auditorium which means that every seat has an excellent view, and even though we were at the side for this performance I don't think we missed a thing. With themes of toxic masculinity, immigration, culture clashes and uncontrolled passions, this 70 year old play feels as fresh as ever.  Although it's structured with a Greek chorus in the form of the lawyer  Alfieri  (Nancy Crane)  this actually feels quite Shakespearian too, and the operatic punctuation reminds us that we were watching grand emotions being played out in the very non-grand community of Italian immigrants living and working in the New York docks.  I am not sure I had the same response as lots of others in the audience, but I really enjoyed it, and we were talking about this all the way home.  I can't talk about it without spoilers though so be beware!!   I enjoyed all the performances here.   Eddie (Jonathan Slinger)  is ...