Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

This is a hit play that has been around for quite some time although it has only got to London this summer. A uplifting play about mental health, depression and the small joys of life, with one performer telling the story of their mother and something of their own life with the help of audience members.  The different performers plus the audience interaction means it is different each night and in this run we have already had Lenny Henry, Sue Perkins, Ambika Mod and Jonny Donahoe (one of the original co-creators) .   When we arrived, Minnie Driver, the final performer in this run, was already bustling around the auditorium, talking to audience members as they arrived, and handing out cards.  We were in the gods so too far away to be involved. The actual play itself is pretty short but effective, and I absolutely get why the audience were given the cards to read out, although I couldn’t always hear what was being said, depending on how loud or where in the auditorium ...

Despite the underpinning themes of American colonialism and the westward landgrab vs modern America, this is a suprisingly intimate play, although as it is written by Samuel D Hunter who wrote The Whale  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.   Jake, a well to do liberal arts graduate has been following the westward trail towards the Pacific taken by his ancestor, but he washes up 300 miles short in the small town of Clarkston and gets a night job in Costco where he meets Chris.  Chris is trying to get into a writing course, but has an addict mum to worry about.  So that’s the set up, which doesn’t sound particularly promising but this ends up being a tender play about people trying to find connection and make the best of their lives, despite the challenges they face.  It’s a bit clunky with the amount of exposition, but the central performances are excellent and I found myself drawn into the lives and concerns of the young men.   Joe Locke plays Jak...

Hamnet - my first proper film of the festival this year, on a Monday morning, so not particularly auspicious.  But we had seen a production of Hamlet on the preceeding Friday, so were nicely primed.  Hamlet is hands down my favourite play ever, and I really loved Maggie O'Farrell's novel on which the film is based, directed by Chloe Zhao of Nomadland fame.  The story imagines how the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet led to the creation of the play Hamlet.  That sounds simple, but along the way it muses over the way that life and art are wrapped together, one feeding the other in a continuous loop.   The novel tells the story largely through the interior lives of the characters, and so I wasn't at all sure how that would be managed.  It was managed by ditching that altogether and having fantastic actors to bring that to us without words,  Jessie Buckley is absolutely the centre of the film , but Paul Mescal brings his fullest and best game to this...

This play by Liz Duffy Adams, transferred from the RSC, has the second fictionalised re-imagining of William Shakespeare I have seen this week.  With Ncuti Gatwa as Marlowe and Edward Bluemel as Shakespeare, the play imagines the two great writers meeting to collaborate on a series of plays to please their patrons (apparently recent academic research speculates that Marlowe may have been a contributor to Henry IV parts 2 and 3).  This is an Elizabethan police state, with factions and spies, and Marlowe up to his neck in all of it.  Shakespeare, meanwhile, is still relatively early in his career and is somewhat overwhelmed by the far more famous Kit Marlowe.   The 90 minutes of this play is an intense sparring match between the two poets as they challenge, flirt, fight, argue and occasionally collaborate.  There’s some flashy technology to open and to occasionally allow Shakespeare to break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience.  But otherw...

Of course it’s always hard to find something new about a 400 year old play, but this production at the National Theatre has a good go at it.  Opening with a suitably atmospheric ghost scene, we shift to a genteel palace interior and meet our prince.  This one is young and cocky, interacting with the audience from the start, and there is a definite attempt to bring some comedy.   For the first half, the set and the music were evocative to me of a country house Agatha Christie-ish whodunnit.  And that worked very well as Hamlet investigates whether his uncle really did kill his father.  The second half though contains a lot more darkness and metaphysical musings and here I would have appreciated a change in tone.  Instead it carried on pretty much the same.   Hiran Abeyskera as Hamlet was different in a good way with his youthfulness and lightness of touch in his 'Tobacco and Boys' t-shirt, rattling through and almost throwing away his lines...

The Hack - A highly accessible, if far too long, account of the hacking scandal illustrating the web of back scratching, corruption and illegal activity held in place with fear over many years.  It’s a depressing story, and unfortunately a complicated one due to the web of connections and cover-ups that needed to be exposed.  But it’s told with verve, using the same approach as The Big Short , simplifying with explanations direct to camera by our narrator and guide, David Tennant as the journalist Nick Davies who over many years doggedly hunted this story down for The Guardian . I fear nothing much has changed, and in fact it may well have accelerated the mistrust of all journalism, including the good and honourable ones, and the turning to online ‘experts’ instead.  The text at the end explaining what happened next was both damning and depressing  But even so, it is worth a watch to remind ourselves of what happened and is maybe still happening. ( Series, ITV and ...

  A man turns up at the door of an ex-UN Relief worker, asking what happened 45 years previously when he was a displaced child after WW2.  Juliet Stevenson plays Ruth, that relief worker, who was 20 years old in 1945, and Tom Wlaschiha plays the adult Thomas.  As well as the German and Slavic children left without families or carers after the war, there were also children (often from Slavic backgrounds) who met Aryan 'master race' criteria stolen from their families and placed with new families to grow up as Germans, attempting to wipe the memory of their previous lives, language and culture.  As the play also points out, after the war there was a concerted effort by the Soviet forces to do the same for all displaced Eastern European children (with the west doing something not so dissimilar).  This is all brought to life in the attachment that develops between Ruth and Thomas as they try to find his family; it is this little boy that has turned up at Ruth’s door...

It’s always interesting to see the ways that Greek tragedies are reworked for a modern audience.  The Bacchae are a bunch of women, followers of the god Dionysos who serve as the chorus but are the main characters this time.  They are back in Thebes to help Dionysos take revenge for his abandonment by his aunt Agave (Sharon Small) after the death of his mother.  The Bacchae are led by Vida (a fantastic Claire Perkins) who introduces the Bacchae to the audience as individual independent women who have all joined for different reasons, and are all living for pleasure without being ruled by men (except Dionysos that is - to be fair, they do call out for themselves!). When the women of Thebes hear about this, they all begin to join the Bacchae too.  Whilst Dionysos sneaks into Thebes and entraps his half brother King Pentheus (an absolutely fabulous James McArdle) the Bacchae take Agave hostage but she soon becomes the most fanatical of the group and blood thirsty in a w...

This latest play at the Donmar is a funny family drama but it is also full of knotty debates about how to live well.  Juniper Blood by Mike Bartlett opens on a family farm that needs renovating; Ruth (Hattie Morahan) and Lip (Sam Troughton) have just inherited and are full of ideas of how to be more sustainable.   With definite Chekovian undertones with the family farm under pressure and fraught family relationships I thought that might be where this goes, but alongside the entertaining family dramas this turns into a energetic and gripping debate  about what is a good and ethical way to live in a capitalist world gone bad.  Throw science at it or carry on regardless, make pragmatic changes around organic and sustainability, or go full survivalist and return to basics?   The characters represent and advocate the different approaches. Ruth is full of middle class guilt and compromise, so advocates organic farming and a few pigs, whilst Millie (Nadia Par...

At a puppet show in a town square, a deaf boy is shot dead by a soldier for not responding to his commands.  The next day the whole town wakes up deaf or pretending to be.  This play at the Royal Court is based on the 2019 book length poem by Ukranian poet Ilya Kaminsky.  Using signing, spoken and written word, it's also a multimedia work, making use of cameras and projection, puppetry and even a drone hovering intimidatingly over the audience at one point.   The set is deceptively simple in design, with the puppet stage staying central whilst other elements and the cast move around it. The sound design is excellent too, with white noise and low rumbling sounds, sometimes blurred speech, evoking a tiny bit of the deaf experience.  It sounds as if it will be bitty, but it does come together in something of a poetic tapestry.   This is a complicated play, a fable, with layer upon layer of metaphor and allegory, and despite light and moving moments, ...

Fisk - Series 3  - I loved the first two series and have been waiting eagerly for its return.  Fisk is now a Partner which means she gets to bring in the nice biscuits and a fancy coffee machine,  but she still has her badly fitting brown suits and continues to be the fall guy as she spends her day fending off mendacious fools.  Fabulous scripts with great dialogue, the characters are well-meaning but also self absorbed and mildly incompetent. Both petty and banal, the comedy is always underplayed but it's dry, warm and quietly very funny. Recommended (Series, streaming on Netflix) Platonic -Series 1 - Late to the party on this one and for the first few episodes I wasn’t getting it at all. The point of this is to take the premise of When Harry Met Sally and show that a man and a woman can be ‘just friends’ and it definitely does that. Despite my misgivings, I did keep going with it (to be fair it was sometimes on in the background) and by episode 6 it grew on me a ...