Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

Cowbois, a transfer from the RSC, is a joyous fantasy, delivered pantomime style.  The basic premise is that in a boring backwater town in the Wild West, the men have been gone for a long while looking for gold and the women are bored, and frustrated.   Then a dashing outlaw,  Jack Cannon, comes to town.  Jack is different from the other men and turns out to be exactly what is needed to shake up the town. There's a sign on the wall in the bar saying 'No Guns, No Politics' which is frequently ignored and only really noticed when anyone shakes the status quo.  Full of cliches,  subverted and played for laughs, this is a play about masculinity, gender, gender roles and freedom, calling out how hard it is to be different, in the end though everyone gets to try out what works for them. I’d say the play is about 20 minutes too long (I'd easily shave 10 minutes off each half) and it took me a while to get over the arch style being used here, but once I was in...

The first striking thing about this production is that it is almost completely monochrome,  A large white stage with a dark glass backdrop, all of the cast in black or grey, except Lady Macbeth (Cush Jumbo) in glowing white.  This means that you can't miss the blood. The play opens with a bloodied Macbeth (David Tennant) washing himself clean, bloodying the bowl of water, bringing red into that monochrome colour scheme,  and then we are into the play proper with the disembodied witches swirling around in our ears.    We were in the cheap seats as usual, but as ever in this intimate theatre it doesn’t make too much difference. Apart from a few times when sight lines didn't work for those of us in the circle, we were so close to the action that we didn't miss much.  This is a tight ensemble cast, all excellent, and I loved the broad Scottishness of it all, from the accents to the music.  This was a fairly short version of the play at 1 hour 55 minutes wi...

  Like all good satire, Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber’s latest venture at the Soho Theatre is both angry and clever.  Pandemonium is a Shakespearian style romp through the Boris years with ‘Orbis Rex’, crowned with his distinctive mussed up blond hair and believing in his destiny as King of the World.   The legacy of that time was front of mind for me before I headed into town for this, in recovery from a cold so taking two covid tests to make sure I wasn’t going to unintentionally kill someone, and conscious that a cough nowadays has a more unsocial resonance than ever.  Alongside Orbis Rex (Paul Chahidi) the play is packed with clever caricatures;  ‘Richer Sooner’, a sprite with too short trousers, ‘Less Trust’ who envisions herself as queenie but is felled by the question ‘ but have you costed any of this?’.  And then there’s Matt Hemlock, the creature from the swamp, Jacob Rhesus Monkey and Dominant Raab amongst others, all played by the five exce...

Well better late than never here are my 2023 Chatterbox Awards.  As usual, the categories are of my making, and the nominees are things I saw in 2023,  regardless of when they were published or released. I have written about most of these before so when appropriate I have added a link to the title.  There will be spoilers but I will try to keep them gentle.  So, off we go. Romantic comedy/drama Starstruck :   Series 2 won this category last year so I was interested to see what would happen with season 3.  As a series which could be described as an anti-rom-com, I am now wondering if it is here under false pretences.  But Rose Matafeo, who writes as well as stars in the show, understands the genre so well and plays with the tropes so successfully that it definitely still delivers as a romcom.  It openly teases with romcom clichés galore, from miscommunication to old flames being rekindled, but then gleefully sidesteps them in a way which made me la...