Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

 Apparently I saw 42 theatre productions in 2025, although I feel like I still missed loads.  Anyway, this is my pick of the year - totally subjective and I am making the rules to suit me.  I have written about each one of these earlier in the year so have given the links to those  reviews too. Best New Play Clarkston:   Considering I know very little about the opening up of the American West, this wasn't really a must see, and I initially booked because Heartstopper's Joe Locke was starring, and I was curious to see him on stage.  But actually, despite the unpromising subject matter, I found the play really interesting, with themes around small towns and lives vs big ideas, economic, historical and cultural forces, and this takes a look at where meaning does and should sit, with dextrous writing which wraps the ideas together so that each line has more than one meaning. InterAlia:   I loved Prima Facie and this play, by the same writer Suzie Miller, ...

Television Plur1bus  - Series 1 has now come to an end and I have found it absolutely gripping.  It takes its time to let things come to light, and I love that the heroes of this piece are not superficially likeable.  Instead they are awkward, and difficult to work with, but that also means they are admirable in understanding and following their own moral compass even if it makes them unpopular.  Carol (Rhea Seehorn) is a divisive figure as she is so difficult, but I love her, and she makes the blandness of the mindvirus folk stand out in sharp relief.   There's plenty of topical stuff being talked about here, a critique on  groupthink, what fascism looks like and in the final episode we get to see with Carol that this is also a abusive relationship with the Others, showing a caring face while doing harm.  In the season finale she finally meets up with Manousos (Carlos Manuel Vesga) who is equally difficult and I think this will be a wonderful par...

As an ex-Essex girl, this was a poignant trip down memory lane for my last trip to the theatre this year, taking me back to my teens and old stomping grounds with DJ Froggy and junior disco nights, and that bit of Essex that continues to sit on the edge of London.   Alfie (Clive Owen) and Julie (Saskia Reeves) have been together for over 30 years, but Alfie has received a terminal diagnosis for his cancer and wants to stop treatment, Julie wants him to ‘fight’. Alfie was a DJ, and the whole play is punctuated with some pounding house and acid disco beats to punctuate their conversations as they both reminisce and look forward, including debating what should be played at his funeral.  There are some lovely intimate and funny moments that are evidence of their long relationship, as they have one long conversation in a single scene for the full 90 minutes of this play; they talk and laugh and argue, sparring and making up, as they talk about what this will mean for them and ...

Bryan Cranston, Paapa Essiedu, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Hayley Squires are the core of the cast assembled for this revival of Arthur Miller's family drama about the sins of the fathers coming back to haunt their children.  It's overlaid with a critique about money grabbing bosses taking opportunities in a time of national crisis to make a quick buck regardless of the harm it may do. So, it may be over 75 years old now, but with so many modern resonances; certainly I was thinking about the Michelle Mone and other Covid scandals.   I liked that this production doesn’t try to force the point though, which is clear enough, without needing to set it in a modern context.   The production really struck gold with this cast.  Essiedu and Cranston are a powerhouse duo, and the whole ensemble are just magnificent.  Bryan Cranston plays Joe Keller, the bluff, jovial, proud master of industry wanting to leave a legacy for his remaining son.  Marianne Jean-Ba...

A play about one woman’s struggle to hold down four jobs is very funny, particularly in dealing with the complications of entitled bosses. She has a home working job as a PA that she does while working her separate job as a concierge for some luxury flats, mixed with a house/dog sitting job, then evenings and weekends doing data entry.   It 's very funny but also it isn't.   All of this working means she doesn’t actually have any life for herself, i solated from her friends and family because she is working so hard, employed by unsympathetic and exploitative monsters.  It  gradually becomes clear how the trap has closed on her through trying to do the right thing for her family after her dad has run up huge debts with payday lenders.   Libby Rodcliffe is excellent and very very funny in playing Bea and her chaotic life, but in this monologue she also plays all of the other characters, moving around the stage to help us to keep track of Bea’s incre...

A few things going on in telly at the moment with older stroppy women - it’s good to see.   The Beast in me.  Clare Danes and Matthew Rhys on opposite sides of a tense thriller full of grief, vengeance and rage.  It has some fairly clunky twists and turns and some bits were too obvious,  particularly the resolution which was ridiculously signposted, but I really enjoyed it all the same. It’s always moving forward (and twisting back on itself sometimes) and the two leads are brilliant.  Clare Danes is twitchy, restless and angry, Matthew Rhys is scarily in control until he isn’t.  Both great performers and a great supporting cast,  it was fun to watch this unravel.  Great autumn telly ( series, streaming on Netflix) Down Cemetery Road:   This has lived up to its promise and I am loving it as a weird mix of thriller and comedy with cartoonish violence but with interesting friendships between women (it passes the Bechdel test)  a...

Ani is a young, successful and award winning academic specialising in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but with a secret addiction to violent pornography.  Ani tells her boyfriend and her friends that is is harmless and not real, but we see the toll it places on her relationships, health and career.   It’s about addiction and the remorselessness and deviousness of it, but it’s also about grief, and sadness, the dichotomy of pleasure and pain, and uses Milton’s Paradise Lost to consider the nature of shame, guilt and sin. Somewhat unsubtly. the first scene has Ani trying to persuade her boyfriend Liam to eat an apple tart while she makes her arguments that her porn watching isn’t harmful.  It also uses Milton as a basis to take a good bite at misogyny too, both from the men around her but also internalised.  Ani is transgressive too in her sexual desires; she is articulate in rejecting the discrepancies between expectations of men and women, and the policing of female des...

I saw this a few weeks ago ( notes here ) and despite some reservations, I really was blown away by the performances.  I also felt it had taken me a while to properly get to grips with it the first time around, and as it isn’t the sort of thing that gets recorded for posterity I grabbed a last minute bargain ticket in the front row of the circle to watch it again.   Everything I said about it the first time is still true, an intimate play with big themes, about two young men trying to find their place in a world which doesn’t really have space for their dreams, living small lives in small towns which are not where the action is*.  I like the way that the big stories of the western colonialist expansion, tales of derring do which are used to create a great national story, are nicely undercut through Lewis and Clark’s 1804-6 expedition diaries, talking about the realities of hard travel, bad food, mixed with appalling racism and exploitation of the native peoples and s...

I am a big admirer of Nicola Walker, and in this particular play at the Royal Court she is Miriam, a mother grappling with the disappearance of her teenage son, Oscar.  The play ranges over a seven year period, dipping back and forward, with panic at the early stages, and as the police investigation remains unresolved, the whole family find different ways of living with the absence.  The Unbelievers in this case are the family who have lost faith that Oscar will return and are finding ways to move forward with their lives, whereas Miriam is fierce and obsessive about not giving up.  Things all come to a head when Oscar's dad (Paul Higgins) suggests holding a memorial service. The staging is simple but effective with a soulless waiting room at the back where the cast go when they are not performing, presumably to represent the limbo the characters are all experiencing; meanwhile the main action takes place in the living room towards the front of the stage.  I think th...