Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

I don’t know Henry IV pts 1 and 2 very well, so don't really know what they lopped off to squeeze the two plays into 3hrs 40 minutes including interval.  But whatever was lost, the remaining bits produced an engaging few hours.   Ian McKellen’s Falstaff, who was the original big draw for me, was as good as I hoped, playing a big bluff character with subtlety underneath the coarseness.  His Falstaff is older of course, but with richness and depth even in part one, and the relationship with the prince develops beautifully during the play.  My big takeaway though was that Toheeb Jimoh as Hal was really impressive and a talent to watch I think. He plays the prince as a high energy and wild fun seeker at the start.  He holds himself tight, with a sense of danger and anger just below the surface and this comes out not just against his father the King (Richard Coyle), but with Falstaff as his other father figure.  And I loved the way the relationships are pla...

We were a bit late to the party booking tickets to An Enemy of the People, so it was almost sold out on the cheaper seats  and we ended up standing.  We did a bit of horse trading so that we could stand together, but I quite like standing; there’s often a touch more camaraderie with the plebs standing at the back so as usual there were a few interesting chats to be had before and afterwards. As for the play, I found the opening scenes a bit dry with loads of exposition and struggled to get into it a bit, and the earnestly hip gang on stage were also quite annoying. But by about half an hour in, I had bought into the narrative and was interested to see what happened next.  Centred around a water pollution scandal in a small town, it reminded me a bit of The Inquiry at Chichester last year.   This reworking of the Ibsen play makes us think about our own complicity in the situation we find ourselves in not just in a theoretical way, but bringing it to life wi...

The Hills of California A Jez Butterworth play comes with high expectations.  As usual I deliberately hadn’t looked at reviews although I did see a lot of 4 stars so I was seated and ready, as was the youngish (good) but quite noisy (bad) audience. The play is set completely in the Seaview Guesthouse (previously Seaview Guesthouse and Spa - but with no view of the sea).  And we open in the public lounge - a seventies classic with broken jukebox and a tropical themed bar.  Three of the family’s four daughters are assembling as their mother Veronica lies dying upstairs.  It’s Blackpool in the midst of the drought of 1976 and everybody is very very hot. This first scene tells us a lot about the family dynamics (mother upstairs is still keeping up appearances wearing her wig) and the women are arguing about whether Joan, who moved to California 20 years ago and has never been back, will show. So, a family drama about grief and loss mixed in with a lot of family dynamics....