Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

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...