Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

 I haven’t had as much fun dancing and singing along to a play for ages.  This was a spur of the moment booking when I had a spare evening so I grabbed a groundling ticket at the Globe to see As You Like It. I hadn’t seen a single review so had no idea what I would be walking into but this romcom of a play is almost always fun anyway so I kept my fingers crossed.  As You Like it takes place in the Forest of Arden where the strict rules of the city no longer apply and where the characters can become different versions of themselves to find their own freedoms.  This production ditched chunks of the language (‘shall we just go to the next scene?’) and all of the songs, replacing them with catchy danceable pop numbers instead, with a definite eye on the audience having fun.  Whilst Shakespeare purists and gender critical types might be a bit grumpy, the only bit from the traditional version I actually missed was Rosalind's closing speech.  But, that's a small g...

 Accidental Death of an Anarchist An angry satire within a breakneck speed farce, at the interval I felt a bit like I had been battered to submission by words and a restorative ice cream was definitely required.  The play opens with 'The Maniac' (Daniel Rigby) protesting his innocence to a policeman (Mark Hadfield) due to insanity and brandishes his certificate to prove it. The hour and fifty minutes is a whirlwind tearing through the state of justice, passing with barely a glance at some awful statistics. There are references to police brutality and well known cases of incompetence, coverup and downright criminality from Stephen Lawrence, via undercover officers to Sarah Everard, not forgetting  the Public Order Bill, dodgy Home Secretaries and appalling dismissal and conviction rates for police misconduct.  So far so good.  And I loved that the music in the interval included Police and Thieves and other songs about misbehaving police. The script, written by To...

I've gradually been getting more and more cross with the commentary on Heartstopper's lack of sexual content.  This comes up in all media, but I am particularly looking at Trixie and Katya's otherwise very entertaining review on Youtube, and the mainly glowing review from the podcast Chucky , as well as multiple print and online reviews which choose to excuse it, rather than consider why such choices might be made. I'm just going to have a mini rant to get it off my chest. The graphic novel series was conceived and has been delivered as a young teen suitable story about love, in itself a highly valuable exercise in providing a different kind of representation to young LGBTQ+ teens beyond the often quite sensationalised and graphic representation of teenage relationships in general. The scene in S2 Episode 6 of the tv series where Nick says he is not ready to do more than kissing, has caused the most amount of disbelief and in some cases scorn and so I am going to use t...

 I am still processing and it’s going to take a while to get my thoughts properly in order but this was an impressive night out at the theatre.  A musical about a queer Black writer writing a musical about a queer Black writer writing a musical … etc.  Layers upon layers of ideas about identity, sex, sexual politics, internalised and external racism and homophobia, family, and religious bigotry integrated into a meta musical about musicals.   A small cast of ‘Usher’ and his ‘thoughts’ who populate his internal monologue (and play all of the other characters) have a big impact, with fab performances and choreography and big production values as Usher writes and rewrites his musical to try to reflect what it is like being him.  I didn’t get all the references, not being a Black American, queer man or a musicals aficionado but honestly it really didn’t matter at all.  The title comes from a theory by  Douglas Hofstadter (a prizewinning US scientist) ...

I finally got around to seeing this, and the biggest surprise was it didn't feel too long.  The sound and cinematography were spectacular in bringing concepts to life, but also showing the horror of the bomb without showing it. One definitely worth seeing in the cinema unless you have a huge tv screen and great surround sound.  The subject matter, framed in a series of jumps around in time, looks at Oppenheimer's early years and involvement in the Manhattan Project through the frame of the McCarthy era and a senator with a hidden agenda (Robert Downey Jnr).  The machinations were intricate and Machiavellian, and it is to the film's credit that it kept such clarity throughout, constantly circling us back to the moral as well as political arguments for and against the bomb and what humans will do with it.   Murphy is his subtle best in this, becoming more haunted as time goes on and he becomes clearer in understanding what the politicians are really up to.  H...

This was another one of those evenings where the audience was a bit annoying.  I had a woman along from me who didn’t just laugh but responded back with little comments and repeating the funny lines.  Then in the second half someone had an audio reader turned on which spent about the first 10 minutes describing what was going on on stage really loudly - maybe they didn’t know how to use their headphones but it took them a really long while to sort it out.    Anyway on to the actual play.  A mix between a sitcom and kitchen sink drama with an overlay of existential dread, and with a cast of 4; a grandmother, her two daughters and granddaughter.  The opening scene is an entertaining commentary on our  addiction to mobile phones as the family wait for their tea in absolute silence apart from the pinging of their phones and then eat their chippy tea with mobile phones in hand, communicating with the outside world, but also with each other.  There are ...

 My viewing this week has consisted pretty much of just two binges of Season 2s of shows that I love. There are some spoilers - you can avoid the worst bits where  I have put the text in a different colour. Heartstopper Season 2 The latest tranche of the Netflix show based on Alice Oseman's graphic novels, the anticipation and expectations were through the roof so it was with a fair bit of trepidation and a lot of snacks that I sat down to watch.  This season picks up the day after the ending of season one, and Nick can't wait to tell Charlie that he came out to his mum.  So, it's all going to be 'perfect'.  And episode one certainly gives us all the feels with a lot of cute scenes between our boys, but we can feel the change coming and it hits pretty early in episode 2. The story continues to focus on the main characters of Nick and Charlie, Tao, Elle, Tara, Darcy and Isaac (I am pretty invested in those storylines already), but also opens out the story to incl...