Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

  Another last minute bargain ticket, this time in the dress circle with a theoretically restricted view because of a pillar, but actually there was a great view. This play about love, fidelity and writing is a tricksy thing, with plays within a play partly about writing a play.  And then there are relationships overlapping, both real and unreal, and with the lines often blurred, and pretty much all of the characters as both actors in the plays as well as ‘real’ life.   The overlapping love triangles in this work really well to explore what is real love anyway.  James McArdle plays Henry, who feels like a stand in for Stoppard, as a playwright, with a successful play about a breaking marriage, while in the process of breaking his own.  Meanwhile Bel Powley as Annie treads a tight path as the lover then wife of Henry, who has some different interpretations of love.  Is love about making one commitment and sticking with it, or bargaining, and remaking that commitment day by day?  We have

‘AJ’ (Chanel Waddock) is a goalkeeper, number 2 in the women’s team with an opportunity to move up to ‘1’.  Angelina (Shannon Hayes) is preparing a pitch in her corporate job that might bag her the promotion she is after.  Through the 65 minutes of this play, we see the overt and more subtle challenges these women face just trying to make the most of their lives.  They have plenty going on already and then they both find they need an abortion.  Not as graphic as The Years , in performance at least, but unsparing in the language and discussion about the practicalities and pressures they face and the ramifications of the decision.   It was great to see another play talking about this, at a time when what should be the most basic of women's rights has become contested again. I wasn't convinced by the final reveal which felt a bit clichéd, but for showing the subtle but very real challenges that women still face, this was very nicely done.  I loved the chessboard type movements aro

  Seeing the first of these plays last was not necessarily the best way to go about this, but it still worked.  Another on-the-day ticket, this time up in the first balcony but with an excellent view. ‘Michael' (an excellent Thomas Coombes) appears to be a stereotypical white working class man, no longer young or married. His Dad has just died as England lost the Euros on penalties and he is trying to make sense of that, his life, and also his Dad.  Michael's dad represents a kind of Englishness - East End, Leighton Orient fan, full of nationalist racist rhetoric, tribal, a Brexit fan, but also kind to his son’s Black best friend Delroy and his mum. Keen on ‘tradition’ in both good and bad senses, but also community minded.   As we find over the course of the performance, both Michael and his dad are a lot more than the caricatures would suggest.  Coombes doesn’t stop for breath throughout the 105 minutes on stage, and it’s a powerful performance, leaping about the performance